 Hey everyone, welcome to this CUBE conversation featuring Senbird. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. John Kim joins me next, the CEO of Senbird. John, welcome to the program. Talk to the audience about Senbird. What is it that you guys do? What gaps in the market did you see back in 2013? Yeah, well thank you so much and I'm excited to be here. So just to give you a quick introduction about Senbird, we started the company back in 2013 and then we first started out as a consumer-based product building social network for moms. But around 2015 when the world was really moving towards messaging, we kind of looked at it as an opportunity to build a messaging feature for our own application. That's when we kind of realized a problem that there weren't really modern SDK or API products that can enable modern messaging experience for other applications. So we decided to kind of build that and then actually launched on the side, which actually became the main business. So we applied the white combinator with that idea and launched to the world in 2016 and then kind of fast-forwarded in a good six years. We're now powering over a quarter billion users on a monthly basis sending billions of messages across different verticals like online communities like Reddit, we'll deliver it like DoorDash, etc. So it's kind of where we are today. And you're now valued at $1 billion. So a lot of evolution, a lot of momentum since 2013, especially since 2016. But also during the last couple of years, talk to me about some of the philosophies and the approaches that Senbird has applied to be driving such momentum during such volatile times. Yeah, I think over the years, what World came to realize is that more and more businesses are becoming mobile first. So by focusing on the mobile-based experiences, conversations really became one of the most efficient and effective ways to build relationship between the users as well as the relationship with the brands. So by incorporating experiences like messaging, people were able to increase the engagement and the retention and ultimately conversion within the applications. And that's kind of where we come in because more and more it's becoming harder and harder for developers and the business operators to build modern messaging experience. So we really want to make sure that all of the developers and all of the businesses can harness the power of messaging as easily as possible, getting all the future richness, plus the scalability that you need. So we really try to build the best-in-class product so that you can have those messaging within your application. Let's talk about that. So building relationships in a digital world today is table stakes for any business. Consumers' patience was quite thin the last couple of years or probably still is to some extent. But building relationships in today's omnichannel world, whereas consumers we expect, we can go to many different applications, apps, and complain or raise issues with technologies or products or services. How is that table stakes for an organization to be able to have that in-app experience to retain the customers, the data, the insights? Yeah. Today if you think about how businesses are engaging with customers, there are a lot of different channels, right? There's SMS, there's your phone calls, direct mailing, emails, and also in a messaging. If you think about as a user, what is the best experience you want to have with the brands is usually through the mobile applications. That's why the entire mobile economy has really grew and exploded over the years. One thing that if you think about, again, as a user, what are the experiences that you don't like to have is if you think about SMSes. SMS is now plagued with phishing and scams issues. FTC reported that there are more than hundreds of millions of dollars that are costing US consumers last year and that's more than 50% growth from the previous year. So more and more, these kind of other external channels are becoming a channel for phishing and scams and really disrupting the user experience. But if you think about the in-app messaging becoming your default mode of engaging with the brands and other users is secure, more reliable, and also as businesses, you get to control the user experience plus actually owning the data so you can actually improve your products and services on top of that. So that's some of the approaches that we've seen over the years. More and more businesses are using in-app messaging as the default mode of communication and then using other channels as a kind of like a last mile delivery in case users miss certain kind of conversation, they may rely on those other channels as a fallback option. Just to touch a little bit on the messaging side of things. So if you think about how the world is using messaging today, you might think of messaging apps like Yameda, Facing Messenger, or WhatsApp and all of these other kind of customer applications, customer mobile messaging is kind of really dumping the world. But if you think about individual businesses, you really don't really want to hand over those experiences and their user data to other kind of social media networks. So what you want to do is actually have that similar level, if not better, experience within your application but also be able to again own those data, control those data and make sure that your users, your customers are having a very clean and secure experience on your application. Absolutely. The secure clean experience is critical for brands. Talk to me about how your customer conversations have evolved over the last few years as brand loyalty, customer satisfaction scores, churn, all of these things are very impactful to organizations. Has the conversation risen up the C-suite? Is it that impactful these days? Yeah. So really based on the brands that you are operating, again like the customer engagement and customer retention and sometimes the conversations turning into business outcomes through conversions, all of these things are really impacted a lot by the conversations or in a messaging. So what we've seen over the years is anywhere from the user acquisition perspective from the marketing also within the user engagement retention that's happening in your application, whether it be user to user or your sales team having conversations with the customers, ultimately to like customer support, measuring C-sets and how do you keep the customers, be sure that the customers never hit a dead end. All of this entire customer journey now can be mapped through in a messaging. So because it's becoming more and more important and critical for your business, now if you think about our buyers today, we're talking to CEOs and CTOs as well as chief digital officers in some of these enterprises companies. That makes sense. I mean, some of the benefits that you've mentioned, increasing retention, driving direct sales, cross sale, up sale, brand loyalty, that impacts every aspect of an organization, customer success, etc. Let's talk now about some customer examples. I know you mentioned Reddit. I know Hinge is another great customer example. Give me a couple examples that really showcase the value that Sunburn delivers. Yeah. So Reddit has been one of our earliest customers, even when we were just a C-stage company. If you think about Reddit, Reddit has successfully transformed from the web-based company to a mobile-first company. And by incorporating in a messaging to a modern experience, just like what you have on WhatsApp, they were able to increase user engagement and ultimately the retention on the application. So more and more users are coming back to the application in any given month. So that's one example. And again, keeping the community safe and secure is very, very important for a community like Reddit. So offering powerful moderation capabilities for the community in Moz, those are also very important factors why Reddit decided to work with us. So the other examples like Krafton, PUBG, one of the world's most successful and largest games today, they were able to increase the user engagement and ultimately the overall session time within the game by incorporating in a messaging that powers the users online communities through lobby chat as well as the client chat. So how do you keep the users more engaged in return to the game and stay there for a longer period of time? Ultimately, increasing the lifetime value of the gamers. And then a few other like business and industry use cases like keep trucking recently rebranded as motive drastically improved the collaboration between this operations control and truck drivers. So those kind of communication capabilities obviously increased the safety of the drivers as well as the trust and the openness and overall collaboration within the businesses. So those are some of the examples. And I think we mentioned like Hinge before, how do you kind of bring all of those conversations to stay within the application so the users don't have to reveal their personal information so that the conversation become again stays on the application, keep the user happy, more secure and safe for the older users. That security is something that keeps jumping out to me. We have seen the threat landscape change dramatically in the last couple of years. It is so amorphous, but you mentioned the SMS security issues that it has. And I think a staff that you guys provided to me was the FTC reported that tech schemes cost US consumers 131 million last year in 2021, which as you mentioned is a huge increase from 2020. Talk a little bit more about the importance of being able to abstract some of that personal information as consumers, we give it out so freely and it's risk. Absolutely. So again, some of the most common phishing scams that we all as the consumers receive these days are pretending to be another businesses telling you, hey, click here to get a refund on a credit card charge or there's a fraudulent case. There's something that makes you either call the number or go to a certain link. And you kind of have to trust and try to figure out, is this a messaging that's really that brand that you are engaging with or is it someone else that's pretending to be that brand? So it's the burden is on the end customers. Unfortunately, all the phishings and everything is like a large, large number. So the more people you send out those messages, ultimately, someone will get tricked into those messages, ultimately costing a lot of money for the end consumers. Now, the benefit of having conversations is that your users are secure. When the users get a push notification or in a message, you know where that's exactly happening because you have a full context of the business and the application you're in. And then whenever someone, somebody sends your message, you know that the sender and the receiver is already authenticated. So those users are secure from the get go. And because of the contextual rich experience you have within the end messaging, plus all of those extra security layers that are baked into the user experience, the end benefit for the customers are incredible because, again, you can trust the conversation that you're having with the brand. And then the messages tend to be a lot more richer and better user experience, also very latency and just overall more frictionless experience for the end customers. So that gives a lot more safety and more benefit for the end customer, as well as the business friends. Absolutely. Two things that you just said that really jumped out at me, trust and authenticity. We think of the five generations that are in the workforce today engaging with companies via apps that trust and authenticity and that security is, it just, it gets more important every day. Talk to me about when you're in customer conversations or you're talking with analysts, what are some of the things that you describe as that key differentiators that makes send birds in messaging really stand out about the competition? Yeah, one of the things that we really focused on was can we actually serve the world? So scalability is one of the key important aspects, how we were able to win customers like Reddit and DoorDash and even like incredible customers like Paytm, one of the largest fintech application in India. So being able to provide a scalability so that your customers, our customers and the developers can go to sleep at night without having to worry about, will this work or not? But also other on top of those things, the feature richness, because ultimately what our customer wants is how can they engage with their customers in a modern and a sleek way? So by offering the features that are up in the latest and the greatest that you would expect out of other customer applications, again like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger or even things like Slack, we offer a lot of those features from Deco. So by having those feature richness out of the box, you can implement a modern messaging experience from day one. So you can go to market much faster, but also give more trust for the users because ultimately end customers are already used to using the best messaging experiences out there. So as soon as they kind of feel the experience are a little bit outdated, they'll stop trusting the brand. So how do you kind of give them modern and trusting and a secure experience for the user is very, very critical for the businesses. So you can offer those again from out of the box. Out of the box, absolutely table stakes for businesses in every industry. John, thank you so much for coming on the Cube Day, talking to me about Sunbird, in-app messaging, the values, the benefits, the what's in it for customers and businesses. We appreciate your insights. Thanks so much. For John Kim, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this Cube conversation.