Endgame
We now come to our final question. Could the inception of “Netcore Progency” pave the way for Netcore’s own pathway to becoming a profipoly? For me, this is the most exciting of the four questions. Done right, the progency can help Netcore create not just a new profits engine but also a profipoly. Let’s see how. But before I begin, a small side story.
In late 1996, two big changes happened to IndiaWorld. We had to change our domain and the $20 annual subscription fee for content had to be dropped. Traffic and revenues dropped. It was one of the toughest periods I have faced as an entrepreneur. I had to not only create a new address but also a new business model. As it happens in life, only when you let go of something can you catch something else. In this case, the decisions were forced on me. So, I had no choice. A year later, I would reflect that these were the best things to have happened to me because it forced changes which I wasn’t even thinking about. The new addresses – Samachar, Khoj, Khel, Bawarchi – created far greater stickiness in people’s minds than IndiaWorld had. The new business model of ads brought in predictability and infinite scale. The troublesome period ended with me making decisions which had a 10-100X multiplier compact on IndiaWorld’s value. Not only did they change the course of the company, but also my life.
The progency can do something similar for Netcore. Today, we, like everyone, play the small game of consumables and traffic. We don’t link our revenues with business outcomes for our customers. In the small game of tens and hundreds of millions of dollars, we are not seeing the elephant in the room – tens and hundreds of billions of dollars being spent annually in AdWaste. But to open the second door, we may need to close the first door. And the ones who can open the second door can get an advantage which will be hard for others to match. This is the question we at Netcore have to address.
The progency can drive a flywheel of innovations because of its proximity to end customers and their daily lives. The learnings on what works and what doesn’t will not be channelised through marketing teams anymore. More data will help generate sharper insights for even better outcomes. The progency has as much skin in the game as the brand – in fact more, because the progency is making upfront investments and is paid only when revenues grow. The progency introduces a discontinuity in the martech market – a new model very different from the old. It is what Google did when it shifted the industry from the impression-based pricing (CPM) to action-based pricing (CPC).
Netcore would need to build on two fronts: the tech stack to stay ahead of the game, and the people factory, to ensure there are specialists who can combine the product and AI insights with their own judgement to deliver the right outcomes for brands. It would be an exciting future – a blue ocean in the red ocean. This is an opportunity to transform not just Netcore’s future, but also change the course for tens of thousands of brands who have forced themselves into captivity with their senseless AdWaste spending.
So, will Netcore Progency see the light of day? Can it scale rapidly to tens and hundreds of millions of dollars? Watch this space!
