Ayush Agarwal is a techy trying to code his way out of things. He graduated with a degree in Computer Science, but more importantly, he discovered entrepreneurship in college, inspired by his successful classmates. He spent years gathering experience in different startup verticals, including fintech. But outside of tech, he loves to play badminton, cricket, and hangout with friends. He is also big into Chess, which he mentioned enjoying Chess.com, as well as our recent interview with their CTO, Josh Levine.When Ayush met his now co-founder, they started to think through businesses and how much goes into setting up payments, taxes, etc. They started to dream about building this layer of payments, to enable builders to send and receive global payments easily, so they can focus on their core competencies.This is the creation story of Dodo Payments.SponsorsPropelAuthTeclaSpeakeasyQA WolfSnapTradeLinkshttps://dodopayments.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/aagarwal1012/Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.com* Check out Vanta: https://vanta.com/CODESTORYSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
Chapter 1: How did Ayush Agarwal start his entrepreneurial journey?
all the potential merchants that we can onboard and started getting the feedbacks. And you'll not believe, but we are actually able to contact around 250 merchants from almost 30 plus different countries. My name is Ayush Agarwal and I'm the co-founder and CPTO at Dodo Payments.
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Took it off the shelf and dusted it off and tried it again. To ride the ups and downs of the startup life. You need to really want it. It's not just about technology. All this and more on Code Story. I'm your host, Noah Labpart. And today, how IU Sugarwall is building your gateway to global revenue by simplifying cross-border payments and all things surroundings.
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Chapter 2: What inspired the creation of Dodo Payments?
So that actually struck with me. And when I met my co-founder, he also had that similar idea. Make the entire process of setting up payments along with billing, tax, fraud, chargeback, etc. And abstract that pain away from the end merchant so that they actually focus on building product rather than payments, right? Which is not their core criteria.
This is the very core problem that we kind of addressed and we started working on it. And then we actually realized there are a lot of merchant on record companies that actually exist. Like there is a billion dollar company called Paddle, which is based out of Europe. Recently, Stripe also acquired Lemon Squeezy, which is also a MOR built on top of Stripe, which is based out of USA.
So we kind of thought there are like already this is already a proven model. Why don't we actually build this model for the merchant based out of India and emerging markets?
Because anyways, they don't have access to stripe and collecting international payment is always a pain point because all the payment gateways don't work really well and only have like 40 to 50% success rate with all the payments. So we kind of dig deep into it, understood. I think it took us almost six to eight months to understand the model itself.
And then we were fortunate enough to raise a venture round and then we kind of scaled the team, built out the product. Now we're in the process of scaling the company, getting more and more merchants and the feedback has been amazing. So, yeah.
Let's dive into the MVP. So tell me about that first version of the product you built. How long did it take to build and what sort of tools were you using to bring it to life?
This time, I learned from my past mistakes. I didn't dig deep into building the product first, then selling it to the customers. This time, we actually built out just a simple website, talking about the problem statement, talking about the solution in general. And that took me just one or two days to build it on Framer.
And then we actually sent that website to a lot of cold emailing, cold DMing to all the potential merchants that we can onboard and started getting the feedbacks around the problem statement, around the use case, around the solution that we were kind of proposing to them. And you'll not believe, but we are actually able to contact around 250 merchants from almost 30 plus different countries.
And we kind of validated the problem really well. And when we told them about a solution, they kind of struck with them. The early PMF sign, which we can actually expect without...
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Chapter 3: How was the MVP of Dodo Payments developed?
building a product is that whether that person will actually buy it or not so we kind of end up with every people we used to ask right now you have allocated a problem will you buy a product will you use a product and actually like in the 250 people that we talked with around 100 of them actually said yes so that was kind of the validation for the problem itself
With that whole narrative, with that whole research around the problem and the solution, I mean, on that, we were able to raise venture capital, so that was kind of amazing.
Let's stay on that MVP for a minute. With any MVP, you've got to make certain decisions and trade-offs around how you're going to build it, how you're going to approach it. It sounds like you got the job done and you raised money, but I'm curious about those decisions and trade-offs in the product itself and how you coped with those decisions.
Building an MOR takes like a billing solution, a fraud solution, etc, etc. There are a lot of building blocks, right, when it comes to payment. So I think there was a conscious call whether we have to build each of the building products on our own or just partner with a different platform, build a sort of layer on top of that and create as a product.
When we actually dig deep into it, let's say if we work with a certain partner for billing, I mean, like it was posing a lot of problems around the customizability because all these different systems, they are built for individual merchants solving for their SaaS or digital products, right? But for MOR, there isn't a single solution because there aren't many MORs that exist in the world, right?
So there isn't any dedicated solution for an MOR. So that's when we're trying a lot, trying to look at a lot of open source tools.
there are a lot of billing tools that are available even there are billion dollar companies for that but it kind of relies to us like after a lot of research after a lot of trial and testing that we can't use the solution we have to build our own system incrementally when it comes to like integrating different payment gateways to optimize global payments or to setting up entities across different countries we can't outsource this to anyone so we kind of mapped out the whole roadmap of the whole product infra that is required for an MRR
Then we did cutting exercise, like how can we build a working product within two months? How can we build a scalable product within, let's say, four months, something like that. So we kind of stripped out a lot of different things that are required when enterprises are a large-sized customer. but not required by the small ones.
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Chapter 4: What challenges did Dodo Payments face in building their platform?
So we actually trimmed down our product roadmap while building the entire infra on our own. So that basically ensured like highest reliability, highest customizability. And we can also do incremental changes on that. So yeah.
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I'm so pumped about my new offshore dev partner. I'm saving a ton, and they even signed an NDA. Wait, is that our financial statements on the internet?
My dev partner has great communication. They can acknowledge an issue or email message super fast, after they run it through Google Translate, of course.
I have a call set up with my partner right now. Hey, guys. Guys, are you there? Wait, did you just ghost me?
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Chapter 5: How did Dodo Payments validate its product in the market?
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Learn more at tekla.io. That's T-E-C-L-A dot I-O. So let's move forward then. You've got the MVP. It's working. You've got the traction you're looking for. You raised the money. Now you're going to go take on the world. How did you go about deciding what was next?
And I'm curious about roadmap and what process you're following to go through that decision process of like, okay, this is the next most important thing to build or to address with Dodo Payments.
I think this time I took on the learning from my last company as well. In my last company, it was just the business was defining the product features. It was not the customers, right? So this time I actually learned from my mistake and we actually in our dashboard, right?
We put this feature called feature request where you can actually see all the feature requests that other customers of ours have put in.
that they want this feature they want this feature and if if a certain customer wants the same feature they can go and upvote right so we have a certain features that have almost more than 50 100 upvotes as of now and we already have a product roadmap defined by our customers
that made our entire process entire product management process very simpler right we actually pick up all the features that our customers ask and we also have certain features which business also demand so we kind of have a framework which we called as a rise framework where we do a effort impact and other sort of analysis and provide a rise score to every feature that we want to build and depending on that we prioritize within our product roadmap
With this exercise, we already have enough work for the next six months. We don't have to worry about that. We are pretty confident that as we progress and build more and more features, more and more requests will start coming. And I think our customers will be the only one who will shape our product.
So then I'm curious about team. You know, I hear you saying we. How did you build that team? And what do you look for in those people to indicate that they are the winning horses to join you?
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Chapter 6: What decisions influenced the development roadmap of Dodo Payments?
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For a limited time, get $1,000 off Vanta at vanta.com slash codestory. That's V-A-N-T-A dot com slash codestory. Let's flip to scalability, and I'm curious where this has come into play. Was this built to scale or with scale in mind from the very beginning, or have there been areas where you've had to fight it as you've grown?
I think we, all the different modules or all the different services that we have built, we have kept scalability, efficiency and responsiveness at the top. I'll give you an example, right? On the backend, we used Rust. So I think nowadays every other company was just starting up. We'll obviously choose Moonstack, Node.js, Django to build out their backend.
But being a payments company, I think what was core to us was reliability, scalability, and efficiency of our systems, right? So we chose Rust as our backend. And whatever systems, whatever services we are building, we are automating a lot of that using different SOPs, different workflows.
We have a lot of AI agents working within our workflows to automate whatever part of process that we have for the product. And
we have a lot of moving part that requires like manual intervention and we have tried to automate it using ai agents and other workflows that we have so yeah everything we build has to scale three months back we had zero merchant now we had more than a thousand merchants processing thousand transactions a day so i mean like that's been pretty insane for us so i think within three months we have grown so much after three months after a year
Our product should be scalable and need to scale and every decision that we take like have scalability in mind.
As you step out on the balcony and you look across all that you've built, what are you most proud of?
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