A group of young professionals from Eastern Visayas creates an app to help young entrepreneurs
By Henry Osinar
Queenie Lazam 
Francis dela Cruz 
Nelson Bathan Jr. 
Aaron JP Almadro 
Aiko Reyes 
Nel Laygo
As vaccinations for the COVID-19 pandemic is ongoing, municipalities and cities in the Philippines are now slowly opening up.
Entrepreneurs are taking advantage of this and are aggressively opening and establishing businesses. They are not only slowly coming back, but new businesses are sprouting like mushrooms: from milktea and coffee shops to RTW boutiques, gadget stores, and beauty and specialty salons.
There’s one thing that lumps these businesses together. The common denominator? Youth. Young entrepreneurs are now taking the reins.
To help these businesses succeed, six young professionals from Eastern Visayas created Peddlr, an app to address one of the hardest and most complicated area of a business—recording sales.
Peddlr CEO and founder Nel Laygo, a native of Catbalogan City, said, “One of the challenges of businesses is recording their sales, inventory, and even compiling reports. We developed Peddlr, a mobile app to do all of that and more.”
“Most of the businesses still use pen and paper in their businesses, which is not only time-consuming but also inefficient. With Peddlr, they will be at par with big businesses with their own POS systems,” Nel added.
There’s one thing that lumps these businesses together. The common denominator? Youth. Young entrepreneurs are now taking the reins.
“Normally a POS (Point of Sales) device costs around P30,000 to P90,000, which is the main reason small and micro businesses have lower technology adaption rate. They can’t afford it. Peddlr is a smart version of that, plus it’s free. On top of that, it works offline. No need for data or internet connection,” he explained.
“We haven’t formally launched yet, but we released the first android version of the app back in January 2021 and iOS version at the end of February 2021. We initially started with a small group of users to try out the app as we slowly fixed bugs as we got feedback. Now, we’re targetting the youth. Since the youth are more into technology, the learning curve is a lot easier for them,” explained marketing director and Palo, Leyte native Aaron J.P. Almadro.
Peddlr is a Smart POS App that assists small and micro business in recording sales, log expenses, and understanding business performance. The app generates easy-to-understand accounting reports and other data.
Aiko Reyes, the COO and co-founder, also a native of Catbalogan, said, “Peddlr is free to use. It’s been a very challenging journey, but even if the app is free, we made all the major features available to all users. Our main goal is to familiarize young entrepreneurs to the digital world and put them at the heart of economic recovery for 2021 and beyond.”
Though one of the founding members and the finance director is based in Manila, Queenie Lazam, she also has roots in Eastern Visayas as her distant grandmother is from Leyte. “We’ve all been aggressive on hearing user’s feedback from early beta testers and delivered constant updates to the app in around every three to seven days,” says Lazam. “We eliminated complicated processes so that starting businessmen can easily adjust to the app. Simplicity and ease of use is our core and paired with the right balance of sophistication to provide real value had encourage users to install it. That’s why we’re so excited because in just seven weeks of rollout from app stores, we have more than 5,000 users! The app has gained popularity especially to young entrepreneurs as they have been very active in the Community Group, and vital in our app update directions.”
The two remaining founding members are also from Catbalogan, Francis dela Cruz and Nelson Bathan, Jr., who are both lead developers of Peddlr, in charge of its mobile and tablet versions. “We will explore developing a version for desktop. For now, we’re focusing on the mobile app, and on its 59th version update, the app is faster, better, more stable, and has even more features," Bathan shared.
“We have Bluetooth capabilities anyway. So, even without the traditional desktop with CPU, printer, and cashbox, with Peddlr, any business can print receipts, reports, and inventory database to a Bluetooth printer,” added dela Cruz.
Peddlr is steadily increasing its userbase. In fact, it is now top one in Google searches, in the Appstore and also in GooglePlay.
“To fellow young entrepreneurs, try out Peddlr. It’s hip, really easy to use, and really helpful. We’ve gotten a lot of feedback from users that it helped them automate and monitor their businesses, just through their smart phones,” Laygo concluded.
Peddlr is now available in the Apple Appstore and GooglePlay Store.