Data-driven, personalized notifications

How is Cooee helping people?

Shwetank: Cooee is a low-code AI platform for e-commerce. Over the past years, creating a website or a mobile app has become easier. Trying to run digital marketing campaigns to acquire traffic and bring customers to your website is becoming more and more accessible. But converting them into customers is still very difficult because choices spoil them. You know, attention spans are decreasing. And also, the most important thing is customer data scattered around—every click we make on the Internet. Small and medium-scale brands must gather customer data, draw insights, and deliver customer engagement.

That’s where we come into play. We integrate within minutes on your mobile app, mobile web, or any eCommerce plugins, such as WooCommerce, Shopify, and WordPress, and gather customer data. Then, take all of that into the machine learning pipeline. Combine all of it and create a unique image for every user at scale. That image can then be delivered inside your website, in your mobile app, and eventually to your omni channel stack to go and engage with them one to one.

What’s the problem Cooee solves?

Shwetank: The result of our platform is driving repeat purchases and increasing your revenue, right? We are trying to increase conversion step by step. It’s five times more expensive to acquire a new customer than to try and sell to an existing one. A 5% retention increase can lead to an 80% increase in revenue. So getting loyalty, getting repeat purchases, and making them enjoy what you’re trying to sell them is a part of the digital experience that Cooee offers to brands as a B2B2C.

Cooee top features

Shwetank: The top feature we have is one-to-one personalized image creation. That’s our unique selling proposition, and that’s how we do it. Very different than any other so-called ‘competitor’ on the market. Let me break that down a little bit to go a little deeper. All traditional advertising and engagement platforms – Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter- are template-based.

If you’re trying to create an email on MailChimp, MailChimp gives you 50 templates. The header will come here, the text will come here, and the image will come here. You can drag and drop, etc. So what we’ve done is we’ve designed a canvas for you to design your template by yourself from scratch. And when you design this template, even if you’re not very good at graphic designing color schemes, you can use one of our preexisting templates from there. But when this template is delivered to customers, the content they see is 100% personalized to each one.

Another very important thing that we built in, apart from name personalization, product recommendation, price optimization, and text personalization, are all the things that are bundled inside the image or the template we call it. We also have a time personalization feature. W deliver notifications to each user based on how they use the app. Because you and I both know that borderline, we hate notifications. We don’t like it. It is the first thing you do in the morning when you get up with your smartphone. Please remove all of them because, over a while, most brands have made notifications very impersonal.

By mistake, if you were on a website and clicked on a shoe and all the brands are trying to sell you a shoe, it doesn’t work like that anymore. This whole digital experience has exponentially grown in the past couple of years. We know e-commerce is growing – 95% of all digital purchases will be done via the Internet in the next ten years.

Cooee best integrations

Shwetank: Natively, we can integrate with JavaScript, and it can do it in one command and is there within a minute. On the mobile labs, some of our customers have been able to integrate our SDK in less than two hours which is Android and iOS. Then we support native hybrid on all the platforms. We are now trying to tie up with more and more eCommerce platforms like Shopify. So if you add our app the way we’ve done this integration, we will be very happy and proud because it helps the customer and doesn’t need to create an account in Cooee.

We also gather customer data from there, so we can not just get data but also draw insights. So as soon as you go and create an account, you will understand whose platform your top-selling product is. And then we also have this integration to get all the images off your CMS from there. So you can run very data-driven and one-to-one personalized notifications within minutes, which used to take days and weeks earlier with other platforms.

How do you differentiate from the rest?

Shwetank: So, multiple people have the engagement platform. There is as simple as the fire-based tool, which comes from Google and is free to use. People can send notifications, and then they are very expensive ones. We have not seen any other company using this AI algorithm to create a unique image for every user and deliver that as notifications.

When did you start, and what was the idea behind it?

Shwetank: We started the company in 2020 and are three co-founders. One year we took on another job, and we were trying to build this, and then we realized that maybe the speed was not as much as we would’ve liked it, and then we finally quit our jobs and jumped into this full-time. So we’ve been doing this for about a year or a few months. We just launched the platform globally in May, so we are at that stage where we are working with some early customers, stabilizing the platform and optimizing it. Between our free and paid plans, we have about hundred-plus customers globally, acquired with zero money spent.

I come from the whole digital side of the world. I spent about 15 plus years in enterprise sales, and my previous life used to work with very large enterprises, and we used to create products for them. So they would call us and say – I want an amazing mobile app, amazing product features, and brilliant UI/UX. Then they would call us and say – my CMO is saying that he wants 5 million downloads.

And then we’d spend the $5 CPA to get their download. Then, afterward, they would call us again in three months, saying – nobody is using the app, right? It was because they never thought of user engagement.

If you look at your smartphone today, you have about 80 to 90 apps. So you don’t necessarily use the best products, but the ones you use deep tech for user engagement. So that’s why when we realize that irrespective of larger enterprises that still have money and resources, the problem is big. But for small and medium enterprises, this problem is insanely large because they have under 15-member teams.

That’s why we created Cooee, which plugs in easily, and you don’t require a data science background. We can help you with this entire marketing automation that grows the revenue because that’s the only way to survive in today’s tough eCommerce market.

Have you raised funding?

Shwetank: We did a pre-seed round earlier this year, which was all towards building the product further and stabilizing it. And I think that’s going pretty much according to the plan. We now have ten people and some teams in Brazil, Europe, and India. So we look forward to raising the seed in the coming months. So let’s see how that goes.

What is your story, Shwetank?

Shwetank: I am glad I’m connected to you. I spent about a year in Romania. That was one of my first projects in Europe, where I moved out of India, where I was born, and brought up so special memories of that place. I used to work for this very large Indian IT company, and they spun off another company because we wanted to focus on the product. So I was part of that team chartered to bring international business.

That led me to travel and meet a very different set of customers. Luckily, I’ve got experience working in 65 different countries because of all this, and in the last five years of my career, that’s what happened, right? That were unique demands from our very large customers. We used to sell it to one customer and then see a similar problem, so we don’t try to sell it to others.

So that’s where I went through the whole drill of developing something from scratch myself. And then when all this finished, which led me to live in different parts of the world as well, I was in France before this, then living in the UK now for about six years. And then I said l would try Cooee to see how it works.

Any piece of advice for starting founders?

Shwetank: What should you do when you search on Google or ask an angel investor or an entrepreneur? They will tell you very nice things. They’ll tell you to focus on a small problem to solve, one country, one region, etc., and do a niche thing. But during the building process, it’s very easy to forget that. The problem was big for me because I come from an enterprise sales background. I always thought that if the platform did not have 50 features, people would not like it. That’s the biggest difference between enterprise and SaaS sales, which I’m still learning and is very difficult.

Enterprise sales are all about attending customer meetings, presenting those big presentations, and trying to talk to a big 20 people. And in SaaS, you’re trying to sell it to somebody who will never know your name, never see your face. So I think you must always remember that for the guys starting now. It’s easy to forget. It’s easy to get lost in the crowd, but think of yourself as a consumer, and if you’re using the product, will you buy it?

Does it solve your need? Does it help? And it’s okay to build step by step. Take your time. If your product needs to be ready in three months, nine months, or 12 months, it doesn’t last. Strong companies take time, so believe in yourself and your actions. Pivoting is okay. Changing direction as per how the market is going is fine, but try to do that one small thing, and I’m sure it’ll work out.

Staying active on social media

Shwetank: To be honest, I’m active on LinkedIn because that’s a very important channel of engagement for our customers. We are an early-stage startup and can’t afford to run large, massive digital campaigns. Let’s, put it that way as well – Being the company’s founder, I need to be the brand of Cooee. Most of the time, I’m trying to tell people about personalization and trying to talk about how this can make a difference in their lives.

It’s not easy. People don’t understand. Most of them would want to launch a digital business, and then they would go to a digital marketing agency. Digital marketing agencies will say – let me run your Facebook ads and Tik-Tok ads, and because they make a percentage of the money you spend on ads, they are focused only on acquisition. Nobody cares about engagement.

That’s where I think we are trying to come into play. That acquisition is very important, but also engagement. You should have the strategy for engagement right from day one, right? Collect customer data, gather it so that you can draw insights and use it, not just Google Analytics. The data goes to Google Analytics, but you only have to hire two people to understand what Google Analytics is. So that is my main goal with social media today, mainly LinkedIn and Twitter, trying to teach small and business people that engagement is a very important aspect of the business and personalization is the way to do so.

Why Cooee is privacy first

Shwetank: I believe in a privacy-based internet. We’ve also built a foundation in Cooee – we don’t integrate with any third-party ASD case. We don’t share your data or your app data. It’s your app data. Many talks I’ve done earlier are trying to make people understand that every time they’re on the Internet, they leave a digital footprint. And people need to be aware of what they’re doing. And this is all customer data. So hopefully, brands will understand that they need to go ahead and build a relationship with the customer based on trust and then deliver something they want and not even misuse it.

What’s your favorite software?

Shwetank: The top one that I’ve been using for the past, I would say, 25 years, is PowerPoint. I’ve just been making slides all my life, and I can say that for so many different reasons. And if you give me Photoshop, I’m uncomfortable with that, but if you want me to clear the same thing in PowerPoint, I’m more than happy. Right now, I love the simplicity of Loom. It’s so simple yet so powerful. You go to the interface, record a video, and share it with people in 30 seconds. I’ve started doing a lot of Zoom videos for product tutorials and investor discussions, and I love it.

The entrepreneurial community

Shwetank: I’m really happy to get connected with you, Cristian. I think the community you guys have built is massive, and I saw a lot of very good entrepreneurs and companies in part of this. I am so looking forward to collaborating and speaking to all of them. And you know, the last thing I’d like to say is that the whole community is about helping each other. We are the closest people who understand what we all go through daily, and it’s hard to explain it to somebody not from the startup world.

A small thing I do when I’m finishing my call with anybody, and I always say – hey, apart from all of this, if there’s any way I can help you, please let me know. And I think all startup guys are very friendly and helpful, and we should maintain that because together, we are stronger.