The Exchanges

Q It's a pleasure knowing and seeing your journey very closely for the last two years, right? It makes me so proud to see you evolve into such a great founder. And we'd love to discuss, you know, to the roots of how you started. So if you could share your growing up, your family, how you got into engineering, and then, you know, what made you start Pepper?

A So Siddharth, I come from a Banya family. My dad's been into business. He's into the steel import, export, tin plate space. And he's a, you know, he's an entrepreneur who built a hundred million dollar business from scratch. So I've seen him see that kind of scale and gone through, you know, ups and downs. And so very entrepreneurial in nature from the very start, very enterprising. I always wanted to do something of my own. Worked hard to get into Bitspilani. Now when you go into colleges like these, you realize there's 900 people who are equally smart or smarter. And you're trying to figure out this one good thing you're at that others, other 900 people aren't. And the only good thing I could come up with was I could write really well. And that translated for my love for, uh, and, uh, from reading. And, um, interesting time after my grades tanked after my first semester of college, I realized I couldn't be a McKinsey consultant anymore. And that's where I started, you know, finding out media houses to intern. A lot of times a first year student wants to intern at a very good place. At that time reached out to TOI, Hindustan Times, and all the top publications at that space. None of them took me in, um, like engineering undergrad, why would they? And then your story was an up and coming media startup, which is scaling fast and really wanted to get in. So I ended up cold millin…

AI assessment note: “I come from a Banya family. My dad's been into business.”

Q And when you decided to build a marketplace, right, what are the first few steps that you took? What was the founding team like along with you? If you could describe the zero to one journey.

A So, you know, there are four of us who started Pepper and I think for me, it was, you know, finding the smartest friends I have and bringing them together. I think one good thing, I think I can pull off is being able to bring great, good quality people together for something. Interestingly, none of us were from tech. So while we were engineers, we didn't know how to code. So for the first two years of building the business out of college from our second year to fourth year, we build the business on Google sheets. Now Google sheets has a two to three MB, uh, memory. And the reason I know that is we almost reached that. And we had automated 100,000 line items on the Google sheet. Making it literally rendering it so complex to use that that's when we realized that, you know, this is a business which will take it to a million content pieces, like a million play, which means we need to build out a product to drive scale, uh, in a space like that. So I think the most interesting challenge was how do you build this out frugally? And, uh, interestingly, we bootstrapped the business till we raised our first round of funding in November, By the time we had completed our third year of college, which was, uh, May, 2019, we had done 1.75 crores of revenue till date, uh, all bootstrapped. Didn't take money from anyone else. Everything was profitable and revenue driven. So we understood funda…

AI assessment note: “there are four of us who started Pepper and I think for me”

Q Awesome. So what gives you, uh, you know, that kind of an entrepreneurial energy and drive to make things happen at this space? Are you still working like 18 hours a day and is it still sustainable?

A No, I think don't work 18 hours a day. I sleep for seven hours a day, which is good enough. Uh, and, uh, see, I think obviously, right, what got you here won't get you there. Hustle doesn't scale by the same time. Uh, what skills is that mindset of thinking big enough? And I think that's where building a great quality team makes a lot of sense. I think that's what's something a lot of entrepreneurs don't invest early on. Right. You need to truly be able to build a great transformational team that attracts likeable talent on its own and help shape what a company is. A company is not one person. A company is, is the team. And, uh, that's where that pepper we've invested in building a phenomenal team. Rohit who heads our product, built Freshdesk, Freshworks largest product. Alok who heads our translations business, was, uh, heading customer experience at OYO. Uh, Akash who looks at our text category was, uh, key unacademy leaders. The quality of team that we've invested in, right, reflects everything about the business. And that becomes a multiplier effect in my scale. So for me, the goal is not to, uh, you know, Work 18 hours a day and drive that. The key for me is can I build 10 more founder level, founder DNA people into the company who think like founders, right? And I think that's what makes all the difference. And I think that's the maturity every founder also needs to build…

AI assessment note: “No, I think don't work 18 hours a day. I sleep for seven hours”

Q And, uh, uh, what would be the total number of active clients right now, Anwar?

A Yes. So see till date, we work with some 2500 plus brands so far on an active basis. We engage with five 50 to 600 customers at this point of time. Uh, just to give you a sense in the last, we work with over 70 out of 85 unicorns in the country. Um, we work with over a hundred plus enterprises at this stage. So large brands like, uh, we're partners to large companies like Adani, uh, Amazon, Google, uh, HUL, PNG. HDFC bank and large companies like this. And we have a very fundamental belief, right? That every company today is a content company. Every business is heavily investing in content marketing. So for us, the most exciting part is literally every customer is a prospect customer. Uh, of late, we've been focusing a lot on fast growth, SMBs, mid market and enterprise customers, where we see larger term contracts and values coming in. Like we recently just Closed a late, uh, seven figure, uh, multimillion dollar deal, uh, with one of India's largest enterprises. And it's probably one of the biggest B to B startup enterprise deals, uh, that someone's closed in recent times. And I don't think someone would have thought of that it's going to be a deal by a, Business like ours. And I think that's where, you know, the, uh, key part about how we think about our businesses or time for a business like this has come where today, what Salesforce has done to sales. Pepper can do for con…

AI assessment note: “We engage with five 50 to 600 customers at this point of time.”

Q And if you can share as a CEO, how do you spend most of your time in a week? How do you structure your time?

A See, I think 55, 60% of my time is spent on hiring. Uh, I think as a CEO, I've learned more to pitch to prospective folks than investors now. So, uh, and I think that's also. Is how clearly I can talk to you about how we think about pepper today. So a lot of my time goes in investing in talent and bringing the best people on board and always remember that the best talent is never, never actively looking. So you have to be the one to reach out to them. So spend a lot of time doing that. Uh, I think remaining, especially with a lot of our focus now going and expanding into new categories. Pepper was earlier into just content writing, but now we've expanded successfully in graphic design language translations, and we soon move to plan into window as well. How do we think about category expansion? Uh, and especially we've ended up closing large enterprise customer deals at this time. So how do we, how, how can I play a role in driving and scaling that? Uh, becomes extremely imperative. So I think that's what I've been spending a lot of my time on. Now, a lot of my focus is towards, uh, starting to build out the U S market. That's where I think, uh, Aniru 2.2 comes into picture. So that's a new learning curve and growth journey. I'm really looking forward to.

AI assessment note: “55, 60% of my time is spent on hiring.”

Q uh, the round from light speed. I believe that was a four million kind of a round that you raised. So, uh, since then, if you can share, right, that was a zero to one journey till you read, 35 lakhs in monthly revenue. If you can share how the company has scaled since then, what is the current annual recurring revenue and how many clients are you working with?

A Sure. So see for us, obviously growth's been crazy over the last one and a half years. We went from, you know, doing about 500,000 dollars of annual run rate. To now we're close to touching about eight million dollars of run rate, uh, just in the last 14 months. So almost use in the last 14 months in how we've scaled. And I think, uh, it's growing at a very crazy scale. We're eyeing double digit. Million dollar play, uh, as we look to scale over the next, you know, year, year and a half. And, uh, the best thing about our businesses, when obviously now in the one to 10 stage, it's growth for growth stage for us. And we've seen models like pepper scale brilliantly well globally, where we've, uh, seen top tile, which does four, fifty million ARR, uh, where they're basically peppers model, but for product engineering folks. Or is a company called Turing, which is growing crazy and about touching hundred million dollars ARR from eight in two years. Now scale like that, right? Proves that the model fundamentally has that ability to grow. And at the same time, it also readies ourselves for the next stage of pepper, which is imagine us growing so fast just in India alone. And now we plan to take pepper globally with a lot of focus towards building out in the us. In fact, today itself, 20% of our business is already global. Uh, there were three 50,000 plus users using pepper marketplace…

AI assessment note: “To now we're close to touching about eight million dollars of run rate”