SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
153 Brands Use Them To Report Sales Volume to Shopping Malls, $20k in MRR, $1.5m Raised
10 Jun 2020
Chapter 1: What business model does ShoppinPal utilize?
We started with a hypothesis of a business model where we don't have to build out a sales team. I mean, we have to see how far that we can carry that. But the latest deals we have closed have an annualized revenue of close to $75,000. But it was primarily closed by me and my co-founder just hustling.
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He is the founder and CEO of a company called ShoppinPal.com. Integration and apps for small businesses and B2B SaaS. Previously as product manager, he grew a company to $40 billion in payment volume and products at eBay and PayPal and was the first non-founding engineer at Trustgenics, which was acquired by HP. Again, now all in on ShoppinPal. Shriram, you ready to take us to the top?
Yes, absolutely.
All right. So how does shop and pal work and what's the revenue model? Is it a SAS company or is it a percentage EMV or what?
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Chapter 2: How does ShoppinPal help small businesses transition to the cloud?
But yes, if we are onboarding them directly in a pure SaaS hosted by us, yes, then we absolutely know and we price accordingly.
Okay. So you have at least 153 locations using you, assuming everyone only has one location, correct?
Right. Absolutely.
Yeah. Okay. Do you have more than a thousand locations like across the 153 or like, is it probably usually a one-to-one ratio? One brand has one location on you.
No, it's usually that our sweet spot is multi-location and multi-country retailers. So definitely there's a pretty good chance that that would translate to thousand plus locations comfortably. I see. Most of these would be on average, let's say our typical profile would be five or six locations. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
Yep. Yep. Okay, good. Yeah. So five locations, there was 153 accounts. You can obviously do the math there and figure that out. Okay, good. So launch in 2014, now have you bootstrapped the company or did you raise capital?
We just raised some seed capital, mostly through angels. And the idea there was just to get to a proof point where we can get to profitability and sustained revenue growth and not require VC funding for sustainability. And that's where we are now. So we are now profitable. And then we haven't really made up our mind of like having to raise VC capital. Is that the right path or not?
But the focus is entirely on making this a big sustainable business.
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Chapter 3: What is the pricing structure for ShoppinPal's services?
Which gets you up to about $20,000 a month in pure SaaS.
Yeah.
So the split is a little uneven and there's a handful of these larger accounts, the platforms themselves, like some of them are doing excess of $3,000 a month in billing with us. So they make up in some sense for the lower revenue or the free pilots that we would be running for in the premium model, right? I understand. Yep.
Totally understand. So your top five customers make up more than 15 grand a month in revenue, basically. Yep. Yep. Yeah. Very good. All right. Let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite business book?
Actually, it's, it's a, it's not an exactly a business book, but autobiography of a Yogi, um, is, uh, is my favorite book. And, uh, if when you read it, you realize that it's, it's seems to be a spiritual book. It has, but it has tremendous amount of business guidance as well.
Is there a number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?
Not one in particular, but many.
Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building shop and pal?
LinkedIn.
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