How Qressy CEO Praneet Chandra grew 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 my head but roughly we might have sold over how many orders uh around 3 400 orders yeah okay got it so so average order size is about you know 80 bucks 90 bucks exactly interesting okay so and those total orders were across how many like so how many brands ddc brands got at least one order last month uh that's a bit tricky to measure for us because again as our decentralized network we do not track everything so we have to go to individual sellers and look at that number uh but on an average what we understand based on the transaction history that hits up on our gateway is like 40 percent of d2c brands definitely make a transaction some of them are so so of your of your 260 paying customers and 40 sold at least one thing last month exactly yeah okay or about 111 110 something like that okay um that's interesting so i guess are they happy paying a flat monthly fee if they don't get any sales that month yeah i think uh that's where the advantage comes in right like they do not have to worry about like oh is how do i really mark it up how do i really uh put it on different pricing and all the pricing adjustment that they have to make so they are really upfront they are anywhere spending on doing their ecommerce sites and building out their d2c run and that costs you a lot more right like even with the likes of shopify you are roughly looking at somewhere like thousand dollars a year kind of thing running a d2c store so anyways uh they see us not as an aggregator but more of our enabler right so we are anyways uh more profitable than or more uh cost affordable than shopify but at the same time yeah we are cutting down all of your aggregator commission percentage yeah bernie are you paying any customer acquisition costs to acquire these customers uh so most of it is as i said right we use instagram as our channel right we send out dms and really try to figure out oh these brands have got good following and everything they must be selling more and that's how we qualify them so it's more of a personal fee as compared to putting on any apps or anything like one thing i realized early on uh google ads and facebook ads is good for getting a sign up but doesn't really convert them to a paid customer so that is how different it is yeah interesting and what about your churn to date what is your turn uh so it's been a very short time that we have been in business as such so we have hardly seen any churn apart from couple of customers who came into a free plan and then they never converted into a paid plan as such so that has happened uh quite a few times but i don't see i another thing that we have to always look at it unless a customer really sees value that i'm able to drive an order i would not really get converted right so we get a lot of people but i cannot call it as this picture and as such at this point yeah i see i see interesting okay so what's the game the game plan over the next 12 months what do you think you can grow revenue to so i think uh we can definitely attend extra revenue from this current standpoint and very soon like even if we double the revenue we are we become profitable as such so we become massively profitable how much are you how much are you burning per month right now uh so right now our burn is roughly somewhere around five thousand six thousand dollars that's it yeah okay that's not that's not bad and you're just paying for that personally right now right yeah it's like yeah most of it comes from like okay business helps and sometimes but yeah that's massive part of my equity that i put in right now so yeah but it's fine i think yeah go on how much total cash did you put into the business to get it going um so roughly around six thousand dollars to start with right so that's what and that included everything like setting up your instances on cloud and everything really getting up the first set of developers and everyone uh to start working on it yeah so that's where it went on very cooperating all right well heck of a story here let's wrap up with the famous five number one favorite business book uh my favorite business book right now is asymmetric marketing uh i really like it and i've been applying quite a lot of it and uh the way how i'm building the company right rather than spending on the conventional channels figure out what are the different ways how you can really acquire customers and change the whole market dynamics so that's something that i'm really do yeah number two is there a ceo you're following or studying uh so ceo right now i'm following is nitin kamath from zeroda so they are one of the biggest stock brokerage uh company in india and they are completely bootstrapped they are unicorn and like i really like the values and ethos that he runs across the company number three what's your favorite online tool for building cressie uh wordpress number four how many hours i sleep to get every night uh sorry how many hours of sleep do you get every night that's typical question probably six or five yeah and what's your situation married single kids uh married uh three years into marriage yeah it's going well yeah no gets yet no kids and how old are you oh i'm right now 32 yeah 22. last question something oh 32 okay uh last question something you wish you knew when you were 20 that you should start a company rather than doing a job guys there you have it cressie q-r-e-s-s-y dot com launched just six months ago now doing about 8 500 a month in revenue because 260 direct consumer brands are listing their product skus on their platform in a decentralized way he's helping them get sales of their products and he doesn't take a 30 fee like amazon that's why he's growing last month they process 30 000 in total orders across all their 260 customers that's about 3 400 total orders as they look to scale their bootstrap to date he's funded the business with six thousand bucks of his own money as they look to scale up their team of nine bernie thanks for taking us to the top thank you have a good one bye-bye one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on 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