AI Founders Podcast

Transcript

Welcome to the SaaS Founders podcast. If you're looking for raw, unfiltered, authentic insights stories and sass wisdom, then you've come to the right place. Go get your cofounders and peers and grab your favorite beverage and get ready to buckle up for an intuitive and lively. Journey TuneIn, and hear discussions on the adventurous, sass, growth journeys embarked by Brave founders and leaders. And now your host Joseph Abraham.

Hi, I'm Joseph Abraham and I'm the founder and CEO of SaaS industry. In this episode I interview Zeus Chanbara, the co-founder and CEO of Bridge Up Bridge up, provides recurring revenue industries like SaaS, service, industries and so on and so forth. Upfront capital by allowing them to trade them monthly or quarterly revenue streams. For the annual value instantly, no debt, no dilution, no strings. In this episode we discuss everything from product validation, venturing into a whole new category, joining as an entrepreneur, rallying a tech co-founder, raising funds, and more. I hope you'll enjoy it. How is yes, thank you so much for taking the time in in joining us today. So it's really nice to have you. We've been talking a lot. And I mean, I was quite intrigued by your startup because you know what you're doing is not well known. It's Catching Fire right now. And everyone's talking with the winter, right? So I mean, your startup does a lot to warm people in the winter, so that's how I see your startup, right? So thank you so much for taking the time and if you can help our listeners in in quick words, you know. Understand what does Bridget do, who is it for and what's the product all?

Sure sure. So of course, first of all, thanks for having me on here. Joe, really appreciate it. And glad to be here. I think the best way to put it is that yes, there is an impending. We see winter going as we speak right now. Stocks both private equity markets as well as crypto or crashing as we speak. God knows what it's going to be by the end of this. So what Bridget does to a large extent is does provide that kind of security, the kind of warms it is needed to. A lot of these companies where they have to bear the winter months with a level of uncertainty. Not knowing exactly what the outcome after the next 12-15 months is going to be. Right, we've seen down market stretch for anywhere between one to 2.5 years and where bridge up does work is not just in the down markets. It works in the other markets as well, but. A lot of the companies that we've been seeing come to us right now are companies which are looking for capital to extend their runway so that they don't have to accept capital at terms which are not workable for them, right? And don't have to take a down round. Don't have to raise at the same as before because you risk alienating a lot of the investors who kept treating you across time. Especially venture. Investors and by providing them access to this kind of capital, we ensure that they are able to continue their operations over a period of time, which a either might help them improve their metrics in order to raise at the valuation they want, or B help them endure. At least to a period of time where this slump ends and they could be accessing venture capital at again better terms.

Right? Awesome, so very quickly. How did this idea you know originate? So how did you guys come and think about this idea? I mean, I do understand that you and Jahangir are lawyers. I don't know about 1/3 founder, you know co-founder back at Bridger, but how did how did you?

OK.

Stumble upon this idea and and. How did it?

And working on this, sure sure, so actually it's three of us Jahangir myself and deepin Deepin, CTO. So he looks after the tech end.

OK, he's a he's a piggy OK got it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we us being lawyers obviously knew we needed a techie at some point in time and we thought it was the best time obviously to reach out to them right at the start. He actually conceptualized this sometime start of 2021, where we decided that we wanted to enter the space which is familiar to us, which. Spintech the familiarity comes from a legal background where we've you know, done a lot of deals which include a lot of transactions, understood them broken down different kind of business models to understand their weaknesses, where they're vulnerable, knowing where in contracts you've hidden things, and kind of put them in to understand at what point in time. In the future, you might be able to jump on them is something. Thing that comes with the game and we feel like we were best placed to enter this space. Obviously the idea of bridge up is not something that's new. You know this is not something that I would say which is also unique to us or also unique to the market in the world. It's not. It's already been done by startups SW like by Captchas etc. And the. Idea and the other concept was formulated but not Indianized. That's why we felt the opportunity was. It doesn't work the same way as it works in India as it works in the western markets. So capital is not provided the same way. There are NBCS and regulated entities which are only allowed to lend capital. There is a lot of intermediary and intermediation that happens, which is much more. Data does not come as clean as it does, so you don't just have a connection. Played you need to have a connection to profiles in India which gives you access to bank statements or what do you do? After that you get access to accounting statements is not APIs for everything and the real opportunity in India is not just limited to the startup space, it's also limited to the SMEs. Right one in every 10 gets access to debt capital in India. The opportunity space even addressed for 15% of the remainder of the market. That's underutilized right now or under approached or under banked. It's a $15 billion opportunity sitting waiting for someone to just come in and provide capital to the plethora of companies here. Obviously we feel that. To start, we want to provide it to companies with much more predictable streams of revenue which is in. The recurring revenue space. While in the US again, the differentiation is that the SaaS market is huge in India. The SaaS market is decent size, but the service is. Market is much larger. Right not accessible to venture capital also? I mean would not access venture capital. They're inherently profitable companies. Which might not be able to provide explosive growth to their venture capitalists, so VC is not interested and neither is the founder of the services business, which is exactly where bridge up comes in. As is true to our name, we provide the bridge between the capital and the company and we provide it at best terms. From the lending side, we speak to a lot of lenders and showcase our instrument to them, which we have again Indian eyes to a large extent. What is in it for them? How do we provide the security? How do they ensure that the returns are made available? Because, let's face it, access to litigation we know is very, very low in India. I mean, you could be stuck for years in a lawsuit with. Absolutely no recourse, so just a contract is not good enough. There are Nash candidates, there are multiple other things which are taken into place. We've made sure that the instrument is 1, in which it makes the most sense for. The lender, as well As for the company because for the company access to capital of this size at the rates is not heard of and for P the lenders they are not used to an instrument which is not secured against traditional securities like immovable property, right immovable property in India which is used as traditional means of security is. And in liquid. Collateral to a large extent. Liquidity on that is not always certain, which means it's more like a warm blanket kind of security. What's the end lender feels safe in the fact that he has something rather than nothing, but if you, the person defaults the time in which you're going to take in order to transfer it, sell it, etc is not exactly conducive. To doing business either. And lenders now are understanding. Finally, the security in a receivable and the predictability of that particular receivable, which is exactly where Bridger comes.

Great yes, so you saw the opportunity at hand. So how did you know that this, you know is a good option to jump? I mean, when was? You know at a time and moment where you realized that it got validated, this whole idea got validated for you.

Ah well, I can think back two sometime around October, November and we had just rolled out our POC and you know we were reaching out to companies we had a few lenders who were interested in checking it out. Wondering, you know? OK, is there really something here? We're very clear we do not want to take that. In our own. Name, or at least on us a. We obviously are not regulated entry so cannot lend and two we don't provide any flags to any of the. Lenders on our platform. So when we really realized that this is scalable is by seeing the number of companies that came on on day one needing capital. Obviously we reached out to a few. Earlier and The thing is that we expected a lot to be SAS, but maybe 10% of those companies were SaaS. All the other companies we were companies we were expecting like there was Co working spaces there was EV. Merging, there was plain vanilla services it a whole host of different companies whose revenues were predictable were periodic, and we could upfront them. So I would say that that's when we realized that, OK, there is definitely. A huge idea here. There's a huge potential here. The market that's not addressed is humongous, like, I'll give you an example. There was a company that came to US twenty crores in revenue 5 crores in profitability. They had to go to 7 NBFC's in order to get 2.5 crores of debt. Because each words just refused to budge beyond a certain amount. It it wasn't really that the numbers didn't add up, it wasn't that at all. It was just that they individually did not want to take on more only because they had these certain preconceived mindsets. They cannot go above a certain amount unsecure because this Chinese wall has been created. Insecure and unsecured. Where you say the word unsecured and it's also bad and you say the word secure and it's mentally also good and lenders over a large period of time because of their cognitive bias build up by the use of this language are very wary of saying unsecure more than 30,00,000 at one time. And that's the kind of. Bias that we are looking at breaking or looking at evolving by using a data centric approach to evaluation. And showcasing the proof in the pudding, if required, by saying that listen, this is the company. This is how much we funded them. This is the percentage of their revenue that we funded them for. This is the security against that, and this is how it turned out. And that's when we are seeing more and more.

Got it, so how did you build your early team to make this happen and to ensure that you're able to like service these people seamlessly?

So early team was firstly just me and Jahangir and back in April 21 when we really, you know, put. Down the roots. We first decided to reach out to the most relevant people that we needed to one of them through one of our mutual friends connected us to deepen who is the CTO of the company and we really. Hit it off. Is our age. He has similar interest to. Us and we really felt like OK, this is something that we could definitely work together. Doing the pain is an eccentric character himself, though very silent and quiet is is is an absolute rager and we thought that we're definitely could see a future working together. And that's when we started onboarding the pain right? And that was the like first co-founder level position that needed to be built and it was the most important. From there on, we reached out to Parijat. Actually, who's the head of risk and capital at Punjab, and he was also introduced to us by dear friend and we decided that obviously by chat with his experience both in Fintech and credit ratings, he's worked for credit rating agency and IBR approved. Rating agency before and LED that team from its founding team size and we thought that OK, this would be a plethora of experience, which obviously we do not come with. And that's when we put it down. From there we built on and on and today we are a small team, still very small. 25 Man team but we are expanding. I would say because as you know, while we're talking, the demand for this product is just going up because of what's happening all around the world.

Yep, absolutely. Great, and so I'm just going to go back to hiring your CTO and the co-founder role, right? So what we're looking for? Because it's very interesting as a use case in SaaS you see that is usually the developers who start a company and then go and look for Co founders from sales, marketing, product and so on and so forth, right? So in in your case you you had an idea and then you. Went hunting to marry a ctor. So how did that go about like what we? Looking for.

So I've always faced this problem even with the first startup being from a non tech background wanting to be in the startup world. You feel largely like an outsider. Well because you are you are not part of the. Tech world you're not part of a large part of the VC world either. So you know. Generally, you feel like you are looking in from the outside to a large extent. We feel that obviously every position and every experience comes with its own advantages and disadvantages and the way to achieve some sort of consensus is to marry them, right? You you see what you don't have and marry it into what you do. Need and find that that's exactly where we saw in deep in what we realize is that he's a founder himself because he started his own IT services company and profitable running for like 2 to 4 crores a year, sometimes more. He was happy to sell his own stake in that because had so much he believed in the idea. So the. First thing was. We were like danger and I were lost. Like who do we call like to understand who is the right person? Is it a front end developer back end developer? Is it an architect who? Is an architect. It was all like Wild West here right? Cuz all you need is like OK. We need a CTO, but we had no idea what what in a C. So we need and. We needed the CTO to tell us what in them we need, but we couldn't say that out loud, right? Because you can't obviously say, hey, you know what I need somebody, but you need to tell me what all I need from this somebody. It was quite crazy so it was had a lot to. Do with understanding. CTO who's maybe run his own business who comes from that perspective. He was obviously a CTO with other startups before, which he was the co-founder of, so that added to the fact that he come with the knowledge of being in a in the startup world, creating products from. And three working for or leading a services company. He had actually had the unique position of building multiple different products across verticals. Like he was making the Android version for rebel Foods, he was one of the early early stage members of their team and actually they outsourced it to him to build and they were so happy. I think that even offered him a chief engineering or chiefs or a CTO role, early days for rebel foods, which is now a Unicorn. And at that time we wanna turned it down because he was like no, I just want to work on my own or basically build something. Yeah, that's how I think. We realize that this is the guy not so more by his not so much by his actual tech knowledge, but by his personality. By understanding what he had done before and then trusting that OK, this is the right.

Guy for us. Nice because I. I've always been intrigued, right? Because by this whole idea that how do you go find a technology co-founder? It's easy if they if you know them. As friends, and it's easy to think through, build, sync up and brainstorm together. Great so you're building this company. You found the right kind of people now. To build further, you need to have the kind of traction and scale. So how did you go about getting your first? You know few customers and I understand that day one. Was good for you, but. How did day three day four turn? Up for you.

So a lot of early clientele was through friends knowing someone. I'm just going to. Be honest here. We didn't have really. A lot of marketing going on or a lot of sales activities. We had no one in marketing and sales obviously we're. Up five 6% team at that point in time and we're looking to really do a POC that's that's out. So get three to four people at that point in time. We also reached out to a lot of companies offering. This kind of a solution early days. They were very happy for it and when we did reach out to them and offering that OK, you know this is what we can do for you. They seemed really eager. So what we did make a mistake early days is thinking OK if we have the companies, the lenders will obviously want to take part in these companies completely off. Fully wrong, we actually end up spending a lot of time trying to get the light lenders for these kind of companies. Convincing them was much harder, obviously, than the person receiving the capital. When we did get our early stage companies they were also like hey, what's happening? You pitch me now when the. Capital coming in. And we were like, yeah, we're definitely working on it. You get it back to you as soon as possible and the. First companies took ages to. Close because we realized that OK, this is such a unique product and to be able to get the right guys in is. Going to be really, really hard. And that's when we closed the 1st 2/3 companies through at least one lender who came on board. But then we stopped all reach out and we said first, let's just make sure we have sufficient liquidity. And that's where we ended up concentrating a lot on, say, December Jan of last year.

Car, it has actually come into that question, but you answer the question which is like the chicken and the egg you know question as to how do you solve that, but but I'm glad that you answered that. And how do you raise money for yourself to to sustain scale? You needed money. So I mean Congrats on your raise. So how did you raise?

So we actually ended up speaking to steer advisors who led around or not LED around were the ones doing the IB for our round and we spoke to them sometime around December. They were really highly efficient and really really quick to move. They had gone down a lead. I would say within a week, maybe less and they were really invested in what we were building. Had faith in it and we decided that. OK, this is the right way to go. Obviously, like everybody else, we reached out to other VC's had multiple conversations, some good, some not so good things were moving. I would say fairly predictably in that sense, there was some interest from some places, some not so much interest from others, and when we reached out to steer, things move really fast. We reached out to the lead who is Mr Darshan Patel who came on board and let the round. He himself took complete faith in the product because he's a huge believer in fixed income returns, has his own NPC himself. Obviously is created products from zero to like billions in dollars in sales from nothing, right? So nobody better we felt to lead around than somebody who's not built one but multiple products from scratch not only exited them but created profitable like billion dollar companies. Overtime, so we thought that is a real match we met went and met him in person. Explained the model. He was fully convinced, and that's when we really landed. I think our first investor. Obviously, once we landed the lead, we got a lot more interest in terms of parties who wanted to. So closing out the round, actually Mr. Patel was happy to close out the round himself. There were a lot of other interested parties who came on at that time. Wanting in some who had said no earlier also wanted to come in at that point in time because there was a leader. I mean, that's how really the venture capital industry works and.

That's that's really nice to hear.

Some of them. Yeah, we closed some of them. Obviously we will reach out to him future.

Awesome, and what's your? Favorite metric at this given point of time as a founder. So what do you measure every single day?

My favorite metric is right now. #1 is how much month on month are you lending out as a business? I don't think there is. Any more important? But if I have to combine that with just one more one metric, I would say how much and to how many companies. That that is the real like ratio. If you're taking 10 companies and giving larger amounts fine, you'll have a huge disbursement. But is does that mean that there's product market fit? Maybe, maybe not. Product market fit is something which is a vague metric or not. A metric, which is a vague. Assignment right like what is true product market for TV and you'll get 10 different answers for it. In my mind, it's lending out to at least 100 companies. Doesn't matter what amount, because if you found hundred companies in India to lend out to, then you know that there is a need for a product like this. And I would say we are quite close to that number and definitely. The other metric, which I earlier alluded to, the amount of capital lent out, is something that is very, very important because we are not going to follow the loss making business. Model we're very clear from day one. We kept our turn to probably an all time minimum. Our team strength is not. Like that strong and we're going to keep growing in a way in which we believe is sustainable over a large period of time. We are not and go into and we're blessed with investors at this stage who truly believe that we don't need to grow in that way where burning money is the right way to go. So we feel like we would be able to turn a profit. Quite fast at this rate and when we do, we obviously have grand plans to increase the revenue through three to four different channels that are in the works.

Speak, yeah, awesome. So I think we spoke a lot about bridge up. We need to talk a little bit about you and your journey as an entrepreneur so very quickly you can share with us what's your journey. You know what has your journey been like and how did you actually brush? You know, against this whole idea and how did this strike you?

OK, so my journey as an entrepreneur complicated. I started out as you know, as a lawyer working in a law firm I worked in. I've met my co-founder interning in a law firm changer. We've been friends since 2010, nine actually, and we met at a law firm doing our internship there, together at Muller and Muller. That is a law firm in Bombay. We were both litigators at that time, or at least working for other litigators. Understanding the business, learning the ropes. From there on, we moved different paths. I went to another law firm. He went to another law firm. Obviously we stayed in touch your good friends the whole time and. We learned new things at that time. From there on, he continued working for that particular law firm I went to do my masters in the US and Georgetown. That's when I came about, or at least was introduced to a whole different world of. Different people there are a lot of unique cultures present over there. You would learn much more than what you would expect to over there, especially about how different businesses operate, how different cultures work in different parts. The world and I felt to a large extent while I was in the program, I didn't want to do law anymore. It's weird you go for a masters. You to decide. OK, I don't really care about law because you just felt there were so many more exciting avenues to explore. And I mean. You just or for the lack of a better word. Just going to be like. **** it and leave so. We that's what we wanted to do. At least I wanted to do. I wanted to quit as soon as possible. Another friend of mine name is Rajneesh actually who was with me in the masters. We both decided midway through that this was not going to be for us. We both wanted other things in life and we decided we which is gonna finish out the semester and then start our own. Company in India. So we came back to India, started our own company was online skill based games company and we completely bootstrapped that company did almost everything possible under the Sun. That's wrong that you should. 2 by that I mean first large mistake. We outsource the tech took on massive tech tech, didn't realize the people who we had outsourced it to and their capabilities. Kind of had blind faith in them, and that's the first rookie mistake that you make as a non tech founder, underestimating the amount of work that is. Going to be required. White labeling definitely didn't, so was good. We learned that the hard way over the span of the two years, but in that time what we did is. Created customers from scratch in the most inorganic and the craziest fashion by flying all over India to meet groups of players who are playing on different kind of apps and convincing them to join ours. So that was something that we did quite well. Changed up a lot of the principal. Revenue generating part of the game and turned it on its head and try to attract customers that way or learned a lot about what actually does and does not attract customers. Also learned about what our marketing costs would look like. Pitched a lot of BCS at that time, all unsuccessfully, but learned a lot doing that as. Well, and that's when we realized that. We were making some sort of revenue. Obviously by doing this there were 2020 hit. The lockdown came in and we got a call from random person. I got a call and call said hi is this? Yes, and the guy said, do you know who ICA dot in is what the website was called? I said do you know who's running this? And I said yes we are. He said no, no, the white label provider. I said no. So he said this guy, who you've given it to Pramod. He has actually stolen the entire tech from me and we were like what? Yeah, so we were like wait what hold on what are you talking about? We've checked everything and there is no such issue here. You know, like what what you're alluding to. And realized later on that this guy apparently had heart attack two years ago. This guy used to work for him. Entire software, entire source code stolen. All his clients along with it started his own company with the same clients because this guy was basically bedridden, and that's when we realized that and he can. He starts saying. Us how long is it actually taken for him to make this change? And I said like. Aternity, like the last year and a half and it's still not done. He's like yeah, because he doesn't know how and you're like everything he started saying started actually adding up because these are all the problems that we had and that's when we realized wow this is messed up and. Weirdly enough, as you would have it right at that point in time, we were in talks with someone who wanted to buy it off straight up from us because we were in around May to June 2020, which was right when the lockdown started. A lot of non traditional businesses stopped making cash right? And this a lot of inorganic. Both came into online skill based games and a lot of people were playing at that time. A lot of interested customers. Obviously we can't keep them happy because a lot of the tech was not in our control and we were just at a frustration point and we were like, OK, you know what? We'll sell it. At least we're making some decent amount of cash. And then when those talks were at an advanced stage, you receive a call saying the software is stolen and we're like we have to obviously mention this. So the next meeting we're like, OK. I don't think the sale is going to work out because this is the case is what we've just learned recently and it's working. But there is ongoing litigation on that guys company. Because of this and. I don't know how far we can work until that guy was still very interested. Obviously in buying it off, it did actually still happened that he ended up buying it off, but it was a different deal where a. Large portion of. The customers were bought off in a way in which you would pay on a per cash level, like a think of like Facebook WhatsApp deal which was measured against. Like a per customer usage. Like that, but a lot of the customers never ended up being on like continue to be on the platform. They would have. To leave and work with a competitor or another platform or continue playing there and we would ensure the smooth transition and a lot of the payoff was. I mean. You know, good drafted around the fact that we would make sure that the transition would happen successfully.

That that's a. Nice wrap on how, how and how did your. Journey so very. Quickly our rapid 55 for you like rapid. Five of five questions for you, right? So it's the first question is, what are you reading right now? Reading, listening, watching right now?

So I was reading Sapiens, actually the last book and I am have a notorious habit of not finishing books and jumping onto other. So as we speak, I have like three to four books later around. The most interesting of which is sapiens. Definitely awesome. And is there any CEO or a leader that you are following are studying? I-1 particular, I don't. I don't say follow a study at all. None I feel like one has to chart out their own path and the the what happens when you try to. For the lack of a better word, mimic another or find faith in the other is you realize that you have created a hero or someone you know absolutely nothing about, which is where the phrase don't ever meet your heroes comes from because there's a chance you'll end up being disappointed. And I know that because not because I have a lot of idols, but. I would say that I am wary of having any such idols in the SEO world because the outside persona that you see the outside speak that you see isn't exactly what. You want to learn from because that's the marketing material. Right, and I guess being a lawyer or having been in different kinds of places where you see different cases all the time you realize trust won't come easy, especially in what somebody is. Saying, and that's why having one model as such for CEOs definitely doesn't work for me, but I am a huge fan and follower. Like if I had an idol it would say. We saw Alex focusing because I'm a huge Manchester United fan, but of course apart from that I read read his book leadership. I think it's one of the must read for all CEO's and I think. You can learn a lot about leading something, creating some. Efficiently scalably and successfully from. A lot of his lifes learnings and preachings.

Great so question. #3 is what's your favorite? SAS app at this point of time.

My favorite SAS app at this point in time I would say like. I mean it's a function of what? I would use. Really, but I definitely use a lot of zoom. Obviously I use a lot of notion. I would. Google Calendar, obviously I I would say it wouldn't be able to function without a lot of these apps today, but yeah.

True, so true so true. Great and question #4 is how many hours? Of sleep, do you get every night?

I sleep quite well. I am a firm believer in sleeping sufficiently. I do not this thing's sacrifice on that, so I would. Say between. 7 to 7 1/2 hours is my average every day and I definitely don't. Try to skimp that because even if I sleep like at one or two, I would still be able to wake up at 8:30 and be absolutely fine. And sometimes work will take you that long, but I feel like if I don't get the right amount of sleep, it's what's true for me. I'm not saying that. Works everyone else the next day for me is like a complete waste. I mean, I'll end up spending 8 hours, but effective. Work is not even three.

So true, so true, and my last rapid fire, I mean, rapid fire question is, is how has pandemic changed your life, I mean. What's been happening?

Pandemic changed my life where I decide to go ball during the pandemic. So I think it changed my life in that. Way apart from that, I would say that it's really a learnt. As I literally taught me a lot about losing a lot of preconceived notions about how business is to be run, like if you told me before the pandemic that you could do start up remotely and completely successfully, I would say that's impossible. I will say it's just too hard. That's one thing that I've learned. That remote is definitely doable. I still prefer in person, but I know that remote works and flexible. It is absolutely necessary.

Awesome, so my last question and this sums up the whole podcast is what's something you wish you knew when you were 20.

OK so number. One thing I wish I knew when I was 20 is that you do not need to wait till even a single day more in order to do. What you want to do? You most people tell themselves that, yeah, OK, I'm doing now. I'll finish it and then I'll do what I really want to do. Maybe you will never do it or it will be 10 times harder than, and we'll be like, oh, I'm just 20. How is anyone going to trust me to run a business? It just will happen. If not then trusting you. You have to make sure that they do by showing them something which can't be ignored. And I feel like if being told that for a certain amount of time, like I have to go back in time and tell myself hey, don't wait, do whatever you want. So today I would say that's the number one thing it you anything you're telling yourself that you need to wait is just an excuse.

Got it great thanks so much. Zeus for your time and it was really nice chatting and getting to know about you. I mean, it's it's nice to see a lawyer turning up and being a SAS founder. More power to you, more power to bridge up. I mean have a great journey ahead and it was really nice interacting.

With you thanks a lot, Joe, really appreciate being here and thank you for having me.

Thanks for joining in today and if you liked what you heard then hit the subscribe button. You don't want to miss any upcoming episodes? Learn more about us at www.cessindustry.com.