Ankit Maheshwari had bought an expensive coffee machine from one of India’s leading e-commerce firms. However, a week after the purchase he received an email marketing message from the same portal offering a 25% discount on the same coffee machine. “I immediately sent the old coffee machine back and asked for a refund,” says Maheshwari.
That incident got him thinking about what was wrong with the marketing channels used by e-commerce companies. “Clearly, there seemed to be a disconnect between the various tools used by the e-commerce companies. Sales have no insight about the tech. The tech has no insight about the customer care. The customer team has no insight about the marketing and so forth,” he says.
Soon after in 2014, Maheshwari along with his brother Arjun Maheshwari, and three friends—Nandini Rathi (CMO), Raghubir Thakur (CTO) and Mayank Dhingra, launched Betaout, a SaaS (software as a service)-based customer intelligence and marketing automation tool for e-commerce players.
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“Betaout assists e-commerce players with its marketing automation tool to address problems such as building customer loyalty, getting users to complete their abandoned purchases, and predicting the future purchases a user will make,” explains the CEO of Betaout.
E-commerce platforms can integrate Betaout’s software into their existing systems with a simple Javascript plugin. “The process takes only a few minutes and does not require any technical know-how,” says Maheshwari.
The company is currently working with about 150 e-commerce companies including Paytm and Lenskart. “We are doing 20% month-on-month growth, and we are targeting revenues of $2 million in financial year 2016-17,” he says.
The Noida-based start-up was recently selected for Microsoft’s start-up accelerator programme. Betaout raised $1.5 million in pre-Series A round of funding from a bunch of investors including Beenext, Stanford Angels, Letsventure, Chennai Angels, Hyderabad Angels, and Mumbai Angels.
