SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How he went $0 to $1m/mo in under 24 months for Waste Management SaaS in India
09 Jan 2023
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Guys, SaaS Open is our next big event in New York City. March 16th and 17th, we'll have a thousand SaaS leaders all sharing how they built their companies. Our keynotes are Henry Shuck, Marie Martins from Tally.sao, Serby from Symbol, Christopher of DocHub, who had a big exit.
Again, hundreds of speakers, a thousand plus attendees, and we've got folks bringing their entire executive teams because we have stages for founders, heads of product, head of finance and BD, CMOs and CROs, and then people in HR stage. It's going to be special. Prices are increasing every week, so you don't want to wait.
Go to sasopen.com right now to see what the ticket price is and lock in your spot today. Again, that's sasopen.com, March 16th and 17th in New York City. Tickets are almost sold out. 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.
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His application processed in December 20th, so last month, over 9,000 metric tons of waste at an average value of 500 bucks per metric ton. That's $4.5 million of GMV throwing through his application. He takes between 1% and 5% of that. So $50,000 to $200,000 per month comes from that part of the business. His other part of the business is pure SaaS, which is even more impressive.
Hey, folks, my guest today is Vishnu Vardhan. He is leading CircleX, one of the world's first Web3-based waste management companies that enable brands to manage their industrial and post-consumer waste quicker and with 100% traceability and transparency, all through their suite of blockchain-enabled SaaS solutions. Vishnu, you ready to take us to the top? Thank you so much, Nathan.
I've been a big follower of yours for a long, long time. Oh, good. So it's an honor to be a part of this podcast. All right. Well, I don't want to lose anybody. When people hear waste management, they think about the trash they throw out of their house. I don't think this is what you're building. So tell us what you mean by waste management. This waste is predominantly the waste of brands.
So brands have a lot of ways that they generated their factories and they need to send that out because they are under various norms like environmental, social governance norms and so on. And in every legislation, there's a lot of rules and regulations for managing that waste properly. That is one thing that we are handling.
And yes, secondly, a lot of brands are under extended producer responsibility rules and regulations. So they have to mandatorily take back waste from consumers like you and me and send it for recycling. So that is something that we help them do as well. So this would be like Walmart, for example, creates 10,000 cardboard boxes every week in the back of the Walmart building.
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Chapter 2: What is the main focus of CircleX in waste management?
I've been a big fan. So it's the least that we could do. Well, I appreciate that. Okay. So this is impressive. So over 50% of all time downloads have actually done a transaction on the app. And I guess quantify that for us, Vishnu, in terms of dollar or dollars, right? Or currency. What was the total volume last year? Last year was close to 6,000 metric tons per month on a monthly basis.
So we channelize a lot of this waste across India. And this year, we are closing at close to 9,000 metric tons on a monthly basis. That's 9,000 metric tons bought or sold through your scrap market app. Yes, yes, yes. Interesting. And what's the average dollar value of those 9,000 metric tons per month? Each metric ton on average is close to $500. Okay, interesting, interesting.
So, I mean, 500 times 9,000, I mean, that's $4.5 million of waste volume going through the app monthly. Yes, yes. So... December, the waste volumes was close to $3 million, December 2022. So that's the amount of waste that was channelized through the app just in December. So do you take a cut of that? I mean, how do you make money?
Yeah, so we charge for the software and then we take a percentage of the transaction as well. Like 1% or 5%? It depends on the scrap prices at the end of the day because it's all a demand and supply game. So our percentages keep varying based on how much we can supply based on the demand. It depends from 1% to 5%, yes. Okay.
On the low end, 1% on 4.5 million a month or 9,000 metric tons per month would be like $45,000 a month in revenue or as high as 5%, which would be $225,000 a month in revenue, right? Exactly. Yes. That's really impressive. And what percent of your total revenue is the percent of GMV versus the pure software?
Right now, a lot of, so this is this scrap market and apps associated with it is one side of the business model. The other side is pure play software that can enable a brand to measure what is the waste incoming and what is the amount of waste which is recycled. They can purchase recycled raw materials from the
uh same app itself that has gross profit margins uh close to 75 to 85 percent but what's the breakdown so the pure play software versus scrap market revenue is it 50 50 PurePlay software, because now we have the other softwares as well, close to 60% and the remaining 40% is made up with all the transaction fees and so on. Wow.
Okay, looking just at the PurePlay software stuff, what do brands pay on average for that per month? It depends on the number of facilities that they put into the software. So typically we charge anywhere between $399 to $497 for every single location per month. Okay. Well, I mean, give me a general range. Do most people average two locations or four locations or what?
We work with a lot of MNCs, multinational companies, CPG companies, consumer packaged goods companies. India is a major base for them. So they average close to at least three to four factories across India. Okay. So that'd be like $1,200 to $1,600 per month on average. Yes. Yeah. And then, yes. So there are close to 4,500 of these big brands sitting in India doing manufacturing.
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Chapter 3: What role does Web3 play in CircleX's business model?
And yeah, so we have four or five on the Web3 and the blockchain side. Yeah. I guess just before we wrap up, I think the most impressive thing about this, again, is just the growth. I mean, how did you get a thousand of these, you know, Walmarts in India effectively to sign up to the platform? A lot of growth hacking techniques.
Basically, we tied up with a good influencer network and they basically set this up for us. What's the name of the network? So these are just YouTube channels, which has a presence. And we did a lot of proper community-based activities like cleaning up streets, cleaning up the entire city of Coimbatore and so on. And that got us a lot of leverage.
People knew us immediately as soon as we approached them. So that is how we've got a lot of these guys on board very quickly. Vishnu, what's the name of the YouTube channel that drove you the most customers? It's a local dialect YouTube channel. I was going to try and search it, but I have no idea how to spell that. Please try. I have no idea how to spell it. Maybe email it to me afterwards.
I'll put it in the show notes. But okay, got it. Influencer network. That's really impressive. Okay. And any plans to raise capital or you're going to stay bootstrapped, basically? Yeah. We want to raise capital because we want to expand to other countries as well. But we are very unit economics focused. Would you ever consider debt? I mean, money is not the issue for us.
Raising capital means that we have network, community access, people that we can brainstorm with. That was the most important thing, not money as such. Well, if you like brainstorming with me, I would gladly... FounderPath is now over $100 million fund. We would definitely look at this. But I will full disclosure, I do not have a YouTube channel with 1000 waste people watching every day.
So I don't know how helpful I could be there. No, very, very helpful, Nathan. I've been following you a lot. In fact, the software, trying to make it SaaS, everything was inspired by whatever I've learned from you and this community. So a lot more to learn from you. I get no credit. You're doing the hard work executing, so congrats. Let's wrap up here with the famous five.
Number one, what's your favorite book? Atomic habits recently, but before that, the law of the garbage truck. The law, that's appropriate. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? Elon Musk at all points of time. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building CircleX? What's my favorite? Online tool.
um online tool pomodoro timer that's it yeah that's a good one all right uh number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night uh today not a lot but on average uh five six hours uh seven hours um i'm trying to sleep for seven hours right now and you mentioned you have a wife so you're married any kids Not yet. I have a pug. That's my kid right now. That's half a kid. All right.
You got a pug. All right. Vishnu, how old are you? Hitting 33 right now. 33. Very cool. The same age. All right. Let's wrap up here. What's something you wish you knew when you were 20? Something I wish I knew when I was 20, that life takes its own turns and takes you to the path that you always wanted to be on, irrespective of where you were at 20. Guys, CircleX.com.
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