What is Truecaller doing that most aren't?
3 key opportunities that could make the 10X journey from here.
Welcome to the 224th edition of the GrowthX Newsletter. Every week, I write two pieces that go to over 100,000 product, marketing, business leaders & ambitious founders in marquee internet companies around the world. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please do.
Truecaller is a profitable consumer company that is headquartered in Sweden. Yet ~75% of its revenue (~₹1,000 Cr) is from India. What makes Truecaller such a huge business in India when other consumer tech thinks of India as just an MAU farm?
Quick Context - launched in 2009 by two Swedish engineering college students to solve a personal itch - “find out unknown callers before picking a call”. However, they never expected it to be such a huge business, especially in India. Truecaller’s launch in India got over 15 Lakh downloads in the first week.
Trivia : Stockholm’s population is under 10Lakh.
Truecaller now has 25 Crore monthly active users in India. It makes money through 3 core routes - first by selling advertising spots on caller IDs, subscriptions from users & selling verification services to businesses.
Last year ₹1,083 Cr came from advertising, ₹165 Cr from subscriptions & ₹136 Cr from Truecaller for business. Clearly, advertising a huge part of the business.
But ads won’t help it go 10X from here. The fundamental problem - Truecaller is more of a utility product & not a social product.
Social products (Meta/ Instagram/ LinkedIn) by definition survive on time share of a user. The longer a user spends on say Instagram, it has a lot more instances of serving an ad within the newsfeed or Instagram stories.
Most Truecaller users either use it to block spam using the Caller Id & very few times go to the Truecaller app to search for a specific number identity. This limits the advertising opportunity.
There is one clear tailwind though. Over 65 Cr Indians own an android smartphone & Truecaller is at 25 Cr users, the headroom with just Android smartphone is good enough to 3X from here.
But, what would it take to do 10X?
1. The category growth with spam calls.
The normal consumer in India easily gets about 1.5 spam calls a day. It is due to two reasons - first the telecom regulation is just poor & second, you can buy a million phone numbers database for as low as ₹500.
One report quotes “Over 202 million spam calls were made by just one spammer in India in a year” - that’s 27,000 people spammed every hour from just one spammer. This problem getting worse will drive adoption for users to search for Truecaller like apps, pure category growth.
2. The subscription business.
Only 33 Lakh Indians out of 25 Crore pay for Truecaller subscription. That’s 1.3% paid customer ratio. That’s extremely poor when over 95% of paid users are on the ~ INR 529 per year plan.
The biggest reason for a free user to go paid is removing ads. Plus, Truecaller does not offer a free trial to get free users to experience what it feels to be ad-free. The whole loss aversion is missing in pricing design. Oh, and because these plans are at a mobile number level, you don’t have to worry about trial period abuse.
The voice mail insight - being a premium Truecaller user for over last 5 years, I have never been pitched the higher plans as a user that has a voice-mail feature. Think about all those users who use WhatsApp voice mail which requires you to save the WhatsApp contact before sending a voice note.
Clear two opportunities - First, solve for driving perceived value of the voice mail through free limited trials to the INR 529 paid subscriber & second is doing the exact same thing with the live personal assistant feature that takes calls on your behalf - here’s a quick video that covers it.
The gold plan isn’t scalable - it is purely driven by status as a service. But it will find its product market fit with real estate brokers, sales leaders & people who need to drive a good first impression with their clients.
Indians love buying status driven products especially the ones that are high frequency. Ability to understand which users are in the business of cold calling high value clients, relationship managers & entrepreneurs can help specifically pitch the Gold plan to existing INR 528 paid user.
3. Doubling down on Truecaller for business.
The business caller ID was the original wedge for Truecaller. It opened up the inroads for businesses to build their caller identify and improve call receiving rates for non-spam calls.
Driving adoption of its call success rate feature - call me back can be a game changer and something businesses will pay for. Quick context - this feature for Truecaller Business allows a truecaller retail user to select when they want to speak to a caller based on their available time - its sort of calendly but much crisper.
Plus, the Truecaller for business onboarding is painful to say the least. If you are a small or medium business, good luck getting access to anything on Truecaller for business without speaking to a sales rep. A self serve model here with the right checks can drive huge delta on this revenue piece
Refer a friend
If you’ve enjoyed this piece, do consider referring our newsletter to a friend. For your first referral we’ll send you the Infographics ebook, which has a collection of growth & business infographics that has generated 1 Milllion + impressions across our social channels.
Hey Abhishek, this article was pure gold. Thanks a lot for putting it together and sharing it publicly.