How Qressy CEO Praneet Chandra grew Qressy to $194.4K revenue and 260 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is pranit chandra he spent 12 plus years building and scaling sas and commerce startups right from zero to ipo intrigued by web 3.0 a new avenue ignoped for commerce he's plunged into building web 3.0 based decentralized commerce system called cressie all right pernic you're ready to take us to the top yeah sure yeah so i think i've spent a lot of tickets since a lot of bundling and bundling i've seen and i think with web 3.0 it's really opening up a lot of revenues for the businesses right so tell me tell me give me an example of a customer that's using you today uh so we have got several top d2c brands in india using us somebody like nario they are india's first women led food brand and they use us to uh sell through our decentralized network with over 80 plus people 80 plus sellers across india selling their products sorry what is it it's not nadio a women's network yeah mario nwarrio.com yeah all right okay got it and what sorry what do they sell uh so they sell basically natural homemade products uh and they source it from the women entrepreneurs and then they basically package it they're kind of a d2c brand and how we enable them is they become a seller on our platform and then there are these several women entrepreneurs who actually become a resellers of their product and this all happens through our decentralized network where uh they do not get charged with any commissions from the likes of your bear mode like amazon or flipkarts but like everything is based on buyers and sellers individually so does nari does nario pay you to use your your web 3.0 technology yeah now you please us to use our web 3.0 technology how much they pay you or how much do your customers pay on average per year so on our customers on average since looking at india where the technology is spent is quite low are roughly like 400 uh a year and that's a kind of thing that we have and we have got like over 260 plus customers on our network 260 yeah 260 customers so can i take 260 customers times 400 a month a year you're doing about 100 000 bucks a year in revenue yeah interesting and when did you launch what year so we just launched like six months back so last year during the second wave of pandemic i was in india stuck at my parents place and i was like why are these aggregators really charging such a high commission like 30 36 percent your likes of amazon or flipkart and others in india and i was like you could literally break it right and that's where this idea came into my mind i did a lot of research right does it really make sense for having a decentralized network and we banged on some of the open source research that has been done and we kicked started company around december officially and who's we how many co-founders uh so we've got i've got another co-founder he leads on the technical front as such yeah did you guys split equity 50 50 up front uh no since majority of idea and conception came from me and plus the initial code uh i run the majority of it like 75.25 okay 75 for me and then uh 25 your co-founder yeah okay and have you guys raised capital today are you bootstrapped we are bootstrapped right now and we are right now trying to pilot with another doubling the number of customers in the next quarter or so and then we'll go for raising the money as such that's the plan for us interesting so okay so bootstrap uh that's great how many folks are on the team today oh we've got like over eight people and just one person joined so i could call it nine people technically okay how many engineers uh so we are like four engineers yeah four okay and how are you signing up these 260 customers is it sort of door-to-door is it outbound inbound how do you setting them up uh so what we do is we take our network as a leverage right so we go into people we really see people are selling on instagram people are selling on amazon we reach out to them tell them like hey are you tired of paying commission or really worried about how do you really get started on this web journey right and that is where we massively attracted we have used linkedin as our uh outbound sales channel and generating loads of revenues with that 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 it 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 valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're going to get a different valuation a vc is going to pay a different valuation private equity firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when i hover over here right so the teal is what a vc would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on youtube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raised they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round 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 valuations 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 wanna check this tool out if you wanna 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 i mean aren't brands like nario and other ddc brands happy to pay amazon a 30 cut because of all the traffic that amazon brings you can't bring those customers the same amount of traffic that amazon does so the power that we run is because we are building this decentralized network on our protocol that is uh backed by uh semi-government organization right it's becoming a decentralized network so we are getting more and more buyer apps on the platform right it's called as uh on dc if you would research if you would read about it it's called open network for digital commerce so we are building on top of it so it means other buyer apps would have incentive to even showcase our seller products so you literally break commerce into two part one side you've got a seller app where sellers are putting their catalog and everything and the buyer apps are really giving the discovery piece for people to really read through the data and open up this whole platform so your whole thing around finders fee could literally be reduced because the whole network is now leveraging the sellers on the network as such so you're one of the first early adopters for it yeah and so last month how what's a total uh summed up a gmv that was sold through your platform so last month the total gmv that if i have to convert is roughly 30 000 us dollars that was a gmv that came in sorry i had to just convert them from rupees that's okay and you make three percent on that as well right yeah so we do not charge any commission on people we are like a flat subscription as such right so that's where we really make it and all the money directly goes through our sellers right directly goes to to sellers we use the payment gateways they charge their markups but we do not charge any commission on top of it so just to be clear you you do not charge a three percent transaction fee yeah i do not charge but the payment gateway might right i see so on your pricing page i see this under starter but you're passing it off to the payment gateway whoever that is exactly i see okay got it um and then i guess what is the you know you have forever free starter unlimited right what's the monthly cost of unlimited the flat fee uh so the monthly cost on limited is roughly 400 that's what we sell that and then uh starter is free right people come in look at the network okay i want to do something and then basic comes from somewhere like 200 to 50 someone kind of thing yeah and i guess tell me a little bit more 30 000 in gmv how many skus how many products sold to make up the 30 000 the exact number would not be on top of...