SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Raising Now: This SaaS Tracks 5m Truck Shipments Per Month, $1m in ARR across 100 Enterprise Customers
05 Apr 2022
Chapter 1: What is WebXpress and what services does it offer?
I mean, can I take 5 million times 5 rupees or 7 cents? I mean, that would put you at about $400,000 per month in revenue right now.
It would 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 paying you. So he no longer pays you that 5 rupees, that 7 cents. He actually goes down to probably a cent or so.
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 Apoorva Mankad.
He founded in 2004 WebExpress, which is a global transportation and logistics SaaS provider headquartered in Mumbai. The company serves over 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 Logic Cloud, a supply chain visibility management platform. It was founded by Apoorva as founder and CEO. Excited to jump into the story today. Apoorva, are you ready to take us to the top?
Absolutely.
Okay. So 2014 was sort of go date. Before we jump into your backstory and your history, help us understand what are companies paying WebExpress for today? What's the product?
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.
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Chapter 2: How does WebXpress generate revenue from its customers?
The $1,500 is what the customer pays for the entire vehicle. They pay me for the tracking of that particular shipment or all the shipments 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 obviously load offload and then go to further to Delhi, for example, and 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.
So if I was going to pay WebExpress to track one 32 foot truck moving my e-commerce goods from Mumbai to Delhi, about how much am I going to pay just for that one truck?
Oh, you're going to pay me per shipment. So you might end up paying me around about $15 to $30 is what you will pay me typically.
Okay, $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?
Absolutely. Absolutely. So what happens is this $15 to $30 will be broken down into multiple shipments. So per shipment, they pay us a very, very small amount, typically rupees five. which might just turn out to be, if I were to convert it to dollars, probably 0.05 cents.
You said five rupees or 15?
Five.
So seven cents, seven US cents per shipment.
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Chapter 3: What is the average customer payment for WebXpress services?
And we hope to become hopefully two X of that this year.
That'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?
We were about 35% less. So last year we grew by about 35%.
Okay, so call it like $57,000 a month in revenue about a year ago, you've grown to $83,000 a month. And Apoorva, where is that growth coming from? Is it coming from expanding existing customers or adding new customers completely?
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 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, it looks like that 2022 and 2023 is going to be a very exciting year for all of us.
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Chapter 4: How do customers benefit from using WebXpress's technology?
And how many folks are on your team today?
We are about 70 people, 7-0.
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Again, both plural founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash valuations. 70 people and a million in revenue. Are you able to pay them out of your revenue or have you raised a bunch of capital to fund their salaries?
We pay them salaries, obviously, and we do raise 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, I 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 per employee per month. So these are very... Well, at least comparing to the US, these are very low salaries.
I'm sure by now you are absolutely wondering how the country like India works on such amounts, 7 cents, 1 cent, $1,200 of salary, how you wish the employee people from USA would 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 who get even paid less than that. But the average per capita income of India, by the way, is $3,000 a year. Wow.
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Chapter 5: What transportation methods does WebXpress focus on?
Number one, what's your favorite business book?
My favorite business book, Mark McCormick's book on how to sell. I think it was the earlier book which I read and I still remember that well.
Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?
I do follow Satyana Dela. I really like his journey.
Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building WebExpress?
For promoting WebExpress.
For building, building WebExpress.
Oh, we are using mainly Ionic as a tool now to build it.
Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?
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Chapter 6: What are the most popular shipping routes in India?
Two kids.
Two daughters. Okay. And Apoorva, how old are you?
I'm 48 years old now.
Last question. What is something you wish you knew when you were 20 years old?
I wish I read your book at the time it was published.
Guys, there you have it. WebExpress.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 WebExpress about $0.07 to track that shipment. WebExpress tracked almost 5 million shipments last month.
They just passed a million-dollar run rate up about 30% year-over-year. Raising 1.2 million right now at a 4 million plus money from our strategic partner. 70 on the team today as they look to scale. Apoorva, thanks for taking us to the top.
Absolutely. Good to talk to you, Nathan.
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