Qressy Revenue (2024)

[00:00] Hey, folks. My guest today is Praneet Chandra. He spent twelve plus years building and scaling SaaS and commerce startups right from zero to IPO. Intrigued by Web three point o and new avenues of can open for commerce, he's plunged into building Web three point o based decentralized commerce system called qressy. Alright. Praneet, you ready to take us to the top? [00:17] >> Yeah. Sure. Yeah. So I think I've spent a lot of tickets in SaaS, a lot of bundling, unbundling I've seen. And I think with web three point o, it's really opening up a lot of revenues for the businesses. Right? [00:28] So tell me tell me give me an example of a customer that's using you today. [00:32] >> So we have got several top d two c brands in India using us. Somebody like Naario, they are India's first woman led food brand, and they use us to sell through a decentralized network with over 80 plus people, 80 plus sellers across India selling their products. [00:47] Sorry. What is it? It's not Nadia, a woman's network? [00:49] >> Yeah. Naario, naario.com. Yeah. [00:53] Okay. Got it. And what sorry. What do they sell? [00:56] >> So they sell basically natural homemade products and they source it from the women entrepreneurs, and then they basically package it. They are kind of a D2C brand and how we enable them is they become a seller on our platform, and then there are several women entrepreneurs who actually become resellers of their product. And this has all happened through our decentralized network where they do not get charged with any commissions from the likes of your bare mouth [01:21] >> like Amazon or Flipkart, but like everything is based on buyers and sellers individually. [01:26] Yeah. So does Naario pay you to use your Web 3.0 technology? [01:32] >> Yeah. Naario pays us to use our Web 3.0 technology. [01:35] How much they pay you? Or how much do your customers pay on average per year? [01:38] >> So on our customers, on average, since looking at India where the technology spend is quite low, are roughly like $400 a year. And that's a kind of thing that we have. And we have got like over two sixty plus customers on our network. 260? Yeah. Two sixty customers. [01:54] So can I take two sixty customers times 400 a month or a year, you're doing about a $100,000 a year in revenue? Yeah. Interesting. And when did you launch? What year? [02:04] >> 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 36% 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 [02:26] >> really make sense for having a decentralized network? And we banged on some of the open source research that has been done and we could start a company around December officially, kind of [02:36] And who's we? How many co founders? [02:38] >> So we have got I've got another co founder. He leads on the technical front as such. Yeah. [02:43] Did you guys split equity fifty fifty upfront? [02:45] >> No. Since majority of idea and conception came from me and plus the initial code, I run the majority of it, like seventy five, twenty five. Yeah. [02:54] Okay. 75% for me and then 25% your cofounder. Yeah. Okay. And have you guys raised capital today? Are you bootstrapped? [03:01] >> 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. [03:12] Interesting. So okay. So bootstrapped. That's great. How many folks are on the team today? [03:16] >> We have got, like, over eight people and just one person joined. So I call it nine people, technically. [03:22] Okay. Yeah. How many engineers? [03:24] >> So we are like four engineers. Yeah. [03:26] Four. Okay. And how are you signing up these two sixty customers? Is it sort of door to door? Is it outbound, inbound? How do you how are you signing them up? [03:33] >> 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 outbound sales channel and generating lots [03:55] >> of revenues with that. [03:57] Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this. You love watching these interviews with SaaS founders, but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 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 Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second, but you log in, you connect [04:20] your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time. You can see what changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're gonna get [04:45] a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation, private equity firm is different. If you're gonna 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 [05:07] built off random data. Again, you guys hear these interviews on YouTube. All these datas are built from real time valuation data points founder share with us on the show. So traction 1,200,000 seed round 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna 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 [05:33] out right now and you're raising your seed round. We'll 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 dataset of SaaS valuations than what you can get now inside of Founderpath. And we're thrilled to bring it to you. Alright. We're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second, but if you [05:55] 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/products/valuations. 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. Alright. Let's jump back into the interview. [06:22] I mean, aren't brands like Naario and other D2C 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. [06:32] >> So the power that we run is because we are building this decentralized network on a protocol that is backed by a 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 ONDC, 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 [06:55] >> have incentive to even showcase our seller products. So you literally break commerce into two parts. 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 Finder's fee could literally be reduced because the whole network is now leveraging the sellers on the network as such. [07:18] >> So we one of the first early adopters for it. Yeah. [07:21] And so last month, how what's the total summed up a GMV that was sold through your platform? [07:29] >> 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 have to just convert them from rupees. Yeah. [07:41] That's okay. And you make 3% on that as well. Right? [07:44] >> 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 through to sellers. We use a payment gateway. They charge their markups, but we do not charge any commission on top of it. [08:00] So just to be clear, you you do not charge a 3% transaction fee? [08:04] >> Yeah. I do not charge, but the payment gateway might. Right? The payment [08:06] 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. And then I guess what is the you know, you have forever free starter unlimited. Right? What's the monthly cost [08:19] >> of unlimited, the flat fee? So the monthly cost for unlimited is roughly $400. That's what we sell that. And then starter is free. Right? People come in, look at the network. Okay. I want to do something. And then basic comes somewhere like 200, $250 a month kind of thing. Yeah. [08:34] Mhmm. 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? [08:43] >> The exact number would not be on top of my head, but roughly, we might have sold over how many orders? [08:55] >> Around 3,400 orders. [08:58] Yeah. Okay. [08:59] >> Got it. [09:00] So average order size is about, you know, $80, $90. [09:03] >> Exactly. Yeah. [09:04] Interesting. Okay. So and those total orders were across how many? Like, so how many brands, D2C brands, got at least one order last month? [09:13] >> 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. But on an average, what we understand based on the transaction history that hits up on our gateway is, like, 40% of B2C brands definitely make a transaction. Some of them [09:32] are So so of your of your 260 paying customers, then 40% sold at least one thing last month? [09:38] >> Exactly. Yeah. [09:39] Okay. Or about one hundred and one hundred and eleven, 110, something like that. Okay. That's interesting. So I guess, are they happy paying a flat monthly fee if they don't get any sales that month? [09:51] >> Yeah. I think 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 put it on different pricing and all the pricing adjustment that they have to make? So they are really upfront. They are anyway spending on doing their e commerce sites and building out their D2C brand, and that costs you a lot more, right? Like even with the [10:11] >> likes of Shopify, you are roughly looking at somewhere like $1,000 a year kind of thing, running a D2C store. So anyways, they see us not as an aggregator, but more of an enabler. Right? So we are anyways more profitable than or more cost affordable than Shopify, but at the same time, yeah, we are cutting down all of your aggregated commission percentage. Yeah. [10:32] Praneet, are you paying any CAC, customer acquisition costs, to acquire these customers? [10:36] >> 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 ads or anything. Like one thing I realized early on, Google Ads and Facebook Ads is good for getting a sign [10:59] >> up, but doesn't really convert them to a paid customer. So that is how different it is. Yeah. [11:04] Interesting. And what about your churn to date? What is your churn? [11:07] >> 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 quite a few times, but I don't see 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 [11:29] >> would not really get converted right. So we get a lot of people, but I cannot call it a specific churn as such at this point. Yeah. [11:35] I see. I see. Interesting. Okay. So what's the game the game plan over the next twelve months? What do you think you can grow revenue to? [11:40] >> So I think we can definitely 10x the 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 [11:53] you how much are you burning per month right now? [11:56] >> So right now, our burn is roughly somewhere around 5,000, $6,000. That's it. [12:03] Yeah. Okay. That's not that's not bad. And you're just paying for that personally right now. Right? [12:07] >> Yeah. It's like, yeah. Most of it comes from like, okay, business helps in sometimes. But, yeah, that's massive part of my equity that I put in right now. So, yeah. But it's fine. Think Go on. [12:17] How much total cash did you put into the business to get it going? [12:20] >> So roughly around $6,000 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 to start working on it. Yeah. So that's where it went on. [12:36] Very cool, Praneet. Alright. Well, heck of a story here. Let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, favorite business book. [12:41] >> My favorite business book right now is asymmetric marketing. I really like it, and I've been applying quite a lot of it in 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 up to. Yeah. [13:01] Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? [13:05] >> So CEO right now I'm following is Nithin Kamath from Zerodha. So they are one of the biggest stock brokerage 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 as such. [13:19] Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building qressy? [13:24] >> WordPress. [13:26] Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night? Sorry? How many hours of sleep do you get every night? [13:32] >> That's a difficult question. Probably six. Okay. Probably gonna be about five. Yeah. [13:38] And what's your situation? Married? Single? Kids? [13:41] >> Married? Three years into marriage. Yeah. It's going well. Yeah. No kids yet. [13:46] No kids. And how old are you? [13:48] >> I'm right now 32. Yeah. [13:50] >> 22. [13:51] Last question. You wish [13:52] >> oh, you knew when [13:53] 32. Okay. Last question. [13:54] >> Something you wish you knew when you were 20. [13:58] >> That you should have started a company rather than doing a job. [14:02] Guys, there you have it. Qressy.com launched just six months ago, now doing about $8,500 a month in revenue because two sixty direct to 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 processed $30,000 in total orders across all their two sixty customers. That's about 3,400 total orders as they [14:30] look to scale their bootstrap to date. He's funded the business with $6,000 of his own money as they look to scale up their team of nine. Praneet, thanks for taking us to the top. [14:38] >> Thank you. Have a good one. Bye bye. [14:42] One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM Central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. 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 1PM [15:07] Central. Additionally, remember these recorded Founder interviews go live. 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