[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Swipe (YC S21) - Simple Billing and Accou...
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Launch HN: Swipe (YC S21) - Simple Billing and Accounting for India
Hi HN, we're Aditya and Sri Teja, founders of Swipe
(https://getswipe.in). We make it easy for local businesses in
India to invoice their customers over WhatsApp. Instead of giving a
paper invoice to their customer, Swipe users send a WhatsApp
message with a link that allows them to pay instantly with a
variety of payment methods. We were building software and IoT for
industrial automation before we started working on this. We dealt
with a lot of invoices, purchase orders and estimates for different
customers/vendors on a daily basis. We used to manually make
invoices on spreadsheets and store them locally on our computers.
Initially, it was working fine but as we got more sales it started
to get difficult to manage. On top of that, we had to file monthly
tax returns where we would manually consolidate our sales on
spreadsheets and send them to our accountant for filing. The whole
process is tedious and the existing software available to do it is
riddled with accounting jargon and primarily targeted towards
professional accountants. We quickly realized that these efforts
were not helping the company and that the time and energy would be
better spent on talking to our customers and focusing on our
product. Interestingly, we also found out that most of the ~75M
SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) in India still rely on manual
processes in tracking sales, purchasing inventory, cash management,
tax filings, and payments--all highly inaccurate and inefficient
and a huge opportunity for us to make an impact. We launched with
a simple MVP, with just the Sales module in January and recruited
our first few customers. With continuous feedback from our initial
customers, we quickly iterated and improved our MVP and started
adding Purchases, Estimates, Expenses and Inventory modules. Now we
have over 1000 businesses onboarded with us and growing. Using
Swipe, business owners can now create invoices, purchase orders and
quotations in a few seconds without any accounting knowledge. Based
on their sales, purchases and expenses, we automatically update
inventory, payables and receivables and make it easy for them to
manage accounting. We also instantly generate those awful monthly
tax filings! Thanks for reading. We would love to hear your
thoughts, experiences and the time you spend on accounting and tax
filing. We are live on https://getswipe.in. Please share your
feedback with us.
Author : sri-teja
Score : 67 points
Date : 2021-07-28 08:50 UTC (10 hours ago)
| baybal2 wrote:
| Good luck, and a question.
|
| Will you anything like the American Swipe? An acquirer separate
| from a bank can be big thing there. UPI is there for retail
| payments, but for everything else...
| adityadsr5 wrote:
| Thank you :)
|
| Currently we are focused only on the Indian market.
|
| I would like to know more about what American Swipe is?
| baybal2 wrote:
| A payment processor.
| adityadsr5 wrote:
| Sure will definitely take a look. Thanks!
| baybal2 wrote:
| Bank transfer fees are quite rapacious across the
| subcontinent, and alternatives to expensive instant wire
| transfers are rather archaic.
|
| Invoicing people on paper, keeping track of all of it,
| and having to repeatedly call your account manager on the
| phone to check arrival of transfers feels so out of this
| world in 2021.
| krishvs wrote:
| Congrats on the launch!
|
| Having worked on the SMB billing and accounting space for 2 years
| in India - its a really really tough space to monetise
| profitably. The market size seems huge from the outside but its a
| tough nut to crack.
|
| The space is also hyper-competitive now with khatabooks, dukaan
| etc spending 100s of crores with no revenue.
|
| Its seems like what you are building is a mini-ERP for SMBs in
| India. If you are touching AP, AR - do you have tally
| integration? Pretty much every SMBs auditors will ask for it.
|
| All the best!
| adityadsr5 wrote:
| Thank you.
|
| We do not have any direct integration with Tally but the data
| can be exported as an excel file.
|
| We are focused on solving the invoicing and payments part for
| now.
|
| Would love to know more of your insights and experience from
| the SMB space.
| umangrathi wrote:
| Best wishes with the launch. I am in constant search for a
| solution which can work for my father. He is running a large
| hardware retail/wholesale business single handed in a location
| not having quality accounting manpower. Its been a search in
| futility so far, as there is severe need of user friendliness in
| the market for complete solutions(my father not that used to
| computers yet).
| adityadsr5 wrote:
| Thank you.
|
| Sure we would love to help you with this. Lets connect on
| whatsapp 7989207832.
| ash110 wrote:
| Congrats on your launch team swipe! I think we already have a
| great payment infrastructure in the BHIM UPI and bill management
| like this is definitely the next step. Am I correct to understand
| that you provide a QR code for payment through any UPI app of my
| choice, similar to what Bharat Pay does, and the bill is sent to
| the number linked to that?
| sri-teja wrote:
| Thank you. Yes, we are using the UPI apps like BHIM, Google
| Pay, Phone Pay, PayTM etc.. And also if the merchant wants to
| collect payments other modes like Debit/Credit cards we are
| also giving them a payment gateway option as well which allows
| their customers to pay through any of the payment methods.
| zero_billion wrote:
| congrats on the launch, Aditya!
| adityadsr5 wrote:
| Thanks a lot :)
| murukesh_s wrote:
| Good luck with launch!
| sri-teja wrote:
| Thank you.
| sirius87 wrote:
| Congrats on the launch!
|
| I experienced ordering medicines over Whatsapp for the first time
| from the local store in Mumbai a few weeks ago. Discussing order
| items and them checking drawers was a PITA, so I just called them
| to get it done. There often is no inventory management system -
| it's a manual check.
|
| It was easy to tell that the person at the store didn't quite
| grasp how things worked around online payment, just that they
| knew how to follow instructions someone had given them.
|
| 1. Generate physical invoice manually
|
| 2. Send customer a pic of the invoice over Whatsapp to reconfirm
| order items and total amount
|
| 3. Send customer a pic of the physical panel w/ QR code from
| payment provider over Whatsapp
|
| 4. Wait for SMS from bank account confirming amount paid
|
| 5. Dispatch order
|
| https://m.imgur.com/sssuU2e
|
| Not quite there in terms of sending UPI "collect requests" or
| digital invoices, but it works! Receiving a picture of a QR code
| was a bit odd but you can easily get around that.
|
| This space is definitely exciting, and you can already see the
| impact digital payments are having on small biz. Good luck, and
| change the world!
| adityadsr5 wrote:
| Absolutely spot on.
|
| This is the pain point we are addressing.
| abhishekbasu wrote:
| Pardon me if I'm not thinking about this in the right way,
| but how would you hold the store owner accountable for
| refreshing or updating their catalogue on the app if they
| don't already use an inventory management system for
| purchasing and re-stocking? Isn't that a huge shift in
| behavior?
| sudhirj wrote:
| What normally happens is that availability is a boolean
| yes/no, and gets set to no when the first person asks for
| something that's run out. The merchant then sets it back to
| yes after stock comes in. That's a lot less work than
| integration ERP systems, and achieves the same result with
| the collateral damage to a few customers' experiences.
| thunderbong wrote:
| What is your business model? How are you planning to generate
| revenue?
| sri-teja wrote:
| Right now, we have a subscription plan of ~$15 per user per
| annum for Desktop users and the mobile version is free. We also
| charge a commission fee on the transactions made through the
| payment gateway.
| fizer wrote:
| My brother is using Vypaar App. How is different from Vypaar
| app?
|
| Also how much commission fee will you charge?
| adityadsr5 wrote:
| We designed the entire workflows from the perspective of
| the business owner/founder (someone with 0 accounting
| knowledge just like us) and that differentiates us from the
| competition.
| wtmt wrote:
| Adding one more question to this list: what about those who
| don't use WhatsApp? The website says "share invoices over
| WhatsApp and email", which I take as native support or
| integrations for these modes.
| sri-teja wrote:
| Yes, they can share the bills directly from the platform. For
| the users who don't use WhatsApp for their business, they can
| either send emails or we have an option to print/download
| these bills and give it to their customers.
| wtmt wrote:
| I should've worded my question more comprehensively. Any
| plans for integrations with other platforms?
| spoonjim wrote:
| WhatsApp is the main form of communication in India, both
| personal and business.
| sri-teja wrote:
| Right, most of our present customers use WhatsApp.
| wtmt wrote:
| GP here. I'm located in India and know about the prevalence
| of WhatsApp. However, I don't use it and I know many people
| who don't use it. Hence the question related to
| integrations (and wanting to know if other integrations are
| planned).
| jeswin wrote:
| You're in a tiny minority then, and it wouldn't hurt
| startups if a small segment is untargetable. In fact,
| they shouldn't worry about it for now.
| ignoramous wrote:
| Congratuations on the launch, Sri Teja.
|
| A couple questions:
|
| How is Swipe different from _Bikayi.com_ (coincidentally by
| IIIT-H and YCombinator alumnus, just like yourself)?
|
| And how different is Swipe to _Khatabook_ , _OKCredit_ and other
| such similar solutions? Do they not focus as much on IT (gst
| /tax) compliance? Where is the catch?
|
| ----
|
| The landing page has more _contact us_ CTAs than _get started_ ,
| you may want to flip the ratio around?
|
| Also, I believe embedding YouTube video on the homepage might
| help given trying the product requires sign-up (in addition to
| linking users to to your YouTube channel for tutorials).
|
| Per my reading, WhatsApp integration is one of the
| differentiators, but the service lacks a mobile app? That is a
| strange disconnect. What isn't the landing page telling me about
| the integrations?
|
| ----
|
| As someone who knows _many_ small, often home-run businesses,
| Swipe is definitely onto something, filling a niche that other
| services won 't / don't. It would be interesting to watch Swipe's
| progress, especially since copycats are on-the-rise given never-
| seen-before fund raises by Indian VCs. All the best.
| sri-teja wrote:
| We are solving the billing and compliance for businesses, while
| Bikayi and other online store solutions make it easy to share
| product catalogue online to the customers. For the businesses
| having offline/store-front sales and online sales in different
| apps, it is becoming more complex to consolidate the sales from
| these different channels.
|
| With the aggressive implementation of GST(Goods and Services
| Tax, a monthly sales compliance) in India, business owners are
| spending between 2-7 days per month to organize these sales for
| tax filings. And even managing the payments is also becoming
| complex for the businesses as they need to manually check who
| paid for what transaction.
|
| Apps like Khatabook and OKCredit and not towards the invoicing
| and GST compliance, but are more used for recording the
| credit/debit. For micro businesses it might work as most of
| them don't worry about inventory and tax stuff. We are
| targeting the small and medium segment and making it easy for
| them to manage inventory, bills, customers, vendors and taxes
| at a single place.
|
| We started with Desktop version as most of our initial
| customers use desktop for billing, and we are comfortable
| developing web apps. Now, mobile app is in private beta and
| some of our customers are already testing it. Soon in a week or
| so we are about to launch the native mobile app on playstore.
|
| Thank you for the suggestions on the landing page, we will be
| working on them.
| ignoramous wrote:
| Thanks for your reply. Swipe is then an alternative to Tally,
| Freshbooks, Zohobooks, ClearTax, Vyapar, Gimbooks et al?
|
| My comparision with Bikyai was prompted by Swipe's support
| for setting up an online store. And with the well-funded
| Khatabook (and OKCredit), because they are bound to enter
| invoicing and tax-compliance market eventually (if they
| haven't already: https://wap.business-
| standard.com/article/companies/fintech-...)
| sri-teja wrote:
| We are building this product from the business
| owner/founder's perspective to make it easy to improve
| business using technology rather than just for accounting
| purpose. The motivation to just record the transaction is
| lesser, but to collect payments easily from the customers,
| at the same time updating the accounts automatically is
| valuable. We are focussed on that which the other softwares
| in the industry are missing.
|
| Also at this stage, we are not too much worried about the
| competition as this is a big market opportunity and we
| believe it is going to be much more bigger market than
| today in the coming couple of years. So sooner or later
| competition exists.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| cool. I am a professional working in this field for so many years
| now. We currently use a host of softwares, basically all the big
| ones in the market, from tally to marg to busy. then we have
| online ones like zoho and margbooks to name a few. I have tried
| to look at khatabook et al myself but they look more into like
| AP/AR recording first. They do not have inventory features, no
| eway billing to name a few. I would like this to work, if nothing
| but to have better competition in the market. my clients send me
| "sales and purchases" every month via whatsapp which are excel
| files that i have to spend 20 minutes everytime because there is
| ".00" in the taxable figures tab and tax rates are mixed up so i
| need to sanitize them.
|
| How are you planning to be better than the incumbent players and
| are you willing to collaborate because i tried with quickbooks
| last time and they have essentially left the market. I lost
| clientele because of the sub par experience i was banking on.
| forgingahead wrote:
| Congrats on the launch, and certainly a space that needs better
| software. However to echo the other comments: what is your
| revenue plan? Looks like everything is free right now.
|
| I have seen this model used in other large countries like
| Indonesia whereby the core product is provided free to merchants
| to juice adoption. This is of course subsidised by the VC
| funding. But what is the eventual monetisation plan?
|
| Maybe this demographic of "customers" don't think about this, but
| if the product is free now, and later if you try to charge, what
| happens if you have lots of churn? And so to avoid that, revenue
| has to come from other methods, such as maybe selling customer
| data?
|
| Would be interesting to hear your thoughts on this.
| adityadsr5 wrote:
| Thanks so much!
|
| We want to make the mobile version free to use and charge them
| for web access currently $15 per user per year.
|
| Also there is a transaction charge we collect on the payments
| made through Swipe. That's another revenue stream.
|
| These are the 2 revenue streams we have on our mind right now
| :).
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(page generated 2021-07-28 19:01 UTC)