Companies often manage their operations and day-to-day communications with software; these include CRM’s which are significantly tweaked to help in efficiency and growth. However, most of them don’t come cheap and do cost a pretty penny indeed. Even getting a customized one is quite a tough job. It’s where companies like Erxes come into the picture.
Erxes is a company that deals with marketing technology software that helps bridge communications quickly for businesses to grow faster. It helps bridge the gap between the sales, marketing, and customer support departments onto one platform to make businesses more efficient in operations. Working as a SaaS version, it’s a revolutionary tool offering multiple features and benefits. To learn more about them, Venture Mirror had a brief discussion with Indra Ganzorig, CMO of Erxes, to know more about the company. All the excerpts from the interview are provided below.
What is the startup / product / venture about? Give us a brief description of it.
erxes is a marketing technology software designed to help all types of businesses grow better and faster. Our software keeps track of all customer interactions so that sales, marketing, and customer support departments can do a better job treating all customers like an old friend. It is the ultimate business management tool that offers a built-in messenger, team inbox, knowledge base, and many more. Our platform is available as a cloud (SaaS) version or an open-source version.
How many co-founders are there? Please introduce them and their backgrounds.
We have three co-founders. MJ Amartaivan is the CEO. He is one of the leading figures in the Mongolian tech and marketing scene. Before launching erxes, he founded The New Media Group (NMG) about 10 years ago. It is one of Mongolia’s biggest social enterprises and is one of the Founding Certified B corporations in the region. MJ is also known as the TEDx trailblazer for Mongolia since 2011. That’s how I got to know him first, actually.
Nauren Batjargal is our COO. She has almost 2 decades of finance experience, and she worked at many leading banks and firms in Mongolia and the UK. Previously she was the CFO of NMG before becoming the CEO of NMG. I admire her incredible ability to dig deep on a wide range of issues and solve them fast.
And last but not least, we have the superhuman Bat-Amar Battulga. He is the co-founder and CTO of erxes, Inc. Aside from erxes, he has built many tools in different areas with wide applications. These include accounting, human resources, procurement, internal control system, and mobile apps. His expertise includes pretty much everything, such as Python, NodeJS, Javascript, React, Microservices, Cloud Computing, DevOps, Docker, Spark, Data Processing, GraphQL, RestAPI, etc. He is especially known for his ability to fire up the developers with vision and expertise.
How did you come up with the idea? What motivated you to do this?
Since the early 2010s, our team has been working on over 1,000 projects developing websites and mobile applications. There is this concept of “growing pains.” It refers to the stressful period businesses struggle to keep up with their brands, tools, and customers. We felt it ourselves and looked into the market for a solution. We couldn’t find a complete solution that addressed our needs. Also, we weren’t the only ones searching for that all-in-one tool. That’s when we created the solution by developing erxes.
Who is your target market? Why do you think your product will appeal to them?
As mentioned earlier, our product is designed to help businesses on the cusp of achieving growth. We know the pain points, such as being a bit burned out by trying out different tools that are not sustainable in the long run, whether technically or financially. Our platform could be the most beneficial to online businesses, such as SaaS or e-commerce. With erxes, you can merge at least 5 different tools into one and truly achieve your company’s growth and unity.
Who are your competitors? How are you different from them?
First of all, MarTech itself is a crowded space. Of course, there are the giants, such as Hubspot, Salesforce, Marketo, etc. Martech is one of the rapidly changing and growing industries where the most number of software are developed. But most of the time, the martech solutions can be overly complex and not accessible by all. A study by the StartUp Genome says that if you spend over $15,000/year for customer acquisition, you end up scaling prematurely. This, of course, leads to a lack of growth. So, if you’re not there yet, you really don’t need to spend a ton for that name-brand software. Relatively speaking, our platform is affordable and accessible. When we say accessible, we also pride ourselves on being one of the few open-source martech tools out there. But our biggest advantage is the flexible infrastructure: just like Lego, you can customize it to fit your needs. And the same principle applies to our SaaS pricing model as well. You can upgrade by individual features.
What are the future plans with the product/startup? Any new features you are planning on?
We just launched our newly revamped mobile apps for iOS and Android. Next up, we’re planning to release the WordPress plugin, which will help our customers seamlessly integrate and use erxes with their WordPress websites. As for the company itself, we are actively fundraising through our Continuous Securities Offering, which opens up the investment opportunity to our community members, such as partners, customers, and open source contributors. So, the plan is to finish raising $3,5 mln through invest.erxes.io. Also, we’re planning to set up our US team this year. This will allow us to provide faster and smoother customer service. It’s kind of a no-brainer considering that more than 40% of our existing 1M downloads and most SaaS customers are from the US.