MailModo: Redefining Email Interactions with Aquibur Rahman

Welcome to hack to the future with Kyle Roof. I am Kyle Roof and today we have Aquib who's the CEO of MailMoto. Aquib, thanks for being here. Welcome.

Thank you guys for having me on your podcast. I'm really glad that we could do that.

that's fantastic. And for the five people that watch this show, you'll notice that my background is different. I'm on the road. Aquibis also on the road. So we're both road buddies and we're doing it with the bad backgrounds. I've also been walking around Croatia. It's quite hot. My face is very red. I've been trying to get rid of that, but we're going with it. This is how we look now. This is a real thing. So here we go. Aquib. Quite impressively, you have been involved with both the Y Combinator, the season 2021, and Sequoia Surge. First of all, congratulations. That's an amazing accomplishment. But I think what people really want to know is between those two, who has better coffee?

Sadly, when we did both Y Combinator and Search, COVID was there and everything was online. So we couldn’t have coffee there. But both are awesome programs. Both are for different stages of companies. Y Combinator is the more early stage when you are at the ideas stage and you're trying to find your PMF and we're trying to get your initial customers. Surge is more when you have like got few customers got about let's say about 100k revenue and now you are up for scaling. That is when the surge comes in and they have the program and the support accordingly YC also has programming support to support more early-stage companies. So Both are great and I have huge respect for the team behind both of them. But they are quite different in terms of who they are.

So that's really interesting that you came in during COVID, which I think is a different experience than what they traditionally are. Were you able to still meet other founders? Were you still able to interact with other founders or was it really kind of like, we're doing Y Combinator, we're doing Sequoia Search kind of on your own, kind of with the mentors? Like, how did that kind of go?

Yeah, I feel that at that time, like everybody was trying to figure it out. And though the program tried to support us in terms of creating small groups and like with other founders, et cetera, to meet and understand each other's business, et cetera, I feel that the current version of Y Combinator where you go there in San Francisco and live there and work with other founders, that is much better compared to something when everything was online is, you know, you can only meet people on zoom call and it's very not that, human. I would say, the, probably the best way to understand people or engage with other people and, be friends with them is to probably grab lunch or dinner or drink. Right. so I think that the Y Combinator Today or Search Today what they are doing with physical offline programs is much better than the COVID time online programs.

Were there any common denominators that you've seen on the people who get accepted into these types of platforms? Are they looking for a certain type of people? Have you noticed it kind of trends towards a certain thing? The reason I'm like, I started my kind of entrepreneurial life mid-thirties, early thirties. I'm now in mid forties. In a way, I kind of feel like I'd be an old man in the room, you know, is that, is that just my incorrect notion? Do you kind of see tends towards a younger, more motivated crowd in a certain way? Or do you see certain things that seem to trend to the people that they accept?

So Y Combinator generally has very large batches and they have a very diverse set of people I would say young very young like college dropouts and old experienced people of my age 30s etc as well. I'm sure there would be someone who is analyzing all this data like what is the median age of the founders and what is the median type or educational background or the city etc. But I don't have that exact understanding, but I feel that is why Y combinator has a very diverse set of people. One common denominator would be that probably all of them have some exceptionalists collected. They have some streak which makes them unique compared to everybody else. Like somebody would, I mean, I say that so. If you think from an investor's point of view, they want to minimize their risk when they're investing in a company. And at a very early stage, there's not a lot of information about the company or what it can become in the future. So they try to see if the founder is dynamic if they have done great things in the past, like exceptional things in the past, and that is probably a signal that they can do great things in the future as well. And great things could be like academically great or great great work at some company or did great things at their previous company, etc, etc. So I feel that try to understand if the founder has done something exceptional in the past or has a diverse set of things. And they have done multiple things in the past. So they want to minimize the risk and bet on the best of people.

Okay, right on. Very cool. So in your career, you worked at a few places and then as I was looking at your journey, it kind of felt like things really took off for you when you were working for ClearTax India and you were there for just under two years. But in that time you had remarkable growth. You 5X their organic growth. There was something like 600000 new signups. Different aspects of their business grew and It's truly remarkable. My crack research team went all the way through your, LinkedIn and found that, but really amazing. But the thing that I find there's this line, there's the LinkedIn line on, on how you did it. And it said you employed a small agile team and leveraged data-driven problem-solving techniques to achieve these remarkable results. And that's, that's the very fun LinkedIn answer, right on what you did, but.

Yeah.

We don't need the secret sauce, but like really what was going on? Like how did that come about?

Yeah, I think those are fancy words for LinkedIn or resume. But I will be honest with you and I will tell like about my journey at Clio. So I joined them when they raised their series eight and at that time they were a very small team. The marketing team was non-existent. I joined them as head of marketing. And the first thing was to hire people in the team. There was no team. So I built the whole marketing team function with a different set of people, people for SEO content, email marketing, ads, et cetera. And the second part, which was a bigger problem was to decide the strategy for the GTM. Like how do we grow? And at that time they were launching a new product for B2B. So it was traditionally a B2C company. But at that time when I just joined, they started working on a B2B product, which was completely new. To give you some context, the Indian government was launching a new tax law for businesses and ClearTax was building a product for that. So we thought that in India, the Indian SMB businesses are very price sensitive, but very big markets. And what would be the best strategy to grow and capture the market when you are completely new and there are like a lot of large players like KPMG, EY, Deloitte, etc. big names like how do Claretax establish your own brand name and acquire a lot of customers. So we thought and we realized that we should invest in content marketing and SEO since the beginning and we had still like six months of time for the launch, so we started like the marketing team started working like six months before. The problem was that at that time there was no keyword volume, like, because the law is going to be launched after six months. The product is going to be launched after six months and nobody's searching for that thing today. so, so there was no keyword volume. There was no keyword research possible. How do you do content and SEO? So what we did was, basically we read the whole law and as a marketing team, we read the law and tried to predict what people would search. We tried to predict what would have changed in the user journey. So we thought that people would be searching for registration, invoicing, the tax written filing, et cetera, et cetera. And we created different pillars for SEO and started writing content about them and none of our competition was doing that at that time. And so slowly in just three months, we started ranking on these keywords and we kept working on that, we produce very high-quality content in very easy words. Law is very complicated. So we started creating content in easy words and that made a lot of people share our content with other people hey, here is a simple explanation of this new tax law. And that boosted our SEO a lot. We kept looking at pages that were tracking low, kept optimizing all of that content, and kept working on backlinks and all the new content that should be adjourned. We had a lot of forms, et cetera, on the pages as well to let people ask questions. So we know what people are looking for, what people are searching for. And then we create new content using those questions as well. So we took a lot of Google inputs and that's how we grew the traffic. And when the product, the new law was launched, we got like a million traffic in one day.

That's awesome

Yeah. So that was great. And then we realized that, okay, SEO is one thing and then, but this just bringing the user, how do we retain the user? So we started collecting email IDs. We started sending them a content, educational content newsletter, not promotional, but very educational about what is changing, what is happening, et cetera, so that people get engaged. And that's how we slowly built thought leadership and the brand of ClearTax. And then when our sales team was meeting companies, they knew cleartax. So it was very easy for our sales team to get their foot in the door. Yeah, because they have already read our blogs. They have already read our emails. And they knew they considered us as the top leadership for the new law and not the big four of the world.

They were going to your site to figure out what was going on. You were the authority. So that's brilliant. So just to break down what you did real quick. So a law is changing and it's going into effect in a certain amount of time. And you only have six months anyway towards tax season or towards when you need to start to get these clients. And six months as we know in SEO is not a lot of time, especially in something like tax where it's a saturated market and you're going up against huge, huge, and huge, you know, they've spent millions of dollars to rank for all the terms they want to rank for, but there's this new law coming. But not only did you just say, hey, we're going to rank for those new law terms, we're going to try to go after ways that real humans are going to search for this. You know, people that are not lawyers, people that are not tax attorneys, people that are not tax professionals, they don't know the technical term. This is how normal humans will search. And then you're able to start to rank for that. But then as you probably get closer to that, that six-month, traffic will increase, right? But then what you're doing is as people come in, you're getting forms from them, asking them more about

Yeah, these are all businesses. Yeah.

how did you find this or what are you thinking about? And that's giving you more content to create because that's how, again, the real humans research what they're thinking about. So that's actually giving you keywords that don't even exist in any kind of keyword planner or keyword tool because again, these are brand new terms, but you're understanding how humans are interested in this, and allow you to create more content to go after that. So then once it all hits, it's this massive surge. And then as you were saying, businesses are coming to you when they were looking for this six months ago, you already have that content and you guys are the thought leader for it. That's absolutely brilliant.

Yeah. Yeah. So like to summarize, like probably the biggest difference between us and the competitor was that we could understand the customer and we were ahead of our competitors in providing that information to our customers in a timely manner. And we were very fast and agile. Like we were creating like a hundred pieces of content every month. So that helped in moving in SEO fast.

Love it. And you know, people always talk about all the time, like when they're in those types of industries, how can I compete against KPMG? How can I compete against whatever huge company? But when there's a shift like that, and those shifts happen kind of regularly where there is something that impacts people start thinking about how people might search for it six months down the road when it actually impacts their lives. And then you can start to win those terms that don't even exist. And you know, KPMG might not even be on the ball. They don't care. Right? There's, there's, there's so far ahead. They don't care. They're not going to do that type of work. And you are, that's where you take your agile team and leverage the data and go for it. As you said, in the LinkedIn line, that's perfect. Absolutely perfect. Well done. Okay. So we're about halfway through kind of your, your journey. You're at ClearTax and then you left there and you did about a year and a half of consulting. And I imagine, was it your success at ClearTax? You were just getting offers like crazy and you realized that maybe I need to transition and do this for myself. Is that kind of careerized what you were thinking or was it something else?

Yeah, so since college, I decided that I would work for five years and after that, I will start something of my own. So I left Claretax roughly after like overall experience of five years and I thought that I would start something. However, I didn't have a problem to solve. I didn't know what idea to work on. So I decided I would work with several companies, try to understand what they are doing, and try to find a problem through consulting as well. So at that time, these companies whom I was consulting were very early-stage companies that had just raised some money and were looking for growth. So I was helping them in setting up the team, setting up different processes, function, SEO, email, ads, etc. It was similar thing what I did at ClearTax. I was kind of replicating at different places. Clients I got were mostly through referrals from people who I have worked with at ClearTex. They have moved or they have started their own company. They called me and they started working with me. Some of the other people that I worked with were through referrals of somebody else. So mostly through referral, I didn't do any pull or treat or advertise anything else. Most of these were inbound. And my idea was to of course help them, but also to understand their business, what is working, what is not working. I'm new to doing startups and slowly find my own ideas.

This is brilliant. I've never heard this before. This I absolutely love this. So you crush it at ClearTax and you're set for life. I'm sure they will, will pay you forever. Like, like you are there, their guy, but then you're like, my goal was to have my own thing and I haven't found a problem yet to solve. And so now you're going to leave what had to have been a sweet setup to consult. So you can go and find other problems in other businesses. So the,, with the ultimate goal of creating a product or a service that could solve those problems. And that's how you can do your own company. Is that, is that what I heard? Brilliant.

Yeah. consulting also gives you enough time, like a full-time job requires your whole mental balance, but you can't think of new ideas. And there's a commitment as well that when you are working on something, you want to give 100 % to it, right? Yeah. Consulting is like, yeah.

That's the next level. That's next-level thinking. I'm, I've not heard that before where I need to go out into the world and consult so I can, I can help them. Right. I can, I've done this amazing thing. I've got all this experience and you were obviously working before ClearTax before. So you've got all this experience. I can really help these companies, but at the same time you're trying to find a problem to solve so that then you can branch out on your own and have your own thing is really next-level thinking.

Not heard that before. That's been absolutely fantastic. I love that so much. So then in 2020, that's when you found MailModo. Now, before we get to that, you're kind of based half time. We talked about this before we started recording. You're in NYC for about half the time, and then you're in Bangalore for about half of the time. Yep.

So at that time, I was in India. I started going to the US only very recently. Most of my life I have spent in India.

Okay. When you're in New York City and you're homesick, all right, and you need something to eat that tastes like home.

Where are you going? Now I looked up the Michelin guide. In the Michelin Guide, there are 12 Indian-based restaurants. Are we going to any of those? Or is there a spot like, this tastes like home? This is where, where are you going when you need to get that meal that feels like home?

So probably cooking oneself feels more like home. But yeah, but I think the best food in New York is in the food trucks that you will find at across like across New York, the halal food guys, food trucks and there's so many food trucks in New York. So I think the best food is there. There are of course a lot of Indian restaurants in New York. But I feel that the food trucks are the best.

What's your go-to? Can we give a shout-out to one food truck that we love?

I don't remember the name so I think that I have tried something really good at outside Madison Square but I don't remember the name.

So anyway, go to, what was the square?

Madison Square, there it is. Easy peasy, go in there, find the Indian truck, and it's gonna be good stuff. Perfect.

actually there are a lot of them and they are like spread across New York is probably one of the best cities in terms of food because you have a lot of diverse food from all over the globe.

Well, here's a better question, maybe then. There are certain dishes. So I'm from the US. I live in Asia. Cheeseburgers are terrible in Asia. Like, it's just a fact. And so I kind of go through when a new place comes in and they have a cheeseburger. That's kind of like my standard. All right, let's see how this is. Do you have a dish or particular food that you're looking for that's kind of like, let's see how good this place is? Like, what's the baseline test food at any of these places? What do you like the best? What do you use to gauge if it's good or not?

So finding Indian food outside India especially in the US like good Indian food is difficult because it is created in like it is crafted with fewer spices and different spices etc. So you won't always like it. Now I remember one Indian cafe like that I really like it's called Gandhi Cafe. It's near I think 10th Street in Manhattan. So it's called Gandhi Cafe and I really like them. And there's a there's a Kawa house, which is a Yemeni restaurant and the tea is really great. Both are very near to each other. So I think those places are really good. In terms of your question, what is the standard thing that I check? I try when I'm not sure I would try something very new. I would not like to ruin my own existing taste. So food item that I really like is chicken biryani, which has a very different taste across different places, even in India. But I like certain chicken biryani in India, but I don't find it usually at everywhere. There are very few places where I would find a match. Yeah.

OK, that's awesome. That's great. All right, so let's talk about MailModo. For people who don't know the tool yet, can you give us the 30-second elevator on it?

Sure, so MailModo is an email marketing platform, something like MailChimp, but we focus on interactivity within the email. With MailModo, you can add forms, calendars, quizzes, polls, shopping carts, games, and calculators, all within the email itself so that users can take action then and there without going to a landing page. So traditionally, in emails when you send emails to users, they have to open it, read it, click on a link, go to a website, and then take several other steps to complete an action. And from a user's point of view, that is too much of a hassle. And as a marketer, you get very little conversion, and very little engagement, because let's say simply, you have to collect reviews on something to purchase. But why would people take the difficulty of clicking on a link, going to a page, waiting for it, loading it, and then submitting a review after adding the email ID again? But if you can provide them an option within the email, hey, did you like our product? Yes, no. What was your feedback, et cetera, within the email itself, they are more likely to respond. And that's what we enable you to do.

So this is what we talked about when you went to these companies and found a problem that needed to be solved. It was, that they send out a marketing email, people might click and maybe like a 22% rate, right? And they go in, but then maybe they fall off once they get to the website. But your idea was, hey, they've opened to that email, we've got their attention. If we can get them to do that action within the email, that's a better outcome for everybody involved, right?

Yeah. So yeah. So what I realized is that no matter what we do, we can probably improve the open road rate a lot, 30, 40, 50%. But the engagement and the conversion are too low across email. And no matter how creative your copies, et cetera is, if you're not making it easy for market users, they are not going to respond. So before like actually working on the product itself, we worked with a very large company to test this hypothesis that this will increase conversion. So what we did was we sent 50 % of their users a simple campaign that they have been sending and we changed just the button with a form, survey form and everything remained the same. The subject line, the content, the color, et cetera, everything remained the same and we got a 257 % increase in responses.

just by having the form inside the email itself without having somebody to go to a website to do the form.

Yeah, because it was much easier for people. They could do it then and there. And that validated our hypothesis and that motivated us to build the whole product.

Now I know on your site and within your promotion, you talk about the AI part of this. How much is AI really part of it? This doesn't sound, this sounds just logical to me. This sounds just like, obviously we've got this function. We want to put this function into the email, but where does AI come into this part of the program?

Yes. So when we started in 2020 and launched our product in 2021, that time there was no AI. So we started with interactive emails. We slowly built the whole product and enabled you to create not only create a template but also manage your contacts and campaigns, manage dashboards, et cetera. And when AI launched, we realized that we could make the work much easier for people to create templates. Because for most marketers, creating email templates is the most time-consuming thing. So, when we launched email, we started with a subject line generator. So, whatever email template you have, we automatically generate subject lines and we give you multiple options so that you can choose from them. We also tell you which subject line has performed well in the past. So, all of that analysis as well. Then we added a content generator. So, inside the email, you can generate a part of a section or you can, a section of the email or you can generate the full email. Then we launch a full email creator itself that depending on your use case and your data products, et cetera, generates different options for email. You can of course edit it further because AI is not that perfect yet. And so we are like, we are still working a lot on the AI side and we are adding more segmentation, easy segmentation, etc. For example, we automatically create different segments for you so that you don't have to manually segment users. We create predefined journeys for you so that you just give your input and send emails. Then we also did like we, as soon as you provide your website domain we fetch all the information like your logo, your color, brand color, et cetera, font style, so that you don't have to manually add them or the settings.

That's super nice. I was clicking around the site just to see what the whole thing was about. And my email list is about 20,000. And I saw that I think your pro plan's only like 200 bucks or something. A buck 99, I like. That's why I thought, that seems too cheap, man. It seems like a no-brainer. That's an amazing price for what you're offering.

It's not cheap, I would say, but we are very competitive in pricing. And we also provide human support because we are small. Like the smaller startup, it is easy for us to care for each customer. So we are still like take care of customers very personally.

Yeah, actually, I saw that with all the AI stuff you talk about, you're also like, would you like to talk to a human? Click here, which I thought was actually a nice little touch. Aquib, this has been amazing, man. Thank you so much for being on. Your journey's been fantastic. Some of your points of view are things I've just not heard before and I've been around a little bit and I was really, I'm impressed. And your tool looks fantastic. I really appreciate your time and thank you for being here.

Yeah. Thank you, Kyle. I really appreciate you having me here and listening to me. So that's great. And I hope that my conversation will be helpful for some of the audience.

Eh. Easy, easy. If people want to get in touch with you, how can they do that?

You can find me on LinkedIn or you can drop me an email at Aquib@mailmodo.com.

Awesome. Again, thanks so much, and thanks to everyone for listening to Hack to the Future. we'll talk to you next time. Thanks so much.

Thank you.