We have achieved 70% YoY growth in revenue: Sandeep Patil, Truecaller

Since its launch in India in 2013, it’s been full steam ahead for Truecaller — the call ID and spam blocking app. The company recently announced that it has achieved profitability thanks to their advertising and user subscription businesses, specifically from the India market. For Truecaller, ‘India is home market. Everything is India focus, India first. Scaled to other geographies later.’ The brand’s India specific acquisitions have been Chillr in 2017 (payments) and MessAI in 2019 (analytics).

Of the 200 million Monthly Active Users Truecaller has globally, a 150 million of those belong to India. Given the scale of spam calls in India, Truecaller is now the third most used app in the country. The app has also been growing in size and scope with diversification into messaging, payments and more. With ‘Truecaller for Business’ the company now aims to target SMEs and SMBs for utility services.

We caught up with Truecaller's MD Sandeep Patil to share the brand’s journey and success in India.

Edited excerpts of the interview:

Truecaller is now profitable, what would you attribute this success to?

This is a very exciting moment for us. The company has been in existence for about 11 years now. We have always been a great facilitator to our community in helping them identify spam calls and who's calling them etc. But last year we focused on revenues and increased it by 70% (YoY), and that was done primarily through our advertising business and the user subscription business. That revenue growth has really helped us go past our breakeven point and achieve profitability. The entire Q4 was profitable for us and this year the first two months have adhered to a similar trend. As an organization, as a company, as a business it is a fantastic position for us to be in. It's a vindication of the ethos with which we started the company and it's a very, very important milestone in our journey to be IPO ready in three years.

Could you elaborate on the nature of the India market, and how has it contributed to Truecaller being so successful here?

India is our home market, we started in Sweden and we are still a Swedish company but we really consider India to be our home market. It contributes to 75% of revenues, 75% of our users and more than 60% of our staff is now based here. So, it’s really make in India, for India and then exported globally to all other markets that we are present in. All the revenue generating features, our advertising platform, SME initiatives, FinTech initiatives, are based here in India.

We actually focus on India quite deeply. We truly build the product with the Indian user in mind. The features have been built keeping in mind the Indian ecosystem. That's one big reason. The second big reason is our core use case, which is around spam identification and call identification that continues to be very strong in India.

What has worked for Truecaller as an advertising platform? What sets it apart for advertisers?

We are a unique and distinctive platform for advertisers. And we don’t take both these adjectives lightly as they really underline some very important things that we bring to advertisers. Our uniqueness is driven by the fact that we have such a large user base. Broadly, Google and Facebook are the only two platforms which have this kind of a reach. One in three smartphones in the country now has Truecaller. If you want to reach 110-120 million Unique Daily Active Users we are one of the few platforms that can deliver that kind of a reach. And it is not just in terms of the number of people one can reach, but the time when one can reach them. So, impressions are delivered during working hours, during a user’s active time.

The second aspect of our platform is the distinctiveness that it brings. Advertising is moving more and more towards personalisation.

When you have a specific target in mind, other platforms will not be able to give you enough penetration, they might have a few millions of those users but Truecaller will actually be able to reach out to 10s of millions of such users just because of the overall scale that we have. The distinctness comes from being able to talk to people of relevance at scale.

How well have you been able to monetise from your user subscription business model?

That has been achieved successfully for us. We started the user subscription for the business about a year and half ago and in that period, it has grown to become 30% of our revenues globally. And it is a similar number in India as well. We crossed a million subscribers in October last year and since then the subscriber number has already gone over 30-40% in barely 4 to 5 months. User subscription is actually a very strong success story.

What about Truecaller’s own marketing plans in India? How does Truecaller ensure visibility?

Let me flip the question on its head, if you are one of the biggest advertising platforms then by definition we don’t need to advertise. Every time you get a call you will see the Truecaller brand.

What the app has done is, it has delivered consistent, high quality service for ten years. That has really built the trust for Truecaller. So, we didn’t spend that much on marketing, we have practically spend zero dollars on marketing because we are visible a lot to our users through our own app and secondly because we have this fantastic history of delivering high quality service, so that trust is inherent in the brand. Fortunately, we don’t have to spend on marketing for that but what you will see us doing now are two things - one there is a cause we are adopting in a big way and you will see us marketing to drive awareness around it. The cause is around women safety and empowerment. We have been passionate about this for a number of years now. Last year and the year before that we had done specific campaigns on International Women's Day, called #ItsNotOk. And this year, “MakeTheCall” campaign builds on #ItsNotOk.

The second aspect is that as we're launching our different commercial features, you'll see a lot more feature specific marketing from us. So, those are the two ways in which we're going to spend a bit on marketing.

With Truecaller diversifying into different businesses, what will help Truecaller differentiate itself from competition?

The obvious answer is that there are very few platforms that can bring together what we're trying to bring together. Whether it is the 200 million users, the amount of trust that the brand has, the number of use cases we have from call identification to calling, messaging, eventually financial services, subscriptions, all of that put together. And the international footprint that we have. That itself will become a massive differentiation and distinctiveness for us.

The serious answer is the tech muscle we bring — all of this is being driven by a team of about 250 engineers that dwarfs in comparison to the massive tech forces that all other peers have. But it has not limited us in any shape, or form. We are punching well above our weight and achieving the affection of our users.