Thread by @_sinhaakash

Having arrived at the milestone of reaching 5 years of Cashfree recently, many people have expressed curiosity about our start.

Following is a thread on my personal and professional journey, and the learnings picked up along the way 🧵 👇🏻

As a kid I always wanted to join the army. I was keen in academics too, and fortunately decent at it. Year 2007, and everything was well set for my 12th boards, the NDA & the Engineering Entrance exams.

But only a week before the exam season started, I happened to meet with an unfortunate accident that left me with a fractured right hand. Little did I know that this was in fact going to play a hand at shaping my future.

Without a fully operational right hand, I had to give up on NDA entirely, and wait for another year to ace at any Engineering Entrance exams. A year hence, I could make through to the IITs but only for a five year course. Eventually, I happened to join CS at IIIT.

Yes, CS happened by chance. I was alien to programming languages when I joined IIIT and had a hard time through the first year.

But come summer break and I got my hands on the ‘Beginning JavaScript’ book. I still remember gulping down the entire book, and drowning myself into creating jazzy web-pages almost all of my waking hours.

Furthermore, creating new dynamic applications by using vanilla tech made me feel very satisfied and sparked my interest in ‘Building Stuff’. Ability to create fancy CRUD applications started to seem like a super-power to me then.

And there, my tryst with entrepreneurship began. With new learnings & skills, I picked up a couple of projects and roped in friends to work with. That was when I learnt more about documentation, tech solution presentation, cost negotiation and more, as a part of those gigs.

Come 2011, got selected for @GSoC and got an opportunity to work on some amazing open source projects. As the placement season rolled in, I got selected at Bankbazaar and was soon packing my bags for Chennai.

The desire to build stayed on with me, and over the next few years, I attended all the hackathons I could. Attempted (and sometimes built) some crazy ideas, from flatmate matching engine to real-time speech translator and to online fingerprint verification.
(Pic from a hackathon)

I would also end up talking about it a lot here & there. At a friend’s party, a mutual friend I bumped into, talked to me about the massive business potential of one of my latest hackathon projects.

Though that project’s discussion did not pan out, we ended up discussing a lot of other ideas. That mutual friend was Reeju, the other co-founder of Cashfree.

So resuming the story. While we brainstormed and dug around, we came across the gigantic problem statement of COD payments in India.

We approached every restaurant & store in Bangalore that we could and pitched them the idea of using our payment solution for their deliveries (Zomato/Swiggy was yet to go mainstream then). Night-delivery restaurants found us interesting and were our first customers.

After signing up 350+ offline stores in the first 3 months, we realized we had come across a lot of business owners who wanted help at online payment collections and with mass real-time disbursals.

Upon researching more on the payments industry, we could see that the incumbents then, were not aggressive enough to keep up with the rapidly-evolving usecases.

Most systems back then were stuck with one-dimensional flow and weren't really tailored for the Internet economy.

That was it. We went all in. For the next 180 days, all we did was build, build & build. With a 5 people team, we launched PG in April 2016 and Payouts in Feb 2017.

A single platform to manage end to end payments looked interesting to a lot of new online businesses, and our growth engine was ignited.

Later that year, we got selected in @ycombinator summer batch and spent 4 months in the valley as a part of the program. With 103 other startups in our batch spanning 6 continents, we realised how much entrepreneurs are shaped by the culture, economy and the people around them.

I must say YC experience changed our thought process and gave a fresh perspective on startups from a global view point. A special thanks to @mwseibel & @nolimits for all the support along the way. More about our YC experience here - inc42.com/resources/cash…

During the YC days, we signed up a couple of enterprise customers and then some more mid-sized, and our workload went through the roof! Here are the five of us who ran everything between product, CS, engg, ops, finance & sales. (Yeah, we had more functions than people.)

Having a smaller team helped us learn to work hard, to prioritize, and to automate. Being bootstrapped for the initial 2 years of operations, made a permanent mark on us. Prioritising revenue and profits became a part of our DNA.

As we progressed we took on and started solving the harder payment problems, at times, before most businesses even realized they were problems. That led us to build Instant Refund, Pre-Auth, Cashgram, Payouts Direct and some more.

We learnt to hire slowly and give more ownership to team members during initial days. We could see how expanding the team gradually helped impart the vision of the company in the best possible way.

And once we hit our initial mass, we grew confident to grow on and take on even more things. Our team grew to 35 by April 2019, and 200+ as of today!

2019 was when we finally took a pause and started focusing on the reliability & robustness of our products & services. With the new scale, our older processes & programs started to break. We took the gigantic task of re-writing our monolithic looking PHP code-base to Golang/Java.

Our efforts started paying off in 2020, when a large enterprise in the fantasy sports segment asked us to offer 600 tps for fund disbursal (Payouts). Most of the other service providers (including banks) were in the range of 20 tps.

This achievement made us realise that our last 12 months of effort had eventually helped make Cashfree Payouts ~30x better!

All in all, really grateful to the teams that helped build, the teams that helped talk to our existing customers & to our potential customers.

As we continue building and growing, we continue holding the mission to help businesses scale through cutting edge payments & banking infra. And we're happy to have joined hands with those who believe in this direction, and believe in us.

Summarizing the journey, very few people believe that there's money to be made in the Indian payments industry. It’s true that margins are declining but what has worked for us, is to keep our heads down, and to keep building.

Shipping the right kind of things that others haven’t built yet and the things that help business make more money, is something that still works.

As we stand after creating a Payouts product from scratch, taking PG to the next level and generating 25Cr of profits while doing so, having turned 5 recently, cannot help but feel grateful to the team and our believers. :)