>>Hey everyone. Welcome to this cube conversation featuring Sendbird. I'm your host, Lisa Martin, John Kim joins me next, the CEO of Sendbird John, welcome to the program. Talk to the audience about Sendbird. What is it that you guys do? What gaps in the market did you see back in 2013? >>Yeah. Well thank you for so much and I'm excited to be here. So just to give you a quick introduction about Sendbird, we started a 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 as an opportunity to build a message feature for our own application. That's when we kind of realized a problem that we, 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 a wide Combinator with that idea and launched to the world in 2016 and then kind of fast forward, you know, good six years. We're now powering over a quarter billion users on a monthly basis, sending billions of billions of messages, cross different vertical site, online community site credit like door C. So it's kinda where we're 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 Sendbird has applied to be driving such momentum during such volatile times. >>Yeah, I think over the years, what we're all came to realize is that more and more and more businesses are becoming mobile first. So by focusing on the mobile basic 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, 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 in a messaging as easily as possible, getting all the, you know, feature richness plus the scalability that you need. So we really try to build the best in class product so that you can have those know messaging within your application. >>Let's talk about that. So B building relationships in a digital world today is table stakes for any business consumers, patience was quite thin. The last couple of years, it 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 a businesses are engaging with customers, there are a lot of different channels, right? There's SMS, there's, you know, phone calls, direct mailing emails, and also a messaging. If you think about as a user, what is the best experience you want to have with the, with the brands it's 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 experience that you don't like to have is if you think about SMSs SM now plagued with like phishing and scams issues, FTC reported that they're 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 of these kind of other external channels are becoming a channel for again, for like fishing and scams and really disrupting the user experience. >>But if you think about the, a messaging becoming your default mode of engaging with the brands and other users is secure more reliable, and also as businesses you get, you, 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 a messaging as the default mode of communication, and then using other channels as a, kind of like a last mile delivery in case, you know, users, miss certain kind of conversation, they may rely on those other channels as all that option. Just to touch a little bit on the, 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, you know, think of missing apps like yo meta facing messenger, or, you know, WhatsApp and all of this, this other kind of consumer applications, consumer mobile messaging is kind of really dominating the world. But if you think about individual businesses, you really don't really want to hand over those experiences and the 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 this, those data and make sure that your users and your customers are having a very clean and secure experience on your application. >>Absolutely. Without 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, is it that impactful these days? >>Yeah. So B 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 convergence, 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 CS, and how do you keep the customers? Sure that customers never hit a dead end. All of this entire customer journey now can be mapped through messaging. So because that's becoming more and more important and critical for your business, now's the, if you think about our buyers today, we are 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, the benefits that you've mentioned, increasing retention, driving I'm direct sales cross sale up sale, brand loyalty that impacts every aspect of an organization, customer success, et cetera. 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 Sunbird delivers. >>Yeah. So Reddit has been one of our earliest customers, even when you're like just a C stage company. If you think about Reddit, red has successfully trans trans transformed from the web based company to a mobile first company. And by incorporating a messaging to a modern experiences, just like, again, once you have on WhatsApp, they're able to increase the 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, one example. And again, keeping the community safe and secure is very, very important for a community like Reddit. So offering powerful and moderation capabilities for the community MOS. Those are also very important factors why Reddi decided to work with us. Some of the other examples, like, you know, Crafton pub, one of the world's most successful and largest games today now, they able, they were able to increase their user engagement and ultimately the overall, you know, session time within the game by incorporating messaging that powers the users online communities through lobby chat, as well as, you know, client chat. >>So how to keep the users more engaged in return to 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 industry use cases like keep trucking recently rebranded as motive, drastically improved the collaboration between this, you know, operations control and, and it's truck drivers. So those kind of communication capabilities obviously increase the safety of the drivers as well as the trust and then 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 applications? So the users don't have to reveal their, you know, personal information so that the conversation become, again, stays on the application, keep the user happy, more secure and safe for the, all the 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, I think a staff that you guys provided to me was that the FTC reported that tech scams 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, it's a it's risk. >>Absolutely. So again, some of the most common fishing scams that we all as the consumers receive these days are, you know, pretending to be another businesses telling you, Hey, click here to, you know, get a refund on, on, on a credit card charge or, you know, there's a fraudulent cases. Like there's something that makes you either call a number or, you know, 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 this something someone else that's pretending to that, to be that brand? So is the burden is on the end customers, unfortunately, all the fishings and everything's like a law, large, large number. So the more people you send out those messages, ultimately someone will get tricked into those messages and ultimately costing a lot of money for the end consumers. >>Now, the benefit of having enough 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, cuz you have full context of the business and the application you're in. And then whenever someone, somebody sends you a message, you know, the sender and the receiver's already authenticated. So those users are secure from the get go. And because of the contextual rich experience you have within the messaging, plus all those extra security layers they're bake to the user experience, the, the end benefit for the customers are incredible. Cuz 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 better 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 brands. >>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, 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 the key differentiators that makes Sendbird in-app messaging really stand out about the competition? >>Yeah. One of the things that we really focus 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, you know, DoorDash and even like incredible customers like Paytm, one of the largest FinTech application in India. So being able to provide us scalability so that your customers, our customers, and the developers can go to sleep at night without having to worry about will this work now, but also other on top of top of those things, the feature richness cuz ultimately what our customer want is how can they engage with their customers in a modern and ale way. So by offering the features that are up in the latest, in the greatest that you'd expect out of other consumer application, again like WhatsApp, Facebook messenger, or even things like slack, we offer a lot of those features from get go. >>So by having those feature richness out of the box, you can implement a modern missing experience from day one. So you can go to market much faster, but also give more trust for the users cuz ultimately end customers are already used to using the best missing experiences out there. So as soon as they kind of feel the experience are a little bit, you know, outdated, they'll stop trusting the brand. So how do you kind of give them moderate and trusting and, and 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 queue today. Talking to me about Sendbird in-app messaging, the values, the benefits, the what's in it for customers and businesses. We appreciate your insights. >>Thanks. So >>John Kim I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching this conversation.