SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
He Left GainSight to Help D2C Brands Sell More, 260 Customers, $30k in GMV Last Month
16 Apr 2022
Chapter 1: What is the guest's background in SaaS and commerce?
Can I take 260 customers times $400 a month, a year, you're doing about a hundred thousand bucks a year in revenue. Yep. You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
We've published thousands of these interviews, and if you want to sort through them quickly by revenue or churn, CAC, valuation, or other metrics, the easiest way to do that is to go to getlatka.com and use our filtering tool. It's like a big Excel sheet for all of these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com. Hey folks, my guest today is Praneet Chandra.
Chapter 2: How is the decentralized commerce system called Cressi structured?
He spent 12 plus years building and scaling SaaS and commerce startups right from zero to IPO. Intrigued by Web 3.0 and new avenues that can open for commerce, he's plunged into building Web 3.0-based decentralized commerce system called Cressi. All right, Praneet, you ready to take us to the top?
Yeah, sure. Yeah. So I think I've spent a lot of tickets in SaaS, a lot of bundling and bundling I've seen. And I think with Web3.0, it's really opening up a lot of avenues for the businesses, right?
So tell me, give me an example of a customer that's using you today.
So we have got several top D2C brands in India using us. Somebody like Nario, they are India's first women-led food brand. And they use us to sell through a decentralized network with over 80 plus people, 80 plus sellers across India selling their products.
Sorry, what is it? It's not Nario, a women's network?
Yeah, Nario, N-A-R-I-O dot com.
Okay, got it. And what, sorry, what do they sell?
So they sell basically natural homemade products and they source it from the women entrepreneurs and then they basically package it. They're kind of a D2C brand and how we enable them is they become a seller on our platform and then there are these several women entrepreneurs who actually become resellers of their product. And this all happens through our decentralized network where
Uh, they do not get charged with any commissions from the likes of your bare mouth, like Amazon or flip cards, but like everything is based on buyers and sellers individually.
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Chapter 3: Who are the D2C brands currently using Cressi?
Interesting. So, okay. So bootstrapped. Oh, that's great. How many folks are on the team today?
Oh, we have got like over eight people and just one person joined. So I could call it nine people technically.
Okay. How many engineers?
So we are like four engineers.
Yeah. Four. Okay. And how are you signing up these 260 customers? Is it sort of door to door? Is it outbound, inbound? How are you signing them up?
So what we do is we take our network as a leverage, right? So we go into people, we really see people are selling on Instagram, people are selling on Amazon. We reach out to them, tell them like, hey, are you tired of paying commission or really worried about how do you really get started on this web journey, right? And that is where we massively attracted.
We have used LinkedIn as our outbound sales channel and generating lots of revenues with that.
I mean, aren't brands like Nario and other DTC brands happy to pay Amazon a 30% cut because of all the traffic that Amazon brings? You can't bring those customers the same amount of traffic that Amazon does.
so the power that we run is because we are building this decentralized network on a protocol that is uh backed by a semi-government organization right it's becoming a decentralized network so we are getting more and more buyer apps on the platform right it's called as ondc if you would research if you would read about it it's called open network for digital commerce so we are building on top of it so it means other buyer apps
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Chapter 4: What is the revenue model for Cressi's customers?
People come in, look at the network. Okay, I want to do something. And then basic comes from somewhere like $200 to $50 a month kind of thing.
And I guess, tell me a little bit more, $30,000 in GMV, how many SKUs, how many products sold to make up the $30,000?
The exact number would not be on top of my head, but roughly we might have sold over how many orders? Around 3,400 orders. Yeah.
Okay. Got it. So average order size is about 80 bucks, 90 bucks. Exactly. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. So, and those total orders were across how many, like, so how many brands, DTC brands got at least one order last month?
that's a bit tricky to measure for us because again, as our decentralized network, we do not track everything. So we have to go to individual sellers and look at that number. But on average, what we understand based on the transaction history that hits up on our gateway is like 40% of D2C brands definitely make a transaction.
So of your 260 paying customers and 40% sold at least one thing last month.
Exactly.
Yeah. Okay. Or about 100 and 111, 110, something like that. Okay. That's interesting.
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Chapter 5: How did the idea for Cressi come about?
So I guess, are they happy paying a flat monthly fee if they don't get any sales that month?
Yeah, I think that's where the advantage comes in, right? Like they do not have to worry about like, oh, how do I really market up? How do I really put it on different pricing and all the pricing adjustment that they have to make? So they are really upfront. They are anyway spending on doing their e-commerce sites and building out their D2C brand. And that costs you a lot more, right?
Like even with the likes of Shopify, you are roughly looking at somewhere like $1,000 a year kind of thing running a D2C store. So anyways, they see us not as an aggregator, but more of an enabler, right? So we are anyways more profitable than or more cost affordable than Shopify. But at the same time, yeah, we are cutting down all of your aggregator commission percentage.
Praneet, are you paying any CAC, customer acquisition costs to acquire these customers?
So most of it is, as I said, right, we use Instagram as our channel, right? We send out DMs and really try to figure out, oh, these brands have got good following and everything. They must be selling more and that's how we qualify them. So it's more of a personal fee as compared to putting on any ads or anything.
Like one thing I realized early on, Google ads and Facebook ads is good for getting a sign up, but doesn't really convert them to a paid customer. So that is how different it is.
Yeah. Interesting. And what about your churn today? What is your churn?
So it's been a very short time that we have been in business as such. So we have hardly seen any churn apart from a couple of customers who came into a free plan and then they never converted into a paid plan as such. So that has happened quite a few times, but I don't see another thing that we have to always look at it.
Unless a customer really sees value that I'm able to drive an order, I would not really get converted. Right. So we get a lot of people, but I cannot call it a specific churn as such at this point.
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Chapter 6: What are the customer acquisition strategies for Cressi?
No kids. And how old are you? I'm right now, 32. Yeah. 22. Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.
That you should have started a company rather than doing a job.
Guys, there you have it. Cressy, Q-R-E-S-S-Y.com launched just six months ago, now doing about $8,500 a month in revenue because 260 direct consumer brands are listing their product SKUs on their platform in a decentralized way. He's helping them get sales of their products, and he doesn't take a 30% fee like Amazon. That's why he's growing. Last month, they processed $30,000 in total sales.
orders across all their 260 customers. That's about 3,400 total orders as they look to scale their bootstrap to date. He's funded the business with 6,000 bucks of his own money as they look to scale up their team of nine. Pernit, thanks for taking us to the top.
Thank you. Have a good one. Bye-bye.
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