Going Global from India: The Power of Exports | Vishnupriya, Razorpay Rize

Swarnim (Host)

Hello everyone, this is Swarnim from Gxpress. Our podcast name is The True Trade Talks. Today we have a very special guest with us named Vishnupriya. She is the community head of Razorpay Rize for exporters. Vishnupriya, could you please explain what Razorpay Rize is, and why did Razorpay build such a community for exporters?

Vishnupriya

First of all, thank you so much for having me here. It's a pleasure to talk on this platform about Razorpay Rize. Rize is essentially an early-stage startup programme geared towards helping the long-tail of India — the SMBs of the country who are pretty much budget-constrained and resource-constrained, and don't have a lot of structure or streamlined processes in place. We help them get the right tools for their business, or access to the right funding to grow.

Vishnupriya

Why exports? Exports end up being a very significant chunk of the 63 million MSMEs that are fuelling the country's economic backbone right now. India itself has a target of about $1 trillion worth of exports by 2030. That is by no means a short-sighted goal. As Rize we want to contribute to that narrative, to that economic flywheel, to the export motion of the country.

Vishnupriya

What we have identified is that a lot of these exports come from the MSME segment — and despite driving so much revenue, they are ironically resource-constrained and budget-constrained themselves. The idea is to ease that bit out. How we do it is through our community, which is completely non-commercial and completely free for our exporters and founders. We also enable support through mentorship, knowledge sessions, events, and partnering with folks like Gxpress to bring the best deals on board — and just create a wholesome ecosystem where they can come in and get whatever support they need.

Swarnim (Host)

Talking about export founders — who is that typical Export+ founder? Paint the picture of a founder who is eligible to join your community.

Vishnupriya

Lovely question. "Exporter" is sort of an umbrella term that we use. A lot of people conflate it with just physical-goods exporters, but that's not the case with Rize. I understand the name can be a bit of a misnomer. Exports essentially entail anyone and everyone who has international plans. You could be a SaaS founder, a goods founder, a services founder — but as long as you have international clients, you are operating in a cross-border jurisdiction, and you are facing any cross-border challenges, you come directly into the ICP of Razorpay Export+. No holds barred. If you are an exporter and you have international clients, you qualify as an ICP.

Swarnim (Host)

Nice. And what is the most surprising thing that you have learned about Indian exporters?

Vishnupriya

I have figured out that Indian exporters are — for lack of a better word — very resourceful. They will figure things out on their own, even if it takes time. They are very tenacious. Exports require so much back and forth. You are pretty much dealing with 10-plus parties: banks, logistics players, DGFT bodies, so many stakeholders in the entire process, just to get one shipment done sometimes.

Vishnupriya

It requires a lot of patience and persistence. Especially when you want to get your EDPMS closed — which in itself is a big ask for a lot of export founders. Some of them follow up with their banks for six months at a stretch just to get their compliances in place, which is pretty impressive given they are running a one-to-ten-person team. They are very lean. They don't have a lot of people at their disposal to go to banks and fight for them — they are doing all of that at once.

Vishnupriya

That observation goes for about any founder, not just an exporter. But I would specifically like to give a shout-out to all the exporters out there, because they not only do a founder job — which itself is so difficult — they are also additionally exploring the across-border business opportunity, which just adds layers of complexity through the whole process. So honesty is very admirable.

Swarnim (Host)

So what are the typical maybe three pain points which you have observed exporters handle — and they are facing issues in this?

Vishnupriya

I will try and rank it by what I feel is the most important, to what is manageable and can be solved for with money and resources and time. The most important, I think, for an exporter is definitely finding the right international buyers. You cannot — everything else can be fixed. I am an ardent believer that you can fix your payment funnels, you can fix your compliances, you can fix documentation. There are provisions and structures in India in place to enable all of that. Of course the structures are very fragmented, the services are very exorbitant, but these provisions exist. Finding buyers is not guaranteed. They might have an excellent product but not the right packaging, or the right distribution, or even the right understanding of the geography. I feel that inhibits a lot of Indian founders to go global. That is one.

Vishnupriya

Second, I know I would be very tempted to say compliances, because that is such an obvious answer for an exporter. But compliances can still be solved for. What is really important and really missing is a complete, thorough understanding of the geography. The market-research piece is still very underdeveloped for a lot of our founders. You can even find a buyer if you go to a trade show or run Meta ads — you will still do some kind of demand generation. But how does an Indian founder based out of Jaipur, who has seen one kind of geography all their life, figure out what is the best SKU to sell in Japan or New Zealand? There is a complete lack of information out there that can classify and help you with market research.

Vishnupriya

When I say how markets operate, I am not just saying what SKU you sell there — that data you can still get from Amazon or some other marketplace. I am also talking about culture, trends, patterns, cultural intricacies that you will not find through one marketplace data set. If somebody can solve for that, that will be very exciting.

Vishnupriya

The third is yes — now is the time for me to say compliance. Extremely challenging. I know some of my exporters with Rize who are trying to enter certain markets but have been stuck at customs for the past two months just because they don't have documentation. It is really sad because they have everything in place except that one document, and they are stuck at customs. I cannot understate or underplay compliances. So those would be my top three.

Swarnim (Host)

And when we talk about payments specifically, I have also noticed that exporters specifically face issues in terms of payments, because payments are coming from international borders and people whom you don't even know. So what are the suggestions that your community can give to founders around that?

Vishnupriya

This is not going to be a comprehensive answer, because I don't necessarily represent the payments aspect of Razorpay — that's a separate, very vast function. I am representing Rize. But if we want to talk about payments, we have two stacks available for our B2C founders, B2B founders and tech founders.

Vishnupriya

One stack is card tech, where a merchant can enable their customers to pay via card. We now support Google Pay and Apple Pay. Enabling Apple Pay on your checkout really uplifts conversion rates by a very high percentage — that's something that's very exciting, and it is a recent change Razorpay has brought in; we have gone fully live with it in the past quarter. Google Pay also promises a certain conversion lift. We support a lot of cards on our platform — we support Amex, we support a couple of others. All in all, the endeavour remains the same: a US-based customer should not be grappling to pay our merchants. The end customer should be able to pay our merchants in every possible manner.

Vishnupriya

The other product is a bank-to-bank transfer solution — a money-saver product where we offer virtual accounts in international geographies, where you can get your money remitted via your end buyer, and that is also at a very competitive rate. These are the two solutions we offer to our founders and exporters right now. The endeavour is to make this journey as seamless for them as possible, at the most competitive rates possible, and make sure that at every point you are getting paid on time, you are able to enable all payment options so you don't churn the customer at any point of the payment lifecycle. That is absolutely not the goal we have.

Vishnupriya

And the third is we want to also protect it. We have some chargeback protections in place as well, so that in case a buyer or an end customer raises a chargeback against you, you have the necessary protection to safeguard yourself against any such unhappy transaction. We have a lot of guardrails in place for our exporters, and we are only improving and making this stack better.

Swarnim (Host)

If you can walk me through a founder journey where your community helped them in a massive way — a founder who got connected.

Vishnupriya

That's a great question, Swarnim. I will be very frank with you: we cannot solve for all pain points of every exporter. That's an unmanageable expectation from us, because exports is such a massive space that we are still trying to solve for a couple of pain points for every exporter. Having said that — last year a lot of my founders who had an exclusively US-based business were hit very badly by US tariffs. I will not take names right now because I have not taken explicit permission from them.

Vishnupriya

This founder of mine who sells furniture in the US was stuck by the US tariffs. Their valuation — they had the option between shutting the business effectively or making a drastic pivot. Consumer investments in the US were also sort of drying up and not seeing as much traction as they used to before. With the advent of AI, all the focus has gone to AI. We wanted to support them somehow so they could recover some of that — sell off their dead inventory — and figure out how they could rev up their business in a space like the US with tariffs being tariffs.

Vishnupriya

Incidentally we were also planning to get some marketplaces on board who could onboard ours on priority and give them managed account support. Usually when you have to get into marketplaces there is a process, and you get assigned a POC who then manages your account on the platform — maybe Amazon, maybe Wayfair or any other marketplace. A lot of accounts that net in low GMV are also not given managed accounts. They are pretty much on their own, and a lot of their POCs are not very hands-on. Rize founders squarely lie in that category — they are not very high GMV, they are not enterprise-level GMV — so support is not always guaranteed at that level on marketplaces.

Vishnupriya

We wanted to get in some marketplaces who could support such founders and work closely with them. I ended up talking to this huge US-based marketplace who is also dealing with the furniture category. Excellent conversation. I thought that as Rize we could support some of our tariff-hit founders, get them on board to this platform where they can actually make some money, make some revenue, and grow exponentially with the help of this platform. I connected the founder to the marketplace, and I am happy to report that they have recovered from tariff losses. They are on a steady upward slope and growing massively on the platform.

Vishnupriya

We also ended up having a very good relationship with the platform. We introduced a lot more leads to them and also did a public-facing engagement with them last quarter. That is how we are creating an ecosystem flywheel of sorts: supporting the founder, supporting the marketplace, and we as an enabler making sure that everybody in the system is unlocking revenue and unlocking success at every level. Why Rize? Because I think we are best positioned to oil this kind of association. We are pretty much non-commercial, so that puts us in an interesting position to lie in this kind of relationship.

Swarnim (Host)

Let's say a founder who is just starting the journey — do you support them also, or do they have to be at some level and then you start to support?

Vishnupriya

We have cohorts. We have divided — Export+ is a year old, and since a year we have figured out that every cohort behaves in a very different way. A very early-starting cohort behaves with a much different risk appetite, a very different tolerance for waiting, a very different tolerance for D2C website-based growth versus marketplace growth. It's a very different appetite across the spectrum for each cohort.

Vishnupriya

For example, the furniture founder I spoke about was already fairly a couple of years into the business, had grown his business to a certain point, and understood the US market really well. So the only macroeconomic variable that was affecting him at that point was the US tariffs. As soon as we tried to circumvent that and give him more support, he was able to spring back pretty much quickly. Maybe somebody early-stage would not be able to figure that. So not one playbook applies to every founder.

Vishnupriya

Maybe a very early-stage founder who doesn't understand the US market, has not any kind of international revenue, would not do as well on a platform when we do a platform introduction to them. We understand that, and we have internally grown to understand that founder behaviour. What we do is we have partnered with multiple buyers and distributors internationally at various stages of exporters. We have some distributor and buyer relationships who are very open to having an initial-level conversation — testing out the product, proof-of-concept. They will say something like, "I will test your product, I will put your product on a couple of retailers, and we'll see how the product does in the Singapore market or the UAE market." That's very interesting for my early-stage founders, because A they get exposure to a new market, B they do it relatively seamlessly, and they get insights on the go — and if they get revenue, great.

Vishnupriya

But maybe a slightly more mature founder is not in the proof-of-concept stage. If I connect them to someone who says "I will retail your products and we will see how it goes," maybe they don't have an appetite for that. Maybe they just want to get listed and get business right off the bat. So then we connect them to mature marketplaces, big marketplaces, we try managed account support — like we did with the founder example I gave. We have tried multiple models for multiple founders. There is no one playbook. But as Rize we are very uniquely positioned to be able to do all this. So to answer your question: yes, we support all founders who have a very strong intention to grow global, or have already gone and are selling globally — but we do it very differently for every cohort.

Swarnim (Host)

Talking about what's one piece of advice you would give to an Indian exporter just starting out?

Vishnupriya

First of all, please understand the product that you are selling. Is it even compatible with the geography that you are targeting? Do a thorough analysis of that geography. Chart out an entire Excel table. Understand what your competitors are doing, how they are pricing the product you are selling. Does it even have demand, or even latent demand, in that geography? Do your homework. That's very important, because as a D2C founder you don't want to waste your breath going to the wrong end. That's a lot more expensive compared to a SaaS founder.

Vishnupriya

Second — don't wait to do the perfect research before you go global, because this analysis paralysis can be very tempting. There are about 150-plus countries in the world. It can be very tempting to figure out what country, what geography, what region I need to export to. If you have to go via a marketplace, you've never tried it before, it feels like a risk — but if you have an appetite for it, go for it. List it. Maybe take a class or two. At Rize we offer a lot of marketplace growth sessions that you can listen in. Come into these sessions, understand from the experts how you optimise your growth on a marketplace. But don't wait a long time. A lot of founders I speak to have been thinking of exporting for one to two years now, but they still haven't taken the plunge because it feels like a very long plunge. Please don't. Once you start listing your products, once you start working with a couple of stakeholders, you will gradually see the process easing up. It's not going to be easy, but the first plunge need not be hard.

Vishnupriya

Third — please work with a very trusted FEMA-regulated, FEMA-accredited CA who understands this space. It's very important, because your CA will support you, help you with the right compliances, the right documentation, the right reconciliation for all your remittance documents. And if you are a D2C founder, if you have a physical goods product — or you are a B2B founder rather — definitely register with your Export Promotion Council, whichever it is for your product. They support a lot. They are not known as much, but they are mandated by the Government of India to support your export journey. Don't ignore them. Get registered with them, go to all their sessions, network, talk to their heads, build a very good relationship with your local EPC, and work up the ladder from there.

Swarnim (Host)

Nice. And talking about specifically Rize — how can founders find Rize and join your community?

Vishnupriya

I love that question. I am going to send you a link — maybe you can put it somewhere in the description below. You can just type Razorpay Rize on Google search and we will pop up, and then there is a community CTA — Join the community. You can simply join. If you are an export founder, feel free to click on Export+. They usually evaluate your application and will get back to you within seven to 15 days. We have a human viewing your application, so it takes a little bit of time. We want to make 100% sure that we are getting the folks who could benefit the most from the community. We are very deliberate about that and very selective about that, which is why it will take a little bit of time to get you in. But once you are in, I will be taking you through the onboarding process, and you will see some very interesting founders in the call, and then you will get added to the community, which is a WhatsApp group. From there your journey with Rize begins.

Swarnim (Host)

Great. It was great talking to you, Vishnupriya, and I wish Razorpay Rize all the best from my side. We will surely send your links to our sellers, our customers. Wish you all the best.

Vishnupriya

Thank you so much, Swarnim. It was lovely talking to you. Thank you so much to the Gxpress team. I had the best time explaining all of this — and this is the first time I have done something like this. It makes me realise, okay, this is a long way to go, and a lot to be done for export founders in the country. We look forward to working closely with Gxpress moving forward as well.

Swarnim (Host)

Thank you, Vishnupriya. Take care. Bye.