E-commerce marketing software Betaout makes it to TechStars, will push for the US market

Ankit Maheshwari and the team at Betaout have been busy over the last few months. As a result, Betaout, built around the idea of creating customer intelligence and marketing software for e-commerce, is now ready to go to market. The thesis is that there are lot of marketers out there struggling with multiple marketing tools that don’t work with each other, and require a high level of technical know-how. Betaout aims to marry data, insight and action together. And to make this marriage stronger, Betaout has decided to undergo acceleration at TechStars, one of the premier startup accelerators in the US.

Having juggled the complexities of the startup world, the team had previously gone through the drill. Selling to enterprises is hard. “We have specifically tied ourselves to a single niche vertical of E-commerce so that we can focus on solving core problems of this niche and give out-of-the-box functionality,” says Ankit. The existing set of marketing tools which can be used by publishers, comparison sites, ecommerce, blogs, B2B sites, etc are general in nature. These general tools have to be customised a lot before they start giving value. And this is where Betaout comes in; with clarity, that the end user for them is the marketer at an ecommerce company.

Over the last year, Betaout has reached a few milestones - getting their first enterprise customer, their first global customer, and hitting a scale of 10,000 emails per second. “Some of our customers like Paytm, Goibibo, etc are leaders in the market, and can bring any datacentre to its knees with their requirements. The current system can easily send 5000 to 10,000 personalised emails per second, and process tens of millions of customer profiles every hour,” says Ankit.

If things were going reasonably well, then why the decision to undergo acceleration and thereby part with a piece of their equity? “The US is a big market for us. Spending a few months in US, and working closely with our US customers, will help us in building our product and team capable of catering to the audience both at home and in the US,” says Ankit. Secondly, they believe TechStars to be the best accelerators, since they only take in 10-12 companies in a batch. It also has an impressive network of alumni, investors and mentors.

With the rise of e-commerce, companies enabling e-commerce have been given huge boosts. Apart from the top two or three players, there are a host of media and smaller players that need to know their audience better and market well. This is where Betaout and a lot of other players come in. Talking about their revenue model, Ankit says, “We charge a monthly subscription based on number of addressable contacts our customers have in their database. We also offer a free plan for startups. We have dozens of paying clients and traction has been very promising.”

Talking of the landscape in general, Ankit feels that marketers are too dependent on technology teams, in creating advanced customer segments. This is why marketers resort to blanket marketing, i.e. sending the same marketing messages across all channels to all their customers. The result of this is untargeted marketing, low ROI and low conversion. “We saw a huge opportunity to create a DIY platform, that could easily give rise to highly advanced customer segments, and target customers across multiple mediums,” he says.

The team behind Betaout has worked on multiple projects together, including a feedback tool (Getamplify) and a content collaboration platform (Contentcloud). And with Betaout, the vision is to enable every ecommerce marketer to do behaviour driven, personalised and omni-channel marketing easily and effectively. “We will help them build amazing marketing experiences for their customers, and drive more customer engagement and revenue,” concludes Ankit.

Website: Betaout