Revolutionizing Sustainable Consumption: A Deep Dive with Vikas Garg of abillion.com

And hello and welcome to this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. Today we're going to talk about Abillion. That's right, we're going to Singapore to meet Vikas Garg, who is the founder and CEO of a platform called Abillion. Welcome to the show, Vikas.

Jim, it's really nice to be here. Thank you for having me on the show today.

Well, it's my pleasure because we're going to talk about how you've built a global community of people interested in a vegan lifestyle and food. And you've got your app downloaded in over 183 countries. You've got over 110,000 restaurants already enrolled, and you've got user-generated content. And I've seen the app reviews and they're all glowing, Vikas. So you only started this business in 2017. We're going to hear how you solved the problem for many user-generated content websites, which is the chicken and egg, how you get content and how you get users and how you build that, plus much more. Vikas, tell us about Abillion and the project you've got in mind.

Well, Jim, thank you for that. And to be really honest, we're still learning. There's so much to learn in kind of how to scale communities and scale networks. It's really hard work. And if you looked at my first model, growth model back in 2017 or '18, those numbers Let's just say we're far off from those numbers. I'm really proud of everything we've achieved, but man, is it hard. So we're a billion. My name is Vikas Garg, and I started this company in July of 2017. And really it's been a lifelong passion for me around animals and animal rights and my love for the environment and for animals. And it's something that's always kept me vegetarian and then vegan throughout my life. And for me, we really started this company to help make that journey a lot easier and more accessible and more fun for a lot of people. We know that there's an interest that's increasing around the world in plant-based diets or more sustainable consumption, if we just broaden it out a little bit more from just food. But consumers, while they may even have a lot of choice, don't really know what to choose. And often they have bad experiences and it often feels like a sacrifice or a compromise. So we want to really bring a community of people together around the world. We've created sort of a consumer review app. If you think of companies like TripAdvisor, what they did 20 years ago for hospitality and travel, or more recently companies like Vivino, which if anyone's listening and they like wine, you know, hopefully you've heard of the Vivino app. We're doing this for a whole new generation of products. where there's not a lot of information online and we're sort of bringing that information together to help make the customer's sort of experience around the world easier.

Vikas, I think that's fantastic. And having one daughter who's sort of gluten intolerant and needing to find choices, it's quite difficult to find that on mainstream social media. Tell us, Vikas, because you kind of had an aha moment 2016, '17 about what we're seeing on social media if we're just going to our traditional channels and why you then built your own Abillion app and community. Just tell us about that for a moment.

So, I'm a very proud immigrant. Actually, now I guess I've been an immigrant several times because I'm sitting here in Singapore and I've lived in a few different countries around the world. But the place that I call home and I've spent the most amount of my time in my life is America. I immigrated there when I was 4 years old with my mom and dad and my brother. And I'm very proud to be a New Yorker. I'm very proud to be American. I'm very proud to have gone through a completely free public school system and have had the opportunities that I had. I'm very proud of the meritocracy that in a way America stands for. And in 2016, something happened. I think many of us will remember in November of— I think we don't have to be American to remember this event, but in November of 2016, We had an election, we had the US presidential election. And I'm not a really political person. It's not really about who won, but it was more about the election interference. It was more about the misinformation campaigns. It was more about what we learned about the role of sort of social media platforms and a lot of Silicon Valley companies and what they were doing in terms of taking our information and using that information against us, kind of weaponizing our private data, our information, and shoving misinformation at us that then caused a lot of these issues that we had with our election, as well as interference in a lot of sort of democratic processes around the world and a lot of interventions that have led to some really disastrous things happening around the world over the years. So for me, I just never really thought about these things. I'd never used social media. I'd never spent a day on Facebook. Or Instagram or TikTok or Twitter prior to this happening, but I started to pay more and more attention. For me, having spent my entire career in financial services, it started to feel like kind of what happened in 2008 with banks and the mortgage industry and predatory lending. And it felt like really that a lot of these companies created these amazing vast networks. They created products that people love to use, But then they became very nefarious with their duties in terms of checking all semblance of values or purpose at the door. And I felt like there was an opportunity to build a community. And I kept asking myself the question, is it not possible to build algorithms to spread peace and positivity and social impact and benefit for society? Is it possible to create a for-profit company that from the first day is also a for-good company? And is it possible to scale these things? Is it possible to build a for-profit for good? So I kind of just became obsessed with the idea of using data and algorithms in more constructive ways to benefit society. And that was sort of an obsession that transformed into a resignation a couple of months later from this obvious job that I had always wanted my whole life and I'd been working hard to kind of get to. And then that started the rest of my life, and it's been 6 years on that journey.

Vikas, that's wonderful. Yeah, and you've given up a career in corporate banking, and bearing in mind who you're working for, you probably were a bit prescient by getting out when you did. But also, you're building something fantastic. But let's just talk about user-generated content because in conversations that I've had with other platform owners, it really is a challenge because you've got to get the content on in order to get the users engaging with the content, and it's hard to get the users to be contributing enough and so on. So why not just take us through how you've been building the platform? How'd you get started? How do you get the first people to use it? How do you get the first pieces of content about what is vegan, for example?

Yeah, I mean, probably just a lot of sheer stupidity, right? Like, you know, when you don't know what you're doing, there's obvious drawbacks to having zero experience. Like, I entered a completely new industry. I didn't know the first thing about software. I didn't know the first thing about engineering. When I tried to make some smart moves, I enrolled myself in a coding bootcamp so I could sit in a room full of people learning to code. Because I thought maybe if I sat in a room full of people for 3 months, I might be able to pick 1 or 2 to help me build the company and I could do that economically. And so it was just really trying to apply common sense as, okay, how do I get started? Then it was like, well, okay, how do I get people on board? Then it was like, okay, well, it's user-generated content. How are we actually going to get people to come and create content on a platform that sucks where it takes 30 seconds to upload a photo and It's not very fast and it breaks. And by the way, there's no users on there and there's no content on there. So there's no utility. There's nothing for people to look at, right? There's no, there's just nothing on there right now. And so it was really, it was interesting to think about, okay, how do we do this? I mean, in the beginning, we started trying to do things like what everybody else does, which is we spent a little bit of money on marketing. We tried testing the waters with Google Ads and Facebook. Ads. We started posting in various different online groups and message boards that, hey, we're creating this. And we got a small trickle here and there of people. I remember our first power user came through, came through a message board and her name is Kyla. She's Canadian. And she did more than 1,000 consumer reviews of vegan food at restaurants in Hong Kong and around the world. But then from there we were like, okay, well, How do we grow? And we didn't have any money. We didn't have any money to spend really on marketing. We hadn't raised any capital or anything like that. We're just bootstrapping everything. And so we started talking to influencers and all these people who were like on Instagram and incredibly passionate about the environment and about animals. And we started reaching out to all of them and they were like, oh, that's great. Well, give me $5,000 and I'll post about you. And I'm like, well, like, are you going to use our product? And like, are you going to create an account? They were like, oh, I don't need to do that. I was like, well, but are you going to try our product? I don't need to do that. And I was like, but how are you going to like convey your enthusiasm for what we're doing is if you don't even really believe in what we're doing. And I felt that I got a lot of that. I felt like a lot of that, right? Maybe I was looking at the wrong people and I'm not trying to pass judgment on kind of the entire influencer industry. By no means, but at least at that moment, that's what it felt like. And so for me, I looked back at something I've been doing for a long time. I have been involved with animal sanctuaries and animal rights groups since I was a kid. And I started looking at that. I started talking to people who were running animal sanctuaries, farm animal sanctuaries. And we started talking to them and saying, hey, look, This is what we are building. We're trying to create this community that spreads veganism and sustainability and compassion towards animals around the world. Can you help us? And there we found people were much more open-minded about having a conversation. Most of them all still turned us down, but then we got one farm animal sanctuary, a woman named Laura Lee Blanchard. In Maui, in Hawaii. And she said, okay, yeah, let's do it. And what we did is we created gamification in the product that instead of spending any money marketing and running ads, what we said is, hey, okay, when somebody posts a review, that review allows us to tap into a business, allows us to build our business. And that review allows us to build our base of content where then people are coming and enjoying it. And you know, that's going to take a long time. But It helps us get going. So what we're going to do is we're going to give that person, when they create a review, we're going to give them a credit. And in the beginning, we kept it really simple. It was just a dollar. We gave everybody a dollar of cash when they post a review. They can't withdraw that money. They can't go and buy something. They can choose where Abillion as a company donates that dollar. And so we started signing up animal sanctuaries and nonprofits around the world. I'm very proud to say that today, obviously now we've scaled and we've raised capital and we've built our business, but we are very close, probably in the next 3 or 4 months, to hitting $3 million American dollars donated to save animals, feed hungry children, rescue people in humanitarian catastrophes around the world, put girls through school in rural parts of the world. Plant trees around the world and support marine life conservation groups. So we now have a coalition, an international coalition of nearly 100 nonprofits that we've created. And we've really brought all these people together and brought all these nonprofits together on Abillion. And every day, and we've built this amazing platform focused on altruism where we never really expected the product would go this way. But today, we have our users are not only spending our money or earning our money to donate. They're spending their own money to support these nonprofits through Abillion. And it's just a really wonderful thing to see.

Vikas, that's an amazing story in only 6, 7 years, right? You started this in 2017. What's the revenue model then? Because you say if you're giving $1 per review, Where's the money coming into the business to fund that dollar per—

Yeah, we've had to raise capital. So I kept the company afloat for the first year and a half. Then we raised an angel round in 2018. We only launched our app in May of 2018. So May 1st is actually our 5th appaversary. And this July will be 6 years since we started the company. So Yeah, it's been a journey. We raised capital, and in the beginning, we used a portion of that capital to fund these donations. Then we raised a seed round in 2019, and we raised our Series A at the end of 2021. We'll raise our Series B next year.

Great, Vikas. So it's raising money to get scale and—

And then building a business.

Yeah. And rather than giving the money to Facebook, you're giving it to people to give reviews and do good things.

Yeah.

Do the restaurants and the providers of the vegan sort of goods and services, do they contribute as well? Because you've obviously got good people like the lady in Maui, Blanchard, giving reviews, but there's the other part of the equation, which is the products they're reviewing or the restaurants or the services. How's that working out?

Yeah, so as of today, we have 895,000 options, vegan options from around the world on our platform that have been reviewed. About nearly 600,000 of those are consumer products. So they might be packaged foods, they might be cosmetics products that are non-animal tested and cruelty-free. We have about 150,000 clean beauty cosmetics products. And then they might even be things like apparel, clothes, et cetera, sneakers, right, that are environmentally friendly. In nature, so we really are spanning the entire consumer vertical. We have 107,000 consumer products companies on our platform, and we have 110,000 restaurants from around the world. And those of all these options have been rated and reviewed by our community from around the world, and that allows us to build our business, Jim. So we have a SaaS product that 5,000 of these companies of the 217,000 companies. 5,000 of them are now on and using. And then we have a marketplace. So on that SaaS product, we have a monthly or an annual fee. And then we've got a consumer marketplace. And that consumer marketplace, we receive 10%. We receive a small portion of every transaction. What makes our marketplace really unique is every seller, whether you're a consumer products company, and to your point on do the brands participate, whether you're a consumer products company Or you're an individual. I sell sourdough bread every weekend in Singapore. So if you come to Singapore, you can buy my bread. I'll bake you some homemade sourdough. And I sell that for $12, but I think the buyers get back half of it to donate. So that's how brands participate. What's really interesting, going back to the altruism of our platform, even on our marketplace, we see that the average depends on kind of the region, but the average percentage of impact that a seller allocates, which means basically is between 10% and 20%, which means if you purchase an item for $50 as a buyer, you'll get $5 or $10 back to actually donate, which is really incredible because it's really helping people make that connection between the purchases that they're making, which are vegan, which are sustainable, and the impact that can have in the real world on the environment. And we work with a lot of brands on this as well.

Vikas, thanks for the offer of sado. I love that. And the next time I come to Singapore, I'll look you up because I'm hoping that the, the next trip won't be too far in the future. Vikas, you've built an amazing business in a short amount of time.

Is it a short amount of time? It feels like an eternity.

Well, for the scale you've accomplished, considering you've had lockdown as well in those couple of years.

Yeah. Yeah. Oh man. And they want to forget about that.

Well, you managed to go global, which is interesting that you managed to get a tribe that's global. Those brands that are coming to put their products and services on the platform, are they coming to you through word of mouth? Or do you have an outreach program specifically to get those, if you like, the supply side on the SaaS and on the platform, Abillion?

Yeah, so look, it's funny, we did a bunch of things in the beginning, just because we didn't know how to do something else. And I would say it's almost like accidental luck. So we didn't know how to build an app, right? I won't even say I learned. I like failed through coding bootcamp. And then I hired the best coder from that bootcamp who worked at a restaurant. He was a cook at a restaurant before he learned how to code. So he was a fresh newbie, but he was very talented, but he'd never built an app before. So we had one guy and myself, and we built a website. And so before we built an app, the beta, the sort of the demo, we built a website that functioned kind of like an app, right? It was a mobile responsive kind of website. And because of that, all of the data that's created on our platform is all available online through the web. And so now a lot of where our time has been spent maybe in the last year has been really to make sure that those pages on the web are optimized and they're smooth and they're fast. But what ends up happening is that for typically, so for these 200,000 businesses on any given day, if you were to Google one of them or if you were to Google, especially for the consumer products brands, if you were to Google one of their products, there's a 1 in 3 chance that our website shows up on page 1. Of Google results, and we don't pay anything for that. It's just the work that we've put into structuring our pages properly so they appear. So that actually serves as a real engine of growth. We don't spend any money marketing to the brands. What we do is we find that every single day from somewhere around the world, 2 to 3 companies are claiming their businesses on our platform, on A Billion. And then that's what gets the engagement, the sort of the commercial engagement going potentially with them.

Vik Asghar, CEO of Abillion. It's amazing. What an amazing story. If there's one piece of advice, one tip you'd give to my fellow unnoticed entrepreneurs on how you've pioneered and built Abillion, what would that be?

I'd say one piece of advice, just show up every day, be present. And if you really believe in something and go for it, go for it, be consistent, be authentic. And I would say, if I could just literally redo what I just said, it's really find purpose in your work. If you can find purpose and if you can find something to do as an entrepreneur that allows you to connect your values and sort of your purpose in life to your work, you will work harder on it. Through the hard times, through the good times, through the hard times, and you will just treat yourself better. You will be honest. You will work your ass off to achieve that thing because it matters to you. It matters to you. It matters to your family. It matters to your sort of sense of identity in life. At least that's what this has been for me. And, you know, I can't guarantee whether it's gonna work out or it's gonna fail, but I feel like this is something that I show up for every day because it really If a billion succeeds, it solves something for me and my own identity in this world.

Vikas Garg, what a beautiful answer. If you want to find out more about you, where can they go to do that?

I'm on LinkedIn, so you can definitely find me on LinkedIn. My name is Vikas Garg. You can also find me on a billion, and my username there is just my first name, V-I-K-A-S. You can go to a billion dot com. or you can check out the Abillion app and connect with me, please. If you download the app, please put in my invitation code, Vikas, and we will actually give you a life-saving gift.

I have downloaded the app. I'm gonna put in your name, Vikas. Okay. Thank you so much for joining me today on The Unnoticed Entrepreneur from Singapore. Thank you so much. Looking forward to that sourdough bread when I come back.

Thanks, Jim. I really appreciate your time today.

Thank you. It's been wonderful. And thank you for joining Vikas and I on this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. I've carried on a little bit because the answers are just so amazing from Vikas. If you've enjoyed this as much as I have, please do share this with a fellow unnoticed entrepreneur. And if you've got the time, please review it on your app because it really helps to let us know what you think of the show and what else we can help you to learn from us. And until we meet again, I just encourage you to keep on communicating.

Thank you.