Applied Series: Designing Retail Stores without Queues with MishiPay's CEO Mustafa Khanwala

The Beginning: Queue-less Payment Systems
The Beginning of the MishiPay story starts with our very own host's retail experiment, The Dandy Lab, in central London. The two kickstart Mustafa Khanawala's entrepreneurial journey in designing the store without queues and from here the fledgling scan-and-go technology becomes a full payment solution deployed at retail stores like Flying Tiger UK, Muji, and more. The episode explores the difficult first years getting over the hurdle of small pilots to full nationwide integrations and MishiPay securing their series B fundraising round.

Redesigning the In-store Experience
The conversation takes a turn towards the psychological aspects of retail, as we delve into theft prevention and the intriguing strategies that transformed modest pilot programs into full hardware and software product offerings. Mustafa reflects on the milestones that marked MishiPay's ascent to a million transactions every month, the pursuit of profitability, and going global which MishiPay is now found across USA and Middle East. Listeners get to hear how the MishiPay team have managed to achieve all of this, parting with actionable insights for anyone working retail tech.

Find out about MishiPay here.
Connect with Mustafa on LinkedIn.

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Transcript

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 0:03

Fashion Tech Applied is published, my co-authored book taking you through six chapters uncovering the technologies and innovations powering the fashion industry. I am Peter Jeun Ho Tsang, founder and CEO of Beyond Form, and welcome to the special podcast series Applied. Each episode, I'll be sitting down with incredible fashion tech professionals that are featured inside the book. On today's episode, I'm sitting down with Mustafa Khanwala, founder and CEO of Mishi Pay, a POS Solutions company and a mission to innovate the retail experience. This episode is a personal highlight for me as Mustafa was one of the first entrepreneurs that I worked with. Pre-Beyond Form days in London with my future retail project, the Dandy Lab. From us literally hobbling together a solution to test in store, to now Mustafa and his team successfully having worked with companies like Muji and Decathlon, from being the primary POS system of Flying Tiger in the UK. Mishi Pay is featured in chapter five of the book, all about smart retailing, and Mustafa shares his insights on how he's achieved all of this the penetration levels at Flying Tiger from the outset.

Mustafa Khanwala: 1:10

They knew that for them to make a lot of sense for this they would need to see eventually more than 20% of people adopt this technology Today. At Flying Tiger now we're 100% of the transactions. That was a big thing for us to get to. It was actually a very ambitious goal because at that time with most retailers we're getting to 5% penetration not really 20 and 20 is a very big deal.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 1:31

Let's get into the conversation with Mustafa on this episode of Venturing into Fashion Tech. How are you today, Mustafa? I'm great, Peter, thank you. Thank you for having me. Glad to hear that. I'm super happy to have you on the show. Of course, I've known you quite a while now, since the birth of Mishi Pay. What eight years ago now, I think it was when we first met and you've progressed so much.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 1:55

We're really happy to see your progression and really happy to have featured Mishie Pay in the book Fashion Tech applied, which we're going to be talking about today, and how Mishie Pay is shaping the future of retail. Before we get stuck into the conversation, I just give our listeners some context as to what's happening in the industry. So the global point of sale, or PRS for short market size was valued at 29 billion US dollars in 2023. It's expected to grow to 81.15 billion US dollars so huge by 2030, with a compound annual growth rate of 15.8%, according to Fortune Business Insights. So I think that's really interesting, mustafa, how you are, you know, really helping this explosion to go ahead In terms of PRS systems.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 2:46

Around 2012, we saw Apple so the tech giant introduce retail stores with no tills. It was very much the blueprint and I'm sure it inspired you quite a lot, mustafa. The retail experience was novel, but not all retailers took to it and no ordered customers take to it either. So I think it's interesting how we have progressed quite a long way since those till list feature retail experience came about. Mishie Pay introduces innovative solutions for physical store checkouts, addressing the issue of long queues and customer abandonment. So we're going to talk all about that in a second, but before we get stuck into it, mustafa, so you and I met at the Dandelion.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 3:27

So for our listeners that have been following Yonforma my journey for quite a while now, the Dandelion was my previous company. It was looking at what is the future of retail. So at the front end it was a retail store. You could come in by products as normal. In the back end we were testing lots of technologies and Mustafa and Mishie Pay was one of those technologies that we actually worked with very much at that idea stage. Mustafa, from that moment, tell the listeners how did you get into it, why did you approach this at the Dandelab and how have you evolved since then?

Mustafa Khanwala: 4:03

That's a lot to say it won't go. But there was big learning there in the Dandelab. But before that, you know, obviously congratulations are launching the book. That's amazing. You've done a lot. And yeah, while the POS market is growing, we're nowhere near 29 billion yet in our revenue, so we're a small part of that but helping and contributing with whatever we can. But yeah, dandelab was big for us.

Mustafa Khanwala: 4:27

It was just about three and a half months, I think, after we had I had incorporated Mishie Pay first, like I had the idea in May 2015 when I was in a little, I waited 20 minutes to buy one coke and in my mind I was like, surely this doesn't make sense. There should be a way that I can scan the barcode of my phone pay on my phone and leave the store with my item. So that was the birth of our first scat and go idea. But you know, since then, in in eight plus years, things have evolved into us being a full service checkout right. So now there are full stores which run on Mishie Pay, like Flying Tiger, with every one of their their UK stores running 100% on Mishie Pay. So the self-checkout kiosks users scat and go is still there. So our original product is still a big one. You have cash registers that run Mishie Pay software. You'll have mobile POS, like the Apple Store experience that you were talking about.

Mustafa Khanwala: 5:21

But yeah, if you, if you asked me eight years ago, I had no idea how all this was going to happen. We were just starting. You know, ucl was was an important part of my journey. I was finishing my master's as I got, you know, the a few offers from from fintechs, potential banks, and, luckily for me, I had the idea, so I got the chance to reject those offers, go full time into Mishie Pay. And then I I didn't know where to start, like where to find the first store. So, while I was talking to UCL, I think I had to apply for that graduate entrepreneur visa at the time because I was still a student and that was a very good route for me to be able to build a company and stay in the UK. And they told me about the Dandy Lab. It was a lot of learning, starting with, first of all, what the word Dandy meant. I had no idea. I went into the store and saw all the fashionable stuff.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 6:12

Yeah, we were educating you about British fashion, weren't we? Along the way?

Mustafa Khanwala: 6:17

Yeah, I had a bow tie, which I still can't do very well, but you can. I just learned how to buy a clip on. Actually, that was the point, but Dandy Lab had a lot of interesting products. The good thing, though, is that there was a lot of technology already there, right, and people like Cisco and all just participating, so for us it was a great test bed, like we actually put it the way we wanted it to be.

Mustafa Khanwala: 6:40

I remember tagging the idols myself, and we had the first store to say, if Mishie Bay was live in a real retail store, this is what it would look like, and I think we had like 80-100 transactions, so there were a good number of people who used it, gave us the first feedback, and then that helped us get into Idea London, right, what you see out. So that was a big launchpad for us. From there, of course, I didn't expect, but it took another two and a half years to get to the first retailer going live with us, but it all started from having the first shop very soon after starting the company, so that was a big thing for us at the time.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 7:17

And just going back from my memories, which is nearly 10 years ago, I see now we did a lot of testing and learning during those six months working with you. I just remember us sitting in the basement actually tagging all of the products and trying to figure out what does that in-store experience look like. I think it was a lot easier said than done, but I always remember this moment where, for example, one of the customers came in and they just loved the whole idea of not being able to, or not having to, queue up, and I just remember this moment where there was somebody in the store with one of your team members and they spent like half an hour trying to get the app to work and trying to go through the entire experience. Obviously, mishie Pay at that time was very, very new in terms of the application and it was a little bit buggy.

Mustafa Khanwala: 8:14

I mean, I was still doing something developing and I'm a pretty bad computer science engineer. In that way, I'm a megastronic engineer in my background, so that's one of the reasons the app was buggy in my own code and I eventually ended up doing it to people smarter than me who could do it better than me. But yeah, at the time people had to put a lot of effort to get to the app. We didn't have the web app either, so they had to download, then they had to sign up all of which has gone now. But you're right, like it showed the excitement that someone was willing to stand with us. I remember that also happened with me once, right, that the customer was standing with me nearly for 10, 15 minutes attempting to do it. Now, in hindsight, that must have meant that they really wanted to try.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 8:54

And I think that's something that maybe that you and I didn't realize at the start what that meant moving forward into the future. But you've really proven, actually, that there is a real use case here and we'll talk about this in a second and you're rolling it out in really big retail chains across the UK and outside of the UK as well. You've gone global, which I'm really happy to see. I always remember as well you bringing potential investors and clients into the store. Can you just take us through to our listeners Can like? What was that like and what were the pivotal moments when sharing the experience?

Mustafa Khanwala: 9:32

So for me, I think, you know, maybe it's because I come from more of a traditional business mindset Right, my father and uncle started their business about 34 years ago in Kuwait, which is more of a wholesale distribution of office supplies, packaging materials. So you know the traditional kind of trading business and you know there is all about the physical goods you can see, you and you know exactly what you're selling. So for us, you know, at the beginning we were just selling this idea of what it would be like at a high traffic store. And sure, danny Lab was was not in that way the perfect store because it was not high traffic, it was different and it was a. It was a pop up for people to come in and experience an experiential store. But it did allow us the opportunity to show it in a real environment where people came in, they were scanning products, they were actually using real money to buy those products and leave the store. So even if it did have a super high traffic, like the first time I had the idea, and like the stores that we have today, where the use case is very obvious, it still gave the investor, the future potential customers, the ability to visualize what it would be like in their stores, ask specific questions about that and then make a proper decision after giving it a fair evaluation, right, because as a first time founder, as a first time CEO, that's you know oftentimes some of the things you get along with that skepticism whether people understand it, whether they think it's worth it, and you know, if they can see it in a real environment in any way, then they could even talk to customers there, they could experience it themselves, they can make up their own mind about it.

Mustafa Khanwala: 11:08

So for us that was really very good with the dandelion, but it came in very quickly, right. I incorporated Mishipe in August 2015. We went live in dandelion very soon after that and then, as I said, it took, you know, more than two years to get to the first live large retailers right, with media, much Saturn that we had with Leroy Merlin in frauds or their cover line then we were starting through that. But that took a while for those big retailers to get convinced. So I can't imagine that if I had to go through that whole period without having had the Danny Lab experience, maybe in the middle we would have doubted a lot more whether this can work. So it very quickly gave us that first validation, which then gave the motivation to go through that long journey of convincing big retailers and raising money to do that.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 12:00

So there was a lot of learning taken from the Danny Lab. As I said, it was really looking at the future of retail. We feed you in chapter five in the book, which is all about what does that retail experience look like, moving forward, for our listeners. What is Mishipei specifically and how does it plug in into that future retail blueprint?

Mustafa Khanwala: 12:20

Yes, of course, happy to explain in a simple way that we are. The way to think about Mishipei is that we're bringing the best of the online checkout experience into the physical store, and we do that today with all of our products in checkout inside the store. But the backbone of that being self-checkout Self-checkout through using your own phone to scan the market of an item, pay for an item and leave the store, or using one of our tablets, which is like the self-checkout kiosk you've probably seen at your grocery store, but it is 90% cheaper capex. So the overall machine, everything that's used, is very light, very low footprint, 70% lower OPEX and something that could be live in the retailer in one month, but also allow you to move your transaction, to scan and go. So it acts as an acquisition channel. So, between these two products, when we go live in the store, we start to typically convert 70%, 75%, 80% of the transactions to self-checkout, making the store a lot more efficient, increasing the repeat frequency of shoppers visiting and, with scanning go, even increasing the basket size and value. But then what's happening is that a lot of our retailers are now saying that if you're already 60%, 70%, 80% of my transactions, I might as well, run the whole store on Mishibé. So that's what's happening with our retailers like SlangTiger, with Pantry, others like Muji are headed in that direction, where they're running the store on Mishibé. And that led to our other checkout products like mobile BOS, like the Apple Store Journey that you have. Mishibé also has that product for retailers, like we have with our own version of the cash desk, again on that same e-sauce of keeping things light with the infrastructure, so integrating into what the retailer already has, but giving a very seamless front end on the customer experience, this time to the customer, to the retailer's stuff, and then also our RFID products, which is what you might remember eight years ago with Dandy Label started.

Mustafa Khanwala: 14:23

Fundamentally, I thought always that RFID would be important to do self checkout. I was wrong. That was good, actually, because I realized in the first two, three years that if we had to peg ourselves to a certain infrastructure like RFID being live at the retailer, the market was very small then for us and we would have to wait a long time until retailers were ready. So I think around 2018, 2019, we said let's start working with retailers who don't have RFID but give them some kind of anti theft measure through our trust engine that we developed at the time, where the idea was that you would have some intervention with staff or in-store machines so that the user knows there's no further like they don't get any further emboldened to steel than they were before, because they should know that the same amount of chance of getting caught is still there. So that's a very big psychological deterrent and that opened our eyes and increased our market size by 100 fold.

Mustafa Khanwala: 15:22

For us at the time that's what got a lot of these retailers to sign up. And then, 18 months ago, that's also what happened with launching the Tios product and then that just went in the direction of where we are today, where we're a full service checkout company. And, yeah, you mentioned us being global. Now we're in 15 countries across the world where we have Mishie Bay. But the big gross markets for us still remain, you know, europe, us and the new one which is the Middle East with UAE and Saudi Arabia. Those ones are very exciting for us with the way that retailers are signing up in those markets.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 16:00

First of all, Mr Fur, congratulations on going into 15 countries. I know that for a lot of startups it's not easy to penetrate all of these different regions, but I think, first of all, congratulations on that. I really like how they, how you're quite honest and you are like okay, if we stuck to mobile scanning payment system, you would have got nowhere, essentially.

Mustafa Khanwala: 16:23

Yeah, we stuck to only that, Only with RFID. We were really making things too niche, too small.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 16:29

Absolutely, and I think that's very indicative of the idea was there, but the retailers, or the retailer like companies and corporates when they're necessarily there yet to catch up. Again, I always remember this conversation that you and I had. I can't remember at some point on that journey is that you're having these meetings, but these companies were like but how do we roll it out across all of our chains? It's just like physically impossible, financially impossible, and they just can get their heads around the whole thing, Correct?

Mustafa Khanwala: 16:59

And if they didn't have RFID already, we'd have to wait three years until they did that.

Mustafa Khanwala: 17:03

Then they'd come back to talk to us, god knows when, right, whether they would ever do that even so, it just didn't make sense. It only makes sense, and that's what happens today. So we've not lost the RFID product. We brought it back because we realized that there are retailers who already had RFID. They've done the hard work, the graft, of rolling it out across their network and for them, it's amazing that we have the capability to say, like you have the journey at Uniqlo or at the CACSlon where you can throw your items in a basket and just pay on the terminal. That's amazing as a journey, right, and we can do that now. But we won't only do that forcing the retailer to get RFID first. If they have it, then amazing, we'll utilize it and give you this great journey. But if you don't have it, you have these whole host of other mischief-aid products that will still give you superb benefits and be relevant for you, right? You don't have to bring this infrastructure to then work with us.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 18:10

We talked about the retailers piloting with you at a very small scale first. So, for example, in the case of Flying Tiger and Muji specifically, they've piloted with you at a very small scale, maybe like a few dozen stores, and now you're rolling it out across their entire chain, across the UK or wherever they are in Europe For our listeners we have many startup founders listening to the show. How did you go from very small pyridose and A? Actually, how did you convince them first to roll it out to 20, 30 stores and then for it to go global?

Mustafa Khanwala: 18:44

Yeah, that also was a big, big challenge, because most of the time, a retailer wants to buy it in one store, right? So you need to convince them that one is really not enough. It's not going to be indicative of the kind of results you want and at the beginning, we took what we could get right. We had this ethos from all the way from 2017 onwards, when we started a lot of these serious conversations with big retailers, when we did our seed round, that we won't work with anyone for free right, we will have to charge, even for the first pilot in POC. That was a difficult one to convince a lot of retailers on, but for me, I feel like it made us. It put us immediately in the right conversations right, with retailers who actually valued what we were talking about, understood the use case and were willing to pay for it. Right. That's a very good filter. Almost it's a filter you want that who is actually understanding what this is supposed to cost and ready to pay for it? Right? It doesn't matter what model whether they pay transactions or subscription or something. They should have to have some kind of budget request or some kind of budget allocation towards your job so that they can they have some value to what it means and they're answerable internally to what is the result right. Then the next job is for us to find out what is that result they want to achieve. Is it a certain level of penetration? So amongst 100 shoppers in the store, 20 should be using Bishop, 10 should be using Bishop and five should be using Bishop. And what's the percentage right that you want to get to in adoption? Is it like a basket value or basket size improvement? Is it a customer frequency or visit improvement? In which case, how do we know those customers and how many times are coming back today, maybe through a loyalty program like Nectar or Club Guard or whatever they already have?

Mustafa Khanwala: 20:40

So those started to become questions we learned to ask early on. In the past we were not asking them because it was slowing down the conversation, because sometimes the person you're talking to, the champion, may not have the answers and they may need to run around internally to find them. And originally the thought was like that slows down the sales process. Let's close the deal and figure all that out afterwards. The problem is, if you do that, then the value of the deal itself is diminished because you don't know that on the outset. What will it take for this client to go from 10 stores that you're starting with to 100?

Mustafa Khanwala: 21:16

So, more and more, we started to ask the retailer those important and sometimes difficult to answer questions that what is the value we want to achieve out of this, as sometimes a retailer may not have the answer, in which case for them, they might be piloting it purely for the marketing benefits of piloting it. They might be piloting it so they can talk about it and oppressively say that they're doing cool new stuff, innovation and that's it. They don't really have an intent or a plan to roll this out across their whole estate and as a startup, you need to decide right. That is that we're doing. It could be sometimes in the early days. You want to take what you can get, but at least you don't have the wrong expectations of that customer.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 22:00

It's quite interesting how you say there's different motivations for different types of brands and, depending on who you're speaking to, you can literally be going round and round in circles before they even decide to close a deal with you. I'm sure, mr Falk, a lot of it was your charm as well to get in there to say yes, because you make it sound so easy, and I know that a lot of our startup owners that we work with they spend so much time trying to convince a corporate to work with them and it can be difficult, especially when we are talking about those new innovations that are very difficult to get internal teams to buy into. Can you share any metrics with any of the brands that you're working with that they were looking at specifically?

Mustafa Khanwala: 22:44

Yeah, of course I can share some of them. Some of them are also published on our website and I've talked about them publicly on case studies, so it's in public domain, information which is fine to share. Yeah, the charm is, I guess. Charm is important. Results are more important, I guess, but charm is important to get you through the door.

Mustafa Khanwala: 23:05

Oftentimes what I do is I do a lot of these pitch training sessions with my team and it's a very valid question to ask how important is the pitch? Is the product important or is it important just the way you talk about it? And the truth is it's both. But the worst thing is to have a good product but not know how to pitch it or how to talk about it, and that gets lower attention than it deserves. Because if you're very good at pitching, then you can at least ensure the other person will listen to you and then if you have a shit product, they won't buy it anyway. But at least you get the right shot. You get them to make a decision on the actual merit of your product. That's all we ever asked for, that. Just give it a fair evaluation and then if it's not for you, no problem. So a big part of it is like that.

Mustafa Khanwala: 23:55

When it came to the results, it was around the things that I talked about the penetration level, the increase in basket size, the repeat of customer frequency. I can give an example on each. So the penetration levels at Flygdiger from the outset they knew that for them to make a lot of sense for this they would need to see eventually more than 20% of people adopt this technology Today at Flygdiger now we're 100% of the transactions where because the store is running on VishiPay. But that was a big thing for us to get to. It was actually a very ambitious goal because at that time with most retailers we're getting to 5% penetration, not really 20%, and 20% is a very big deal. But that was 30 stores to begin with which eventually unlocked a 200 store contract and that has gone further from there. When we look at Muji, there we achieved a 25% increase in basket value, which also in Flygdiger, in scan and go transactions, we achieved a 35% increase in basket value. In Muji that was 25% increase in basket value. That was very important Together with the penetration figure. In that case it was more like 10% in the early days where it took us from being live in the first store in London to being live across the UK. So that was the win, so to speak, from achieving that result.

Mustafa Khanwala: 25:18

And then there's been Iroski. With Iroski now we're at the point where we're starting to get into 20 plus stores, if you're not starting to expand even further. It's been a bit of a slower expansion, but it's the third largest grocery weekend in Spain. It's also where we saw a 33% improvement in customer repeat frequency. The way that we were able to measure that is because in their case, 85% of their customers are part of their loyalty program. Like Club Guard or Nectar, like we have in the UK, they have an Iroski club. In the Iroski club members they were able to see that.

Mustafa Khanwala: 25:58

Let's say, two people, peter and Mustafa, both are Iroski members. They come three times a month to the store and they buy about 100 euros worth of goods. There's been no change. But one of them suddenly has started using Vichy Pay right and they are now coming to the store four times a month and buying about 114 euros worth of goods. So if you look purely at the average basket, you will not see. You'll see it in fact falling. But because you're coming back more often, on an average user spend they saw a 14% increase. That was another very important result for them. So you know, but this does require the retailer to be super cooperative with you and wanting for a good result, right, because otherwise they won't share the data, they won't look at that data, they won't validate that the data makes sense.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 26:46

I like that. I think the key word there is to be cooperative, and if we're talking about fashion specifically, let's just say that unnecessarily the most collaborative when it comes to those sorts of things, they can be quite okay, Especially speaking to luxury fashion as well. They're going to be like we're not going to share anything with you at all. What's your experience been like trying to convince fashion brands to sign up?

Mustafa Khanwala: 27:13

So I can't name names in some of them. But you know we haven't had the best experience across fashion brands. I will say that myself. But you know, some of them are amazing, like Muji, right, I'd say they have a superb culture of innovation. So they're not purely fashion, they're more general, with fashion and hall wear and mix of things. But that's just their culture. They want to be innovative, they want to do things differently.

Mustafa Khanwala: 27:44

We also have had in the past, pilots with people like Mango, pilots with people like the Gatslaw, with our older products, with our legacy one enable products which we discontinued from 2018, 19 onwards. But the point of doing things for the sake of pure marketing that has happened in the past with us with some fashion brands right, there was one in Spain, different kind of fashion brands, still a big label, not luxury, because we've never worked with luxury. Our products are not relevant for them, except now for the mobile posts. So that's why we have some conversations. But you know, this retailer really wanted to pilot, convinced us that. You know, even though our usual contract is always 12 months, they were like you know, we'll just do three months because it was a big name.

Mustafa Khanwala: 28:30

We're like you know, why not. Let's take a look and honestly, there wasn't just the right motivation to doing it, because it was one project that the innovation team had agreed, but they didn't get the buy-in from the internal retail ops teams, right? So, even though one team had confirmed the project, the other team was like you know, we just have other priorities. This isn't a priority for us, right? So the integration wasn't done properly. We did have the right information and then during the project, the whole thing was a big mess, right, without any good results, which then, you know, we realized from the outset that that was doomed to fail.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 29:07

Yes, I'm sure they they. They blame G for that, right Is that?

Mustafa Khanwala: 29:11

correct. We're always right. The new entry, the new entry does the water gets blamed, but I think I think, rather than blame also, they just didn't care right, it didn't make a difference, because the truth is that they had that pilot budget. They had to use it on something. Perhaps they found us to use it on and you know, whatever result came with cave, it doesn't matter. So that's some things that we started to learn, like you know those types of flags to look out for and you know if, if a new startup founder asks me look, this innovation team is interested, the retailer is a big name, what do I do?

Mustafa Khanwala: 29:46

It's true, you still might want to end up signing with them, but at least you temper your expectations and you try to work your way towards what can get it fixed, which means that telling that innovation team can I speak with retail? Can I speak with retail ops? Can I understand who the other stakeholders of these projects are going to be? Can I try to? You know, discuss with them, try to bring more people on board. Even if it takes and extends your sales cycle, makes the deal slower to sign, it's worth it Because when it does sign, the deal will be far more valuable. I don't mean monetarily, doesn't mean that the the amount they pay you will increase, but valuable in terms of the learnings from it and the potential expansion from it.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 30:27

So, to any fashion retailers listening out there sort yourselves out. Basically, when it comes to innovation. No, no, no, no no, no.

Mustafa Khanwala: 30:36

Some of them are great and do great innovation, even if they don't do it with us, even if they don't do it with us.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 30:42

But I don't think that's unique to you. That, Mr Foy, you know. Obviously, I speak toa lot of startup founders as well that are dealing with retail tech and non-retail tech, and they share very similar stories. It's notoriously difficult to get fashion brands signed up on board, but anyway, let's move on to then growth. In the book we mentioned that your goal was to reach one million transactions per month on Mishi Pay. Have you reached that? Yes, we have.

Mustafa Khanwala: 31:08

Yes we have Congratulations, thank you.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 31:12

Congratulations on that point. So you are showing huge growth. One million transactions that's not an easy feat to do for any digital software applications.

Mustafa Khanwala: 31:22

If you'd asked me when I started, like when I was 22, I would have probably very arrogantly said that we'll achieve that probably in two years. It took us seven and a half years to get to the first million transactions cumulatively in our history, right? So we've been in the business for 15 years and seven months, actually, from August 2015 to February 2023. In just the five and a half months after that, from March to July 2023, we achieved another million. In the next two and a half months, we achieved another million and, as of November, we're at a million a month. So it's like you know, it's been a big progression, yeah, but much later than I had initially thought. So that's generally what I'm going to advise, also that your timelines might be off if you're in your early 20s starting a startup.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 32:13

Which is very normal. But I'm pretty sure that we had the conversation at some point in the store where you were like, yeah, we're going to do a gazillion transactions like tomorrow type of thing, but in terms of Mischie Pay's growth, then you fundraised some money as well. So if you're going through the VC route, what's next for Mischie Pay? How do you plan to grow beyond those million transactions?

Mustafa Khanwala: 32:35

Yeah, so I think in December we will beat that million probably million, 200,000, million, 300,000, that'll be very important by next year. There's really three very important goals For that. We're doing a fundraise right now, out of which we just finished our first close, and the second close will happen in the coming weeks and we will announce it to the public very soon about that round. In our history in general, we raised more than 10 million pounds, so that's good. We've had some really strong support from investors now to Capital, American Express, united Ventures, a few others over time who've been superb for us. But what was important for them also and for us was to have that patience to understand where was it a market timing issue, where was it the right product market fit issue. And through those things we figured out the way to our growth today.

Mustafa Khanwala: 33:33

But the next step is to ensure we get to profitability, get to a real business, like my father likes to call it. Right that it's a project right now. Still, it's a lot of business until it's making money. So that's our step. What's good is that we've got our brand rate by more than 50% in the last 12 months, while our revenue has more than doubled and our transactions have more than 10x. So all the metrics are in the right direction.

Mustafa Khanwala: 33:59

I think in 2024, the first big goal is getting to profitability right, evened out, positive, and I'm very sure that we'll get there. The second one is getting, but maintaining the transaction growth. So while this month was one billion sorry, last month, I guess now in November 2023 was one billion, by December 2024, I want to be more than 10 million transactions a month. It's possible with our existing retailers who are expanding in a big way. And then revenue wise, I think that there's the scope to more than triple then. But given our new model where we're making money on transactions, really all we need to focus on is getting more stores, getting those stores to see the value of the shiba, and the revenue will come with that so essentially world domination.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 34:51

I love how it's not a real business until your father says so. That's important.

Mustafa Khanwala: 34:58

The family. I guess you still have that, but it's important in the general sense that you need to be default alive, like tomorrow if all funding dries out. I should be able to still survive and that's the good thing. It's a certain importance majority step to reach in the stage of a company where you're finally profitable. There's, of course, the question of earning enough profit to make up for all the losses of the last eight years, but let that come with time, absolutely so I just want to finish off this episode with a quick fire round of questions.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 35:32

Mr Fur, the first answer that comes into your head Are you ready? Yeah, sure, let's do it. What retail tech inspired you the most when developing Mishipay RFID?

Mustafa Khanwala: 35:43

Best piece of advice you'd received as an entrepreneur In the early days there was Leanne Kemp, who's the founder of Everledger, a good friend and mentor. When I was telling her that I'm going to start Mishipay before I started she said okay, let me tell you, they'll take twice as long, be probably 10 times as tough as you think because you're 22 and you're stupid right now, but it will be 10 times more fun than anything you can imagine. So that was very, very good advice of the time for me. It convinced me to reject the offers I had from the big companies and go into Mishipay.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 36:14

We were all stupid at one point. Mr Fur, I hear you, I am probably still stupid, according to some people. One word to describe the future of retail tech, autonomous, I would say. Favorite feature of the Mishipay suite.

Mustafa Khanwala: 36:30

Oh, item recommendations. Or the fact that the QR sign of the very fact that we made it so that you scan a QR and go straight to the camera to start scanning items that when we developed it was really amazing because it took away all those pain points that we talked about at the Dandy Lab, seeing customers go through step download sign up, give location, then give camera access, then get to the camera. We went straight to camera access after we developed that about a year and a half ago and that was amazing.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 37:05

Yes, a huge leap. Then One word to describe the feeling when you saw Mishipay's first successful implementation in a store Besides the Dandy Lab, of course.

Mustafa Khanwala: 37:16

Besides the Dandy Lab, after the Dandy Lab, I guess just elated full in a way. I remember that there's this picture of mine, a very embarrassing picture from MediaMark Satur, which launched the Satur Express store in Innsbruck, in Austria, which was the first store which was 100% Mishipay, done as a pilot, and for some reason in that picture I'm looking really fat, I'm looking really big like this, my cheeks are fully blown up. So I think I was just full of excitement, I would say, but maybe full of a few other things too. Thank you so much for your time, mr Fur. Thank you guys. No-transcript.