Transcription
Today, I have an incredible interview just for you. Today, we speak with an incredible entrepreneur, Yash. Yash, after getting scammed in a commodity deal, went on and built VUI, a data aggregator software that helps you find sellers and buyers online. Yeah, you'll see what I'm going to show you is the closest to get leads—incredible leads, vetted leads—without even putting a pen to paper. All right, let's jump into the interview.
All right, T, so let's start this interview with my favorite question: Can you please walk through a very painful moment during your trade? I know you have one.
I know you have one. Yeah, um, so after I understood a little bit more about sugar and how the sugar brokering market is completely a fad, I then ventured into, uh, metals, right, and more specifically scrap metals. So what I did was I essentially knew that a lot of companies in India were importing like scrap metal, so aluminum scrap, um, I think it was also like copper scrap. And long story short, right, we found this buyer from this website. I think it was like, um, one of those online B2B websites. So we found the buyer; we did like the buyer-led start method that you talk about, right? And essentially, we didn't really understand how to price like for the actual material, and that the buyer massively low-balled us for like way below the actual asking price. So if you think of like the time, the asking price for aluminum scrap was like, I think it was like just a little bit below the, um, LME price, which was $2,000 per ton; we agreed that we'd find—we we'd agreed with this buyer who's never really bought before, and we should have vetted them more—that we'd buy, you know, we'd supply them at $1,400 per ton, so like $600 below the actual market price. So anyway, being yeah, just right from the get-go, it doesn't make sense. I mean, we—we to India actually, so, uh, usually it depends which type of scrap it's going to be, like 70%, the lowest grade, maybe 90% LME price, 70% LB price if you do read the low sheet, but yeah, that's it—it was already doomed from the beginning, but this is this is why it's so important to actually like understand how things go. So anyway, we we we're looking all online for a supplier for this, and we found one supplier on Alibaba for like half the price—half the price of the material. I was like, "Oh wow, this is some crazy opportunity. We can we can double our money in commodities, like just imagine if we do 10,000 metric tons a month." So anyway, I flew my brother out to China, right? He met this this person; they they took him to this warehouse—we didn't even know if it was their warehouse, right—and they showed us like 25 metric tons, right? But the cash was one thing; we had to pay them, um, I think we had to pay them like 25% upfront, 'cause we asked for a lower order quantity 'cause we just wanted a small—even if it was 25 metric tons—we paid them like 25%, right? We paid them 25%, and I remember, um, they said, "Oh yeah, we're going to ship the goods; we're going to ship the goods," and my brother was waiting for so long that he had to actually just fly back home because he had other things to do. And, uh, very simply, um, they still message to this day, a year on, "Oh yeah, we're going to ship the goods; we're going to ship the goods." No, no. Oh, that's bad, man. But yeah, but man, it's true, and you don't know nothing; you're like, "Okay, I mean, this—why not, man? Why not?" Uh, but, uh, so this is so your first, um, first and only deal in commodity—first and only deal—it was a complete failure, but I think the good thing was, um, and this is the interesting thing is most people don't even go to that length; like most people don't even like at least just try, you know what I mean? Um, but yeah, that's kind of why I started the company that I run now.
Yeah, because I remember the first time we discussed together, um, you said, "Yeah, my brother went there; he inspected the goods and so on." So at least you you had something going. I was like, "Yeah, you know, at least they made it happen," because in the grand scheme of things, okay, what is the price of one one, uh, flight ticket to go anywhere in the world just to inspect the goods and maybe do business? So at least you had something going, but yeah, but from the get-going, yeah, that that was a doom, but it led you to what what you have now—VUI.
Yeah, that's right. So basically, uh, I started this company called VUI, and the key thing behind it all is using, um, import-export data. And if you want, I can like—
Yeah, sure. Show me.
Yeah, let's do it now. So then this is easier—better to show rather than to tell. So, um, very simply, what happens is, right, is loads of different countries share, um, data, and what I mean by data is what we call bill of lading data. So if I just take you to our website real quick, we have, um, customs data. So whenever you ship something from one country to another, it usually goes through customs, and at customs, okay, they inspect, uh, all the documents, uh, with that shipment, right? So they look at, uh, the bill of lading; they look at maybe customs declaration documents; and from these documents, they upload it to their government system, and different countries openly share that data, uh, with, um, a company like ourselves. Once we source this data and we get like literally everything, we can see who's importing and exporting what out of all these different countries. So all the countries in yellow at the moment are the countries that we, uh, get data from. And then what we do is we upload it to the system, and then you could pretty much type the name of any product in, and you can actually see what's going in and out of every every country. To—for instance, sugar.
Yeah, AOM sugar. Can you just—
Yeah. So what I would need to do is just type in, for example, "sugar," it would come up with the HS code that fits for sugar, uh, just give it a second. So it gives you 1701, right? And then what you can do is you can actually see real like trades—real imports and exports of different products. So, um, as an example here, we can see that this company in the US imported some sugar—some azucar—azucar is sugar in Spanish—and you can see that imported it from this company in Ecuador. We can see like the price; we can see all of this kind of information as well. And the great thing is you can actually like click on each individual trade, and you can see, um, the bill of lading. Yeah, so like say you're looking for like buyers of a specific product in a certain country, like say you're looking for buyers of sugar in—I'm just going to do the United States. I know they domestically produce as well, but just as a simple kind of explanation, if I was to look at like US importers of sugar, we can see, uh, you know, only US importers, and what we can do is we can click on these companies; we can see, you know, a little bit more information about like, you know, where they buy from, so their top origins. So they're buying from Ecuador; they're buying from Colombia. We can also see the other products they import, so not only does this company import, um, sugar, they also import wheat; they also import, um, fruits as well. So it's an agricultural importer. And then what we could do is we could see the the list of vendors they work with, and if you want to look into more detail, you can also see, you know, each individual import record, the price, the quantity, all of this information. And this is really valuable because, you know, when I first started my company, I had no idea where I was going, what—so if I didn't know that the top importers of copper scrap or aluminum scrap went there, and I didn't know that China wasn't actually an exporter of scrap, yeah, I was—I was going to set this one—yeah, this makes no sense. But, um, you—you—
P it. But but it's quite impressive. And just for the the people, I use VUI on a weekly basis. Each time I want to see what's up with a new commodity, with a new raw material, ingredient, I just—as Yash showed—put the HS code, and then I can get a rough idea about what is going on—okay, is this country importing from that country? Is this country exporting? Because there's some commodity you have no idea—I mean, if you are not in—you don't know that this country doesn't export. So then it gives also a very good idea about what's going on, and it's, um, it's very interesting data when you want to attack a new market, and I use it like, yeah, as I said, on a weekly basis. Each time we have a new product, a new request, I just check to see—to see what's up. So—no, no, very, very interesting, too.
Yeah, uh, thank you. And there's like tons of other things that you can do with it, such—such as like looking at like, you know, which countries are top importers, top exporters; you can like look at statistics back from like three, four years ago and look at like, you know, know the top countries for this and that. It's incredibly helpful, especially like for commodity traders, and we work with a lot of, you know, commodity traders actually, you know, um, you know, a lot of commodity traders, a lot of producers all around the world. Why you—okay, um, how long has VUI been around?
No, so it's been around for just over a year now, um, and there was about like a couple of months where we were just building it and really perfecting it. What looks like your your best customer? What—what—what type of company is it? What can you just—yeah, explain a little bit more so then people can see, "Okay, am I a customer or not? Who is it exactly for?" and so on.
Yeah, so predominantly, we don't, uh, work with certain customers, but it's—it's not like a cheap product. I know that it's for existing businesses; it's for companies—mostly producers, manufacturers of different products. So we work with people who sell like finished goods, um, who want to kind of see what their competitors are also exporting and who they're exporting to. And we also work with like a lot of commodity traders and food manufacturing companies. So whether it's just like very, very raw materials at the beginning of the supply chain or people selling more finished goods, like, you know, chocolates or, you know, machine parts—CNC stuff—it literally—if if your product has been imported or exported before, typically you could use our system to find large importers of your products, and you can see small ones as well, but typically if you're more in the wholesale game or you're, you know, you're dealing in bulk items or raw materials, our product is like the best for those types of people who want to—basically—
So now that you're saying that you sell to everyone in the world, I guess you don't have like a a specific region that is—because everyone could benefit from that, as long as you are an exporting country. I think the big exporting country—I don't know if you have Germany, Turkey, China—and so maybe China—yeah, you need to be in Chinese, but the, um, the big exporting country should be a big target for you, right?
Exactly. So yeah, we work with a lot of, um, companies in Asia; we work with a lot of companies, you know, um, that produce—like South America is also a really, um, interesting market as well, but but predominantly in the Middle East, in Asia, that's kind of where, um, we're seeing like the most traction, and also from a time zone perspective as well, right? Like I'm based in the UK at the moment, so we mostly are working with people kind of close to us, but yeah, that's where the growth is. And if you actually look at the data, it's kind of interestingly enough because I see everything, right? I literally see where the world is going in terms of, you know, where the goods are going, where they're getting produced, and it's interesting how like, you know, Europe and, uh, the West is kind of falling down in terms of their export values. I mean, I'm literally making a video for my channel right now about how, you know, the UK has been in a huge trade deficit for like the last like I don't know, 30 years or something, and it's only getting worse, whereas we're seeing more of like a global shift of things being produced in the East and being exported to the West. And that's a a very key trade flow, isn't it?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. And the thing is also it's like it's a a vicious cycle, but the vicious cycle takes a long time to to get going. So—and then so Europe is is completely dead, and the only country was like Germany that was still okay, but now after COVID and the the when they blew up the pipeline, uh, basically just now Germany is also at a deficit, so that's—I don't know how Europe is going to—doing—all the factories were slowly closing; the jobs would be gone. And the other problem is like if you have no factories in your country, you just—your your population loses the ability to build up new factories, and that's bad. So that's—that's very bad. So now the all the manufacturing capacities, the new one, the new China, is it going to be India? I don't know, but I think the new China is going to be more the Southeast Asian part countries, like Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, and so on. They have huge—huge population, low salary, and they don't speak English. So I think if you look at like countries like the Philippines, India, they speak English, so they do more like admin tasks, you know, tasks that require you to speak English—outsourcing tasks—and so maybe a little bit less factory rather than the other countries that can—that still have like a massive population that don't speak English, and they will be able to do like a factory job. So I don't know, we'll see; it's—it's—it's quite an interesting world, but, uh, with your data, we will see what it goes, but, uh, but—
Co—and and what—how do you—I I I wanted to ask you how do you find a new customer, because as your base is so large, how do you—you have your YouTube channel; you also do a bunch of ads. How do you find those customers?
Yeah, so at the moment, like it's quite interesting; it's kind of a 50/50 split, right? Uh, we do run like, um, a couple of paid advertising—a little bit of that. We also do like a bit of cold email as well, um, because we have our own database of people who manufacture, right? So we actually use our own system to reach out to people in different countries. But I think the key thing is whenever you start like a business is to focus on one geographical location, and, um, you know, in the beginning, we we mostly started just advertising worldwide because we had no idea like who are we going to sell to, right? And I think, um, it's important at the beginning just to be very open, uh, with who you sell to, right? And just going and optimizing to the people who actually, you know, they actually pay you money. Because the one thing that I've learned about international trade, um, because we've worked with, you know, we were talking to a lot of people all around the world—we advertised in South Africa, uh, we advertised, you know, in Asia, India, Pakistan; we did US, UK—and when you work with different cultures and you speak to different people, the way that they do business is very, very different. Like, you know, you speak to an Indian person—unfortunately, I'm Indian, so I'm not gonna—it's not racist, but I'm just going to say this straight up: like a lot of Indians and, um, from that part of the world, they tend to lie a little bit more, right? And, um, you know, if you go to Europe, people are a little bit more straightforward, but then the cost of advertising is higher, and is there really manufacturing going on there? What—what do their prices look like? Are they really competitive in the global market? And that's another thing: like if they can't afford to export, then our tool doesn't really make sense for them. Like you're seeing like a lot of companies—like I went to a conference—went to a conference—UK Metals Expo last week—and you look at a lot of the UK producers of steel, right? And I go up and I speak to them like, "Uh, do you export?" And they're like, "Uh, no," they can't—doesn't make sense.
Yeah, yeah, no, no, they can't—I mean, the honestly, right now, I think—I don't know if the UK is that, but in for steel, Europe just put a lot of tariffs on the Chinese steel. I guess the UK—pretty sure they are part of that—but, uh, what is funny—like so when they started, all the Chinese steel went through Vietnam, so then it goes to Vietnam, then you get Vietnamese origin steel shipped to Europe. Obviously, people are not stupid; Vietnam is next to China. After a few months, they started to seize all this, uh, Vietnam steel. But now what I'm seeing now in Malaysia, I'm seeing like Chinese steel being shipped to Malaysia, rebranded Malaysian origin, and then shipped back to Europe, and even with that added leg of the trip, it's still way cheaper than what you can produce. So—and then when—when I don't know when customs will get caught of that—they will find another place to do the steel. It's never-ending; it doesn't—it doesn't stop. They're all struggling; they're all struggling. Like honestly, it's happening everywhere. And I'll tell you one thing though that's interesting: like say that you go and try and work with these companies in, you know, uh, the second world or the third world, as they say, the other challenge now is, okay, what is the geopolitical status of that country, right? Because there's a lot of countries, um, that print a lot of money, right? Um, and there's a lot—there's like high—high inflation, right? I'm not here to get like political or anything like that; that—that's not what I'm interested in.
You're—you're an entrepreneur; you're a realistic—a realist like me.
Yeah, you have to be a realist. And I remember when we started, um, advertising in Egypt, everyone loved our product, but the challenge was it's just—they're printing money like there's no tomorrow, and because the inflation is so high, like it just—like if you charge in US dollars, for example, to a company in Egypt, they just can't afford it; it just doesn't make any sense. And then we'd have to like drop our prices like really, really low, and it—it's killing—it's killing a lot of, um, companies in these—in these regions. So the other side is the corruption, right? So even though they might have raw materials at a very, very low price, if the currency situation is wrong—which, you know, unfortunately is the case in a lot of, you know, second-third world countries—it does really affect their ability to export. It's—it's a problem; it's a real big problem.
For sure. For sure. And there's no easy fix for all of that; it's—it's quite complex. But, uh, but—
J—so—and so what I'm very impressed honestly is, um, I've seen VUI evolve a lot from the very beginning now, um, it was a little bit buggy and so on—some data were missing—but now it—it works very—I mean, it's very smooth. I've seen the evolution and also the speed of iteration. So this is also what I was very impressed with. I wanted to ask you to come here on my YouTube channel because, um, that this is—you really take care of what people say about your product, and you iterate very fast. So this is also something that was—I was impressed with because you only—you—you—you started with your brother, right?
Yeah, so like just a little bit of like a synopsis before this, I used to run a previous company, um, and it did pretty well, but long story short, I actually had to shut down the company because I was—I thought I was going to close a big sugar deal; I learned more about commodities and all of this thing, right? And long story short, my company was making $1.2 million a year; I was 23 years old, and I met this guy in central London, um, very like high-end gym, and he claimed that he was basically a millionaire or like a multi-millionaire—many times over. He said that he was a sugar trader and that he would teach me more about sugar. Now, obviously, I was young, and I was very green behind the ears, as they say in here in the UK, and, um, unfortunately, I thought that, you know, I—I would broker deals for him; he would supply the sugar; and, um, unfortunately, it got to a point where I—I was really close to, you know, closing this deal for like I don't know, $15 million or whatever the—whatever the hell it was, right? Right. And I basically shut down the company in—in—in ruins 'cause I had no idea how like the commodity space worked, and, um, pretty much like we went from shutting down that company to burning lots of money because like there's a whole year where we were trying to make commodities work; we're trying to like import and export loads of different things. But if I just kind of like found you before that, like my life would have been changed; I like—I genuinely like—I would have known so much more. And if I just knew about where like the data as well—that's another thing—I actually just looked at the data and see which countries actually import sugar, which countries, you know, export the sugar or, you know, other products. I—I knew that most of these deals that you see—these little LOIs that you see sent on WhatsApp group—they're actually all just full of—
Right. This—
Yeah, so it's funny because we can—we can talk about that because, you know, I'm from—I mean, I started in a small commodity trading firm, so I know—I work for a big firm, but then I really started in a small commodity trading firm and so on. And back then, I think we had—what—or maybe it was the beginning of WhatsApp. So there were no—LinkedIn was not as popular now with people, and, uh, then I—I stopped trading; I did all other stuff, but always related to commodity trading, and then I went back to really trading, and then I saw this world of LOI senders—of people on WhatsApp groups, on LinkedIn—looking for what are the top—the gold, diesel—no, gold, jet fuel, 95, 90—and I was like, "What is going—going on here?" And you know, it's—it's because I spoke with a bunch of—I was like, "But man, it doesn't work like that, or am I stupid? What's going on?" And then they come up with a procedure—or this is a buyer procedure; this is a seller procedure—like—like what—the—no, it doesn't work like that, man. I've done it, man; it doesn't work like that. Like what—what is that? And then I saw this—yeah, I don't know—those broker games. And seriously, I've never spoken with one guy that made money. I've never spoken with one guy. At first, I tried to help them, you know, because I had—I'm all about that on YouTube and so on. I was like, "Man, this is not how it's done; you are going to lose your time; it's a scam; it's probably someone that doesn't know what he's doing, or it's maybe a big—a big buyer in China that is trying to get something at a low price that makes no sense." So you—you're just waiting with—I try to help them, but then I—I've seen that they don't want to believe in me; they want to believe in their—and that they're going to make half a million in their—in their brokerage deal. Like, okay, so then—is—is done. But man, this—this is pure madness, man. This—this part of the world is pure madness. Plays into like really dark psychology, I'll tell you why: because most of the people, they get kind of lured into this—there's someone who works a job where they're not very happy, or they're in like a country where they just really like—they're just broke, right? Like that's just like a very simple way of explaining—
It, and then what happens, is there these kind of like weird scammers in between, uh, creating these fake documents saying, oh yeah, like you know, someone's looking for XYZ product in this area of the world, right? And then what they do is they get these people who are so desperate to just get out of where they're where they are right now because I was running a company, right? It was the same thing. I was running a company; I was actually making money, right? But I just hated running my company. Like I just hated running it, and I was I really related to it.
And then you see like the rise online of like people making literally millions of dollars a month, right? And you just want to be like these people, and you see, you know, there's this whole online culture, right? Where people are on YouTube and they're just like, yeah, I can make like a million dollars a month like straight away. You look at like people like Andrew Tate and all this, but the sad reality is most of these people who make like gous amounts of money, it's taken them like five to 10 years to even get to that level, but they sell you this thing of like, oh yeah, you can do this. So when this brokering thing comes out where you can literally like make 15 million in commission straight away, people like almost like they fall into this trap; they lie to themselves, right? And I don't know, man. No, no, but you're right, you're right, you're you're right because I saw that. I'm like, look, man, okay, so and I had this conversation multiple times until I just stopped because, man, my my time was so precious, but I was like, man, you are there in your little uh, I don't know, maybe you you're naked uh, on on your WhatsApp and with your LinkedIn open, and you think that you are going to broke a deal for 50 million, and this deal is going to bring I don't know, like 5 million. You just you behind your laptop, do you think it makes sense that you are in competition with the biggest company in the world? Cuz those trading companies, they are making the most amount of revenue; they are people; I know them; they are must; they are thirsty, bloodthirsty people that work there; they are 10,000 more time more connected, clever, have more money than you, but you can make it happen, and they can't explain to me how it makes sense, and they just can't, you know, because but they want to believe too bad. B, but this is this is but it's sad, man; it's sad. At first, I was annoyed, but now it's just sad, man, honestly. So I don't know what what's even crazier is the ones that lie that they've closed a deal before. Yeah, of course, they always I said, look, and yeah, yeah, yeah, but yeah, you need to believe, but but again, it's not it's not a and some people say, look, but if I can't be a broker, I cannot be a trader; it's too much money. Like yeah, so do something different, man; there's a thousand things to do in life, man. Don't just anyway, but uh, so but you saw a lot of that also when with Fuji. I guess a lot of people book calls because they are just broker brok Bookers, right? Yeah, so in the beginning, yeah, a lot, right? And um, yeah, it's just a pain in the ass whenever we speak to anybody who is a broker; it's just it's like it's almost like I just send them straight to you. I don't even send them straight to you; I send them to your channel because like I just don't want them to waste your time, but like they just need to like actually just watch all of your videos, and they just need to have like a reality check, and then sometimes I even just give them a free trial to our software for like an hour just so they can actually see that nobody imports like, for example, like there's not huge amounts of sugar that's imported into China because China, for example, has a huge domestic supply, or it's like, you know, EN590 isn't imported or exported from, you know, this country. They need to see it, and then what's interestingly enough is once they actually see the data, they know that the whole thing is a scam, right? And they've wasted like six, seven months of their life, and they typically end up ghosting me, right? Because they it's such a such a hard pill to swallow, right? Wasting six, maybe one month, one year of your life, like it's it's it's horrible.
Sucks. Yeah, yeah, that's that that's tough, man, but that's but anyhow, man, I think uh, honestly, so I just wanted to okay, let's go back on VUI because again, I was very impressed on on the on the what you've done with your brother in one year; it's pretty pretty good and it's very very fast. So where do you want to to steer VUI in which direction for the next few months, few years? Do you already have like a road map of new features that you want to add, or what what do you want to do with with VUI? Do you have already have like something in mind? I think the most important thing, right, is is to think about starting with why, right? So we started the company to basically make international trade easier, right? So I think we're at a stage where the product is really good, but it can still be improved, and that's the goal, really, just to make it like absolutely insane for all of our users. I think longer term, we want to obviously make the company a lot bigger, and I think there's other things in international logistics, international trade, global commerce that are just really behind, right? So our goal really is to identify these other problems that can be solved by not just like tech on the computer but also like harder tech, right? And solve some of these problems. I mean, you know, you go to like these conferences, and you see like there's there's like mining equipment, these like conveyor belts that scan the aggregates and things like this, so I want to kind of get more into like solving like also bigger problems within, you know, um, different areas of the supply chain, whether it's logistics, whether it's kind of more, you know, at the complete source, whether it's metals; I'm not really sure, but the key thing that we're trying to solve is just to make international commerce a lot easier, and I think we will build some other products, but for now, just don't be cute and focus on what's works; that that's my goal, really.
Yeah, all right, cool. So uh, yes, thanks a lot uh for your time. Where should people go if they want to to learn more about what you are doing, what VUI is doing? Sure, no problem. So if you go to vui.com, uh, you need to fill out a form, but if you do uh mention that you're coming from um, you know, Damen, if you use the coupon code woron uh checkout, you will actually get uh 5% off, so uh please uh fill out the uh fill out the form, mention that you um you know, you put Damen woron in there, and when once you speak to one of our team members, uh, we will also apply the discount, and uh, we'd love to work with you. A lot of your um, you know, a lot of the people that you've referred to us, they've become customers, and they absolutely love our product, and they've made a lot more money by um be using it. So yeah, I mean, the reality is like uh, I can talk about that like one minute; it's like when you get one new customer in commodity trading, I I don't know about manufacturer good, but in commodity trading, everything is about relationship building, so one new customer, if you don't screw up, it will still be your your customer in five years, 10 years, 15 years, so the lifetime value, the value of the customer is completely insane, and this is what people tend to miss. So man, but so again, thanks a lot for for your time, and then man uh talk to you soon. Thank you, man. Thank you. I appreciate you having me.