How WebXpress Hit $1M ARR in India Tracking 5 Million Shipments a Month for 100 Enterprise Customers (Interview with CEO Apurva Mankad)

Introduction and Company Overview

Nathan Latka

00:00Hey, folks. My guest today is Apoorva Mankad. He founded in 2004 webxpress, which is a global transportation logistics SaaS provider headquartered in Mumbai. The company serves over a 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 LogiCloud, a supply chain visibility management platform. It was founded by Apoorva and as founder

00:27and CEO. Excited to jump into the story today. Apoorva, are you ready to take us to the top?

Apurva Mankad

00:32>> Yeah. Absolutely.

Nathan Latka

00:33Okay. So 2014 was was sort of go date. Before we jump into your back story and your history, help us understand what are companies paying webxpress for today? What's the product?

What Customers Pay For: Supply Chain Visibility

Apurva Mankad

00:45>> Supply chain today has become a very crucial operation for every company post COVID. 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

01:09>> 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.

Nathan Latka

01:15And is your transportation as a service offering and LogiCloud, are they both SaaS or is one like percent of GMV?

Apurva Mankad

01:23>> So well both are SaaS. We do everything in SaaS cloud based and software as a services multi tenanted. The world is multi tenanted. You need to have everybody on the platform to make it happen. So it's naturally a SaaS software for all the work that we do.

Nathan Latka

01:38Got it. Okay. So I I assume you have a lot of different kinds of customers, but I'm gonna force you into a tough question here, is an average. What's the average customer paying per year to use your technology?

Average Customer Pricing and ARPU

Apurva Mankad

01:49>> Okay. So since we operate in the Indian market, our average customer typically pays us somewhere in the range of around $1,000 a month. That's a typical pay that we get from our customers today. On the higher side, it can go to $5,000 a month. On the lower side, it can go to as low as $500 a month.

Transaction-Based Pricing Model

Nathan Latka

02:07Okay. Got it. And so someone that's paying you a thousand dollars per month, 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?

Apurva Mankad

02:19>> So we link to our growth with the growth of the customer. So we typically pay, make them pay us by transaction. We do expect a certain minimum level of operation with us 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 customers, all of our customers become much more successful as they grow.

Shipment Volumes and Transaction Definition

Nathan Latka

02:40And what is the average transaction size? Give us an idea of what that transaction is.

Apurva Mankad

02:45>> So typically transactions are shipment. Everything that you move from point a to b is a unique number and we call it an enviable number in our industry and that's the unique shipment ID as we call it and that's the building block for our solution. Typically we expect our customers to move anywhere between 10,000 to 25,000 odd transactions every month. Do note, many of my customers are serving businesses. So while the transaction ID may be one, they

03:08>> may be moving thousand boxes behind every transaction.

Nathan Latka

03:11I see. So when you say move 10 to 25,000 transactions per month, my audience can understand that as they're moving 10 to 25,000 shipments per month.

Apurva Mankad

03:19>> That's correct. Absolutely. You're right. When you work in some of the sectors like e commerce, those number of shipments really shoot up and they go to as much as a million and million and a half transactions in a month.

Ground, Rail and Air Transportation Mix

Nathan Latka

03:30And we talk about transportation and where these transactions and shipments are happening. Are we talking ground, freight, air, sea?

Apurva Mankad

03:38>> 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. Absolutely very small percentage is by domestic air transportation.

Nathan Latka

03:57Oh, 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 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 Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second. But you log in, you connect

04:20your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time, you can see what it 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

04:45get 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

05:06not 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

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Mumbai to Delhi Route and Per-Shipment Economics

Nathan Latka

06:20the 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?

Apurva Mankad

06:29>> Okay. So Mumbai where I'm from and Delhi which is India's capital are the two probably it's one of the most used route in the world in terms of sheer number of shipments you know and also in sheer number of people who move between them, the planes which fly between them. We come in top 10, you know, world rankings as far as this route is concerned.

Nathan Latka

06:47Okay. 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 twenty six hour drive. Right? So what does it cost to ship one truckload from Delhi to Mumbai usually?

Apurva Mankad

07:02>> So it will typically cost around $1,500 if you're moving a 32 feet size vehicle from Mumbai to Delhi one way. That's a typical freight today given current diesel prices. It will take you a bullet very fast bike to drive in twenty six hours. It actually takes more than 35 on road today And that's for a car and a vehicle might take longer because that will take breaks and it's more slower.

Nathan Latka

07:27Yep. Okay. So let's break down the unit economics just on that trip, right? So it's $1,500 now. Is that what your customer pays you? And if so, what what do you keep of the 1,500?

Apurva Mankad

07:39>> The 1,500 is what the customer pays for the entire vehicle. Right? They pay me for the tracking of that particular shipment or all the shipments which go which go inside a particular vehicle. And a big truck like 32 feet long truck can take thousands of shipments. We charge them for every shipment. Do note everything does not move from point A to B. It will always reload, offload and then go to further to Delhi for example and

08:01>> 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.

Nathan Latka

08:07So if I was gonna pay webxpress to track one thirty two foot truck moving my ecommerce goods from Mumbai to Delhi, about how much am I gonna pay just for that one truck?

Apurva Mankad

08:17>> Oh, you're able to pay me per shipment. You might end up paying me around about 15 to $30 is what you will pay me typically.

Nathan Latka

08:26Okay. 15 to $30. Now, I assume you obviously don't have customers paying you for one shipment. You sell in bulk, 15 to 10 to 25,000 transactions per month, right?

Apurva Mankad

08:35>> Absolutely, absolutely. So what happens is this for 15 to $30 will be broken down into multiple shipments. So per shipment, they pay us, you know, a very, very small amount, typically rupees 5, which might just turn out to be, if I have convert it to dollars, probably 0.05¢.

Nathan Latka

08:53It's 20 it's fifth you said 5 rupees or 15?

Apurva Mankad

08:57>> 5. 1

Nathan Latka

08:58Yeah. So 7 so 7¢. 7 US cents per shipment.

Apurva Mankad

09:02>> Well, you can say absolutely. That's what they pay me for every shipment. That's economics. $1,500 what they pay for a vehicle. They pay me 7¢ for tracking it.

Nathan Latka

09:11Interesting. Okay. Now then what you were 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 5 rupees or 0.07¢ dollars. That's where you get your thousand dollar per month average average customer value.

Apurva Mankad

09:28>> Absolutely. You are right.

Nathan Latka

09:30Is a great story. Okay. So now that we understand the economics, give us your backstory. When did you launch the business?

Founding Story and SaaS Pivot

Apurva Mankad

09:36>> Well, I am from the background of, you know, working in the software and 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. It's almost seventeen years ago, looks like eons ago. 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

10:01>> is webxpress today? And then ultimately we moved to a pure cloud based offering and last two three years it's all has been SaaS now. In fact we pivoted to SaaS in 2017 to be more precise. Till then we were offering them what we call as, you know, point to point on premise kind of solutions. And India has been, you know, really accelerating in this area. So I think the journey in the last five years is much

10:25>> more faster than the previous ten years.

Nathan Latka

10:27And so then fast forward to today now, how many customers are you working with total?

Current Customer Count and Enterprise Focus

Apurva Mankad

10:31>> Yeah. So we work with about 100 enterprise customers. When we say enterprise, which means each of these are companies and they have probably anywhere from, you know, 5,000 to 8,000 employees working for them across their network and we work with them mainly in Indian market and we also have 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.

Total Shipments Tracked Per Month

Nathan Latka

10:54And how many total shipments per month are you tracking for these 100 customers?

Apurva Mankad

10:59>> Yeah. So if I put together, will be tracking today, latest we rent number, including our ecommerce customers, we will be probably tracking about 5,000,000 shipments for them.

Nathan Latka

11:09Per month?

Apurva Mankad

11:10>> Per month. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

11:12Wow. Okay. So I mean, can I take I mean, can I take 5,000,000 times 5 rupees or 7¢? I mean, that would put you at about $400,000 per month in revenue right now.

Apurva Mankad

11:21>> Yeah. It will it will be lovely if it worked out that way because the minute the customer goes in a higher slab, he squeezes you quite tight in terms of you know paying you. So he no longer pays you that 5 rupee, that 7¢, he actually goes down to probably a cent or so.

Revenue Today and Monthly Run Rate

Nathan Latka

11:35I see. Okay. So can you give us, I mean, revenue today more like 200,000 a month, a 100,000 a month, something like that?

Apurva Mankad

11:41>> That's right. That's correct. We are a million dollar ARR company today. We US products, we pay about million dollar a year is what we earn today in India. And we hope to become hopefully two x of that this year.

Nathan Latka

11:53That'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. Where were you exactly a year ago in terms of monthly revenue? Do you remember?

Year-Over-Year Growth

Apurva Mankad

12:06>> We were about 35% less. So last year we grew by about 35%.

Growth Drivers: New Customers and Post-Pandemic Demand

Nathan Latka

12:10Okay. So call it like 57,000 a month in revenue about a year ago. You've grown to 83,000 a and, Apurva, or sorry, Apurva, where is that growth coming from? Is it coming from expanding existing customers or adding new customers completely?

Apurva Mankad

12:25>> Adding a lot of new customers because post 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 you business. So that is driving a lot of people to adopt even smallest of companies are adopting. So we increased

12:46>> our customer base by 50% last year but they will pay me over the next two years of time so that's why our growth was 35%. But we see that now that we have come out of pandemic completely in India, we are growing very fast and despite the rise in fuel prices looks like that '22 and '23 is going to be a very exciting year for all of us.

Nathan Latka

13:06And how many folks are on the team your team today?

Team Size and Profitability

Apurva Mankad

13:10>> We are about 70 people. Seven zero.

Nathan Latka

13:1270 people. Okay. That's amazing. So it's fascinating. So 70 people and 1,000,000 in revenue. Are you able to pay them out of your revenue or have you raised a bunch of capital to fund their salaries?

Apurva Mankad

13:23>> Okay. We pay them salaries obviously and we do raise you know capital at times. We do also raise some debt funds 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 positive profit after tax for many years. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

13:41I 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 1,200 US dollars per employee per month. So these are very well, at least for the comparing to The US, these are very low salaries.

Apurva Mankad

13:59>> I'm sure by now you are absolutely wondering how the country like India works on such amount 7¢, 1¢, $1,200 of salary. How you wish the employee people from USA could hire from India right and that's why we have one of the biggest outsourcing industries in this world. You are right that's what we pay approximately. Of course there are people who get paid much higher and people get even paid lesser than that. But that's the average per

14:23>> capita income of India by the way is $3,000 a year. Wow.

Nathan Latka

14:28So you're well above average. 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 did you raise?

Funding History and Current Raise

Apurva Mankad

14:37>> So we raised about $200,000 in 2016, we raised the first round at that point of time but very recently we have almost signed up with for the next round and that should be in the range to about $1,200,000 is what we should be raising very soon.

Nathan Latka

14:541,200,000 in debt or another VC firm?

Apurva Mankad

14:58>> In between VC firm.

Nathan Latka

14:59Okay. Got it. So you've only raised 200,000 today, you're raising another 1,200,000 right now?

Apurva Mankad

15:04>> Absolutely.

Nathan Latka

15:05Oh, wait. So I thought you said you raised debt. Did you not raise debt?

Apurva Mankad

15:09>> We are about to raise debt. So almost kind of done. 200,000 is what we raised in 2016 is what I told you. And we are about to raise this year 2022 around $1,200,000.

Nathan Latka

15:20In equity or debt?

Apurva Mankad

15:22>> In equity.

Nathan Latka

15:23So you just I thought you said you raised debt as well that's what I'm trying to understand.

Apurva Mankad

15:27>> Debt We raised, we use somewhat working capital if we call it debt. So we use bank lines to fund a gap between what customers pay us and what we need to pay our salaries in time. So there is always a trade gap as we call it and that's funded typically through 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 you know

15:48>> some capital from banks to use it on a temporary basis.

Nathan Latka

15:53And Apoorva, back in 2016 when you raised $200,000, most people when they're raising sort of pre seed rounds, they're doing it on a convertible note at a $5,000,000 cap valuation cap. Is that what you did?

Apurva Mankad

16:06>> Our valuation at that point of time was around 1,000,000 at that point of time, million dollars.

Nathan Latka

16:11And what valuation do you hope to raise this new $1,200,000 at?

Apurva Mankad

16:16>> So we have we have finalized this at around 30 CR. That's around $4,000,000.

Nathan Latka

16:24Okay. So does that valuation feel fair to you? $4,000,000, is that pre money or post money?

Apurva Mankad

16:30>> 4,000,000 is post money.

Nathan Latka

16:32Post money. So you're you're basically at 2,800,000 valuation pre money raising 1.2. So 4,000,000 post. So you're selling about I mean, you're selling about 25 of the business. Right?

Apurva Mankad

16:43>> You can say that. You're absolutely calculated correctly.

Nathan Latka

16:47Well, why I guess, who are you raising from? Is it a company is it a VC in India or overseas? And and why do you think they're only giving you a sort of a three x, four x valuation?

Apurva Mankad

16:57>> Well, one of the reasons is that our focus market has been India and we are a company focused on SaaS revenue. And as you just saw the numbers, the Indian numbers are not very large if you count in dollar terms. So obviously if you are selling into a rupee market, the valuations become lower than you are selling let's say in The US market for example, right. Obviously a dollar will fetch you much more. That's one reason.

17:19>> Secondly, this funds that we are raising is much more from a strategic partner right now who also happens to be one of our customers and in fact the investor into our customers is you know who are raising the funds into us.

Famous Five Rapid Fire

Nathan Latka

17:33I 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?

Apurva Mankad

17:42>> Favorite business book,

17:47>> Mark McCormack's book on how to sell, I think it was the earlier book which I really actually remember that well.

Nathan Latka

17:53Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Apurva Mankad

17:57>> I do follow Satya Nadella. I really like this journey.

Nathan Latka

18:01Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building webxpress?

Apurva Mankad

18:06>> For promoting webxpress.

Nathan Latka

18:08For building building webxpress.

Apurva Mankad

18:11>> Oh, we are using mainly Ionic as the tool now to build it.

Nathan Latka

18:17Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?

Apurva Mankad

18:21>> Eight hours.

18:22>> Eight hours.

Nathan Latka

18:23And what's your situation? Are you probably married, single, kids?

Apurva Mankad

18:26>> I'm married. I've got two children. I still have sleep for eight hours.

Nathan Latka

18:29That's amazing. How many kids?

Apurva Mankad

18:32>> Two kids. Two daughters.

Nathan Latka

18:34Okay. And, Apoorva, how old are you?

Apurva Mankad

18:37>> I'm 48 years old now.

Nathan Latka

18:39Last question. What is something you wish you knew when you were 20 years old?

Apurva Mankad

18:45>> I wish I read your book at that time it was published.

Nathan Latka

18:49Guys, there you have it. Webxpress.in. 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 $1,500. They're paying webxpress about 7¢ to track that shipment. Webxpress tracked almost 5,000,000 shipments last month. They just passed a million dollar run rate, up about 30% year over year, raising 1,200,000 right now at a

19:144,000,000 post money from our strategic partner. 70 on the team today as they look to scale. Apoorva, thanks for taking us to the top.

Apurva Mankad

19:22>> Absolutely. Good to talk to you, Nathan.

Nathan Latka

19:25One 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 one

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20:34saying. Sign up for that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode. And if you enjoyed it, click the thumbs up. We get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows, I do it so that we can all learn. We have to counter those

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