How Qressy Reached 260 Customers and $30,000 Monthly GMV with a Bootstrapped Web3 Commerce Platform (Interview with Co-Founder Praneet Chandra)

Introduction and Background

Nathan Latka

00:00Hey, 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?

Praneet Chandra

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?

First Customer Example: Naario

Nathan Latka

00:28So tell me tell me give me an example of a customer that's using you today.

Praneet Chandra

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.

Nathan Latka

00:47Sorry. What is it? It's not Nadia, a woman's network?

Praneet Chandra

00:49>> Yeah. Naario, naario.com. Yeah.

How Qressy Enables D2C Brands

Nathan Latka

00:53Okay. Got it. And what sorry. What do they sell?

Praneet Chandra

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.

Nathan Latka

01:26Yeah. So does Naario pay you to use your Web 3.0 technology?

Praneet Chandra

01:32>> Yeah. Naario pays us to use our Web 3.0 technology.

Pricing and Customer Count

Nathan Latka

01:35How much they pay you? Or how much do your customers pay on average per year?

Praneet Chandra

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.

Nathan Latka

01:54So 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?

Company Launch and Origin Story

Praneet Chandra

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

Co-founders and Equity Split

Nathan Latka

02:36And who's we? How many co founders?

Praneet Chandra

02:38>> So we have got I've got another co founder. He leads on the technical front as such. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

02:43Did you guys split equity fifty fifty upfront?

Praneet Chandra

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.

Nathan Latka

02:54Okay. 75% for me and then 25% your cofounder. Yeah. Okay. And have you guys raised capital today? Are you bootstrapped?

Praneet Chandra

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.

Team Size and Engineers

Nathan Latka

03:12Interesting. So okay. So bootstrapped. That's great. How many folks are on the team today?

Praneet Chandra

03:16>> We have got, like, over eight people and just one person joined. So I call it nine people, technically.

Nathan Latka

03:22Okay. Yeah. How many engineers?

Praneet Chandra

03:24>> So we are like four engineers. Yeah.

Customer Acquisition via LinkedIn and Instagram

Nathan Latka

03:26Four. 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?

Praneet Chandra

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.

Nathan Latka

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06:22I 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.

Praneet Chandra

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.

Monthly GMV and Transaction Volume

Nathan Latka

07:21And so last month, how what's the total summed up a GMV that was sold through your platform?

Praneet Chandra

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.

Flat Subscription Model Explained

Nathan Latka

07:41That's okay. And you make 3% on that as well. Right?

Praneet Chandra

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.

Nathan Latka

08:00So just to be clear, you you do not charge a 3% transaction fee?

Praneet Chandra

08:04>> Yeah. I do not charge, but the payment gateway might. Right? The payment

Nathan Latka

08:06I 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

Praneet Chandra

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.

Nathan Latka

08:34Mhmm. 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?

Praneet Chandra

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.

Nathan Latka

08:58Yeah. Okay.

Praneet Chandra

08:59>> Got it.

Nathan Latka

09:00So average order size is about, you know, $80, $90.

Praneet Chandra

09:03>> Exactly. Yeah.

Active Customer Transactions and Retention

Nathan Latka

09:04Interesting. Okay. So and those total orders were across how many? Like, so how many brands, D2C brands, got at least one order last month?

Praneet Chandra

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

Nathan Latka

09:32are So so of your of your 260 paying customers, then 40% sold at least one thing last month?

Praneet Chandra

09:38>> Exactly. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

09:39Okay. 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?

Praneet Chandra

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.

Nathan Latka

10:32Praneet, are you paying any CAC, customer acquisition costs, to acquire these customers?

CAC and Acquisition Channels

Praneet Chandra

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.

Nathan Latka

11:04Interesting. And what about your churn to date? What is your churn?

Praneet Chandra

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.

Nathan Latka

11:35I 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?

Praneet Chandra

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

Burn Rate and Bootstrap Funding

Nathan Latka

11:53you how much are you burning per month right now?

Praneet Chandra

11:56>> So right now, our burn is roughly somewhere around 5,000, $6,000. That's it.

Nathan Latka

12:03Yeah. Okay. That's not that's not bad. And you're just paying for that personally right now. Right?

Praneet Chandra

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.

Nathan Latka

12:17How much total cash did you put into the business to get it going?

Praneet Chandra

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.

Famous Five and Wrap-Up

Nathan Latka

12:36Very cool, Praneet. Alright. Well, heck of a story here. Let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, favorite business book.

Praneet Chandra

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.

Nathan Latka

13:01Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Praneet Chandra

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.

Nathan Latka

13:19Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building qressy?

Praneet Chandra

13:24>> WordPress.

Nathan Latka

13:26Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night? Sorry? How many hours of sleep do you get every night?

Praneet Chandra

13:32>> That's a difficult question. Probably six. Okay. Probably gonna be about five. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

13:38And what's your situation? Married? Single? Kids?

Praneet Chandra

13:41>> Married? Three years into marriage. Yeah. It's going well. Yeah. No kids yet.

Nathan Latka

13:46No kids. And how old are you?

Praneet Chandra

13:48>> I'm right now 32. Yeah.

13:50>> 22.

Nathan Latka

13:51Last question. You wish

Praneet Chandra

13:52>> oh, you knew when

Nathan Latka

13:5332. Okay. Last question.

Praneet Chandra

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.

Nathan Latka

14:02Guys, 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

14:30look 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.

Praneet Chandra

14:38>> Thank you. Have a good one. Bye bye.

Nathan Latka

14:42One 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

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