After Twitter's Parag Aggarwal, a new Indian CEO will sit on YouTube's throne!

Asian Paints is a business monopoly for 55 years!
Berger Paints, the 2nd largest paint company in India after Asian Paints, earned ~INR 7800 crores in revenue in FY 21-22, and a profit of ~INR 750 crores.
During the same period, Asian Paints earned ~INR 25,000 crores in revenue (>3x), and a profit of ~INR 3200 crores (>4x)!

How is Asian Paints able to get these amazing results and is so far ahead of its competitors?
Well, it's because of their commitment to perfecting their inventory management and supply chain.

A) Inventory Management
- For any manufacturing company, excess inventory can be a headache. So, the goal is always to sell off all inventory as quickly as you can.

You measure this using a ratio called "Inventory turnover ratio". Inventory turnover ratio is simply the number of times you can sell off your inventory in a year.
So, if you can sell your inventory every 60 days, so in a year you'll be able to sell off all your inventory 6 times.
So the inventory turnover ratio is 6.

Now, Asian Paints has an inventory turnover ratio of 3.4, while Berger Paints has a turnover ratio of 2.58. So, they are able to sell off their inventory in 107 and 141 days respectively.
But, what impact will a small 0.82 difference in inventory turnover ratio have?

Well, if you consider:
Berger Paints yearly production capacity => 610,000 KL
Then they can produce and sell = 1671 KL in a day
Asian Paints, on the other hand, can sell = 2202 KL in a day

So, Asian Paints is able to sell 521KL more every day. The average price of 1 KL paint is INR 10 lakh. So, Asian Paints makes 53.1 CR more in revenue every day than Berger Paints.
Let's say the Asian Paints plant runs for 22 days a month. So, in a year, they make ~INR 14000 Cr extra revenue.

B) Supply Chain - Secondly, Asian Paints has adopted a direct-to-dealer strategy, where they remove all the middlemen and directly supply paint to dealers who sell to customers.
But, here the problem is that dealers have limited storage space. So, Asian Paints very cleverly restocks all dealers 3-4 times a day.

Compared to the traditional model with wholesalers, Asian Paints gets a margin (post-distributor) of 95% as opposed to the usual 75%. That is in spite of the added transportation cost. The 20% edge in margins saves Asian Paints INR 5000 crores!

WhatsApp is wildly popular, especially in India. 20% of their 2 billion monthly active users are from India!

But, had WhatsApp made any money from Meta? More importantly, does Meta even have a plan to buildd a successful business out of WhatsApp?

Before WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook (now Meta) in 2016, here's how they were planning to make money:
- WhatsApp is completely free to use for a year
- After that, users have to pay a $1 fee every year to continue using the app.

When Zuck came in, he completely trashed the $1 fee plan, and instead choose to make money through another app called WhatsApp for Business.

With WhatsApp for Business, businesses can reach customers with promotional messages, customer services, etc directly on WhatsApp.

But, how much money can Meta make from this line of business?
Well, WhatsApp charges businesses based on the number of messages sent. As the messages increase, the price per message decreases.

From the lowest slab of $0.0085 per message for the first 250,000 messages, WhatsApp makes $2,125!

If we consider 1 business, all 6 slabs & 20 million messages, WhatsApp for Business makes $130,250 in revenue!

Now, if we consider all businesses in India, by taking a few assumptions, WhatsApp can conservatively make ~$9 billion in revenue!

What is UserLoop?

UserLoop is a Shopify tool that helps e-commerce merchants collect user feedback during the checkout process and later via email.

It comes with in-built analytics and customizations to drive relevant insights from user feedback and inform your marketing decisions.

Founder, James Devonport, had some experience in the customer feedback and e-commerce domain. So, he built a simple tool.

But, UserLoop was nothing like the product it is today!

Version 1 ⇒ The app simply sent emoji reaction emails to collect feedback to a mail list.

Version 2 ⇒ His early uers were all based on Shopify. And they wanted an app that doesn't require a lot of set-up work on their Shopify store.

So, with that feedback, in a few minutes, he made the app easily installable and usable on Shopify without any set-up process.

Version 3 ⇒ The customers wanted to run surveys during checkout and not just emails. So, he added that feature.

Version 4 ⇒ Then they wanted to run multiple surveys and not just one. So, that prompted James to add more complexity and customizable features to UserLoop.

Benefits of using NoCode:
1. Low cost
2. Whip up a working prototype fast
3. Start collecting feedback from day 1
4. Make changes and iterate in a few clicks
5. Ship features quickly

UserLoop's NoCode Stack!

1) Bubble ➝ Used to buildd the entire platform (integrated with Shopify)
2) Postmark ➝ Used to send emails
3) MixPanel ➝ Provides proper analytics for the survey data
4) Hookdeck ➝ Handles all the Webhooks

The impact

Today, UserLoop has
1. Onboarded 350 Shopify stores
2. Reached 70K customer responses and 100K emails
3. Scaled to $10K MRR
4. Grows by 20-30% month over month
5. All on a ⇒ $500/month NoCode tech stack + $1000/month of Bubble freelance contractors