Zocket Founders (L-R): Sundar Natesan, Mukund Srivathsan, Karthik Venkateswaran, Nandha Ravi
“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”
Is the business equivalent of “If you have a great business, but you don’t have an online presence, is it even a business?”
Today, social media has become the new identity for all businesses. Most businesses run their marketing campaigns on all platforms including Facebook, Google, Instagram etc. Zocket helps businesses create social media posts and digital ads in less than 30 seconds without any expertise. All a business owner needs to do is download the Zocket app, add their business offerings and within no time they can generate social media posts and launch digital ads on all platforms. Zocket is making digital marketing that easy!
SMBs are a pillar of the Indian economy
As India marches towards its goal of becoming a $5 trillion economy in the next five years, SMBs will play a decisive role in the nation’s economic transformation.
Today, India has over 70 million small and medium sized businesses. These small and medium sized businesses employ roughly 106M, a staggering 40% of India’s employable population, are expected to contribute close $216B India’s GDP by 2024 and are responsible for 50% of India’s exports.
Digital adoption is taking SMBs by storm
Nearly all consumer-facing SMEs are ‘digitally influenced’ or have adopted some form of technology for business enablement. In contrast, pre-covid, roughly 29% SMEs had some form of technology adoption – this rise in tech adoption is what we call India’s ‘big digital shift.’ This drastic shift in adoption has also been influenced by changing consumer preferences and more customers looking to discover new products and businesses on social media platforms. However, this increased adoption has also led to requirement of more & more tools to eventually enable these businesses and increase their visibility.
Small businesses across the globe are adopting tech solutions as they are becoming more vital for the success of these businesses. SMB owners are gaining better insights, control over different verticals of their business – from marketing to customer service and financial performance.
What do digitally savvy SME business owners further need?
Like Maslow’s need hierarchy theory, SMBs tech adoption follows a pyramid hierarchy of tech needs. SMBs have evolved connectivity and thanks to the likes of Paytm, RazorPay & others most SMBs have adopted to a tech-based payment solution as well.
We believe the next big disruption will be in the digital discovery layer as business owners move up the digital hierarchy stack. Till date, most SMBs use the online classified portals to generate leads for their businesses. However, with increase in digital adoption and changing consumer preferences – more businesses want to go social on their own to acquire customers from various social media platforms. Unfortunately, setting up a marketing team in-house is expensive and the current marketing tools and digital channels are focused on solving problems for large enterprises – thus being expensive and complex to use for small businesses.
Rise in Discoverability
Social media has fundamentally transformed the fabric of today’s society. Access to information online, has moulded the way people discover, choose, and spend. Discovery is easier than ever before. Customers have an abundance of information. All goods and services can be discovered online, ordered at home, everything from hyperlocal to global goods can be accessed and ordered online. Without a distinct online presence, businesses lose their competitive touch.
What if every SME has access to a digital marketing agency on demand? That is the problem Zocket decided to solve.
Why Kalaari Invested in Zocket
Zocket helps businesses create digital ads in less than 30 seconds and grow digitally without any expertise.
Their proprietary tech stack combines ~150 variables to generate the best copy, visual design and platform for a particular SMB based on parameters such as type of business, target audience, age, expected spend and so on.
Strong Founding team that has known each other and have a very clear product vision!
Karthik, Nandha, Sundar, and Mukund are seasoned 2x founders, having successfully exited their previous venture, GoBumpr. We were highly impressed with their clarity of product thinking, their vision around building an affordable tech solution for SMBs and their knowledge of the space. The founders have seen the digital marketing problem up close and have spent a lot of time understanding the needs of today’s SMB owner. Leveraging learnings from their first company, the founders have decided to productize their digital marketing expertise through a SaaS offering.
Market Tailwinds: Increasing global digital ad spends
Roughly 47% of total global digital ad spend comes from SMBs. India has 70M SMBs. However, +60% of SMBs in India do not have a digital marketing strategy and most find it challenging to manage online ads. SMB growth and lead-gen are becoming heavily reliant on digital marketing which has challenges including 1) Content creation, 2) Ad campaign management across multiple platforms and 3) Ad spends optimization & analytics.
Zocket’s product solves these pain points by automating digital marketing.
Differentiated Tech Stack
Zocket has built an end-to-end tech platform that helps generate instant content, publish across different platforms, and optimize ad spending for the highest ROI. The product is mobile-first, launches campaigns in minutes, and incorporates multiple vernacular languages.
Strong Go-To-Market Strategy
Zocket has launched an Invite only Beta Access for Businesses on Google Play Store. Currently they plan to acquire businesses that have their digital store setup – either through Shopify, WooCommerce and other SMB focused digital store front apps. Zocket has also mastered the feet on street model to acquire small businesses and help them in creating a strong digital presence across all major platforms.
Zocket has already created over 1000 unique ads across Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn. Targeting India first, Zocket plans to go global in next 12-18 months and capture a large chunk of global ad spends as well!
Karthik Venkateswaran, Co-Founder and CEO at Zocket said – “Consumer facing SMBs in India have been heavily reliant on online classifieds for digital discovery. With social becoming the new identity, most businesses want their business presence in Facebook, Instagram & other social media. This is where Zocket comes in to help these small businesses instantly create and grow their brand online”
Vani Kola, Managing Director at Kalaari Capital commented – “There has never been a better time to build for Indian SMBs and we are excited by Zocket’s vision to serve India’s growing 70M SMBs. We believe the next wave of digital disruption within SMEs will be digital discovery and we are delighted to partner with Zocket on their journey to make every business grow exponentially by setting up their digital ads instantly and give the best returns on their ad spends ”
Kalaari Capital is an early-stage, technology-focused venture capital firm based out of Bengaluru, India. Since 2006, Kalaari has empowered visionary entrepreneurs building unique solutions that reshape the way Indians live, work, consume and transact. The firm’s ethos is to partner early with founders and work with them to navigate the inevitable challenges of fostering ideas into successful businesses. At its core, Kalaari believes in building long-term relationships based on trust, transparency, authenticity, and respect.
If you are an entrepreneur (or know an entrepreneur) building a company in the SaaS space, write to us at [email protected]