How Coastr CEO Biswajit Kundu Roy grew Coastr to $1.7M revenue and 50 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is biz condo roy he's building a company called coaster c-o-a-s-t-r dot com it helps digitize vehicle rental operations now he's a software engineer and management consulted by background he's also an avid traveler he's faced numerous issues while renting cars which force them to think about finding a disruptive solution for the industry to ensure fellow travelers can benefit from a truly digital car rental experience of the future busy ready to take us to the top absolutely it's ready to go all right i know there's there's nothing i like less than flying across the country landing in la waiting for the fox rent-a-car bus to pick me up at the airport stop then waiting in line at fox rent-a-car for an hour and then not having the car available that i booked because it wasn't actually confirmed and then i it sounds like you've experienced the same problem it is exactly the kind of starting point of where the coaster journey began because i'm quite a regular user of current for myself and you know i i just stopped to wonder what what a kind of you know totally different experience could look like and that's where sort of the idea behind coaster really uh emerged and what we are effectively doing is really you know taking a step back looking at what customers really want and providing the technology to their car rental operators to achieve that so almost making them future ready so who are you selling to are you selling to fox rent a car and hurts and these kinds of people so um yes a large part of our kind of proposition is to settle to or provide the innovation and the platform to car rental vehicle rental operators um although a lot of our focus tends to be in the more kind of sme sector so you know we are trying to almost equip the um local current businesses and the reason for that is um which is another of my kind of or our founding finding is that a lot of the local players don't have access to really state-of-the-art technology for them to build something that you know we can offer is really really difficult so we are sort of democratizing the access to such innovation for these and thereby creating an uplifting upliftment of the entire industry as a whole so that every bit of car rental services provided to you know every consumer or every corporate user achieves the same uh kind of digitization in future and so what about the idea of sort of car rental shops pay you per month to use the software well it would vary depending on what what they would take but there's quite a bit of um you know flexibility so for example they could just use the software um version without any of the kind of connected mobility uh or uh connected cars technology but very very basic users would pay anything between kind of you know three to four pounds per vehicle per month uh and that could uh that as the three or four pounds per one per vehicle per month per v what if a vehicle doesn't go rented it's just sitting on the lot i know so we it doesn't matter uh so it's more on the asset rather than on uh whether they're being booked or not uh so we don't charge any commission on the booking it's morally more about management of the asset because our platform is a operational platform right so how many cars did how many cars did on average do your customers have as an asset base uh it would vary again um a what we classify them as tier three and tier two so tier threes are anything between kind of 10 15 vehicles to up to uh let's say a thousand vehicles and then tier twos are the slightly larger volume players so anything with a thousand plus vehicles effectively is a tier two and then your hearts of the world are tier ones in our kind of um the way we classify the customer segmentation sorry tier one has more than ten thousand vehicles i would say they are more sort of multinational global uh they could have fleet anywhere from kind of 100 000 plus 100k plus okay interesting oh what's going on there youtube good to see 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larger operator side it's about um on an average of the 3000 vehicles and the reason why i'm keeping them separate is the customer concentration is different so if if i find an average it's going to be a heavily uh weighted average which would not make any sense so we we have to treat it as two separate segmentation and different averages that's fine how many are on tier three right now paying customers on tier three um so we currently we are obviously focused on the uk market so we have about 50 plus customers and so these have been largely acquired in the last 12 months and on the tier two side we have about um three or four of them um who are just coming operational and then um by end of this year we are looking to bring some more which are on the early conversation or in the pipeline so we'd expect to get about kind of 10 or 12 of them um hopefully by the end of this year okay but those tier two folks paying you for 2000 vehicles at four bucks a pop i mean each of them are paying you something like 8 000 bucks a month something like that um i i um so the map doesn't work exactly um on volume players so the pricing for volume players would be there would be heavy discounts um well how heavy though you just said the average tier two is paying three to four bucks a car if i take four bucks times two thousand vehicles that's eight grand a month uh yeah so uh i was quoting you the price which you offer as a retail to tier three operators uh with volume players there would be a discounted offering of anything between uh 25 to 30 percent um so they would pay maybe a smaller amount um anywhere from kind of two pounds to three pounds per meter per month on the software only i see i see i see so converting to usd maybe like is three bucks per vehicle per month across two thousand vehicles which is the average you said that's like six grand a month in revenue instead of eight grand yeah okay but still i mean we can take six grand a month times three or four of those that you're on boarding right now i mean that puts you like 18 20 grand of revenue plus you've got 50 with 200 cars each right 200 cars at five bucks a pop what is that a thousand bucks a month so there's like 50 000 bucks a month in your tier 3 segment uh yeah well i mean um on an average if you put it at at 100 yes so around about that figure so we earn about...