CleverTap – How it came about

CleverTap today –
We enable over 4000 leading brands such as Sony, Samsung, McDonald’s, Reliance Jio, Hotstar, Idea, Zomato, BookMyShow, Cleartrip, Mobikwik, Tribe, Hello.com, DC Comics, Denver Broncos and Hooked On Phonics to better understand their customers and engage with them at the right time, right place, on the right device and via the right marketing channel.
Numerous Fortune 500 brands, as well as the long tail of startups across various industries and use cases leverage CleverTap to understand, identify, onboard, retain, engage and monetize their users across mobile & web.
In just the month of March this year, we sent over 10 billion messages, processed over 55 billion data points, and have reached a billion devices. Our customers are spread across more than 100 countries.
Across the board, we’ve noticed that users who are on-boarded using CleverTap are 25% more engaged than the rest of the users month over month. This gives businesses the opportunity to build long-term valuable relationships with their customers.
So how did we get here?
In May 2013, when we started CleverTap, we noticed that mobile user engagement was severely broken.
There were a plethora of “marketing automation” tools back then.  But what we didn’t quite understand was, how could you engage your users without first understanding of who they are? Or where they are from? Or what behaviors they have exhibited in the past?
There are many analytics solutions that help you understand user behavior, and there are an equal number of marketing automation solutions that help you run campaigns. You now have to integrate and manage two disconnected solutions wasting your time and resources.
Also, this leads to various critical issues that severely affect your customer acquisition and retention strategy. You are stuck with:

• No single source of truth as teams work off of different sets of data.
• No end-to-end reporting, and we’re not talking about opens and CTRs here.  No answers for questions such as  – How many users who were touched by a campaign in Feb, are still transacting in May?
• Lack of collaboration and visibility between product and marketing teams because of the use of different set of tools.
• Missed opportunities as you cannot react to user behavior in real-time.

We saw it as an opportunity to integrate analytics and engagement into one consolidated, comprehensive and out-of-the box solution.

1. Analyze – Use CleverTap to first understand your users, whether you have a hundred, or hundreds of millions of them.
2. Segment – Then create live-segments of  users based on their behavior, location, lifecycle stage, or pretty much any combination.
3. Engage – Now build personalized, contextual communications at scale to influence each segment based on their needs and your business objectives.
4. Measure – Watch these segments grow and shrink over time and evaluate effectiveness of your analytics and engagement strategy by iterating in real-time and at scale.

This allows businesses to talk the same language internally and quickly achieve the same business and customer objectives. You could now truly pivot on the most important axis of your business — Your User.
With these seemingly obvious advantages, we set off to build an event-processing engine that would become our secret sauce – and a massive differentiator. Similar to how you can’t build a skyscraper without a deep foundation, we wanted to get this architecturally right no matter how long it took. After almost 18 months of rapid iterations, we were ready with the first version of our event processor technology. This event processor is a core part of our intellectual property.
Once we built out the first version of our event processor, and had some basic querying capabilities in place we were ready to onboard some mid-market startups.
With each iteration of the event processor, and the resultant analytics + engagement capabilities that got unlocked, we started attracting and onboarding larger brands. Our learnings grew with each large customer we on-boarded and this allowed us to solve more complex use cases, and that too at scale.
Omkar Shende, AVP of Product at Sony, relies on CleverTap to execute on their hyper-growth strategy. “The ability to have analytics and engagement on the same platform has been critical to our customer acquisition and retention strategy. CleverTap’s advanced segmentation engine allows us to analyze and target the right customers in real-time and then send timely contextual messages using their powerful feature – Live User Segments. We have seen exponential user growth in the last few quarters and we needed a platform that would scale with us. No other platform was able to provide us actionable analytics and personalized engagement at this massive scale.”
To add to this, one leading Telco trusted us as a partner as they grew from 0 to 100 million users in 170 days. The quickest to 100 million users on-boarded ever!  A leading sports app used us to segment, and send 40 million messages per minute.
Today, our event processor can analyze hundreds of millions of data points in a few milliseconds on a single server. Add more servers, and the processing capacity becomes limitless.  This gives us a unique advantage, as we can outcompete virtually any solution provider out there.
We’re starting to create a powerful full-stack that’s miles ahead of the current solutions.
Future –
The KPI of the future is customer value. For any businesses to succeed, they need to provide personalized user experiences in a contextual and timely manner.  You need a solution that thrives on quickly processing petabytes of data, provides actionable insights that drive your engagement strategy, automates your workflows and at the same time continuously learns using Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning to map your business objectives to your individual customer’s expectations.
It is 1913, and we’re building cars.