Profits Skyrocket by 470% in 2023 for WisePass
Last year, WisePass announced that it was profitable after the COVID period. It managed to resume its business activity and turned profitable by focusing on events and managed to acquire several major global clients.
A year later, the company has experienced a 470% increase in its profits year over year.
The company attributes this robust growth to a strong focus in their business with events, a strong demand for events from web3 clients, especially. This impressive growth is a testament to the company's adaptability and resilience in the face of the challenging economic climate of the past year.
As part of their strategy, the company has also remained disciplined with its cost structure, resulting in stronger profitability that have enabling the business to grow back its lists of partners steadily in Ho Chi Minh and Hanoi. The company has been operating in 2 cities since November 2023 and has grown back its network to almost 50 venues in Vietnam.
The company has also taken some time to launch a new value proposition for consumers, the buy 1 get 1 free. Consumers subscribing to the app can enjoy drinks anytime for 379,000 VND per month.
This remarkable financial achievement marks a significant milestone in the company's history and paves the way for a promising future.
Here are 3 questions asked to the founder and CEO of the company Lam Tran
After the performance of the year 2023, what do you expect WisePass to achieve for the year 2024?
We kept the objective for this year, growing the profits of the company and pushing it to another 500%.
By doing such things, it requires to simply focus on our sales, maintain our fixed costs and find any pockets of growth that doesn’t require any capital expenditures.
The mantra for the past few years in the startup world around South East Asia was to go pitch some investors and raise lots of funds and just burn it. That’s ok if sales can materialize and lead to profitability over time. The truth is it’s not that easy and many startups just die because they can’t fundraise or simply don’t have any customers.
My personal stance since COVID is to always focus on customers with a path to profitability. Constant focus on how to serve and improve after each transaction.
For some reasons, I feel like as a CEO we are driven by the numbers too much after we fundraise and forget sometimes who’s paying. It’s like many founders forget customers are the reasons why we run the business. We then lose ourselves with some vanity metrics like valuation, funding or headcount.
You don’t think that hiring people is important?
I believe that taking pride in having a lot of employees. Lots of employees doesn’t necessarily translate into more sales automatically. It’s incurring first and foremost a higher cost structure.
My way to look at hiring building a team is simple, I look at the revenue per employee. That’s a healthier indicator to look over a sustained period of time and evaluate if we’re efficient.
Most of the people I’m talking sometimes still have the glamorous idea of having a big office, with a big logo and a reception where you have all the employees coming to everyday.
I believe this era is over and the most important thing is to actually get work done. Quite an odd concept right?
If you can hire team members that will significantly impact the bottom line by scaling up sales or cutting costs down, then it’s strategic. It’s usually harder as you hire human beings and you’ll need to take into account many other factors such as the culture fit.
How can you actually scale the revenue of WisePass, especially with events?
Short answer is you can’t scale revenue with events.
The way to scale the business is more tech driven and the way we work and generate sales now is product led.
Any feature we build now is focused on providing some value for our stakeholders and increase the efficiency in executing some tasks. We will test a feature this coming quarter where some venues spend 1 and get at least 20 back. That kind of return is good for venues looking to increase their sales cost effectively.
Internally we also now focus on reviewing every step of the business and look at reducing friction. A quick example is implementing Face ID. We use an OTP each time a user tries to login, one of our users complain during a meeting we had and we just put that on our roadmap to avoid users entering an OTP for a period of 90 days.
Another example is the venue onboarding. It used to be very manual but we start implementing in Q3 a new app, WisePass for venues so venues can sign up and welcome WisePass members within 1 minute anywhere around the world.
We grew from 0 to 100 venues within 3 years. If we want to grow 100 new venues 3 seconds, we won’t be able to do it and need to improve our process to go global.
On the user side, we pretty much have to innovate and bring in a go-to market blue print for every city we’ll expand to. We’re preparing the launch of free trial where users can download the app and try WisePass for 14 days. We found that it’s the best marketing for users, we just let them try.
