 Please put your hands together as I welcome on stage, Alok Bhashpayee, CEO and co-founder, Exigo. Good evening everyone. So today we're going to talk about a very interesting topic, it sounds counter-intuitive, $0 marketing. At the moment, somebody says marketing, you know, a lot of the CEOs out there start looking for their wallet because most of the time, you know, there's somebody out there pitching something to you and wants a piece of that wallet. However, in the Exigo journey, you know, we've had the fortune of not having raised billions of dollars and as a result of which, you know, the first five years we were bootstrapped, you know, raised some money and, you know, have not really spent anything on TV if you look at it. The fortune we had of going that frugal was that we came up with ingenuous ways of marketing because we still needed to put our brand out there, you know, in a very competitive space where you had a lot of online travel brands spending a lot of money and, you know, trying to build a brand in that environment without the same amount of dollar led us to actually innovate and innovate without capital, so to say. So, I'll share some of the secrets of our story with you guys today, but just a little bit about Exigo for those who don't know, I mean, how many of you actually use our apps or have used our apps already? Okay. So, for those of you who don't know, Exigo is now actually the most used mobile travel app in the country. You know, if you look at any numbers for last year, if you look at, you know, numbers from any third party app engagement tool, we actually did, okay, if this works, can you get this to work, please? So, last year, you know, we actually did more app downloads than all the other travel brands combined and we did it by spending less than one percent of all the other travel apps combined and, you know, some of the learnings for us were, you know, the fact that you're able to build a product that, you know, builds organic pull, right, and is able to drive organic downloads is the most critical aspect to start with. That's the starting point really. Okay. So, I was just talking about the app and the numbers, right, this is from last year. We were actually four times bigger in downloads than the next biggest, you know, downloaded app last year, right, and if you combine the app downloads of all the online travel guys, you're actually still bigger. It's not a well-known fact. We don't like to, you know, beat the drum about this too much, but the best part is that 90 percent of these downloads were actually organic, so we didn't spend more money than actually what most of these brands spend in a day, that's what we were spending in a year, right, so that's the way to look at it. How did we do it? So, the first thing is building a product for the right audience, right, so unlike all travel brands who are focusing a lot around people who fly and stay in three, four, five star hotels, six years ago we said that Bharat's people travel on trains, right, and with that simple insight, the moment you look at 26 million people traveling on trains versus, you know, what, three, four lakhs traveling on a flight every day, it's very clear where the numbers are, right, and so we started to build a product that was super small in size in terms of app footprint, which worked offline without internet and GPS, which actually was available in eight regional languages, so this works in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Gujarati, etc., and where you could even have a voice based user interface to give your inputs rather than, you know, having to type them out, and where you could use this power of crowd sourcing information from other travelers to provide more accurate data to, you know, the people who are using it, so to give you an example, you know, at times, Ixigo will give you a more accurate live running status of a train than even the official NTS website, and the reason why we are able to do that is that every train in India has a bunch of Ixigo users who are actually sharing their location information with us, even if they don't share the location information with us, we have a massive database of cell tower locations and based on the cell tower that we are seeing in your vicinity, we can tell exactly where the train is, right, so this has been crowd sourced over the last few years, and you know, by building this kind of small, I mean it sounds like a small feature, it took like a few years to build, but by doing that, you know, we've solved a problem that nobody else was out there solving, right, and when you solve for problems for the train users, you know, you suddenly get millions of downloads, right, I mean, we are literally doing millions of downloads every month right now, you know, and many of these users just come because the user experience is vastly better than anything else that's available for any train-related information or a booking app, right, and many of these people actually end up buying flights, buses, hotels, and many other things, right, so you can still make money of them. The most critical thing is that you've got to drive frequency, right, because you spend money to acquire customers into a mobile app, and then if they don't retain the mobile app for too long, you know, it's essentially wasted spend because, you know, the CAAC on these things, if you start spending money, can get very high. In our case, the CAAC is extremely low, but you know, even then, we are very, very sensitive about, you know, how long is the retention, right, and 30-day retention, 60-day retention, getting those percentages and seeing if we can move the needle upwards on that. One way to do that is to introduce more content and engagement-led use cases, right? So, recently, we've also launched, you know, vernacular videos, radio games, news, you know, things that people like to do along the journey because, you know, nowadays, GEO has covered most of India with fairly dependable, you know, 4G or LTE, and also, you know, almost, people don't know this, but more than 3,000, almost 4,000 railway stations in the country now have a very high-speed free Wi-Fi by Google, right? If you've been to a railway station recently, you might have tried that. So, network coverage is not a problem anymore. People are willing to consume content on the go, and we have discovered that by partnering with a few OTT platforms recently and launching, you know, even videos and entertainment inside our app. So, if you're able to build a product which is suitable for this fast-growing audience of GEO users coming from tier 2, tier 3 cities, and if you're able to then create content and utility use cases that keeps these users hooked on to your app, you know, you can grow really fast, and this is true not just for travel, but, you know, for any category where you see people having targeted those users in the right manner with the right content and product, you are seeing crazy growth, whether it's social, whether it's social commerce, so, you know, there's a bunch of examples out there. The second growth hack is that it's always about customer experience, right, building a great customer experience. I think a lot of people get obsessed by things like pricing and being the cheapest, and, you know, also when they say great product, you know, people limit themselves to saying, you know, is the product work well? But I think more than the product, I think it's the overall experience that the customer has on your platform, right, right from landing on your Play Store landing page till the time he actually is talking to your customer care executive for any issue that he had, you know, that's all customer experience, right? It gets defined by how your user, you know, your UI is talking to the user, gets defined by, you know, how you actually approach problems when somebody writes to you on Twitter or one of your channels, and it gets defined by, you know, how anal you are about responding to these things very fast and with the right level of empathy, right? So NPS and customer satisfaction have always been, you know, the responsibility of the entire team in our case. You know, it's not the customer support team, customer happiness team, it's actually every single individual's responsibility. It starts from the top. So me and my co-founder answer a few customer feedback queries every single day. We respond to Twitter, you know, queries or somebody who's pissed off, you know, every single day, and we make sure that people feel that they are being heard, right? It's very important for your customers to always, you know, stay at the top of your priority list. All marketing actually starts there. And then what we did is we also added technology to it. So we launched something called Tara last year, which is our automated voice and chatbot that we built in-house to handle all the travel support related use cases. Today, Tara is handling almost 80% of inbound queries coming on chat, email, and on voice, we've just rolled out a small version of it for now, but almost 5% to 10% of the voice queries are now flowing through it as well. So we think that in the future, you know, anything that does not require very complex human interaction, you know, can be handled by a bot. The voice bots are getting fairly adaptive and, you know, people think that this is a 10-year-old problem, but, you know, in our view, it's a one or two-year-old problem where you will start seeing a lot of customer support being handled by bots and not humans, right? At least for English and Hindi, it's a solvable problem in the near term. And, you know, we've been pioneers at it, and we are seeing, like, for our scale of business, you know, similar businesses in the travel industry have, like, 800 or 500 customer support, you know, people on their payroll. We have less than 30, right? And we are able to do that because most of our queries are actually handled by the bot. The third growth hack that I wanted to talk about was that there are ways in which, you know, by doing some smart ASO, smart barter deals, and distribution, you can grow your business without, again, you know, burning a hole through your pocket. And, again, you know, if you want to build your brand, there are two ways you can go and spend millions of dollars on TV, or you can ride on somebody else's, you know, distribution. So in the first case, you can ride on Google's distribution, because Google Play Store gets visited by millions of people. How will people discover your app, right? How will you rank on the top for all the relevant queries? You know, it's very easy to start doing paid marketing and start feeling happy about the users that you're driving. But trust me, you know, the real test of whether, you know, you're going to continue getting organic love is whether you are able to get the Play Store listings, get the Play Store images and videos, and, you know, get the Play Store keywords right. Because if you don't get those right, you know, you're not going to start seeing organic growth. And in our case, you know, it's still driving a very large number of downloads for us, right? So getting the ASO right is super critical. Doing barter deals, so there are two ways to get on TV, you know, buying TVC spots or doing barter deals. So we've done a lot of barter deals that got us on TV, right? These barter deals were all kind of ref-shared deals or coupon deals, right? So they don't burn a huge hole in your pocket because that's your cat anyways. So similar cat as online marketing, but hey, you get to be on TV, right? So we've done this even with a few movies where basically the movie production house, you know, promotes us and we go promote, we get bites from the actors. These actors would charge like crores for spending even, you know, a minute doing any shoot, but here they are able to give that content literally almost for free, you know, in return for flight vouchers or in return for some kind of deliverable from our side, which is not necessarily, you know, like dollar deliverable. Similarly, you know, when you do distribution deals, so that's Flipkart, Flipkart's flight is powered by us. There are several distribution deals we've done which are not here. When you do distribution deals again, you know, you are doing these mostly on ref-shared and you want to make sure that, you know, as the distribution guy grows, you know, you also grow with him and both parties are incentivized to make that relationship work. So by doing these kind of deals, you know, you are limiting the amount of burn that you do, you know, and that burn only happens when you actually get transactions going and therefore, you know, you are able to keep a lid and check. At the same time, your brand is getting built because your brand is visible at most of these places, right? So in the minds of consumers, you know, they've started seeing you at more places and it's very important that you do these deals in a branded manner and not in a sort of white label or, you know, manner where you're not exposed. Growth hack number four, and I'm sure the exchange for media guys will agree, but basically PR is very important, right? Getting word out about what you're doing is extremely important all the time, right? So I remember that in very early days, when I started Ixigo and we were bootstrapped, right? So we didn't have any VC funding at all, it was just our own money bought three computers, got started, I reached out to a few publications and said, you know, can you write about what we're doing? And the guy said, you know, who's your agency? And I said, there's no agency, it's just me, right? We started the business like literally six months ago. So I remember I had to write the first press release, myself learn how to do it, do a few online sort of checks of, you know, how others do it. And then I wrote this release in how an agency writes it, sent it over to like 50 journalists. Guess what, a couple of them actually picked it up, right? So our launch story was published without sort of having to do a lot of PR around it, just finding the right people to reach out to. And nowadays, even today, what I do is sometimes, you know, write to journalists who are writing for the travel industry and just generally, you know, appreciate what they're doing, right? Because sometimes you find really well-written, you know, stuff out there and you want to appreciate the guy. And that's how they learn about you and then, you know, whenever you have something interesting to announce, they definitely are going to quote you on it. So over time, you know, we've built this largely in-house. So we've tried to work with agencies. It's never really worked out. We still do PR in-house. Like we have an in-house PR team that manages PR. And we're doing it fairly well because in terms of share of voice in the travel industry, you know, we've almost got the at-bar share of voice with the market leader in terms of PR. We've also seen that it helps a lot in SEO and ASO rankings, right? So if your brand gets mentioned a lot on digital, you know, obviously, there is a rub off impact that Google sees and promotes, you know, in their rankings. The most important point is don't overdo it because some people spend a lot of time in their energy on PR. I think a lot of this has to come organically over time as your product and your, you know, brand awareness sort of improves. And the fifth and the most important one is where we've really sort of, you know, discovered this whole blue ocean of how you can use the strength and power of viral videos to reach out to millions of people, right? So I don't know if some of you have seen this, but, you know, there was an incident at a hotel in Bali where an Indian family was trying to take out, you know, a lot of stuff from the hotel, which was not meant to be taken out. I'm not going to go into the specifics, but this video started going viral suddenly overnight over WhatsApp, right? A lot of you would have got this. Within 24 hours, actually, we had made this video about stuff you can take from hotels and stuff you can't take from hotels, which we sort of refurbished and said, this is the moment actually to launch this video, right? And within 24 hours, actually, we released this video. How many of you have seen actually our video? Stuff you can take from hotels? Almost everyone in the room, right? So we don't even know how many views we got. We are guessing we got like a hundred million views. I wrote even less here, maybe. But basically, I think it just went to almost everyone we were in touch with, irrespective of us sending it to them or not. Like a lot of my family members started sending it back to me without realizing it was our video within 48 hours, right? And the power today of a viral piece of content actually touching like a hundred million views mark within a day or two is unprecedented that we have ever seen before, right? So earlier, these things used to have a graph which was more exponential, it would grow slowly and you would be seeing it at day three, day four, hitting some sort of peak. If you have true virality and true topicality, so topicality was very important here that you were doing moment marketing, something just happened and you talked about it. Similarly, you would have seen news jacking or you would have seen tweet jacking, right? These days, you have Zomato tweeting something and all the other brands actually tweeting something back at them and it becomes a viral story. Now, these things actually, the potential of them reaching millions of people overnight is unprecedented totally, right? I mean, all TV channels put together will not give you that kind of reach. Even if you burned millions of dollars that night, you would not get that kind of reach that you can get with this piece of viral content, right? So, and then the best part is that it gets picked up by all sorts of people, right? So in our case, whoopee Goldberg in her show the next morning, you know, like we were watching that, she talks about this video in her show and she pulls it up and she asks her guests that have you guys ever flicked anything and then one guest admits, yeah, I used to flick pens from this hotel, fancy hotel I used to stay in, right? So it just becomes the talking point of that moment and the best part is it flows into your app downloads and everything you do, right? So we got like 20% increase in app downloads for almost a couple of weeks. We got increase in engagement, we got increase in time spent and all of that. That was quite visible, right? Without having, I mean, literally the way we shot this video was we rented a hotel room night. The girl in the video works for us, she's one of our content, you know, team members. It was shot by in-house video team that we built this in-house video team five years ago. There's a guy called Ashish Chopra who runs this, some of you might have attended some of his sessions here and everything was done in-house, right? Literally spent less than 10,000 rupees on this video, right? In making this video, right? So it's not like a, you know, I remember last agency pitch, the guy said, I can't do anything for you if you're not willing to spend 25 lakhs and I threw him out of the room obviously. But, you know, the challenge is that it's not about the money. It's about the topicality, it's about the ingenuity and it's really about, you know, getting the messaging, right? So that it goes viral. I mean, if you're not talking in the same language as your audience, you know, it's not gonna go super viral because you might be talking to the first 50 million users or you might be talking, you know, only to the bottom 100 million users. If you have a message that can actually empathize with almost everybody out there, it's gonna go super viral because the reason for people to share usually is to say, hey, I found this first, right? And I want to tell others about it. Give them a reason to do that. To summarize, you know, I think in today's world, the way we do marketing is changing, right? So let me throw a question at you. What's common between J&J, Uber, Lyft and Hyatt and Marriott? Anybody knows that? Okay, so none of these companies have a CMO anymore. It's been almost, for many of them a few months, for some of them a year or more, they don't have a CMO anymore, right? And the reason they don't have a CMO anymore is that the role of a CMO has actually changed, right? So if you think about it, in today's world, there are two almost left brain and right brain approaches to marketing, right? So I'm here on point number four to start with because that's probably the most important point on the slide. But how you set up your marketing is super critical, right? So you have one part of your marketing which looks at growth. So you had Ashish Pratap from my team actually talking about performance marketing a couple of hours back. He's part of that growth team. We have product people there. We have engineers there. We have data people there. And we have people who look at acquisition, retention, engagement, day in and day out, right? These are people who come with a engineering bent of mind, right? These are not the most creative people out there, but they come with a very data-driven engineering led, product led, technology led hat, right? You will not find these people from any classical marketing try to hire a CMO who has these qualities, you will fail, right? I mean, we've tried it like you've spent years looking for one, but you won't find one, right? So the other bent of mind is creative, right? So you have people who are good at coming up with nice copy, you know, thinking design, thinking brand, thinking, you know, content, video, social. You may find people of this kind of, you know, attitude and temperament coming from the classical marketing backgrounds because that's what their forte has been, right? The moment you try to combine this in one person, you fail miserably. And there are several examples. I don't want to quote here, but, you know, people do not realize that, you know, you cannot find any more one person who can do it all, right? You will have somebody driving your growth. You will have somebody driving your brand. And maybe that person can also drive all the creativity and the video and all the stuff for you in-house, right? But it's super hard to find somebody who can do all of that at once, right? And the moment you realize that, you start structuring your team, right? Because, you know, you have people who are either left-brained or right-brained and you know which part of the team they actually are going to get into and perform in, right? So marketing has to start by looking at product. You know, you cannot do any marketing until your product is right. I mean, I see a lot of startups making this mistake, launching something, starting to buy and acquire traffic and saying that, you know, they have growth, right? It's the biggest mistake to make, right? That's called faking growth, right? If you have a product that works, you will see organic growth the moment. Even if you tell 100 of your friends to start using it, 50 of them should be using it two weeks down, right? I mean, there's no reason why you don't get organic growth if your product works, right? So till the time you don't get the product right, please do not go and market anything, right? Get the product market fit, right? Increasingly for brands like us who are tech product-driven, you know, in-house works better than agency-led, right? I know a lot of people in this room will get pissed off, but you know, that's hard fact of life because brand is so tightly coupled with product now that you cannot literally have somebody from the outside coming and telling you how to start building that, right? Because what you're doing on social, what you're doing on your product, and what you're going and doing, you know, on digital is so tightly coupled that it's very hard for somebody from the outside to become an expert at it the way you are. And the more you discover that within yourself, you know, the more better you're gonna get at it over time, right? And even the largest of tech companies out there are sort of moving down that route. And build great content, share worthy content. Do not create ads, right? The moment you start thinking of creating ads, you're set up for failure, right? In today's world, nobody wants to see ads. Even Google wants to move away from the ad business model. They're spending more time thinking about transactions right now, right? So the question really is, how do you build great content? In our case, you know, we have a process to it. We brainstorm, we research, we look at trends, we look at, you know, if something major happens, you know, we have situation rooms which come together and say, okay, what do we do about this? So the way you do this is a very different kind of approach, right? It's not any more the traditional brand marketing approach. It's more of an experimentation-led approach, right? And then online is working far, far better for most of the digital brands right now compared to, you know, the traditional media, right? And, you know, we've done experiments, we've seen the kind of customers we end up acquiring and the kind of retention curves you have. And I think the best part with digital is that you can actually almost measure everything out there, right? And it's very hard to measure the impact of some of the stuff you don't do online. It's just hard fact of life. Customer happiness, company-wide KRA, important to nail this in your culture if you believe that customer support is, you know, the KRA of somebody sitting in that other building, I think you've failed already again because it needs to be every single person's KRA, right? Lastly, you know, build a freedom to experiment in the system, right? So people who are scared of failing or scared of trying things which don't fit in with the company norms, et cetera, you know, I think again, you're not gonna discover crazy pockets of growth with that kind of mindset, right? The way you growth hack is to find crazy pockets of growth before anybody else does. And the moment everybody else moves to those crazy pockets of growth, you stop doing that because it's outpriced already. I mean, the moment everybody is doing that, you know, it's the wrong place to be find another crazy pocket of growth, right? This applies to everything, SEM, social media marketing, you know, you name it, the moment everybody is onto your strategy, it's the wrong strategy now, right? And I think the best thing is that, you know, if you get somebody with a creative bent of mind, allow them, you know, to come up with content that can potentially go viral about your brand, about what your brand does, but not an ad, right? Related to your domain, related to what you do, and use that content. I mean, some of the content that we do, we also then start using to promote, you know, on Facebook and drive more app downloads for, right? So some of these viral pieces of content end up performing like an ad for us in all our digital campaigns, right? Which becomes a great loop and reuse of this content. Last but not the least, why did I start with $0, et cetera? Because what is very important to understand, and this is a learning from the Xigo journey, not just about marketing, but about, you know, our company in particular, is that, you know, money buys a company time, but not the ability to execute. It can buy you growth, but it cannot buy you product market fit. It can buy you revenue, but it cannot buy you a viable business model. It can buy you traction, but it's not gonna buy you customer love, genuine customer love. It can buy you engineers, but it cannot buy you innovation. It can buy you VPs and AVPs, but it cannot buy you the passion required to execute. It can buy you a lot of swag in your office, but it will not buy you the culture you need, right? Because these kind of things, there is no price tag for. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. That was, I think I'm beyond time. But I'll take a couple of questions if there are. Any questions? Okay, you have a question? Yeah. I have a specific query about travel. So how are you guys thinking about, because you're already integrating with the flights and railways? So do we have any chance to look at end-to-end journey planning and booking at the once in India? Considering that I can actually book it from one town to other town, which can mix off railways, air travel, bus, everything in one ticket. Actually, we had launched something on those lines six years ago, but I think we were too early to the market back then. It was called Xigotrip planner. And the only challenge then was that we were functioning like a meta-cert, so you couldn't book all these in one ticket. As of now, we've started to work on this again. We're calling it like a multimodal product where you can combine flight, bus, train, et cetera, to create your end-to-end trip from any city in India to any city. You should see it out there soon. So we're working on it. Yes, the back. Sure. So your question, just to get this right, is that if somebody's talking to our chatbot, how do we ensure we don't lose that customer to one of our competitors? Or is that the question? Okay. Look, the reality is whether your AI enabled or not, right? If you don't have either the product or the pricing or the offering that somebody else is able to offer the customer, you're gonna lose out on that customer any which ways. So I think we worry less about specifically this situation, but we worry more about saying, how can we get the customer experience right? How can we get the content right? How can we get the pricing right? And those are problems if you've solved, then AI or not, you can then retain that customer, right? So that's the way we look at it. Yes, at the back. Hi, if I understood the journey correctly, you looked at railways as the first pocket of growth because that was an untapped market, right? And you got huge downloads and downloads out of that. How does the Arpo function play out there? Because it would be lower ticket size as compared to, and when you're chasing Arpo, wouldn't you then have to spend huge marketing dollars because then everyone is chasing Arpo customers? Yeah, so it's a good question. You know, so we started with flights back in 2007 because the train users were not online yet, right? And we latched on to trains around 2013, right? About six years back. The reason was we saw a lot of growth in train-related utility queries which no product actually was able to solve well. I mean, believe it or not, there was a time where for several months we were the only train-related app on the Play Store, right? There was no IRCTC app. There was no other train-related app there. And we were giving PNR predictions. We were telling you where the train is right now and we were doing like a bunch of stuff. For four years, almost for five years, this app did not sell anything, right? It was a utility app. And I think that was the beauty of it and that's why it went so viral, right? When the moment you start selling things to someone, you know, people have their doubts, but when you are saying, I'm solving all your train-related problems, please come here for utility. You know, you tend to have more trust built in from day one, right? So we actually went down the monetization path on this only like two years ago. When we said, hey, we have more than a million daily active users, that was back then, now we have three, but we said, okay, we need to do something about, you know, monetizing now. And that's when we started thinking of, okay, shall we sell tickets? Shall we try to upsell flights, et cetera? Should we monetize from advertising and all of that? So even when we launched on flights, we were actually a meta-search engine that helped you compare, you know, all the other OTAs and the airlines at one place, right? So it was a utility app even back then, like even the website we launched in 2007 was a utility website, right? So most of our approach to this market has been very different. We never start thinking about, I mean, maybe it's a weakness as well. We never think about revenue when we think about a product. We think about saying, okay, what are the pain areas? What are the big challenges travelers face today? How can we solve them with technology, right? And then we arrive at products. And then last, when we have a lot of users using them, we're like, okay, how the hell do we monetize them, right? And this is the approach probably a lot of successful internet companies out there have applied. And you know, the good thing about this approach is that you are more user-centric than revenue-centric in your thinking internally at the organization level, right? So the product guys are worrying more about, hey, are people liking what we are doing at all? More than, you know, hey, are we making money on it, right? Because actually if you get a lot of traffic, you know, what we are discovering now is that it's very easy to grow and make money, right? I mean, last three years we've been growing our revenue to the extent where we are happy with that growth, right? The harder problem is building something where users come on their own. And that's the part we spend 80% of our time on actually. Anybody else? So we're done. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, sir, but we would like to extend like a thank you for you.