How Cercle X CEO Vishnu Vardhaan grew to $16.8M revenue and 1K customers in 2024.

guys circlex.com his application processed in December 20 so last month over 9 000 metric tons of waste at an average value of 500 bucks per metric ton that's 4.5 million dollars of GMB throwing through his application he takes between one and five percent of that so fifty thousand to two hundred thousand dollars per month comes from that part of the business his other part of business is pure SAS which is in even more impressive hey folks my guest today is vishnuvardhan he is leading Circle x one of the world's first web3 based waste management companies that enable Brands to manage their industrial and post-consumer waste quicker and with 100 traceability and transparency all through their Suite of blockchainabled SAS Solutions visually ready to take us to the top uh thank you so much Nathan I've uh I've been a big follower of yours for a long long time oh good uh so it's it's an honor to be a part of this podcast all right well I don't want to lose anybody when people hear Waste Management I think about the trash they throw out of their house I don't think this is what that is what you're building so tell us what do you mean by Waste Management uh this race is predominantly the waste of uh Brands uh so brands have a lot of ways that they generated their factories and uh they need to send that out because they are under various Norms like um the environmental social governance norms and so on and in every legislation there's a lot of rules and regulations for managing that ways properly that is one thing that we are handling and yes secondly a lot of brands are under extended producer responsibility responsibility rules and regulations so they have to mandatorily take back waste from consumers like you and me and send it for recycling so that is something that we help them do as well so this would be like you know Walmart for example creates you know 10 000 cardboard boxes every week in the back of their you know the back of the Walmart building they might use your tool for what's called iwm Industrial Waste Management it helps them send pickup requests with a single swipe track vehicles that are coming to pick up the boxes meet ESG requirements things like that exactly exactly so we're like a uber for waste so you can just swipe up and uh raise a pickup request and within 30 to 45 minutes one of our Executives will come and pick up your waste and uh take it and these Brands like Walmart pay you directly a SAS fee yes they pay for the software uh on top of that they also pay something for the service that they Avail so I mean like I see I look at your model look at the website did you just stick web 3 in your name to increase your valuation no no uh actually uh web3 is uh not something that we stuck uh to increase our valuation first thing for the first two years the company we spent um just building the network because ultimately Waze needs to go for recycling to be able to build a circular economy and I can't build software on top of a network which is not present so first two years we focused on building this network and then because brands are increasingly under the hold on hold on hold on while you're building the network is this the scrap Market concept is that how you sort of creatively built the network to start yes exactly so uh waste is a lot of value to a lot of people and uh the people who handle waste are uh people that we call as kabdiwalas in India rat Pickers Traders aggregators and um the network of recyclers as well so I built this network and then on top of that we plugged in blockchain and web3 because it will give us 100 traceability and transparency over the complete journey of the waste so yeah that was that we did it that's interesting okay so we I guess put us on a timeline for me when did you launch or sorry when did you write the first line of code for the platform uh 2020 September was when we uh wrote the first line of code okay and we launched software in 2021 and I guess in 2021 how many people downloaded this app right for the scrap scrap Market um over the last uh two years from 2021 to to date we have over 45 000 people um from um uh download this app and use them use it oh what's going on there YouTube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with SAS Founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews I've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built the into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out I'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for evaluation this year now the secret valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different evaluations inside of your founder path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending 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well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of SAS valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform I hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview what it what does use mean I mean that's a very it can mean a lot of things uh the you they use it to uh showcase what uh scrap they have uh they can buy and sell scrap on the same platform they can bid for Waste which it which is coming from Brands so as soon as a pickup request is raised from a brand uh the request goes to a set of recyclers or Traders closest to the brand and they can bid for the waste and uh and then if the bid gets accepted they can go and pick up the race so how is this different than like Facebook Marketplace you know everyone just lists their on Facebook Marketplace it's basically their waste you know it's their old couch and then people can go bid on the couch and then go pick up the couch if they want it I mean isn't this very similar except it's like you know pipe cuttings and you know copper cathodes things like that Brands produce a lot of waste um in fact brands in their own factories or under their APR produce uh millions of kgs of waste so that is what we focus on not the uh yeah the Standalone ways that you may have in your pure B2B it's only waste from companies yes only okay how many people the 45 000 downloads actually bought or sold a scrapped via the app over the all time uh uh over 25 000 of them have done at least one transaction that's actually pretty good activation rate it is it is it is and a lot of the other people come basically to check the market prices of scrap on a daily basis it's like uh it's also a commodity so it keeps changing across India so that is what they do and by the way it's very late where you are you're it's like 3 A.M isn't it yes yes yes it's uh yeah thank you for being either up early or up late with us we appreciate it thank you thank you so much Nathan I mean a big fan so it's a lease that we could do well I appreciate that okay so this is impressive so over 50 of all time downloads have actually done a transaction on the app and I guess quantify that for us Vishnu in terms of dollar or you know dollars right or currency what was the total volume last year uh last year was close to uh six thousand metric tons per month on a monthly basis so we channelize uh a lot of this waste across India and uh this year uh this year we are closing at uh close to 9000 metric tons uh on a monthly basis that's that's nine thousand metric tons bought or sold through your your scrap market app yes yes yes interesting and what's the average dollar value of those 9 000 metric tons per month uh uh each each metric done on average is uh close to 500. okay interesting interesting so I mean 500 times 9 000 I mean that's 4.5 million dollars of waste volume going through the app monthly yes yes so uh December the waste volumes was close to uh three million dollars December 2022 so that's the amount of ways that was generalized through the app just on just in December so do you take a cut of that I mean how do you make money yeah so we charge for the software and when and then we take our percentage of the transaction as well like one percent or five percent uh it depends on the scrap prices at the end of the day because it's all a demand and Supply came uh so our percentages keep varying based on how much we can supply based on the demand uh it depends from one to five percent yes okay on the low end one percent on 4.5 million a month or 9 000 metric tons per month would be like 45 000 a month in revenue or as high as five percent which would be 225 000 a month in Revenue right exactly yes that's really impressive and how what percent of your total revenue is the the percent of gmv versus the pure software um right now a lot of so this is this scrap market and the um apps associated with it is uh one side of the business model the other side is PR play uh software that can enable a brand to measure what is a waste incoming and what is the amount of waste which is recycled they can purchase recycled raw materials from the same app itself that has gross profit margins uh close to 75 to 85 percent but what's the breakdown so the Pure Play software versus scrap Market revenue is at 50 50. uh pure Place software because now we have the other softwares as well uh close to 60 and the remaining 40 percent is uh made up with the all the transaction fees and so on wow okay looking just at the Pure Play software stuff what are Brands pay on average for that per month uh it depends on the number of uh facilities that they put into the software so typically we charge anywhere between 399 dollars to 497 uh for every single location per month okay well I mean give me a general range do most people average two locations or four locations or what uh we work with a lot of mnc's uh multinational companies uh cpg companies consumer package Goods companies uh India is a major base for them so they average close to at least three to four factories across India um okay so that'd be like twelve hundred to sixteen hundred dollars per month on average yes yeah and then yes so uh close to there are close to uh 4500 of these big Brands uh sitting in India doing manufacturing so that's our Target and how so how many customers do you have today uh we have close to uh thousand um these are small medium companies as well and uh we are scaling that up as we speak but they're all paying about 1200 bucks a month uh some of them are paying 1200 some of them are paying even more than that because uh offer other softwares that we sell to them okay but they're all paying at least 1200 per month uh no the average range is between eight hundred dollars to uh twelve hundred dollars on average uh because these companies have one or two facilities I mean but any I mean Vishnu even even if it's 800 bucks a month times a thousand customers I mean that's 800 000 bucks a month right there in Revenue right yes and then you add on top of that another 50 to 200 000 from the scrap Market stuff I mean you're approaching a million dollars a month in Revenue yes so we do uh December we closed at uh 1.01 million dollars that's super cool congratulations thank you thank you so much thank you all right um I love this story talk to me more about the team how many folks are full-time today uh we have 42 uh people uh full-time and uh our CEOs from Ghana he settled in India to work with us on this project we have people from Syria a lot of other places as well they believe that waste management is something which is really key to mitigating climate change so we have a cool team sitting out of the Indian office and uh and then scaling this up this is software that we built initially for India because India is a proper testing Market but if we can prove it in India which we have done we can scale this up overseas so we are now in the U.S and so on and if you're doing about a million a month today in Revenue where were you doing exactly one year ago one year ago uh one by Tenth of this was what we were doing so about a hundred thousand dollars a month yes hundred thousand dollars wow I mean I think what's most impressive to me about the story really is just the growth right I mean you launched in 2020 you said right yes so you're 24 25 months in right maybe even a little less today now if you bootstrapped or did you raise capital uh we raise Capital but it was a very small town 250 000 when was that uh this was December 2021 a second year and and I guess why did you need that money what what made this Capital intensive uh be needed we didn't need that money because uh Evita wise or unit economic twice we were positive but we wanted this so that we can hire a lot of people and scale this up across the country because there's a lot of opportunity and we want to grab that yeah I mean this is I would consider you bootstrapped right you raised 285 250 000 bucks you're doing 12 money year in Revenue that's basically bootstrapped I mean when I'm running how much of the team how many of the 42 team members are in India um Everybody right now is in India with uh based out of multiple locations yeah I mean the reason I ask is because if you take 12 million run right divided by 42 employees I mean you're generating 285 000 a month and sorry a year in Revenue per employee that's like extremely high especially considering your cost on average in India is probably something like 60 to 80 000 per employee you must just be printing money uh I'd uh I'd rather uh see it's printing money the smile confirms that he's printing money so Vishnu that this begs the question how do you decide you know you're a capital allocator at this point how do you decide where to reinvest the capital um what we are doing is just scratching the surface of waste which is present across the world so right now we are probably doing 0.1 percentage of the waste which is available across India so we want to channelize a lot more of that and get to 10 percent that's our goal in India and then subsequently do this across uh us and uh Canada and UK and the other places as well yeah it makes tons of sense um are you a sole founder or how many co-founders um I have a co-founder she is my wife as well uh we've been in the sustainability business for uh close to seven years now and uh she's uh she's my wife for uh three years that's amazing who owns more Equity you or her now both of us earned won the same percentage basically 50 50 right yes that's awesome that's so cool what a great story okay so 42 of you got um and how many of the 42 are engineers uh we have close to 12 uh 12 people on the engineering on the technology side and uh yeah so we have four or five on the web 3 and the blockchain site yeah I guess just before we wrap up I think the most impressive thing about this again is just the growth I mean how did you get a thousand of these you know Walmarts in in India effectively to sign up to the platform uh a lot of growth hacking uh techniques uh basically we tied up with the a good influencer Network and uh they basically uh set this up for us what's the name of the network uh so these are just YouTube channels which has a presence um and we did a lot of uh proper Community Based uh activities like cleaning up uh streets cleaning up the entire city um of coimbatore and so on and that caught us a lot of leveraged people newers immediately as soon as we approached them so that is how we've got a lot of these guys on board very quickly Vishnu what's the name of the YouTube channel that drove me the most customers it's uh it's a local dialect uh YouTube channel I was gonna try and search it but I have no idea how to spell that please try I have no idea how to spell it you'll you maybe email it to me afterwards I'll put in the show notes but okay gotta influencer Network that's really impressive okay um and any plans to raise capital or you're going to stay bootstrapped basically uh yeah we want to raise uh Capital because we want to expand to other countries as well but uh we have very unit economics focused would you ever consider debt uh debt uh I mean money is not the issue for us raising Capital means that we have Network Community Access people that we can brainstorm with that was the most important thing not the money as such well if you like brainstorming with me I would gladly I mean I you know founder path is now you know over 100 million dollar fund we would definitely look at this but I will full disclosure I do not have a YouTube channel with a thousand waste people watching every day so I don't know how helpful I could be there no very very helpful uh I've been following a lot and uh in fact the software trying to make it says everything was inspired by whatever I've learned from you and this community so a lot more to learn from you I I get no credit you're doing the hard work executing so congrats let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite book uh Atomic habits recently uh but before that the law of the garbage truck the law that's appropriate number two is there a CEO you're following or studying Elon Musk at all points of time number three what's your favorite online tool for building Circle X uh what's my favorite online tool um online tool Commodore timer that's it yeah that's a good one all right uh number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night uh today not a lot but on average uh five six hours seven hours um I'm trying to sleep for seven hours right now and you mentioned you have a wife so you're married any kids uh not yet I have a pug um that's my kids right now that's half a kid all right you gotta you got a pug all right Vishnu and how old are you uh hitting 33 right now 33 very core the same age all right let's wrap up here or uh what's something you wish you knew when you were 20. um something I wish I knew when I was 20 uh that life takes its own turns and uh and uh takes you to the path that you always wanted to be on irrespective of where you wear at 20. guys circlex.com his application processed in December 20 so last month over 9 000 metric tons of waste at an average value of 500 bucks per metric ton that's 4.5 million dollars of GMB throwing through his application he takes between one and five percent of that so 50 000 to 200 000 per month comes from that part of the business his other part of business is pure SAS which is even more impressive a bunch of these Brands like Walmart as an example you know maybe not a customer but Brands like Walmart a thousand of them use the app to try and understand you know how much waste they're producing to manage the waste collection all that kind of stuff they pay on average a thousand dollars per month they did over a million dollars in Revenue in December or 12 million run right up from a hundred thousand a month just a year ago and he's only raised 250 000 bucks to build it up not father and son husband and wife team Vishnu thanks for taking us to the top thank you so much Nathan thank you it was a pleasure thanks one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1pm Central it's called Shark Tank for SAS we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers 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