The Fund Founder Spotlight Interview: Param Shah of Badaboom
The Fund is a founder community and early stage fund, by founders for founders.
Welcome to The Founder Spotlight where we highlight the incredible people behind the companies we’ve backed at The Fund. This week the spotlight is on Param Shah, CEO and co-founder of Badaboom, the end-to-end platform that enables brands to create professional private label products better, faster, and cheaper.
Who wants to create their own eyewear brand? A lot more people than you might think, and thanks to Badaboom, anyone can make a private label in a simple, fast, and intelligent way. CEO and co-founder Param Shah, along with co-founder Assaf Raviv are focused on creating ultra-optimized, product-specific supply chains that can be accessed on demand via their platform. They currently provide eyewear and will soon be launching jewelry, bags, and cosmetics. They are a one-stop solution so brands are able to source high-quality products from the world’s best suppliers better, faster, and cheaper….bada bing Badaboom!
This is Param’s second rodeo as a co-founder, having previously created a successful manufacturing software company where he was the CEO for over 6 years. Prior to that, he co-founded and ran a non-profit organization called The Lotus Life Foundation. They provide medical treatment to children with disabilities in rural India, serving around 1,000 per year. During this time, he built manufacturing labs in the rural Himalayas to produce devices locally and is the reason why he got involved in manufacturing and supply chains in the first place. It’s easy to get behind a founder with a mission not only to help customers, but to give back to the community.
What makes Badaboom a “must-have” vs a “nice-to-have”?
Today if somebody wants to create their own product with their own brand, they have to go through this crazy 12-18 month-long process of finding suppliers, vetting them, looking at thousands of samples trying to find the right products, negotiating, sending emails back and forth over supply chain, etc. It’s nearly impossible. Our team has decades of experience building private label products and we set out to make it very easy and allow anybody with ambition to create a world-class brand. Somebody can effectively get a full end-to-end supply chain product - branding, packaging, shipping, and fulfillment - just through Badaboom and all they need to do is fill out a survey.
What’s Badaboom's "Northstar"?
To build an extremely good customer experience in the supply chain and from there it’s about how many brands we can touch. One of our guiding principles is to celebrate the customer’s second order. We feel fantastic about that because a.) they liked their service, but b.) they sold enough of the first order to feel confident putting in a second.
Speaking of customers, how does inspire “customer love”?
This is a tough one because it’s very common in our industry that everybody hates their supplier. I always tell the team, from a customer success standpoint, we will have succeeded if our customers love us. We try to inspire confidence and trust through communication and sharing our knowledge. We’re building customer love and it’s something we want to continue.
Tell us about a recent milestone Badaboom crushed.
We're actually going into our next funding round. We launched our product six months ago and received a lot more demand than we were expecting. Who knew how many people wake up in the morning and say, “Hey, I want to create a sunglasses brand." We've received over $700,000 of orders that we're managing and completely by word of mouth, from small brands and individual creators, all the way to big chains. We’re going into this funding round to capitalize on our growth and put the proper resources in place to make this a successful business.
Do you have any hobbies or interests?
I used to travel around the world as a landscape photographer and have taken pictures in over 35 countries. I don’t get as much time to go out and do that nowadays, but it’s always been a passion for me.