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The algebra of infinite patience | Ankit Oberoi @ AdPushup
332 Plays2 years ago
Ankit struggled for years to build AdPushup, pivoting multiple times and struggling to attract investors. The company had only raised $2.5 mn before its recent phenomenal acquisition of 70 mn dollars. In this conversation, Ankit shares the ups and downs of building a global martech SaaS company and the lessons he learned along the way.
Additional links:-
1.The AdPushup Story: From Fighting To Survive To A $70 Mn Acquisition
2.We'll Continue To Provide Latest Tech While Expanding In The Market: Ankit Oberoi, AdPushup
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Transcript
Introduction: Ankit Albright & Ankit Oberoi's Journeys
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello everyone, I'm Amkit Albright, founder and CEO at ZYTO, known popularly for our software and offering at Pusha.
00:00:19
Speaker
Sometimes we at the podium just managed to get the perfect timing. As we were working to release this amazing conversation between your host Akshay Dutt and Ankit Oberoi, the founder of Ad Pushup, we heard the news that Ad Pushup has been acquired for $70 million in an all-cash deal by a Softbank Group company.
00:00:38
Speaker
This is a phenomenal ending to an amazing story. Ankit went through many years of struggle in the journey of building up ad push-up, pivoting multiple times and not really attracting investor interest for many years. In fact, it had only raised about $2.5 million before the acquisition, making this one of the most profitable acquisitions in the SaaS space in India. In this conversation, Ankit shares the rollercoaster ride of building up ad push-up and making it into a global MarTech SaaS company and the lessons he learned along
Founders' Insights & Early Ventures
00:01:06
Speaker
the way.
00:01:06
Speaker
Stay tuned and subscribe to the Founder Thesis Podcast to learn directly from founders building some of India's most successful global product companies.
00:01:22
Speaker
Then a cousin of mine actually got a desktop, that big machine, like I think back in 98, 97, 98, I was born in 89. So it's about nine, 10 years of age. And then I got a really deeper experience. I was also learning a little bit of programming at that stage, basic, right? Beginners on purpose, symbolic instruction code and all those.
00:01:42
Speaker
and all those programming languages because I also had an interest in business. I would read books like Richard Branson's story, Michael Delca's story, Rich Dad, Poor Dad from Robert T. So I was reading all these books and like different stories. So I realized I already understand science, technology, and I had that interest. Now I thought what I don't know a lot about is business. So let me take commerce.
00:02:08
Speaker
What did you do for graduation? I didn't graduate, so I dropped out of college in the first semester itself, I think towards the end of the first semester. You joined like a B.Com or something? BBA, Bachelor's program. A lot of my friends together, we thought, okay, let's pick this college, let's go there. Especially one of my early close friends, we were both doing business degrees and I ended up also starting a business with him. My second startup was with him.
00:02:32
Speaker
Big change happened is when I got access to internet around 2004, I was like, wow, it really changed my perspective about so many things. My learning accelerated so much. So there was one particular game, Electronic Arts for the Sims. And in that game, you could build objects. So I learned a little bit of different tools. Flash was very popular back then. Then there were a few other tools. So I started making objects for that game. You can think of it as digital signature, et cetera.
00:03:00
Speaker
And I would just make it for fun while browsing on the internet one day, I realized that people would pay for it. And I was like, wow, people are paying for something online because this was that generation where e-commerce did not exist, especially in India. When my dad got into that internet connection, he thought this is just a waste of money and there's no, like, nobody knew that you could make money on computers.
00:03:21
Speaker
So that was a complete shock to me as well. So in my pursuit to sell some of these objects which I was creating online, I really figured out what websites are, how to create a website, how to register a domain name. And that whole thing was so exciting for me.
00:03:36
Speaker
that I pivoted and ended up creating my first startup, which was a web hosting company, right? This was not as succeed as we call it today. The cloud was just a regular web hosting company, which I created back in 2004. I was, I think in 10th grade. And that's how we started.
00:03:51
Speaker
What I did was basically I reached out to maybe a hundred web hosting companies and I told them, look, I'm going to run a community about this gaming and we will promote you and we will run ads about you and send you customers and all. I have zero money. I only have a domain name. So give me free home state.
00:04:09
Speaker
So one hosting company ended up agreeing to it. The guy's name was Tim. We went on a MSN call and I explained to him, he basically saw like, I'm a kid. So he was like, okay, I'll give you for three months. If you send me any customer, great. Otherwise, you know, we'll have to shut it off. But in that forum, so basically that community used to operate on a forum, forums were very popular back in the day.
00:04:32
Speaker
That's when I realized there was so much interest. People also wanted to open their website. That whole community angle was so interesting. I was spending so much time on the forum that I realized, okay, there could be a business here. And I started participating in other web hosting forums, et cetera. So I think I convinced some people, getting money from home was no option for something like this. I think we didn't even have a trade card or something. So I
00:04:58
Speaker
I opened up an account or something, you know, at that time it was much more easier. I convinced some people to put donation for the forum, the gaming forum, which I was running about these objects and somehow hustled my way into getting a reseller account to this guy, right? And then using that to resell space, but within like three more months, like in six months, I think that's so well that I had dedicated shutters, which I was getting in Florida.
Transition to Security & B2B SaaS
00:05:21
Speaker
And then I loved managing that Unix part, going on command line shell, like running those servers.
00:05:27
Speaker
I had learned so much about it, which was the most fascinating part for me. And within six months I had dedicated servers in the US, which I was managing and working from here, creating hosting accounts. How much money were you making? So I think the memory which I have, which was a milestone, I think about one year into the business, I got two dedicated servers and I was roughly making within the first year, year and a half about 80 to 90,000 rupees a month, or one lakh rupees a month from here on back.
00:05:54
Speaker
And how old were you? I was 15, actually. And I was enjoying to learn a lot about information security because around that time, it had been three years since I had started my hosting web hosting business. So we would constantly face security issues. So that made me more curious about server security, information security.
00:06:15
Speaker
And while all of this was happening, I was getting a little bored running that hosting business. So, and this was also the first semester in college. And then my friend and I, we would talk about security all the time, information security, technology, what was happening in the hacking world, typical geeks. So the decision to drop out, sell this business, this messaging business, and then start something in security, which was the second startup in a bus. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
00:06:42
Speaker
So this was like a consulting business, like you were acting as security consultants. It started off as a training business where we would be doing certification programs for security, teaching people. So it started in the first couple of years.
00:06:58
Speaker
our training business, but I think as we journey have it, we came across a lot of people who also wanted some software around security. So, and then that's how we had a bit of a spinoff where my co-founder took the lead on it and he still runs that business is where we started building software for law enforcement agencies.
00:07:17
Speaker
or governmental bodies where we detect security, etc. Which of course was always a passion to build something like software and technology. And that happened, I think maybe a couple of years after we started. And your clients were Indian companies or you were sending to US companies? It was all basically governmental law enforcement and government bodies, all Indian at that point in time.
00:07:40
Speaker
Like, government sales is not easy to do, right? Like, how did you manage that? No, absolutely. And that was one of the reasons that in 2014, I stepped out and you had performed for some time also stepped out of that business. We put it on the bank burner. It was bootstrap business. So there was, you know, it was completely owned by us, completely bootstrap, cash flow positive.
00:07:59
Speaker
grew really well but you know hit a ceiling because of that same reason as you mentioned but luckily for us that market was so small that a customer discovered us and basically told us this is what we want so it was like co-creation where we ended up building the first version of the software based on the needs of a customer and as a side of the market what was the software like help me understand that
00:08:22
Speaker
So think of it as like Palantir, just like how there is Palantir in the US market. We're doing something of that as well as helping law enforcement agencies run offensive security tools. So that plus maybe the Palantir data part. So they would use this or whatever they had in terms of campaign or like monitoring their adversaries, very high tech stuff, very security heavy hacker stuff, things like that.
00:08:47
Speaker
Okay. I don't exactly know what Palantir does in the US. So Palantir is the data teams startup there. And this is basically a go-to tool where a lot of law enforcement agencies, central intelligence agencies will be able to, let's say, keep a track of a lot of big data coming in.
00:09:06
Speaker
Understand
Ad Pushup: Strategy & Challenges
00:09:07
Speaker
that, for example, if there are certain targets or adversaries that are going after what their profiles are, collect a lot of information about, for example, Telves, collect a lot of information about criminals, etc. Keep a track on that. And just with data, be able to figure out, for example, how they can advise their teams on the ground on what to do.
00:09:27
Speaker
So like a surveillance tool, like say it would be scanning social media posts to identify if there are known threat actors and if there's any posts or there's an image of that known threat actor somewhere that would get flagged for an analyst to investigate for the stuff like that.
00:09:44
Speaker
That would be one part of it, although there's no specialized tool, this is also a very developed space. I think taking care of the initial level input, screening back their specialized software for that, but I think it would be used a lot more in terms of, for example, hacking into some of these targets, using offensive tools to manage access to extract more data.
00:10:05
Speaker
they are legally permitted to, as well as here they have probable cause to be able to attack some of these adversaries and gain confidential access to some of their information resources.
00:10:16
Speaker
Yeah, I thought this was largely what Pegasus offers to governments. In a way, you're right. I think Pegasus will be perhaps closer, because there's also a strong data limit to it. So we closer, a lot more to Palindir, but a combination. But was business maybe next year? You could have done what NSO did with Pegasus, like NSO initially was doing for Israel, and then they started selling it to governments across the world. Yeah, you're absolutely right. I think one thing we realized very quickly is we are tech people.
00:10:44
Speaker
And I think we had solved this for a few people here. The moment you go to an international arena, things were different. Back in India, we tried raising funds. I think the laws about export of software at that point in time was so rigid and complex that the kind of software we were building, there were a lot. And of course, in NATO countries, there were so many other requirements. I think the kind of profile, the kind of customers we needed.
00:11:08
Speaker
So, we were selling it as like a small shop for specific agencies with relationships and all our customers were through reference and all that. But to run it at a global scale internationally, we needed a more corporate foundation. So, we tried raising funds a couple of times. VCs back in India did not understand, you know, Deep Tech itself back in 2010, 2011. So, information security and then they would hear about all of this, such as security, which I mean,
00:11:34
Speaker
Sometimes they would get scared, right? I still remember we had like Indian, Indian electrical used to be big, right? So we would go to IEL, meet up and all the interact and you know, a lot of people would ask us questions, which probably made us realize that they don't understand the space at all, right? And deep tech was not that thing. Actually, the only thing which now in hindsight, I can think is we have made sense is basically move the company to us and start selling to the NATO countries and things like that. Perhaps
00:12:02
Speaker
would have been a much better option. Market would have extended. But that would have needed capital first, like setting up operations in the US is not cheap. You would have needed to hire a team there, incorporate there and all that. Yes. Or maybe, you know, noodle budget, sort of, you know, or something like that. We didn't really have any exposure outside the US at that point. So I think that was probably a mistake, but also because I think there was some knotty coming in.
00:12:28
Speaker
By 2013-14, it had been six, seven years since we were running the business. And then on top of that, we realized this is more like a B2G. As you said, the government fails. Even if it would have gone to the US, one thing which our government bodies, how they operate does not change a lot. So even outside India,
00:12:46
Speaker
that slow sales process, having a very bureaucratic sales system, but for something which we would enjoy. And at that point in time, a very close friend of ours was doing B2B SaaS. We all used to live in this area in Delhi called Rohini.
00:13:02
Speaker
And this friend of ours had just started, the startup had taken off B2B, SaaS, SMB. So Parasants Purish basically back then were doing really well. And we realized we always enjoyed making software, also do a little bit of marketing and then not be involved too much into the sales process. Right. And that was perfect. That is what we were seeing basically working for them. So we spoke at length with Parasants Purish, me and my co-founder Atul.
00:13:28
Speaker
And what we realized is they had built a great testing tool, but it was for marketeers. Now, because of my experience, I told you as a publisher back in 2004, five, when you pay me those dollar checks, I realized that their testing tool was not covering well-made or use case, which is for publishers. Like how do, as a phenomena was growing a lot, you know, and CTR. People are becoming more immune to banner ads.
00:13:54
Speaker
And that has an impact on content creation. So, content creators could not monetize their website so well. So, like, which is basically the fundamental essence of how, you know, all the internet content that we find. If I'm a content creator, can I like move my ads around? They said, no, this is not a market, but I realized that this is a big 20, 30 billion dollar market and there is no code for it, which does e-b testing. So, it was kind of a category creation in hindsight, of course, category creation is so tough and so difficult, but as a young entrepreneur, when you lack
00:14:24
Speaker
All that wisdom, you realize, okay, nobody is doing that. Let me jump into this. This must be a billion dollar idea, right? As I said, too foolish sometimes, right? So I think things took a great turn when we started a block first approach. So even before building the first version of a script or any form of product, we basically started blogging about the problem.
00:14:44
Speaker
And we suddenly realized there were so many people, which is why I think my personality has changed from a developer to a marketer now at Core around that point, where we started with this blog first approach. And we started seeing a lot of people would come and discuss that, yeah, this is a problem. This is a challenge. We would love to do that. We've never done it. So we had together some code on another weekend.
00:15:06
Speaker
We basically put our product from data list where it didn't exist, basically talking about the value that we would provide and we certainly saw 30, 40 people came up, we interviewed some of them and out of that three or four people said, you know what, yeah, we would love to A-B test.
00:15:21
Speaker
where to put my ads. Right now, let's say if I have my ad on the right side of the page, let's try left side or bottom of the article. We've never maybe tested things like this. So we said, sure, great. And I think we ended up spending two or three months in no product, just basic JavaScript, which we use to like rotate their ads in Word. And within that two, three month period, some of these publishers or these website owners almost doubled their revenue, their advertising revenue.
00:15:49
Speaker
So what did you create as a product? Just help me understand that also. Did you write the code for those multiple versions or was it happening in an automated way? If there's a particular layout for a website where the ad is on top and that's it and then you want to experiment, let's put an ad on the side and an ad on the bottom. So how did this multiple versions get created?
00:16:12
Speaker
We were doing it manually at that point in time. The first three months, it was all manual. No product, no automation, no data collection, et cetera. So basically that one JavaScript will randomly decide which version to play. And based on that, there will be some marker in the document object, which where it will insert the ad or inject the ad for that variation. The thing with which we realized what was not so complicated for us was super complicated for an average population because they did not understand technology, right? I think that's where we realized the beauty of the business was.
00:16:42
Speaker
the companies that we are working with or those publishers we are working with, their whole business trajectory changed. Imagine if you're doubling your income, whatever your top nine is, we are able to improve that by 70, 80% or double it within a month or two months. The way you look at your business changes completely, right? They were hiring more people, creating more content.
Scaling & Market Understanding
00:17:00
Speaker
That was so inspirational that we decided this is definitely something we should put to the side, invest more time on it. Then we started talking to more people. By that time, the startup ecosystem was a bit more mature. We started going to some more startup events. In the meantime, we were continuing to talk more about our interest in that other business was slowly declining. We were spending more and more time
00:17:22
Speaker
And then in one of our conversations, my co-founder at that time, he said, let's raise some money and push the pedal to the floor. And when we went to speak to, I think we went to a few events, like let's venture and all. And we also spoke to Parsons Purge, which ended up saying, Sean, we could invest in your business. So they were one of the first two people to commit because they were able to
00:17:45
Speaker
to see that we were able to take the power of AB testing to a completely different market and be able to figure out a completely different use case. And I think just within one and a half month, we saw that there were more and more natural publishers coming to us to use this hackish product to the point that we realized to algorithm, we will create this for everybody. So like who's going to see the performance report, who's going to create the code. It was creating like for the development process and then
00:18:13
Speaker
At that time, within that 1-1.5-1 period, we were seeing so much interest from Indian investors that within that period, maximum 2 months, we ended up getting commitments of about $500,600,000, which for us was like
00:18:30
Speaker
Wow, because we are running the company with seven-figure revenues. And just like one year before, profitable, yet in a security space, et cetera, we had people showing no interest. Whereas suddenly, we're doing something else and different market, software positioning. And suddenly, we have so much investors. Actually, we have planned to raise half a million. We received commitments of like a million dollars. And then, of course,
00:18:57
Speaker
We did flow data all to avoid dilution, did a few things, ended up randomly closing at 632,000. We actually wrote a blog post about it also, that how we waste this money within that two month period, which also went viral in 2014. And we had gathered, I think, investments from technology entrepreneurs.
00:19:15
Speaker
funds from all over the world. As I said in India, this included people like Amit Rangjali from SlideShare, Jonathan from SlideShare, Kima Ventures, the French fund, Purvi Capiti, and generations of entrepreneurs, like Europages going from the Tali family. But most of them are all technology or software entrepreneurs.
00:19:36
Speaker
from the valley, from India, from Europe. And I think that's when we decided, OK, great. We raced around. Let's not drink our own kool-aid. We, I think, got an article on tech cry, which a few other things. OK, let's put heads down. And that's how we made our first mistake.
00:19:52
Speaker
We decided, okay, now let's shut down everything and start making the product. Because at that point, we had a POC. In hindsight, this was like a very, very big mistake. We were continuing to do marketing. We were continuing to build a waiting list and the blog part, social distribution. So many people are coming on the website with all the PR happening. Everybody wanted to try out how this product would work and how they would also increase the revenue. But we started thinking again, more like developers, like, okay, let me get the product out first.
00:20:22
Speaker
And Jago product, people are waiting for us. So everything will be shorted. And it was supposed to be a three-month period, right? Where we would say that we would have the fuck out. But none of us had built a product in this space before. We had almost no experience in that day. The only experience in that day was as a publisher, as a publisher. And so very quickly, we realized that three months began six months.
00:20:46
Speaker
Six months became nine months to the point that we started having a tech shiver in the company, like, what is going on? Here we are, you know, where media is chasing us and like 2014, 2015, we were positioned as, you know, by Inc. 42 and some of the companies as one of the best startups.
00:21:08
Speaker
What are we doing? Basically, that set us back for some time. We launched our product in 2015, then eventually closer to the summers. If I'm running a blog, what will be my experience of using the product?
00:21:27
Speaker
That first proper launch that we did was a visual A-B testing tool for publishers, which meant that you will basically open your website inside a product, connect your AdSense account, install our JavaScript, and then all your ad spots will become draggable. And by install JavaScript, like on WordPress, there would be some way to install JavaScript or something.
00:21:49
Speaker
like a plugin or you can yeah, if it's WordPress through a plugin or you can sort header, footer, plugin, you will put our code, one line code on your job, on your website. And once you've done that, once you've connected your AdSense account, so you know your product, you will get like a visit the editor, right? Where your website, your different category pages, et cetera, different type of pages will open automatically on different types of screens like desktop, mobile, tablet.
00:22:14
Speaker
And then in all your current ads which you have put, they'll basically in some way become draggable. So you can create multiple versions of those pages. And then our system will help test OK of your ads. A 300 by 1250 versus a 336 by 280 ad in the same spot, which one does better? Or if it is to try to share in textiles of the ad, native ads, which one will be better? So you will be able to experiment with all of that in the first place.
00:22:43
Speaker
But we did end up getting a good surprising to our interest, a good set of publishers onboarding when we launched, which we didn't. We did a 15 day free trial or something. 30 day free trial. We were also figuring out pricing. We were also hapy testing our pricing models. We were able to see which one is better or which one will stay. And why that was happening. But I think
00:23:09
Speaker
What we realized very quickly is, which we would have already known sooner, if we would have like, let's say not stopped doing that manual approach to, you know, optimization, is that within two to three months of trying the product, especially if we are charging people a decent amount of money. So in such a scenario, within two or three months, they will notice that, okay, my testing is complete. I know which are the best ad spots now.
00:23:37
Speaker
I can agree with the increment value actually testing is not that high once you figured out exactly like once you've optimized the layout, then it's done like that. Maybe you do that once a year.
00:23:50
Speaker
The exchange of design change was very low. So John would be very high after the third month. It was a great product market trick, but that's when we realized the term business market trick. And then again there is, you know, they say startups are a roller coaster. So we were going through that.
00:24:17
Speaker
We can't invest in marketing or building of gizmos where there is such a strong leaky bucket. So we went back to the drawing board. There are so many businesses which have this limited period use case you use when you need it. Like say, if I'm looking for a job, I will maybe pay for some premium subscription. And once I find a job, I may not use it again, like say a resume writing product or so on.
00:24:41
Speaker
problem here in the publishing space, right? That change of design does not happen as often. Publishers second, it is not as big as a consumer market or like, this is a very, so the market size is very sort of like, in fact, that we also learned a year later. So I'll tell you the question.
00:25:01
Speaker
about the market was. And we were going through inbound, right? So inbound gender, you get more like small, medium sized businesses, which are very, very cost sensitive, right? Which are extremely cost sensitive in terms of like, how long will they pay? The moment they realize, okay, value, I'll come over here, they'll cut off.
00:25:19
Speaker
We were, again, enough snatching our heads because it had been one year and three months since we had raised funds. Revenues start together. I think the first month, which my memory shows me well, about $26,000 in revenue. So, Hamdul, I think around 2016, we were close to maybe, I think, 300, 300K or something, sort of 200, 300K sort of revenue. And was that enough to manage your costs?
00:25:47
Speaker
Or were you like losing money? We were losing money. And that's where the second important lesson from at Pushup came, which was understanding your market landscape. But understanding the landscape of marketing that break up.
00:26:05
Speaker
how important that is. It became very clear because we had built everything around SMB. We had built everything. And of course, based on the market, the channels that you pick. So what we realized this key after a lot of research, and by the time we had started doing a partnership with Google, we became partners with Google in India. Thanks to introduction from one of our angel investors, they had a program where we could sign up. And basically it was like a
00:26:32
Speaker
win-win partnership where Google will help us get customers and since you will improve the revenue of publishers, it's also great for a company like Google because when a publisher's revenue goes up, Google's revenue also goes up. And while that was happening, we were sort of like, we were trying to figure out the market and one key insight thanks to this partnership and all the doors that opened for us and the market research which
00:27:00
Speaker
sort of came with it, etc. is that Pareto role of mid-20 applies very strongly in this market, where 80% of the business is with 20% of the publishers, which are enterprise, mid-market or enterprise.
International Expansion & Partnerships
00:27:14
Speaker
And at the same time,
00:27:19
Speaker
The kind of time that we will invest in, or time of sale, or the money that will be needed, the sales process, instruments for getting these channels which provide access to such large customers. So getting to the core, we realized how complex the whole ad tech ecosystem was. Nobody had any idea what was happening under the hood, let's say in a system like Google. And the market is clearly dominated by Google, right? For the publishing space display, the display ecosystem.
00:27:48
Speaker
Google is which controls this market to a large extent. Or did at that time, now it is comparatively less, but at that time it was a clear monopoly. But nobody had any idea what was happening under the hood. Once they would put Google ad exchange or Google DFP back then, ad managing now, or Google AdSense, people thought, okay, everything is sorted. And even at Google, it's a legacy product, like the Ad Manager ad server product, which came from DoubleClick. Things were all like 10, 15 year old products, right?
00:28:17
Speaker
So when we started looking deeper and deeper, we realized how inefficient the whole monetization system was. Eventually, in bits and pieces, we said, what is the problem? What is the problem? But what is the problem? We are building that backbone around the ad server, which is now running the auction. Your auction order is basically for listeners, for example. You are not aware that every time when we open a webpage, right?
00:28:46
Speaker
there is an auction which happens where tens of thousands of advertisers bid on that spot and the highest winner gets to show their ad, which is called this programmatic ecosystem. So we had built the whole auction in on bits and pieces, of course, we were basically we had built up that auction logic for net publisher around the whole Google ecosystem on wherever one bits and pieces. It was not so great that
00:29:09
Speaker
with just Google alone. And then again, same problem, category creation. People did not even know Giska needed because people thought he would be like, oh, whether that is an ad manager product or an ad exchange product. But one critical thing that it was able to solve is the moment you remove this piece of technology, then your revenue goes back down to where it was because auction logic that is not like just EBT testing. So we realized that what we needed or what we are doing is not EBT testing where
00:29:38
Speaker
Optimizing the revenue, so ad revenue optimization, right? So that is the category that we were creating ad revenue optimization, not AV testing for publishers. And I think that was a big change. And that's when things started taking off 2016, and suddenly we had interest from a company based out of Japan called Gini. They're listed there now and they're backed by SoftBank and they were in the similar space, solving problems for publishers in Japan.
00:30:06
Speaker
So they thought what you guys are doing is great. We'd love to invest like 2 million dollars into your company. You guys decide the valuation and we will also bring your product to market here in Japan. For us, money was not the, I think, convincing factor. It was that they said that we will take your product to all their customers in Japan, right? And they were a much larger company at that point in time. So we said, sure, perfect. Sounds great. And we ended up raising billion dollars with them and starting our GTM for Japan.
00:30:36
Speaker
or integration, which with their product, they were also a product-oriented company. At SSP, they were a supply-side platform. And we started working on that integration with them, which we eventually realized that integration and any sort of product planning and how complicated or how procedural it is that it took almost one and a half years to move from that point to eventually launch it with a Japanese company. So many learnings along the way for that.
00:31:05
Speaker
But our fundamental product, by that time, the positioning we had understood, the product where that pivot was complete. Tell me the publisher experience for the V2 product. Like if I'm, let's say, running a new site of, let's say, like a million users every month, come and read it. So that would be like your kind of customer that you'd be going after. So what would be my experience? How would I sign up and how would it impact what I'm doing? Sure. Sure.
00:31:34
Speaker
So one big change which happened is that first version, most of our publishers, I would say 90-95% of them were AdSense users, right? They were all using Google AdSense. Now, since you're going for more larger accounts, big market or enterprise, this changed. 70-80% of them were ad exchange users, or DFP was the same thing as Google ad product, Google DFP users. So integration would change. What's the fault of DFP? Double click for publishers, but now it is for Google Ad Manager.
00:32:03
Speaker
And what is the difference between the AdSense and Ad Manager? How are these different? So, AdSense is like the retail product for small and medium publishers, where you set it and forget it. When you use Ad Exchange, that is a far more Ad Exchange and Ad Manager now, the ad serving tool, generally they've come coupled together.
00:32:30
Speaker
Exchange runner product is far more superior than actions because there is more control, like you have access to more premium advertisers and as an ad manager, you can run your direct sales campaigns also. So anything bought from India house or a larger media publisher, more control, more clarity, better analytics, better reporting, more details, something which a small publisher will never use also. It will be too complicated for them.
00:32:54
Speaker
industry specialized teams out here, then you have different teams in a more advanced setup, your mag operations team, you have your sales or revenue team. So it would manage the workflows for them, et cetera. So that information point would change. But I think one thing which was famous, the entry point is still the visual editor.
00:33:11
Speaker
We are showing you the ads. You can play with the ads. But one difference now is that when you put the ad to a platform, while you're connected to your ad exchange and everything and your demand seats, one thing, big difference is now we are running the auction. We are not simply just sending the ad call to Google and saying, okay, fill the unit. But isn't Google doing that like through their ad exchange, ad manager's program?
00:33:36
Speaker
They also participate in the auction, but since this is far more better product, we are able to make them compete. So we have a lot more control and granularity in terms of how we can offer. How are you able to make them compete? Like you have more, you have like integrations with multiple exchanges. Like, is it like say Shiprocket? Like I could directly use for logistics, like a delivery or something. But if I use Shiprocket and Shiprocket integration with all logistics partners and it lets me choose. Absolutely. Spot also.
00:34:05
Speaker
So basically now we are connecting and making Google compete with 10 to 15 other exchanges. So like it would be Google, Nadd, Inmobi and like all of the FMS. Yes. So suddenly
00:34:26
Speaker
What changes is, publishers who so far had never had a taste outside Google, where 90% of the programmatic, 95% of the programmatic revenue came from Google. 50-60% right, yeah. And because nobody had built that name, that code, which will make them compete efficiently. But the key bit here is that while AB testing our incremental revenue jump for three months, the cost is higher. If this is a bit, maybe 30-40-50% additional revenue,
00:34:53
Speaker
But after three months, if you remove our product, so that option can be incremented. So that's basically why now the product is far more sticky. And the last few years, for example, that much to the dividends for which we still are earning. For example, last year, we hardly lose customers. I mean, while accounts don't let them, you know, let the positive growth accounts at the break. But even on gross basis, we don't end up losing 3% of our customers.
00:35:20
Speaker
That became like, I think in hindsight, that was such a big thing that we sold early for. Had we not, I think our growth that we are seeing since the last few years, to give you some context, this year, we were the 33rd fastest growing company in North America. Last year, we were the 19th fastest growing company in North America. All without any additional capital after that last $2 million would have never happened.
00:35:43
Speaker
And what was your GTM? Like in Japan, of course, you had that GD partnership, but for other countries, and I'm guessing you would have wanted to focus on like US as a market. Absolutely. 100%. US has 50% of the overall programmatic market. So we were absolutely focused on that. And first lesson, as we discussed was the, you know, like when you, with iPhone 8, you have to close the data from the one cut out seven. Second was about the market.
00:36:10
Speaker
The market understanding is crucial. And third was, you have to start up partnerships. You have to work on your channel of acquisition. You have to match the segment of the market that you're going after. And we started doing a lot more of like ABM account based money for which we had
00:36:30
Speaker
re-created a playbook from scratch. In fact, I think we ended up building something really new while we had inbound and outbound. Outbound was this effort, which is that year cover for the sales team, where they're going after other accounts. We ended up developing something which internally we call marketing, which is the sales enabled marketing team, which is a very heavy ABM team, which majority of our revenue now comes with the help of this team. So one quick question here. Can you help me understand what is ABM?
00:36:58
Speaker
account-based marketing. So basically, when you're doing enterprise sales, or if you're looking at the higher end of the market, you can't say that, okay, the market is $10 billion and somebody will come inside the board. Let's find out. So you actually have to do that research and say, okay, when you're going after a larger account,
00:37:17
Speaker
You have to be very personalised based on the region that people are in, based on the language that they speak, etc. So you have to say, okay, India may have made a pass 25 accounts which qualify as my ICP. In state of, let's say, California made a pass 36 prospects which qualifies my ICP. So you have to actually drill down and make the decision.
00:37:40
Speaker
And you do account skill list, right? So, basically, account-based marketing. You're going after specific accounts. And what were you pricing it at? So, at that point in time, you would price it off of their revenue. Next, if a publisher is generating an X amount, we would put a performance from print that, this is my baseline. And whatever incremental revenue that we will generate, we'll take a percentage of that. And what was that percentage if you are at liberty to share?
00:38:06
Speaker
Yeah, we started at 10%. We expanded and grown back since then, but started at 10% of the incremental revenue or delta. I think by around 2017 or 2018, that playbook was like becoming very clear.
00:38:22
Speaker
We had started building more products like pre-bid, auction logic models, et cetera, all on top of it. And I think the team had slowly again started growing, which had shrunk from 25 to maybe 10 by people at one point in time, when we had no clarity of what to do, it had started growing again.
00:38:40
Speaker
they were all healthy science one thing which happened during that my co-founder left right and went back to the security business with two early years during that time which was perhaps one of the hardest thing you know when things weren't working out this was all before we actually got out that new product and how that new ad revenue optimization positioning works.
00:38:58
Speaker
Fast forward to today. Luckily in India, we cover most of the big media outlets from Vito, Network 18. We have had a lot of entity, for example, has been our customer for almost three years. And not just in the north and south, right from United. So a lot of regional publishers, we just onboarded Amaru Jala as well. And a lot of these regional publishers, etc.
Product Diversification & Innovations
00:39:20
Speaker
Like for example, NDTV's all display ads on NDTV website are being run through at pushup. Like at the back end at pushup is deciding which. We're running the auction. Correct. Correct. Correct. And now we have a lot of offerings, right?
00:39:36
Speaker
Back then, I think it was just option logic but today for example, we would be helping them also monetize their offerings. Now we also have video player. So today we would also be helping them monetize the ad block impressions. Somewhere around 2010 to 2015, ad blocker extensions were really quickly on the web, right?
00:39:55
Speaker
Right people would add it to the browser like on your Chrome browser you can have an ad blocker extension which will stop a banner ad from loading. All together in the first phase. Now the second phase of growth of ad blockers basically the ad blockers came to this conclusion that the problem and we are part of that study which happened very early.
00:40:13
Speaker
I think around 2016-2017, back then we did not have any commercial interest but we were as interested in the market, always exploring what ad blockers are. It is something of interest to our target persona or our buyer persona. So we are doing all this research when we realized that you'd be surprised that 70-80% of users who were installing ad blockers
00:40:33
Speaker
They were installing it because of those YouTube and Skittable ads. So back then, that was the number one reason why somebody would install the ad clock. Does it work? Like, does it help you get rid of that ad on YouTube? Yeah, it does. It does. And how does it do that? Like it just blocks the network ones to, you know, you know, advertising resources.
00:40:53
Speaker
Yeah. Get further research. Why don't you go on to block ads on websites? If they are like saying too flashy or too much of the pages covered with ads. So, so those were the top reasons why people, but it's not that consumer who wanted to kill media content creators or something. Their idea was, you know, just too many ads or, you know, it's an inseparable video ads. But once you install an adblocker, no matter as a publisher, if you're keeping that balance of ads or an author, it doesn't matter because it's locked all together. Right.
00:41:20
Speaker
So we were able to build in partnership with some of these ad blockers called the Acceptable Ads program where there is a threshold where you don't show too flashy ads. And people can of course opt out, but a lot, 70-80% of the adblock readers now opt into this program, which is basically that balance, right?
00:41:40
Speaker
you don't cover more than 15, 20% of the screen space, low flashy, you can block this website selectively. So that because of your one single installation, not every publisher suffers. So that whole management of that user experience or how ads are to be personalized and show to the users personalized, not in terms of the ad layout, because our product is ad layout for us, it's automatically built and built into it. So it was very complimentary. So that became an offering and it was very natural to us.
00:42:10
Speaker
There's not a very good desktop market in the first place. Okay. Ad blockers are more effective on desktop than on the phone. In the phone, you don't have that market. There's no crop intention. You can. Yes, exactly.
00:42:25
Speaker
So that, but yeah, in the US where most of our publishers are there, of course, the product was super useful. To the point that tech blogs, for example, 50% of their audiences would be using ad blockers. And once we bring in this accessible ad standard or the banons, they would be able to recover or recoup, let's say a sizable portion. Then AMP, for example, Google AMP project. What kind of tech blogs are working with you? So, so we have worked with like,
00:42:52
Speaker
very sizable tech blogs, more like Steenit, et cetera, for example, but in different markets. But I think one of our biggest publisher today, which we work in partnership is Yahoo. So even Yahoo's ad blog, Yahoo Finance, et cetera, they're being monetized to us today.
00:43:09
Speaker
So yeah, you were telling about the other features. So one feature was this monetizing ad blocker audience. Yeah, correct. So I can see the key is when we realized the job is still optimized. All of this became part of the product. And your incentives are so beautifully aligned because you will only earn if the publisher earns. If they get more revenue, then you get more revenue. So your incentives are
00:43:35
Speaker
Absolutely. Which also means that we can charge them a bit more, right? When that is common, when there is higher risk for us, the reward is also higher for us, right? So they were really trying to make sure that positioning accelerated mobile pages, right? The Google AMP projects, so that pages load faster. But then again, because there being a project where you can't run any script or something, there were limitations which publishers had.
00:43:59
Speaker
So we got part of the project in this open source project, which Google had initially first started, but now and very independently, we got our modules published, solved for that, and brought a lot of advertising technology and optimization systems so that publishers should also improve their revenues on their AMP pages. And this AMP, what is this AMP? Let's just explain that also.
00:44:20
Speaker
accelerated mobile pages. So basically, a few years ago, what problem which a lot of biggest internet companies including Google and Facebook realized is that the reach of the internet is basically the only thing stopping it today is especially in developing countries is slower internet, right?
00:44:38
Speaker
So, in countries where there is slower internet, especially mobile users, it is still extremely difficult. Think of those days, right? For an RFI, let's say think about pre geo data, even like in TR2, TR3, 2G, 3G. Yeah. Yeah. It was, even today you will find that in all places, mobile internet connectivity is not that strong. And that was because how HTML and web was like,
00:45:03
Speaker
It was just so complicated. It was not the early HTML days anymore. JavaScript, CSS, and all could become so heavy now. They came up with something called Instant Articles. Google started something to avoid a conflict of interest. It helped actually start something which now is completely open-source and immediately managed. The AMP called it Accelerated Mobile Pages. Once you put your website on the AMP format, it becomes a lot more lighter and faster.
00:45:30
Speaker
How do you get that format onto your website? Like, like, do you put in some code on your website or what is it like? Or is it a set of standards and you have to follow the standards? Correct. It's basically that conversion process. Actually, if you're a WordPress publisher, it can happen to a plugin, a very simple plugin.
00:45:46
Speaker
But there is a conversion process where a lot of your HTML content will basically get converted into predefined tags. It will not have a support for everything. So you won't be able to put a lot of custom JS and things like that. But it does end up becoming a lot more faster. So you build your website in an AMP compatible manner and there is some AMP specific code which the browser is able to understand and renders that page with less bandwidth being consumed. Correct.
00:46:16
Speaker
When it's a, when it's a mobile device with like whatever characteristics. Correct. Correct. Correct. So that then of course content creators. And in an AMP page, you can't really have banner ads and all because it would defeat the purpose.
00:46:29
Speaker
You can, you do have ads, but those are also like the ads and then the ad component is severely restricted. Right. So, so with those, while keeping those restrictions and like whatever sort of limitations of the platform, we were able to, for example, push in terms of tech, what we could do, right? Really hard being again, technology or developers or coders, you know, like, so.
00:46:51
Speaker
You know, like while restrictions of the platform existed, you were able to bring in that efficiency, optimization, et cetera. So that became an offering. And then off late, very recently as, and recently as a year ago, we started building that video player, right? Since for video ads, like as soon as you load a website, the video ad is playing on mute, something like that.
00:47:11
Speaker
So more so for like in-stream, in-stream is, you know, where like say people are consuming, like, for example, YouTube takes the biggest market, right? Or Netflix takes the bigger market, but then there is not an other OTT market. There is CTT. There's so many other companies, right? Which require video players. And some of them, of course, like CNET would have like video reviews of products on the website.
00:47:33
Speaker
Yes, absolutely. So for publishers which will have already a video content and will run it, need a platform to be able to monetize that video content, stream that video content. So that's what we started pouring into the video market as well. We ended up also launching a product called Glimpse. Now this is the first product outside the monetization sphere.
00:47:53
Speaker
where it is more for engagement. How do I make sure that I give a Wikipedia-like experience to an average internet website? For example, I don't know if you're aware or if you're conscious about it, but when you go to Wikipedia, you open one article, but you end up finding so many right-click-based hyperlinks that you end up seeing five or six other terms which you're curious about. Just like that, on a media property, you might have had hundreds of employees, your content creators,
00:48:22
Speaker
creating an article today would probably not remember an article which was related to something what they're creating today or to a term or something what is being discussed in the article right now, which somebody wrote, let's say, on the Christian team three years ago, right? Which is very relevant in the contextual line or term or something being used. So that collective knowledge does not exist. But being again, since our technology works,
00:48:44
Speaker
on the publishing space or like on the website, across the whole directory, like all the pages, we have that knowledge or intelligence about what each state or how large the website is. And as we plug in more information and context about the page, so we are able to bind it all together. So we brought in a small tool called Lynch, and basically is able to automate that process of like finding relevant links inside and connecting them to your pages. So sort of to give that Wikipedia experience,
00:49:13
Speaker
on every website, right? Improval engagement. So we started expanding, which I think is very important as once you're finally productive. Which would increase the time spent on the website, like users will spend more time because if I'm reading an article on a topic and there's a link in it about related
00:49:32
Speaker
Yeah, page use per session, the bounce rate goes down. So all your make press has improved. Now, not only are we selling to the revenue or ad operations team, but the product teams inside media companies are also using that product. So basically, a very sharded business strategy. And how does this get integrated? Like, if a publisher, like this would be a WordPress, if a publisher is using WordPress, then you give a WordPress integration or at the time of? In fact, the repress is already there. It's just a switch of a button, right? You don't have to do much.
00:50:02
Speaker
And you will have some sort of a machine learning algorithm, which will try and figure out which is the most relevant link for a specific set of words. Absolutely. So that motion started about a year and a half or two years ago. And while all of this is happening, as I said, we've established a lot more. We're of course, really scratching the surface even now. This is such a large market, especially if you look at US and Europe, I think market share would be still about one and a half percent based on recent estimates.
00:50:31
Speaker
You're looking at only large publishers here, like only 1% of large publishers are currently using at push-up. Yes, absolutely. In any case, the market itself, large publishers dominate or generate 80% of the market. So in terms of overall revenue, I think that's what basically is making up the market. So we are looking at enterprise also mid-market, but mid-market in the publishing.
00:50:53
Speaker
So publishers that don't use that push up, what do they use? Then alternatives? Now we do. Yes. We have a competition from two or three competitors. The market has evolved a lot compared to when it started last eight years ago. Who are those competitors? So there are companies like Freestar. There's companies like Modernize More, etc. Nothing Indian, which we compete in that international landscape. Of course, we also end up competing with indirectly with let's say small consultants or low product setups.
00:51:22
Speaker
which we end up basically displacing in most cases. Like there would be an agency who would be managing the monetization. Correct, correct, correct. So you would displace that agency. Absolutely. So that, and then AdSense replacement, that's a different market. There are some companies which do what we do that advertising, but they operate in a different market for that long tail, right? So we wouldn't consider them as competitors anymore.
00:51:44
Speaker
But revenge, predominantly if you will see in this market, even if you look at the charting accounts, the marked accounts that we have today, which we have identified that are going after, at least a billion, two billion dollars worth of revenue through those accounts, which we aim to go out, right? The market sizing that we have now.
00:52:01
Speaker
What's your current TRL? So our revenue is because as we said in the portion part, we take that of the higher revenue. So our growth and nets are different from what technical size this is. But what I can tell you is that last year we ended up hitting our goal, which was about $60 million in run rate on a gross 70 basis.
00:52:21
Speaker
I am not clear what is the difference here between gross and net. You say gross is the total revenue that your client generates, that is gross. Not what the client generates, that would be higher. But when we do this auction, for example, for our publisher, there is an extra delta.
00:52:38
Speaker
and when we create this more efficient auctioning for our publisher. In some cases, we also would bring in additional demand. For example, let's say the publisher has only Google and Permatic and Inmobi or a few other partners. In the last three, four years, what we've also built is 50 to 60 such relationships of her own. For example, maybe 2% of your traffic emissions could be coming from South America.
00:53:01
Speaker
Right? But you don't have any demand for which is South America. Whereas we would know that. So what we do is ask my permission would be generated, let's say $100 and we created a dental, let's say 60 or $70. So out of that 70 additional dollars that I'm bringing you, technically, I should be charging 10% and making $7, which he might see right my rent. But
00:53:25
Speaker
What ends up happening is why we take your revenue from $100 to $170. We're also bringing maybe some of these very, very niche demand partners, which you don't have access to and you haven't partnered with yet so far, which we are okay. Let's say if in the future, you know, for compute transparency, you would start working with them directly also or something.
00:53:47
Speaker
But for at least some time what ends up happening is that $170 while I'm still charged $70, but I may also be responsible for bringing some additional demand to you. So out of that $170, it is possible that maybe $30 is actually being generated through my platform, which I am being the publisher also. Correct. So for the 60 million run rate is basically that revenue, including what our fee is plus on top of that, some revenue, which we're generating for the publisher, which we pay out to them.
00:54:16
Speaker
How long is your sales cycle? Tell me how you onboard the public sales. So today, depending upon, I think the region that we are in, it changes a lot. In a true enterprise setup, it can easily take like a year. So I think six months to one year is very easy. And this is because there are multiple decision makers, plus there is some amount of time needed to also deploy even after they sign up.
00:54:40
Speaker
I'm not even including deployment or scaling office again. We've built a whole assembly line, right? From a small sales team now to a point where we've structured, this is basically three parts of the assembly line where there is the SDR team, which basically goes and does the sales development and identification. Actually, even before that, there's an MRE team which goes and finds all this data, right? Market research.
00:55:03
Speaker
The universe of leads basically. Yes, they will basically build this universe of companies to go after and do extensive research. So not just find the name of people, their designation companies, recapture more than like 70, 80 parameters about the country and the contact. So a very index search about each of these things, their preferences, their likes, etc, which is used a lot with us marketing, our bond teams, etc, which we use in targeting and personalization, etc. But
00:55:32
Speaker
From there, there is the SDR team, which tries to develop or identify the need. Basically there are, before somebody goes to the actual sales team or as you call it, there is something which we call as bank. So basically bank is a, basically this is a way of quantification to understand that if somebody's getting to be sold or not, right. And a lot of it is basically education. What's the full form of that bank?
00:55:57
Speaker
So, the first thing is a budget to make sure that we understand what the budget is, right? Inside the buyers.
Customization & Revenue Models
00:56:05
Speaker
Why does budget matter to you? Because you are, you're only getting paid if they get more revenue. Correct. But you know, in order to, for example, get to that point.
00:56:12
Speaker
In our case, that budget would mean qualification in terms of the size of the partnership. So bank is something which is in the traditional term which we implement, but the way we would borrow it is making sure that it is qualified in terms of size. But that is the first thing. Second is authority. Authority means the person we are talking to the organization are even relevant to the cross-border disorder.
00:56:33
Speaker
Correct. And understanding the authorities layer or decision-making layer, how they take decisions in the company. Third is the need. What is the need? What are the problems they're facing? What are the challenges they have? There's something we can solve. And it's not educating or developing it. The fourth T is for timeline. Is the need now or it needs solar education? So the HDR team will continue to work with them until his right to be sent to the sales team, right? When they're looking out for a solution, when they're
00:56:59
Speaker
In a way, if you can think about when that tender process opens, when you're invited to that dance, they're reviewing four or five vendors or whatever to select the partner to work with. And then the sales team, which is the account executives, which is basically they're going out and helping, ensuring the same decision-making and insurance, and we're able to showcase our best stuff forward based on the information we gathered through the SDR process.
00:57:23
Speaker
And then once the sale happens, the account management team is which basically inverters and scales the account. How manual is the process of scaling the revenue? So, I mean, your goal when you sign up a customer is to increase the revenue because you get 10 or some such percentage of what increase you generate. Is that all on autopilot?
00:57:43
Speaker
or is there also some manual intervention to grow that revenue? So, the manual intervention, so one big change again of our product from SMB to enterprises, whatever we would do give as a platform as self-service in SMB, right? Where people will do it themselves. Basically, running the tool and ensuring its success is now the account manager's job.
00:58:04
Speaker
So basically whatever manual work we have to do is basically triggering and running the tool. Okay. And planning the tool, you mean like deciding the optimal layout for the ads? Because the auction would anyway be automated, right? There would be no. So there are so many things in the auction logic as well, which are personalized, which you want to disallow, for example.
00:58:22
Speaker
Things like that. So there are so many components which for an enterprise tech, you know, which are configurable. I think configuring that in the tool is what becomes. And I think once in a while, of course, one in maybe 20 cases, there might be some, so if you're selling to enterprise, you can't be scared of customization.
00:58:37
Speaker
It's actually a feature. You generally build a peripheral team or around your engineering team because your core engineers, you shouldn't let them focus on the product. And as Girish of actual scholars, it's called the SaaS knife, which your sales team brings to your product or engineering saying, okay, if you don't give me this, we turn on or lose this account or whatever. And so basically those personalization and a little bit of customization are something which are inevitable.
00:59:02
Speaker
they have to go as part of the offering but i think one in twenty cases majority of the cases that go correct it's more around making sure that the customer is using the product correctly and we are able to really educate the buyer the customer in that case.
00:59:16
Speaker
So is it like a set and forget, like you do a one-time setup and then it just runs on its own? For 80% of the work, yes. Glimps would not be something you charge extra for, right? Because it is naturally adding to your revenue increase target. Like if a customer is reading three articles instead of one, then automatically the ad revenue will increase. Or do you charge separate from Glimps?
00:59:38
Speaker
So it depends if that is the only feature that you are using, then yes, we do charge separately, but that pricing eventually changes. In the first set of customers, we didn't charge them at all. Right. And now I think we build a sort of a pricing model around it, but we just store like fast-based. So I wouldn't say it's perfect at all, but as you, as you slightly said, the majority of the value which we get from this is also helping the first set of the business on the core offering. So it's very complimentary.
01:00:06
Speaker
And same would be the case for the Adblocker and the AMP products. They are essentially contributing to revenue growth. So, you anyway. Yeah, we don't have to. So, once somebody sends an offering to that product, the existing commercials are automatically in place. So, the account size increases. Got it. Amazing. Okay. I'm just curious about one thing. Why do publishers use this tabula and outbrain for monetization? Like, especially NDTV uses it a lot. And I just find that so irritating.
01:00:36
Speaker
Both these companies started off as content recommendation companies. I think I'm not sure where, but their initial objective was to improve the engagement on the website. So they were doing what lib says. But what we're doing is through recommended links, right? But they were showing them at the bottom of the article, etc.
01:01:01
Speaker
more articles that you need to consume, especially at the bottom of the article. Once you finish reading an article, you're at the end of the article, like, you know, like, okay, they would recommend more articles to read, right? Which makes so much sense. Like New York Times was the pioneer of this. Like I used to read at what times a lot. And at the end of every article, there would be like other articles.
01:01:21
Speaker
It makes sense. If you think about, if you find showing something relevant, as a curious person, I would definitely want to understand more about the subject. So a good percentage of your readers who reach that article in, that's what you want to understand. But I think eventually along the way, bring that business market straight, right? Why the personal market straight is great for engagement. There is an unnecessary need for, you know, like to make sure that it's also something which makes money for the publisher. And also for these companies is then like,
01:01:48
Speaker
They started putting ads inside some of these facelands, et cetera. Because it would be hard to get a publisher to pay you a fixed SaaS subscription. I mean, publishers anyway are struggling in the world of free content.
Growth Plans & Financial Insights
01:02:03
Speaker
So when we initially started, we were also positioned as per page view, et cetera. We learned very, very quickly that in the market that we're operating at, I mean, no more.
01:02:15
Speaker
Yeah, publisher's current. Yeah, publisher's love that delta. The delta is amazing for them because they are not stretched about money and if I'm generating and bringing them more, they're also very happy because psychologically they're not paying me anything out of their pocket. Technically I'm paying them.
01:02:32
Speaker
Like even after I interviewed the founder of iZuto, I don't know if you heard of them. We have great partners, we do. So they also have the same model, like they will... Yep, yep, they are 500%. Depublish the notification technology and they will monetize by including few ads.
01:02:53
Speaker
Yep. One of the events that we did in Dubai this year was actually in partnership. I mean, I've known Wake since a very long time. We wake in need. So they're also from Moira. So based here. So what are you thinking of doing in terms of like the roadmap on how you can improve monetization further for publishers? Like how could you help them earn more? Because that's the bottom line for you also, right? Like if you can help them to earn more. So what are some of those ideas you have?
01:03:19
Speaker
Absolutely. So I think as I told you, in terms of the market penetration, we're really stretching the surface. As far as the product is concerned, the way we look at it now is one is our core monetization, auction logic product, right, which is ad revenue optimized engine. And then we have all these peripheral products.
01:03:36
Speaker
which is Glims, AMP, Video Player, Ad Blocker. And we're actually now also looking to acquire some early next year other products which we can include as part of our overall product suite. Like the notification product of iZoot or something like that or other such. Like publisher-focused products which help them monetize.
01:03:57
Speaker
Publish a focus. Yes, not necessarily any specific category, but yes, publish a focus product actually on which can help other people with the same persona. Very recently we worked on a model to which it's a bit technical, but how we do bit caching, like let's say if you.
01:04:13
Speaker
had an advertiser which participated on a specific ad and they didn't win. But can I cash that bid and then use it for the next auction wherein maybe that bid might be higher than the other auction bids that we got for the same user bid. So I'm not sure if I was able to explain it, but in very simple terms, if I can just not finish and remove my auctions which were unused and bid them over to be subsequent
01:04:38
Speaker
Highly technical, but we keep up these all 1 or 2% optimizations compound together beautifully. And then video is an excellent market. We've found that there are companies generating hundreds of billions of dollars of net revenue, building legacy products, etc. Even newer companies which are in that space and our revenue from video is still a very small portion of our revenue.
01:05:02
Speaker
So I think we found a lot of glimpse in itself has so many opportunities and use TSS even outside the publishing space for content marketeers, bloggers alike. So I think we're just realizing that for each of the programs that we have, what beautiful journeys that we can build. And I think next year, but one big thing that we are also excited about is
01:05:22
Speaker
trying to understand how maybe our first acquisition would look like, because it's always tricky, bringing in new products, making sure they succeed. We've seen cases where most acquisitions don't work, right? And how do you bring in more founders from outside in as sort of talent and things like that. Do you plan to raise more funds for funding the acquisitions or do you want to do it through internal accruals?
01:05:45
Speaker
We have actually been massively cast to a positive, very, very profitable. I think we have enough cash. Although we've gotten just in the last 12 months, two acquisition offers, maybe five or six sheets for investment, et cetera. Yeah. We might consider debt, to be honest, if required, like long-term debt. But the idea is to first maybe just fuel it
01:06:09
Speaker
using the cash flow that we've accumulated. What do you think will be your gross revenue this year, end of 2022-23? So far, I've worked with projecting it, because since we're almost losing the year in quarter four for us, it's very, very significant. One role which will be important with the overall economic situation of the US has not been great this year, right?
01:06:29
Speaker
So that's simply on how much that impact revenues for tech in general. But I think from our estimates, they will end up closing this year, about 40 to 50% higher than last year. So this is more for the financial revenue from the last year. So when we say we did similar in terms of run rate, that is the revenue reached by the end of the year, right? But our actual book revenue, for example, last year was more closer to let's say 36, 35 million dollars.
01:06:58
Speaker
So again, your run rate in a couple of months would be hitting $100 million. So in this case, the number idea is more around regional book revenue. So this year, for example, we'll end up closing our revenue between around $45 million on our book revenue.
Conclusion & Audience Engagement
01:07:13
Speaker
Our run rate this year is something which we're not projecting yet. We're not sure of yet this time because I think it will depend a lot more on the economic situation. But of course, the objective is to be again, 30, 40% higher than $60 million we did last year.
01:07:27
Speaker
Yeah. And like you must have a pretty lead team, right? In terms of, I mean, it's not like a very ops heavy business. You need like these high quality sales resources and tech resources, but you don't need a lot of them. So yeah, from an overall team size of 150 people, the operational teams per se that we would have would be maybe about 10 people, 10, 12 people.
01:07:50
Speaker
And that brings us to the end of this conversation. I want to ask you for a favor now. Did you like listening to this show? I'd love to hear your feedback about it. Do you have your own startup ideas? I'd love to hear them. Do you have questions for any of the guests that you heard about in the show? I'd love to get your questions and pass them on to the guests. Write to me at ad at the podium dot in. That's ad at t h e p o d i u m dot in.