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 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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 15 to 30 dollars will be broken down into multiple shipments so per shipment they pay us uh you know a very very small amount typically rupees five uh which might just turn out to be uh if i converted to dollars uh probably 0.05 you said five rupees or 15. five one plus yeah so seven so seven cents seven u.s cents per shipment well you can say absolutely that's what they pay me for every shipment so that's five hundred dollars what they pay for a vehicle they pay me seven cents for tracking it interesting okay now then what you're saying earlier is your average customer is paying you for 10 to 25 000 shipments per month so we can take 10 000 shipments per month times five rupees or point zero seven cents dollars that's where you get your thousand dollar per month average average customer value absolutely you're right this is a great story okay so now that we understand the economics give us your back story when did you launch the business uh well i am from the background of uh you know working in the software in the technology industry i got exposed to logistics early on through one of my customers and i started working with them in 2004 and i launched my company in 2005. uh it's almost 17 years ago looks like uh eons ago uh the initial days we were consulting companies to bring technology to them over time we graduated to create an entire end-to-end solution for them what is web express today and then ultimately we moved to a pure cloud-based offering and last two three years uh it's all has been says now in fact we pivoted to says in 2017 to be more precise uh till then we were offering them what we call as uh you know point-to-point on-premise kind of solutions and india has been you know really accelerating in this area so uh i think the journey last five years is much more faster than the previous 10 years and so then fast forward to today now how many customers are you working with total yeah so we've worked with about 100 enterprise customers when we enterprise which means each of these are companies and they have probably anywhere from uh you know 5000 to 8000 uh employees working for them across their network and we work with them mainly in indian market and we also a very strong presence in southeast asia and middle east but india remains our home and we serve maximum number of customers here in india and how many total shipments per month are you tracking for these hundred customers yeah so if i put together we will be tracking today uh latest we rent number uh including our e-commerce customers we will be probably tracking about five million shipments for them per month a month yep wow okay so i mean can i take i mean can i take five million times five rupees or seven cents i mean that puts you out about four hundred thousand dollars per month in revenue right now well if it would be lovely it worked out that way because the minute the customer goes in a higher slab he squeezes you quite tight in terms of uh you know paying you so he no longer pays you that five rupees at seven cent he actually goes down to probably a cent or so i see okay so can you give us i mean is revenue today a more like 200 000 a month 100 000 a month something like that that's right that's correct we are a million dollar ar company today uh uh us pay about million dollar a year is what we earn today in india and we hope to become uh hopefully two eggs of that this year that's very exciting okay so you're doing about 83 000 per month in revenue or a million dollar run rate today which is great so we can understand growth uh where were you exactly a year ago in terms of monthly revenue do you remember we were about 35 percent less so last year we grew by about 35 percent okay so call it like 57 000 a month in revenue about a year ago you've grown to 83 000 a month and and uh or sorry about where is that growth coming from is it coming from expanding existing customers or adding new customers completely adding a lot of new customers because uh course pandemic anybody who was not yet digitized is saying i'm out of the game and the end customers are insisting that unless you don't give me tracking solutions visibility and many such things i'm not going to give you a tick mark where i even put you into contention for giving your business so that is driving a lot of people to adopt even smallest of companies adopting so we increased our customer base by 50 percent last year but you will pay me almost two years of time so that's why our growth was 35 uh but we see that uh now that we have come out of pandemic completely in india we are growing very fast and despite the rise in fuel prices uh looks like that 22 and 23 is going to be a very exciting year for all of us and how many folks are on the team your team today we are about 70 people 7-0 70 people okay that's amazing so it's fascinating so 70 people and a million in revenue are you able to pay them out of your revenue or have you raised a bunch of capital to fund their salaries okay we pay them salaries obviously and we do raise uh you know capital at times uh we do also raise some debt funds uh to pay them but obviously most of our payment comes from our customers revenue so we are a profitable company and we've been able to make uh positive uh profit after tax for many years yeah i mean for context there though if you're doing 83 000 a month in revenue and paying 70 customers assuming all of your revenue went to salaries you're able to pay a maximum of about 1200 u.s dollars per employee per month so these are very well at least for the comparing to the us these are very low salaries i'm sure by now you are absolutely wondering uh how uh the country like india works on such amounts seven cents one cent one thousand two hundred dollars of salary how you wish uh the employee uh people from usc would hire from india right and that's why we have one of the biggest outsourcing industries in this world but you are right uh that's what we pay uh approximately uh of course there are people who get paid much higher and people get even paid lesser than that but that's the average work every time of india by the way is three thousand dollars a year wow okay uh so you're well above average so so i guess take me back to how you funded the business you mentioned debt you mentioned equity when was the first equity that you raised and how much do you raise so we raised about 1 000 uh in uh 2016. uh we raised the first round at that point of time uh but very recently we have uh almost signed up with for the next time then that should be in the range of about 1.2 million dollars is what we should be raising one 1.2 million in debt or another vc firm okay got it so you've only raised 200 000 today you're raising another 1.2 million right now absolutely oh wait so i thought you said you raised debt did you not raise debt uh we are about to raise that so almost kind of 200 000 is what we raised in 2016 is what i told you and we are about to raise this year 2022 around 1.2 million dollars in equity or debt so you just i thought you said you you raised debt as well that's what i'm trying to understand we use somewhat working capital if we call it that so we use bank lines uh to fund a gap between what customers pays and what we need to pay salaries and time so there is uh always a trade gap as we call it and that's funded typically through uh working capital funding as we call it or bank funding as we call it so we leverage our equity in our balance sheet to get uh you know some capital companies to use it on a temporary basis and apoorva back in 2016 when you raise 200 000 bucks most people when they're raising sort of pre-sea rounds they're doing it on a convertible note at a five million dollar cap valuation cap is that what you did uh our valuation at that point of time was around a million uh that points back million dollars and what valuation do you hope to raise this new 1.2 million dollars at so we have uh we have finalized this uh uh at around 30 cr it's around four million dollars okay so does that valuation feel fair to you four million dollars is that pre money or post money uh four million post money so you're you're basically at 2.8 million valuation pre-money raising 1.2 so 4 million posts so you're selling about i mean you're selling about 25 percent of the business right you can say that your absolutely calculated correctly well why i guess who are you raising from is it a company is it a vc in india or overseas and why do you think they're only giving you sort of a 3x 4x valuation uh well uh one of the reasons is that our focus market has been india and we are a company uh focused on sas revenue and as you just saw the numbers the indian numbers are not very large if you count in dollar terms so obviously uh if you are selling into a rupee market uh the valuations become lower then you are selling let's say in the us market for example right obviously a dollar will fetch you much more uh that's one reason secondly uh this uh funds that we are raising is much more from a strategic partner right now uh who also happens to be one of our uh customers and in fact the investor into our customers is uh you know raising the funds into us i see that makes a lot of sense well we're rooting for you though in the meantime let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book my favorite business book uh how to uh mark mccormick's book on how to sell uh i think was the earlier book which i read and i still remember that number two is there a ceo you're following or studying uh i do follow satyana dela i really like this journey number three what's your favorite online tool for building webexpress for promoting this for building building web express oh uh we are using uh mainly uh ionic as the tool now to build it number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night eight hours eight hours and what's your situation i'm probably married single kids i'm married i've got two children and still i sleep for eight hours that's amazing how many kids two kids two daughters kids okay and uh how old are you i'm 48 years old now last question what is something you wish you knew when you were 20 years old i wish i read your book at that time it was published [Laughter] guys there you have it webexpress.ian very interesting company it's called a logistics company in india to give you a sense of what they're doing a trip for an e-commerce brand to ship goods from mumbai to delhi will cost them about 1500 bucks they're paying web express about seven cents to track that shipment webexpress tracked almost 5 million shipments last month they just passed a million dollar run rate up about 30 percent year over year raising 1.2 million right now at a 4 million post money from a strategic partner 70 on the team today as they look to scale aporibut thanks for taking us to the top absolutely good to talk to you nathan 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 youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any 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