How beverage wholesaler Gamatauri added $200k in revenue by building its ERP on Hercules

Gamatauri is a beverage wholesaler in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. It supplies 700+ alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks to homes, bars, and restaurants, and even direct to consumer. Its founder, Thales, comes from a family of wholesalers. Today Gamatauri does ~$1M in revenue with a team of 6.

Thales built Gamatauri's entire ERP himself on Hercules. He believed building an entirely custom ERP would save him time on admin work and give him a competitive advantage. Thales uses Hercules to change from flat pricing to dynamic pricing, lifting his in-store sales by ~$200k in annualized revenue. He has also used Hercules AI to automate sales and support over WhatsApp, saving him 100s of hours a month.

Increasing revenue by $200k with dynamic pricing in a custom ERP

Before Hercules, Gamatauri's flat per-product pricing was leaving revenue on the table. Every customer paid the same, regardless of how much they were willing to pay. With 700+ products, he couldn't keep prices in his head or in a spreadsheet, so he charged everyone the same price. He knew he could charge different customers different prices, but he had no way to easily track or calculate this. Worst of all, he had no centralized place to track all of his finances. He had no idea if he was making money or losing money for each customer.

He sold a can of Brahma at R$4.99 and felt stuck there.

I used to sell Brahma at R$4.99 and I was stuck always selling at that price. We have more than 700 products. Remembering them all by heart was awful. Consulting an Excel spreadsheet was even worse. It was just easiest to have one price for everyone. Now with Hercules, I can change the price per product per customer easily. My sales instantly went up.

Thales built a custom ERP on Hercules and switched to dynamic pricing. Gamatauri's sales went up 49%. He can now update prices across 700+ products in seconds. Each customer gets their own pricing and promotions. He can also run tiered pricing that rewards bigger orders: a Heineken is R$6.98 for one, R$6.63 for three, and R$6.41 by the case. Most importantly, he has a centralized view of his finances: margins are tracked automatically, and when a supplier's cost rises the system flags any promotion that's now losing money.

Automating sales and support with Hercules AI

Almost all of Gamatauri's orders come in over WhatsApp, the way everyone in Brazil buys. Today a person on Thales's team has to read each message, answer the customer's questions, and key the order into the system by hand. Buying from suppliers is just as manual: Thales checks supplier prices one by one across Amazon, Ambev, Coca-Cola, and Grupo Petrópolis. He and his teams spend hundreds of hours a week just handling buying and selling.

Thales is building an AI assistant for Gamatauri to automate buying and selling. The seller AI assistant will integrate with Whatsapp, answer real customer questions over WhatsApp (like "which beers are gluten-free."), recommend products, and place orders, all without a human needing to step in. The buyer AI assistant will research supplier prices and place purchase orders automatically. He is using the Hercules AI Gateway to power his AI assistants, and App Connectors let him plug in his delivery and supplier platforms. Thales expects the automation to personally save him 10 hours out of his existing 16-hour day.

If I can automate the buying and selling parts of my business, I'll save more than 10 hours a day. I currently work 16 hours a day. I can spend those extra 10 hours increasing my revenue.

Why Hercules

Thales chose to build his ERP on Hercules for two reasons:

1. Customizability: Thales wanted an ERP fitted to exactly how he runs Gamatauri. Generic ERPs like SAP are built for someone else's business.
2. Speed and simplicity: Hercules let Thales build a full ERP just by describing what he needs in plain language. Despite having a technical background, Thales didn't have the time or resources to code and maintain his own custom platform. Hercules has everything he needs included out of the box: no code, servers, or API keys needed.

I came from a tech background, so I know what it takes to build and run software. With Hercules I just describe what I want and it's done, same day. It's much faster and easier.

What's next

Thales aims to triple his revenue in the next 12 months. His immediate plan is to finish the WhatsApp AI assistant for buying and selling. After that, he plans to turn what he has built with Gamatauri into a B2B SaaS platform, offering it to other distributors as a new line of business. Thales believes there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of distributors who would pay for the automations he has developed. He recently visited a single warehouse with over $50M in annual revenue, where the team also spends hundreds of hours each month on WhatsApp buying and selling, just like he used to. As Thales puts it: "The problem Hercules solves for me today is small. The opportunity I can go after with it is enormous."

I want to sell the ERP and AI assistant I am building to other distributors in Brazil. I imagine there must be 100, 200, 1,000 big-warehouse entrepreneurs like me who could be using this product.