How WebXpress CEO Apurva Mankad grew WebXpress to $3M revenue and 100 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is apoorva mankat he founded in 2004 web express which is a global transportation logistics sas provider headquartered in mumbai the company serves over 100 leading supply chain companies and 10 000 users it's a globally proven solution with deployment in eight countries in southeast asia the middle east and africa the company has two offerings transportation as a service and logic cloud a supply chain visibility management platform it was founded by apoorva and uh as founder and ceo excited to jump into the story today a porvar are you ready to take us to the top absolutely okay so 2014 was was sort of go date before we jump into your backstory and your history help us understand what are companies paying web express for today what's the product supply chain today has become a very crucial operation for every company post covet and given the disruptions which are never ending today there is a very key requirement for having a clear visible supply chain across your network today people are paying us for using our system where we bring in large number of logistics partners onto a single platform and give them one single window by which they can look at any shipment as it moves across their supply chain and gives them a prediction if it's going to fail and it's going to be late and they can act on it before it's too late and is your transportation as a service offering and logic cloud are they both sas or is one like percent of gmv uh so well both are says we do everything it says uh cloud-based and uh software as a services multi-talented uh the world is multi-talented uh you need to have everybody on the platform to make it happen so it's naturally a sas software for all the work that we do got it okay so i i assume you have a lot of different kinds of customers but i'm going to force you into a tough question here which is an average what's the average customer paying you per year to use your technology okay so uh since we operate in the indian market our average customer typically pays us somewhere in the range of around uh thousand dollars a month uh that's a typical page that we get from our customers today on the higher side it can go to five thousand dollars a month on the lower side it can go to as low as 500 a month okay got it and so someone that's paying you a thousand dollars per month uh what what are they getting for that in other words what do you upsell by is it number of shipments done number of product features turned on what are they getting for a thousand a month so we linked our growth to the growth of the customer so we typically pay uh make them pay us by transaction uh we do expect a certain minimum level of operation with us uh and as they grow and we have couple of customers who are into literally millions of transactions every month and they become a very high paying customer for us and we hope that all such questions all our customers become much more successful as they grow and what is the average transaction size give us an idea of what that transaction is so typically transaction is a shipment everything that you move from point a to b is a unique number and we call it an available number in our industry and that's the unique shipment id as we call it and that's the uh building block for our solution uh typically we expect our customers to move anywhere between uh 10 000 to 25 000 odd transactions every month uh to note many of my customers are serving businesses so while the transaction id may be one they may be moving thousand boxes behind every transaction i see so when you say move 10 to 25 000 transactions per month my audience can understand that as they're moving 10 to 25 thousand shipments per month that's correct absolutely you're right when i work in some of these networks like e-commerce uh those number of shipments really shoot up uh and they go twice as much as a million a million and a half transactions in a month and we talk about transportation and where these transactions and shipments are happening are we talking ground freight air sea well the space in which we operate is essentially ground and we have been focused on a lot of movement in large countries large geographies like india for example is a very big country and we focus on ground transportation operation a small percentage does happen by railways for example railroads uh absolutely very small percentages by domestic air transportation 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 raise 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 going to 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 evaluation 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 okay so what's the most popular route in india that you're you're serving right now in terms of shipments what city to what city okay so mumbai where i am from and delhi which is india's capital are the two uh probably it's one of the most used route in the world uh in terms of sheer number of shipments uh you know and also in sheer number of people who move between then the planes which fly between them we come in top ten in uh you know world rankings uh as far as this route is concerned okay so to fly obviously from from mumbai to delhi it's about a two and a half or about a two hour flight but to drive i think it's like a 26 hour drive right so what does it cost to ship one truckload from delhi to mumbai usually so it will typically cost around 1 500 if you're moving a 32 feet uh size vehicle from mumbai to delhi one way uh that's a typical freight today uh given current diesel prices and it will take you a bullet uh very fast bike to drive in 26 hours it actually takes more than 35 on road today uh and that's for a car and a vehicle might take longer because that will take breaks uh and it's moved slower yep okay so let's break down the unit economics just on that trip right so it's it's 1500 bucks now is that what your customer pays you and if so what what do you keep of the 1500 now the 1500 is what the customer pays for the entire vehicle right they pay me for the trekking of that particular shipment or all the shipments which which go inside a particular vehicle uh and a big truck like 32 feet long truck can take thousands of shipments we charge them for every shipment do not everything does not move from point a to b it will obviously load off load and then go to further uh to delhi for example then it can go to all parts of the country so we charge them for such shipments and they can go by multiple vehicles not just one so if i was going to pay web express to track one 32 foot truck moving my e-commerce goods from mumbai to delhi about how much i'm going to pay just for that one truck oh you're going to pay me uh per shipment so you might end up paying me around about 15 to 30 dollars is what you will pay me typically okay 15 to 30 now i assume you obviously don't have customers paying you for one shipment you you sell in bulk 15 to 10 to 25 000 transactions per month right absolutely absolutely so what happens is put...