I’ve known Raj Sunder since Bakrie Telecom, where he ran Value Added Services. He was also a presenter at the first TADSummit in 2013, sharing Bakrie Telecom case studies on bringing the internet’s model of freemium to telecoms. It seemed appropriate to kick off with Raj, and see what he’s been upto in the intervening decade.

Also Wootag’s coming out celebration was at TADHack London 2015, where they built a hack using Wootag and Apidaze, a click to call.

Wootag Interactive Video Experience, Raj Sunder (@rajsunder) CEO Wootag

Wootag is an interactive video provider, that is they tag videos at particular points with calls to action, and for TADHack they made one of them a ‘click to call’ with Apidaze. Wootag has experimented with click to call services in Indonesia and experienced call through rates as high as 22%, which is amazing compared to western markets. They were a joint winner of Apidaze prize ($500). See his hack pitch below.

Now back to 2024, what Wootag became, pitching unlead.ai, a case of deja vu. That is when I sent an email to Raj earlier this year, he was working on unlead, and the memories came back on how TADS helped Wootag. Hopefully, we can do the same with unlead. Raj’s presentation slides are here.

Raj went through the classic, engineering, product, business carear path. It was a simple realization, while watching a movie he really liked a pair of glasses. But there was no way to get them. Wouldn’t is be nice to just click on the movie and discover those glasses and buy them.

Raj grew Wootag to a $1M ARR (annual recurring revenue), then COVID hit. After recovering from the COVID hit, he then grew Wootag by 3X, he’s now building unlead, based on his Wootag experiences.

When Wootag began it was not addressing an immediate need. Video creation was growing, but driving commerce off online videos, was not a thing. It took some time to find the product market fit. And gather brands in different verticals and countries. But that process enabled them to rapidly scale, all on a lean team of 10 people.

The customer type is someone investing in video content, that makes money through not the video (e.g. YouTube views), rather the product being demonstrated in the video. For example consumer packaged goods, automotive, tourism. They’ve invested in the videos, and Wootag can help drive engagement and insights with that content.

The sales process was for a targeted customer, to ‘wootag’ one of the target’s videos, and email it to them. The proposition is immediately clear and highly relevant. What wootag sells on is interactivity and insights. The brand understands what in the video is relevant to customer, what engages best.

For brands wootag drives:

• Engagement through the multimedia interactivity, seeing an interesting tennis racket and clicking on the wootag.
• Behavioral platform (intents), discovering the person likes tennis, and plays tennis after they clicked on the wootag.
• Personalization, for example highlighting the tennis facilities at a resort they are communicating to that target.

Raj give a frank review of how they survived COVID as marketing budgets were slashed, people worked from home, and customers were no longer buying certain things. Wootag evolved its business by focusing on:

• High repeat customers, not acquisition
• Customer success
• Decentralized approach as customers worked from home.

Coming out of COVID to achieve its 3X target, wootag expanded its scope by:

• Any media, not just videos.
• Country focus: India, MENA, North America.
• Personalization: Increased conversion rates based on intent.
• People: everyone is hands on.

In achieving their 3X targets, there were 2 problems they faced in engaging prospects:

• Emails, messages, and calls became more important through and after COVID, potentially 83% of those interactions could be text related.
• And on the calls, where video is often off, how can the engagement with the team be determined?

This lead to creation on unlead.ai. At about 20 minutes into the video Raj gives a great demo of the product, and how its personalization and automation features work. Check it out, it’s much easier than reading through a description.