FreeStand's 2023 Wrapped

$0 to $100k and more

Let’s start with a quick intro: We are a B2B SaaS-enabled marketplace that enables FMCG brands to deliver samples across online/offline retailers and communities. Google ads for product sampling, with that out of the way, let’s get into it.

We had a great year, super easy to summarize in metrics, super hard to capture via feelings, thoughts and emotions, but let’s see how we do at this challenge.

This will be a mix of the two feelings and metrics, we will have a mention towards the end with all of our key metrics, but everything before that will be an attempt at capturing the feelings and emotions behind the year.

We raised funds, twice, closed more customers than we ever did and grew 100x, interviewed several, wrote a lot of lines of code and had about 3 parties in the entire year.

For a pre-seed stage startup, we served 5 Fortune 500 enterprises. We partnered with the largest startups in India. What!!!!!

We didn’t update our website for the 2nd year in a row and still got about 40+ inbound demo requests. How is this still happening???

We had a key tech team member join our business team and that enabled us to build a business unit. Not only did this make our business unit stronger but also enabled our tech team to gain a true insider they could trust on matters of the whys of our product and feature decisions. It’s incredible I tell you, this was my idea, pat on back Konark!

We graduated from Google Startup Accelerator, ISB-Iventure and IIM-CIPs Samriddh Accelerator, these were 3 different flights for the respective accelerator’s demo day.

Graduating from the Google startup accelerator was awesome, we felt like somebody as a result and got introduced to Guneet Singh, who eventually ended up joining us as an investor and a business & sales advisor. Wow!!

I met a popular Indian VC who has an amazing Twitter presence and semi-annoyed him, cause he couldn’t understand or thought that we are stupid to call ourselves a marketplace. Sigh!

Oh, our tech team is jacked, everyone goes to the gym between 6:30 to 9:30 PM, almost making it impossible for our CTO to have an all hands. Our youngest team member Pratik, with whom I share my alma mater completed 1 full year of being stupid and awesome, like all interns should do, we offered him a PPO, and that phone call melted my heart, a few joys of being a founder. Also, no timeline was met without delay, may that change in 2024. Gen AI features have gone into development Q1 2024 should see the first few releases going live.

Mohit and Lakshay continued to be the backbone of our stability. Sushant delivered a successful hiring event in the form of Externship 1.0 and is now leading our AI efforts too, Abhishek pumped up our infra game, Kavach was more than a CTO, managed legal and ops like a champ, Sneh rode the rocketship and brought us to $100k, how she managed this is only known to her, but she did and we are all grateful.

I continue to be grateful for the opportunity that I get to lead this team day in and out.

2023, was awesome for all of us here at FreeStand and we hope, you the reader also had a great year. We at FreeStand would like to wish you, your team and your families a very happy and prosperous 2024.

Key metrics:

1. Revenue TTL: $100k

2. Samples distributed: 1.3Million

3. Brands Served: 7

Thanks for checking us out, learn more at www.freestand.in