How I turned WisePass profitable last year (again)?
The pandemic years have been horrible for many businesses, WisePass included. During the year 2020, we were lucky to receive funding and be cash rich, yet we were facing one of the biggest challenge, an unknown virus that would kill over 10,000 people everyday with no clear solution...
The environment was gloomy but the people who were still around mentioned how Vietnam managed to contain the virus. I decided then to kickstart with some small events and asked some sponsorships to see how the demand would be.
Founder's Night Edition 1 November 2020 at Ministry of Men - WisePass
Year 2020 - November Founder's Night - Khiem Tran
Vietnam shut down its borders but I managed fly back with my investor license on September 2020 and I started to look at ways to grow the business back, starting with an event called Founder's Night I held at Ministry of Men with Khiem Tran from Expara
The event would be designed in a way where I would invite a guest speaker monthly every second Thursday of the month and let people access the event by charging them the monthly membership that Singha and WisePass priced initially at 239,000 VND per month ( It was priced initially at 189,000 VND per month in 2019 )
We had a few guests coming from our marketing activity and started to work on the subsequent guests like Mike Tran from Ticketbox, Hieu Tran from INKR, Hien Ta from Joolux. The event drove some people and we could start letting few people know about WisePass and get subscribers during the year 2020 and early 2021.
Hieu Tran, co-founder of INKR - Founder's Night Edition 5 at Ministry of Men
Year 2021 - July - Lockdown part 2
During the year 2021, the hope to get out of the pandemic started to be an idea we could believe in as some labs made some vaccines. It started in the US and Europe and then the rest of the world would be able to benefit from it.
That was great, until the delta virus happened and forced the Vietnamese authorities to declare a lockdown for a few months during summer time. It felt like a hammer hitting your hand the second time since I already had to go through a lockdown in France.
The Fashionista Edition 4 - Tinh Khoi Studios in District 7 - December 2021
On October 1st 2021, I went straight to Circo ( where I set up my office ) and started to look at ways to build the business back again... We started to run some events again with The Fashionista in December 2021, another original series event we launched earlier in 2021.
Even more businesses shut down during that second lockdown. Many businesses were not doing so well already after the year 2020 because the borders shut down. The main question I was asking myself was how many venues would be left for the year 2022...
Charles Lee, founder and CEO of Coder School - Our first customer purchasing our Founder plan on January 2022
Year 2022 - April - Event Machine
During the year 2022, I re-connected with several business partners from the ecosystem and re-launched the WisePass membership where people could enjoy a bottle every night at Layla Eatery and Bar in district 1 on Dong Du street in Ho Chi Minh City.
Quickly after, I met randomly a friend of mine Nicole Nguyen that launched APAC DAO. A web3 community on Telegram at Bel on Pham Viet Chanh in Binh Thanh District. We enjoyed that evening on the rooftop and I started in April the first web3 series event with Stably about the Luna Terra case.
Rapidly on the second event I got approached by some companies looking to invest their budget into this web3 series. Dracula Metaverse. From that event, several other businesses came to ask WisePass and pay for organizing their events privately.
Web3 Edition 2 - Pernod Ricard Vietnam Vietcombank Tower - May 2022
One thing led to another, the company started to grow faster and kept getting new requests and WisePass started to add more and more venues back on its network.
We ended up having several companies paying WisePass every month to run events and we saw triple digit revenue growth quarterly.
What’s the next for WisePass?
I set WisePass to grow its EBITDA by 5-10x yearly within the next 3 to 5 years.
Why don’t you keep focusing on revenue growth instead?
I think that revenue growth is not the only meaningful metric anymore for WisePass. The main reason why is because you’ll end up neglecting many other important factors leading to the demise of the company.
For some companies, it may work fine and I think it’s ok to take that path if you’re ready for it. At WisePass we simply decided to focus on growing the profits. 5-10x yearly is good enough and some investors ok with that.
What are the 3 key learnings I’m using daily to run WisePass?
1 Cost control
I ended up in 2019 learning a painful lesson. As we reviewing numbers at WisePass, from 2016 to 2018, our revenue grew up by 100x. That was great for investors but that meant as well that my mindset was solely focused on growing the business at all costs.
Since we’re having that new cash infusion in 2020, everything is about how to spend properly. Because of that new mindset, it’s really near to impossible to end up with some surprises. In 2019, I didn’t pay enough attention to our finances and many vendors were paid late, too late. That led to a social media storm I had to handle and work on many months after.
Today, cost management is a key aspect in ensuring WisePass can’t never spend than a certain amount and the money is being sent out slowly to ensure that the money we spent is carefully considered. One the things we’re working at the moment is to improve the system so we can ensure WisePass is always having a minimum 50% gross margin with our subscriptions.
2 Systems
As a CEO, I now spend more time on solving problem in ways to ensure the problem can be solved in the long run. That means that I’m slower and I need to stay put to review the ins and outs of an initiative before I start to execute.
By being system driven, you’ll need to know when the input and output and ensure it will scale. That requires to design rigorous process and strong QA to see where things may still break. I hated that kind of thinking before, I ended up loving it now. Bottom line, as we allocate our scarce time and resource, it must follow a strict process to amplify the business results.
I convinced myself though that it was the best way though since I pictured myself being at the beach while the numbers keep growing without my presence at the office. The keyword through systems is how we can gain more efficiency in what we do without sheer brute force anymore when executing inside a department.
The test is simple for me now, if we get 10x in subscribers usage, will I still be able to sleep? If the answer is no, I need to look up for the reasons and work really hard on it.
3 Value Creation
As we move toward with our platform, the question we’re asking ourselves at WisePass is how we can create value for our stakeholders are endless. It’s always coming back to the same core though.
How can we make brands reach and market their products more efficiently?
How can we drive traffic and sales to our venue partners so we become the default partner when any F&B outlets start?
How can we ensure our consumers can save a significant amount of money when they subscribe to any of our plans?
If we can manage to answer these questions properly, the market will usually simply vote yes with their wallets and that will help us to get to the office another day.
Conclusion
We were profitable in the end of the year 2019 already. We’re profitable again in the end of the year 2022. I waited a little bit to reflect on it. Many other tech startups raised way more and ended up crashing before WisePass…
I should have given up earlier according to a few… And yet here I am. At the end of the day, the firm belief in what you’re doing matters more than capital or anything else. It seems that many forget that humans are still powering businesses and they forget the human component behind the numbers.
