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Connecting Technology Seamlessly | Sriram Subramanian of ShoppinPal
97 Plays5 years ago
This pandemic has put businesses on an accelerated path to digital transformation. For larger organisations, achieving digital integration is relatively easy. But, for SMEs it poses unique challenges. That’s where our guest for this episode Sriram Subramanian of ShoppinPal comes to the rescue!
With a product tailored to make world class tech solutions available to SMEs without burning a gaping hole in their pocket, ShoppinPal has been powering growth for businesses in the retail ecosystem.
Join us for a chat with Sriram Subramanian to know more about his entrepreneurial journey, right from his days at the prestigious UC Berkeley to working for amazing businesses like HP and Paypal, then returning to India to adopt two beautiful daughters & set up his own SAAS startup.
Show credits:
Host: Akshay Datt
Production: Vanya Shruti
Voiceover Artist: Vanya Shruti
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Transcript
Career Reflections and Podcast Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
Akshay, did you always knew what you wanted to do when you passed away to the MBA? I was all over the place. Sort of, what about you? Confused about your career choices? Wondering what steps to take next?
00:00:18
Speaker
In this podcast called Beyond Campus, Saurabh Garg, founder of C4E and Akshay Dutt, founder of Kundnati, are on a mission to crack open the career success code for the youth. So, let's turn the dream into reality.
00:00:43
Speaker
Hi, I'm Shridam Sudham again.
Startup Journey and Shoppingpal Introduction
00:00:46
Speaker
I'm the founder and CEO of a B2B SaaS cloud startup called Shafinta.
00:00:53
Speaker
When you hear this conversation with Sriram, founder of Shopping Pal, you will hear him using the word serendipity, the act of finding something good by chance, quite a few times. But by no means is the growth of his current startup a result of mian, good luck or fortune. Sriram Subramanian, an aluminist of Carnegie Mellon and University of California Berkeley, worked at tech giants like HP,
00:01:22
Speaker
and Paypal before returning to India and starting his own business. Sriram's current venture, Shoppingpal, is a B2B SaaS integration platform as a service or IPaaS in short form. It is a transformative, cloud-based integration suite that aims to future-proof dismisses.
00:01:43
Speaker
Listen to Sriram talking about his entrepreneurial journey and explain his intricate eye-passed product and its relevance in the post pandemic world.
Career Path and Technological Ventures
00:02:00
Speaker
I got an opportunity at this place called Convergis Labs. Convergis, I think, has had a wide variety of businesses from telecom billing, BPO, and so on. They had a good setup in India as well, I believe. And they had a very small research-focused division where they had advertised for a PhD with eight years experience, saying that we want someone who can bring together both wireless networks and security and effectively commercialize it for us.
00:02:27
Speaker
And those are the two areas I was really into. And I sort of knew that, I mean, I looked at that role and almost felt like there's even no point in applying. I'm not qualified, but there's something about it where I felt like, no, this is such an amazing thing that I must give it a shot. So that process actually of getting into convergence was about eight months long.
00:02:44
Speaker
In the meantime, I had three other offers that had come through campus with other companies, but my heart was set on this. So it was pretty much like the last day or two when I was almost about to go elsewhere that they finally came through. So I ended up joining Converges in Cincinnati, Ohio. And it was really cool being amongst people that were at the intersection of deep research, but also commercialization. So I got that very unique opportunity to like, these were guys that were in their maybe forties or fifties with tremendous amount of technical experience.
00:03:14
Speaker
While they also gave me the ownership to say, hey, why don't you figure out who should we partner with in the identity management and security space? So that's when I found my path into the Valley, which was a startup called Trust Gen X. And they were really building amazing single sign on technology, which is very common these days that you do it with Facebook, Google, et cetera.
00:03:34
Speaker
So in the early days of single sign-on, that team, which was only four people at the time, ended up building the first enterprise single sign-on product. And I was lucky to get a chance to join them after nine months at Converges. So my fiancé who had met at Carnegie Mellon, we got married and she got an offer in the beta. So she was already there. And it was quite serendipitous that the company that I trusted and that I partnered with was actually in the same zip code.
00:03:59
Speaker
where she was located. And so I ended up working with the Trusty Enix team through the standards parties. So I got to know them well, and it sort of worked out in an organic way. And so, yeah, that was how the shift happened. And then we got, in nine months, we got acquired by HP. I was handling the OEM partnership, all the engineering aspects of that for HP, and that went well. So that wasn't a long ride either. So it was nine months in the startup and then an acquisition.
00:04:23
Speaker
So in HPE, what was your role? I continued in a development and research role for the product and at HPE it was quite interesting that we got support from the management to take the product into different areas ranging from printing to all the other businesses that they had, even desktops and so on.
00:04:41
Speaker
And I was very interested in this process because it was very much aligned with how you would commercialize and expand the scope of a product. So it was very much like trying to do a startup within HP and they had assigned people to help us out. And I filed a patent in that process for especially around printing.
00:04:58
Speaker
and Federation. So I think it was one of the earliest concepts, which today it has come to fruition. You do see single sign on in the printing scenario also to end well. And then I think HP went through a rough patch themselves and they were starting to, they had done four acquisitions in the identity space. So they were starting to consolidate the units to a lot of free orgs, et cetera. And the, in that process, I started getting the conviction around saying that now I need to chart a clear path to doing something on my own.
00:05:24
Speaker
I decided as I was exploring product management seemed like an interesting thing, especially technical product management. It was close enough to engineering and being on the other side with engineers. So I got a lucky break at PayPal and eBay when they were together to go into the global operations team there.
00:05:41
Speaker
essentially help them flatten out the skyrocketing ops costs by building out technology around IVR systems and also BPM workflows. So IVR, of course, is a simple process of when you call in to any place and then it takes as an automated.
00:06:02
Speaker
Or, you know, more sophisticated ones that will also not have you do presses, but guide you just to voice responses at some scale. And we realized that we really needed that to be very sophisticated because at PayPal, there were a lot of fraud rings that started operating in different parts of the world and doing attacks.
00:06:25
Speaker
And in general, when people lose money or money doesn't get stuck or there's a dispute, you really want quick resolutions at scale and you just cannot keep deploying thousands of people. It does. The business model just doesn't work. So all that work was around automation and it really gave me the foundation to understand what automation can do because a lot of times you, you hear about automations and integrations and it's,
00:06:50
Speaker
You know, it's hard to build an appreciation for it until you see that impact firsthand. And that sort of led was, I would say, the very foundation of what led to what Chopin Pal does and what we are doing today. So why did you decide to leave PayPal?
From Product Management to Founding Shoppingpal
00:07:05
Speaker
So I was in parallel pursuing B-School at Berkeley in the evening weekend program. You see the history of UC Berkeley. A lot of social movements and radical innovations have come from there.
00:07:17
Speaker
So again, you get exposed to a lot of people, like I had this group of friends in my class where we just said, okay, let's just meet every weekend and informally brainstorm about things, just catch up, right? And that was quite an interesting process which gave me that, started building this urge and urgency around, let's go do something. And in that process, part of it was just the environment there, but
00:07:40
Speaker
Also in parallel, seeing the problems that the transition to the cloud had started creating for merchants, because I was running an initiative called TurboCheckout, which was cross-linking. Basically, it's like single sign-on across EBN PayPal. So use your credentials. And if you go Google TurboCheckout, you'll find it today. I was a product manager who built it there.
00:08:02
Speaker
And the experience there was very useful in terms of talking to merchants firsthand and understanding that, yes, there is a lot of promise around all the best of breed cloud systems, but as businesses move there, their business processes and all the workflows that they need to accomplish, which are fairly complex are not being catered to by this disparate set of systems that are in this new world. So that was a recurring theme.
00:08:31
Speaker
that I heard whenever I was engaging with merchants of different sizes, especially in the SME segment. And my heart would go out to a lot of them to say that there's this business owner that has invested his sweat and effort over 10 years to build something meaningful. And there's such a struggle now because he wants or she wants to get so much out of technology, but they're not
00:08:55
Speaker
able to do it because they don't have the right guidance or tooling. So I started connecting with the audience and the problem in a way that the conviction started building that this is something that is worth solving. It's a global issue, and it is really hurting SMEs. So that was really the, I would say, the genesis of SharpenPal and what led me to eventually come down this path. When did you move back to India, and why did you make that move?
00:09:23
Speaker
My wife and I, we moved back in 2014, August of 2014. And actually, the trigger was because we had decided to adopt daughters in India. And we had spoken to an orphanage. This was when the system was not online as it is today. We had spoken to an orphanage. And they had said that basically that, look, you would have to come at short notice. And we were in agreement there.
00:09:50
Speaker
When we got the call in July 2014 at that time, we did not have much of a base. We had not set up any permanency in the US. And so we showed up. We were back in India within two and a half weeks and we adopted our first daughter at the time. So that was basically the trigger. Was it a mandate for you to stay in India post adoption or you just wanted to be in India?
00:10:17
Speaker
No, in as per there's something called the Hague Convention, which is a treaty between different countries with regards to adoption. So if you look at the US India Treaty, which is it requires that post adoption if you want to return to the US and you spend a minimum of two years outside in in whichever so if you have adopted in India, then you have to put
00:10:38
Speaker
And for that child, yeah, you have to stay in that country for two years before coming back. But for us, I think it became clear that we were able to get well set and there wasn't any immediate plan to rush back to the US. So we did a second adoption also in 2016. And of course, more than two years have passed since that also, but we have continued and we will for the foreseeable future.
00:11:05
Speaker
So when did you end the freelance work and decide to become a full-time founder?
Challenges and Strategies in Shoppingpal's Growth
00:11:13
Speaker
What was that point of time like? What led up to it? Yeah, so around 2016, as I was... I think we had figured out quite a few things and we'd even started some work with the pause and payments players
00:11:34
Speaker
And I think I had started getting a good handle of what's really the problem that exists at scale and how we could really help businesses automate their workflows. And on the other side, how could we really benefit these cloud-based systems, whether that's a pause payments or a ERP company that is struggling today also in the market trying to sell to SMEs. So that thesis had started to form
00:12:03
Speaker
And then while I was here, I was already in India. I had started building. See, one of the key factors is can you start to have a build a good team and scale that up, right? When you're talking about a startup. So that process started to take off where Angelist had started to become sort of popular or startup minded folks who are hanging out there.
00:12:31
Speaker
So I didn't have much of a network, but I had put out, I created a profile, put out some posts and started getting some good raw talent into the company. And at the same time, while I was just started talking about, hey, these are the things that I'm working on. And as I was exploring, I was going to conferences in Mumbai and so on to figure out what's going on in India.
00:12:59
Speaker
I ended up meeting a couple of good people also that said, hey, we'd love to advise and help out whichever way possible. And like kind of seeing this from the lens of, oh, this is an amazing problem you're solving or like this can really be done at scale. So I got some good validation from industry veterans, like people who had built
00:13:21
Speaker
multi-billion dollar companies themselves to say that this really makes sense. I can see why a lot of people may want to use this. So having that validation and support both from a team and ecosystem perspective was the catalyst I would say to then from 2016 onwards for me to start looking at this as more like, okay, this is a venture that must be built properly and scaled in the right way.
00:13:53
Speaker
So what was the original thesis of the product that you wanted to build? You were looking to build like a middleware in a way which would connect different cloud platforms with each other. What was it exactly? The original thesis was that retailers were lacking different applications. So they would go and pick whichever system, let's say any point of sale or payment system.
00:14:21
Speaker
that they want to work with. But then they said, oh, I have stores and warehouses. I don't know how my replenishment is going to work on this new setup. So I felt that the app's opportunity was very significant. If you were able to build a scalable way to create
00:14:43
Speaker
a large set of apps that could address the SME ecosystem. And especially if you could open source bulk of that, it would be a game changer. So that was the starting point to say, let's start creating apps for solving these different problems, but by creating a common underlying data layer. So that when I create the second and third and fourth app, it's a very efficient and almost like could be done in two weeks or less.
00:15:13
Speaker
And the second part of it was we were lucky enough to find the early customers that allowed us to open source the product. So even today, if you go to our GitHub profile, ShopnPal, you'll see that for a small team, the body of open source we have created is quite disproportionate because that is very much in our DNA. And that is something that makes us very appealing to both businesses and cloud platforms is the affordability. Right. So even today in the
00:15:43
Speaker
post pandemic situation, we're able to make ourselves very relevant, affordable, and we're seeing growth. And that's part of the reason is that it was always in our vision and our DNA to say that for the small guy, for the SME, how do you make a solution that is not just world class, but that doesn't hurt their wallet.
00:16:06
Speaker
So who were some of your early partners, early adopters? There was Wend, which is a New Zealand based point of sale company. And even to this day, they are our largest customer and partner. And I got, they were, they had built out a great product. They were seeing success in multiple countries. And the CEO was a very good product and engineering guy. He saw the potential. So he gave us the chance to
00:16:35
Speaker
build out some of the early integrations. And in turn, what exactly did you build for them? The first one was this stock replenishment application, which I mentioned, which we open sourced. They loved that. And we also brought at the time their largest customer that we found in the US, where it was very serendipitous. We had started a meetup for local tech people.
00:17:05
Speaker
This guy showed up ahead of IT. He didn't really introduce himself properly. But then he did his homework, went back and said, you guys could really help me. I'm looking to transition to a nice cloud-based setup. And I have the surrounding challenges I want to solve as well. And how has the journey been since then?
Scaling Strategies and Global Impact
00:17:31
Speaker
Overall, it's been a great journey. Of course, as with any startup,
00:17:35
Speaker
You go through your moments of, hey, I might shut down tomorrow. So I have a couple of those. But all in all, being able to build an exceptional team, a very solid foundation for the technology, because now we are each deployment that we go into, it's scaling very fast. Basically, we go from if we start working with, let's say, this payments company in Palo Alto,
00:18:02
Speaker
where they deployed our accounting connectors, meaning that for their payment transaction data, a merchant can go into the product. They're able to set up their accounting integration from within the payments product to let's say a QuickBooks desktop or online. And in that process, they're able to also migrate years worth of historical data. And from today onwards, then every transaction starts syncing in real time to their accounting system.
00:18:33
Speaker
So the company, you know, it was quite an eye-opener for us to see that we were able to save up to 90% of the cost compared to what it would have taken them to build within house or work with, let's say some custom developer to use our connectors and similar savings around time to market as well. Because what we have is ready to use plug and play connectors.
00:18:59
Speaker
So if someone's using our established already existing connectors, it's a very quick process for them to go to market. And they were able to, in a self-serve model for customers, they were able to start scaling it. And within the first two, three weeks, they had already touched about 80 customers. So then that started giving us
00:19:25
Speaker
the validation that, okay, what we are building can scale up very quickly. And now we're ready also for the big leagues in terms of pitching to the number one players in this market. And, and hence being able to impact millions of merchants, right? Not just hundreds of thousands. Okay.
00:19:46
Speaker
So what is your pricing model like? Is it like a one-time setup fees that you take? Or is it like a SaaS where you take a monthly subscription fee? So what is that like? Yeah, so for that, let me explain to you what is the engagement model and journey. And associated with that, I'll also explain pricing. So our primary customer as a first step is that we go sell to a cloud system.
00:20:12
Speaker
Now, let's say that could be, as I have said, a pause, a payments company. It could be someone is in the retail or restaurant space. For example, we are working in the food space actively as well right now. So when we go sell to that company, they would want a certain set of connectors slash integrations to their ecosystem.
00:20:38
Speaker
Now they look at our portfolio and say, oh, these three or four, I want right away to get started with. So those that already exist, we are able to license them in a typical SAS subscription model. Additionally, the value proposition or differentiation that we bring is our entire setup, which is microservices based, we are able to take that set of core
00:21:06
Speaker
services or connectors that they want and deploy it inside of their environment. See, the benefit is that the data doesn't leave their premises. So the company or their customers don't have to worry about it, which is a huge value prop for them. In light of everything that has happened, you look at Facebook and other fiascos in terms of data leakages.
00:21:29
Speaker
So once that's done, then they say, look, I want actually these 10 other connectors to various systems. So then in that process, they are funding the development of those new connectors. So there is an approximate cost to involve in that, let's say, for example, anywhere from 2 to $5,000 per connector, depending on what that is.
00:21:58
Speaker
So then we build out that portfolio for them, start keep going live with the things that keep getting built while depending on the roadmap, we're able to also build out new scalable integrations. But the important thing is once we build out those new connectors, now the thousand other companies and apps that are out there can now also access that. So our portfolio of plug and play connectors is rapidly increasing.
00:22:25
Speaker
through this process, because it's not a one-off just for this company, but something that the entire world can benefit from. So now once that happens, then it's time to go live and get into the hands of businesses. What we find now is that our cloud platform partners, they want us to drive the setup and integration also. First, because we have built very good technology around automating data migrations and setup,
00:22:56
Speaker
which is part of the same platform. And second is with a very small but highly efficient ops team, we are able to now bring onboard a merchant for as little as $200 to $300 per customer. We're able to say that this merchant signed up for a trial and now within two weeks, they have all the historical data and a beautifully working and integrated setup in the new environment.
00:23:22
Speaker
So we find that all the customers that we are working with, they have started relying on us for onboarding. And this is where the business model innovation lies, which is that the cloud platform became a customer and then a channel for us. And now, because we deliver such value to their customers, and in some sense, we are working as one team with them, we work directly with these merchants.
00:23:53
Speaker
which means that we have that direct relationship, which typically may not exist in a channel scenario. If you see how channels work, the channel does not expose the customer, but the degree of value that we create and the kind of things we do makes it possible or it makes sense for the cloud platform to hand the customer to work with us directly. And that is very powerful.
00:24:20
Speaker
in terms of having that direct relationship and then helping the merchant through the journey over the next two, three years or the lifespan that they can now rely on us directly. And then the merchant can look at the rest of the portfolio saying, hey, there are these three things you have that I could really benefit from. So can you please help me get on board with those other things?
00:24:44
Speaker
So those are the two facets. I hope that makes sense. And so then the merchant side, just to close the point on pricing, is for a lot of the small things that the merchants would use, we start as low as $30 a month for a merchant to use one of our offerings. And on the higher spectrum, if there is a midsize retailer or someone who's using it, they may be paying us about $1,500 a month.
00:25:11
Speaker
So that's sort of the SME side of the equation. And so those are both unique customer segments. And this channel aspect comes in between that links the two.
00:25:25
Speaker
So your customers would comprise of A would be companies that have some sort of tech product where they want to integrate with other products so that the customer has a better value proposition for their end customer. That would be one set of customers for you.
00:25:45
Speaker
And the other set of customers is online retailers who want some sort of better integration with other cloud tools who have like a in-house tech for running the retail, not like someone who's on Shopify, I guess, but someone who would have built a custom online retail kind of a module and then wants it to be connected with other modules or other tools.
00:26:13
Speaker
Correct see in it is a quite a broad set of customers. So, even if you take it could be any retailer or for that matter any SME that wants to bring in automation in his or her business.
00:26:31
Speaker
No, but this would definitely be someone who has their own tech team inside. Otherwise, if somebody was to just, for example, say, OK, I want to use Salesforce for my automation. In that case, they would not really be a customer for you, but it's possible that Salesforce might be a customer for you in case Salesforce wants to integrate with other tools. But yeah, you're right that on one side, the customer doesn't need to have a tech team. We create a lot of value for those people who don't have tech teams because
00:27:02
Speaker
they're able to plug and play our technology without having an IT guy to run it. But this would necessarily be someone who has their own custom technology built rather than someone who's just taken an off the shelf solution from a sales force or any of these cloud solutions. Not necessarily. So if someone has taken, let's say a sales force and a Shopify and some set of standard solutions,
00:27:29
Speaker
Over time, you will see that we would be in the app stores of all these ecosystems, plugging in various important gaps.
00:27:41
Speaker
And today, of course, our expertise is in retail, restaurants, and service businesses. But we will be vertically agnostic and serving a wide range of industries. And we'll be filling all those key caps in the ecosystem. And that's an active work stream for us today. So what happens is, and this is the evolution where we are headed now, and where I think we can create tremendous value is for the business to look at Sharpen Pal and say,
Shoppingpal's Unique Value Proposition
00:28:08
Speaker
You know, I don't necessarily. So let's say that someone like a Shopify Salesforce or any other company that we work with. So they bring them a solution to address one need. Now there are five other needs, unmet needs for that business. And so that's where they are working with us directly to fill that gap.
00:28:35
Speaker
So it's not the relationship and the exercise may start with the cloud platform, but we are the ones that complete the journey for the business. And that's where we will be investing heavily in creating a marketplace and a direct channel for businesses to come to us and just do an a la carte take off, all the things that they want to automate their business.
00:29:03
Speaker
and just plug and play, set it up as you would see with any SaaS offering. So that's why it becomes powerful because they're not necessarily just reliant on the cloud platform to get all the value. It can certainly be a starting point.
00:29:21
Speaker
So in a way, you would be competing with Zapier once you have that kind of self-service thing in place. Yes. So you are right that from a business model or marketplace perspective, it is aligned with what Zapier does today. However, the fundamental difference is that we're talking about the entire scope of B2B systems and long tail apps.
00:29:51
Speaker
that exist today, which are not supported by a Zapier or anybody. So we have customers today that are experts in swimming pool management software or golf courses and various types of successful startups in different niches that want to be able to talk to successful point of sales, accounting and other types of systems. And there is a massive long tail of such companies all over the world.
00:30:21
Speaker
So we would be empowering all this entire ecosystem of these long tail apps and all the systems that want to talk to each other. But yeah, fundamentally the marketplace model is important and necessary because otherwise you don't want your business to be entirely channel based because the merchant also at the business won't get the entire benefit of the offering in that case.
00:30:51
Speaker
So and the second part which already mentioned that their data would still sit inside whichever cloud platform that we've already integrated with. That the merchant data is safe inside of their core system that they trust already versus with Zapier, you do have to release your data to them. OK, so when you're using Zapier, then they actually the data passes through them.
00:31:21
Speaker
Absolutely, so with the Zapier it is going to. So it's going from your system A to the Zapier cloud and then from there to system B. So that may not be OK for a lot of businesses and I feel that there's going to be a radical shift. Where that becomes less and less acceptable to businesses. Right and that that's the vision that we have to say that.
00:31:49
Speaker
we will make our deployment model has supported that from the start. Okay, so here's a hypothetical question say now you know my bread and butter business is a recruitment business and we are running our workflows on sales force and our source of profiles or job seekers is linked in so if I was to tell you I want a way to
00:32:12
Speaker
connect my LinkedIn job posting with my Salesforce workflow tool. So would this be something that you would be able to do easily and would both LinkedIn and Salesforce kind of play nice and give you access to their APIs or whatever you need to get this done or you know, how would that happen? Yeah, so the short answer is yes, that is very much doable and in the scope of our roadmap may not be the next three months, but certainly beyond that horizon.
00:32:43
Speaker
Because these, if you look at Salesforce, the way AppExchange has been built, it was the first successful B2B marketplace for apps. And they've always believed in having the open API. And as long as you qualify and you're building according to that standard, you can go and publish in AppExchange. If you don't publish, there's an option to keep it private as well.
00:33:07
Speaker
So we have both models and it is something that we are exploring very seriously. We just want to make sure that we enter with the right set of offerings when we touch these types of systems. So that's on the Salesforce side. What about on the LinkedIn side? Will they give you access so that you are able to take the data from LinkedIn when somebody applies for a job and push it to Salesforce? Yeah, I believe there shouldn't be an issue there because
00:33:35
Speaker
LinkedIn is not a CRM company, right? So so they it's very much in their interest to support this kind of a workflow to do this so that businesses like you can get that benefit. So but in general, do you need to speak to these companies or do they have like a standard documentation and you just like kind of follow a process and you get the access that you need? Yeah, in many cases, we don't need to speak to them.
00:34:04
Speaker
We apply, they vet the application seriously and then there is an online process to get through it. What we do is we supplement it sometimes with having discussions with senior management because it really helps align on what is the shared vision, why are we doing this and then they could support us in the right ways if needed. And in general do Indian
00:34:33
Speaker
Cloud products also have that kind of openness of collaboration. So again, I'm going back to the recruitment example. So like the biggest player in India is nochry.com. So would nochry.com also be as open to doing an API integration and allowing you to take that data and push it into Salesforce? See, I can't say for sure because we have not explored that path at all.
00:34:59
Speaker
But in general, do you find that Indian companies are open to this? We have not done much work with Indian cloud companies and when we have explored with few folks like Tally and whichever one the majors players are there,
00:35:21
Speaker
The big difference becomes that the level of sophistication of both the mindset around an open API and ecosystem is missing in a lot of companies. And I think that's where as an industry, country, and to really be a global success for a lot of companies, I think that is a key shift that needs to happen. Because everybody is building in their own silo.
00:35:52
Speaker
versus if you see the best of breed cloud companies in US and Europe, they have understood that the platform and the ecosystem is going to be one of the biggest drivers. The very fact that I can talk to a Salesforce or a Shopify is going to bring me let's say 100,000 to 100,000 customers.
00:36:12
Speaker
And I think that that somehow is missing, especially in some of the well-established companies in India. They have not been agile enough to make that shift. And I hope that that will change very quickly. And as we have started engaging with a few players in the pause and payment space, and we see that there are some of the newer startups are actually pretty good about it.
00:36:40
Speaker
but the more established guys, 10 years plus, that's where the gap exists. So I'm sure you would have heard about Postman crossing a 2 billion valuation.
Synergies with Postman and Ecosystem Expansion
00:36:54
Speaker
So how does Postman fit into the ecosystem vis-a-vis you? Are they like somebody who would help you because they would help companies build API or just help me understand that? Yeah, see Postman on one side, Postman has this
00:37:11
Speaker
aspect of how do I make an average or entry-level engineer get comfortable experimenting with APIs so that they can foster many, many more exponentially higher integrations happening and API usage across the world. Otherwise, there has always been a high barrier to entry.
00:37:34
Speaker
to say, oh, there is this API. How do I authenticate? How do I get data? How do I push data? And in the past, there have been these sophisticated engineers who have done that work. But the main benefit that Postman has brought is broken that barrier, saying, no, Akshay, maybe you could feed in this basic data and see how this API works, even if you're not coding on a regular basis.
00:38:02
Speaker
On one side, I think they have this very important role to play, which, and it's validated by their growth and what's going on, is they are going to create, facilitate this rapid journey towards an integrated, higher integrations and an ecosystem that plays well together. But they are, it's more of a horizontal play and an enabler for them, as I understand it, they are not in the business of
00:38:32
Speaker
connecting specific systems Okay, so if I could kind of like just throw in a Comparison so in a way postman would be like somebody like a company which is building Highways and you would be a company which is running a transportation service like say like a bus service which is taking people from destination A to B and
00:38:57
Speaker
Maybe to a certain degree that analogy works, but the highway is that highway part of it is also being provided by the cloud, the platform itself. Because as as a payments company, I am doing all the hard work of creating a robust, scalable API. And postman comes in and says that I will let you explore this and hundreds of others with ease.
00:39:27
Speaker
So it is creating another layer of convenience and use on top of these APIs to make that transition effective and smoother. For example, tomorrow, so we are in the process of also launching our own API for the outside world. So for example, if you see in the restaurant space today, there are a lot of companies that are sending orders still via fax. And so if those guys continue without
00:39:55
Speaker
really hooking into this food app and restaurant point of sales and cloud kitchens revolution. They will miss out on a lot, even though they have been around for a long time, they have a good customer base. But if you go tell that company, hey, in the next one month, why didn't you build out a great API? That's just not going to work because that's not their DNA.
00:40:19
Speaker
So what we are taking is a reverse approach to say, here's an extremely simple way to pass data from your system to us and we will pipe it to whoever wants it in the four people system. So that's our journey towards saying, how do we also enable the long tail of
00:40:40
Speaker
whether that's food apps or service businesses and so on, who are not in a position, who don't have the expertise and the ability to build APIs themselves. But it's very important for them, even for survival, to connect to the rest of the ecosystem. So we can be that bridge as well. And Postman would again fit in that journey of saying, this guy who's been sending his orders by fax, he has this one
00:41:09
Speaker
junior engineer on his team, that's it. So that junior engineer can now use Postman and get a good handle of how to talk to us. So Postman is essentially a tool for developers, like it helps developers to learn about APIs and utilize them better. Is that what it is? That is the key value proposition for them is to simplify and dumb down so that even an entry level developer
00:41:39
Speaker
would work with APIs. There are many other things they do, but this has been the biggest value problem. So how much revenue did you make in the first year of operations?
Revenue Growth and Team Dynamics
00:41:51
Speaker
Initially, the revenue was I think less than $30,000 that we did in the first year.
00:42:01
Speaker
We were very focused on, of course, building out the technology. We had just one large customer who was funding the operation. And we had not really brought in much external money. And we were really looking at scaling this organically. But once that happened and we built the product to a point where it started working for this US customer,
00:42:26
Speaker
And it was open source. So when our partners like Ben saw it, they were very excited because it was pretty unique. Nobody else was doing that. I think that's where it started hitting us that we do need to look at as a product company, we should start talking to investors and raising some money for this.
00:42:49
Speaker
So we were fortunate to find a few angels and small funds that were willing to back us in the initial days to build out the technology to a level where it is today.
00:43:04
Speaker
And I think from this point on, in fact, we have kicked off another fundraise just about a month ago and already gotten a couple of commitments from Angels and Funds. And part of that is because we have achieved profitability and fortunately are continuing to grow revenue even in the face of the recession. I think it helps investors understand that we are
00:43:32
Speaker
bringing in a painkiller and not a vitamin, right? So that part has helped us. And so now we are faced with some very interesting growth opportunities in terms of the absolute best cloud companies wanting to work with us in terms of the market leaders in various segments. However, it does require investments from us to be able to scale up our integrations across, let's say 15 of these companies in the next year.
00:44:03
Speaker
So, and that's the reason. So that's the part that we are subscribing to say is that look three years or four years from now, we have to be at a scale of at least of, you know, 15, 20,000 merchants using us globally. Then we need to invest in that growth and partnerships right now. And in this time when the rest of the world is nervous and hunkered down and
00:44:32
Speaker
very risk averse, we have to actually step up the game and make those investments. So, this we believe is now is a good time to do that. So, we are actively raising money, hiring and going very aggressive on new partnerships as well. How much did you close last financial year at like which just ended in 31st March?
00:44:55
Speaker
31st March, I would have to look up the numbers and get back to you on the exact number there. About a hundred and forty thousand dollars. And we what we are seeing is about three to four X growth, revenue growth.
00:45:19
Speaker
on an annualized basis. So that's what we plan to continue now from here on. And that evidence we already have for the current financial year, we are already on track to be at
00:45:31
Speaker
So, you will cross half a million in this year? Yes, yes, comfortably cross half a million. So, we were actually are, we are very much set on the trajectory to do, to try and cross a million. But in a given the situation, I think we have to be realistic in terms of where the global market is.
00:45:57
Speaker
And also that for us, more than revenue, absolute revenue growth, it's about investing in these long-term partnerships. So that's going to be in terms of the growth focus. That's where we are. What is your team like? How many people on the tech side and so on? What does the organization look like?
00:46:19
Speaker
Yes, we have a total of 14 people and it's majority of the folks are on tech and basically split between engineers, product manager, designer, QA, et cetera. And that forms the bulk of the team. 10 out of the 14 are in those functions because that is who we are. We are basically a product company.
00:46:48
Speaker
And we have recently onboarded a great CMO who is driving all of the marketing and inbound sales initiatives. And then we have a couple of people on the CS ops side, what I mentioned around onboarding and data ops. So that's where we have seen tremendous growth. So we're scaling that part of the organization as well.
00:47:13
Speaker
one person leading it. And at this point, we actually have three people contributing part time to it. But with that, in the last few months, we were able to more than quadruple revenue, even with that. Because technology is at the core of it. So we feel that that's an investment we are making to scale up that part. And I imagine it would all be remote work right now.
00:47:42
Speaker
Yes, we were always set up like that. In fact, that is one of the main things that has helped us also that we did not, it wasn't like this big shift for us. Even my developers, people who were local would sometimes make the choice that and not show up in office two or three days a week. And that was fine.
00:48:05
Speaker
And there's enough, obviously, enough tooling and understanding amongst the team to get work done in the right way. So we are set up well pretty remotely. And that also, I think, makes it appealing for a lot of engineers and other folks to join us because we are quite supportive. And I have always tried to follow the Silicon Valley model in terms of ownership and just view your best judgment in terms of
00:48:36
Speaker
how you want to do work. So our entire setup is remote and functioning well. And part of that is that we are following the same practices that we espouse to businesses, which is that our product offering is made all the more relevant by the current post pandemic situation, where every business has to move to a low touch or no touch model.
00:49:02
Speaker
And that requires very speedy customized and secure integrations between all the systems that they use today. And the basis of driving automation is integration. So without that, no business can be fully automated.
00:49:20
Speaker
So we adopt that ourselves in everything we use. And that is what we want to bring as a value to market and to society, is to say that when a retailer, restaurant, or any business that has had faced hardships has scaled down today with very low staff, potentially even lost their real estate, we want to contribute towards the growth and sustainability of this enterprise.
00:49:49
Speaker
which we can now enable via all our partnerships with the various cloud providers and provide the right tech framework for them to sustain.
00:50:11
Speaker
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