Dan Novaes
speaker
169 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2025
last heard Jun 2025
Dan Novaes’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
That's the one thing that you learn, you know, from those hardships along the way is how to make like some of our OKRs internally is like revenue per team member. You know what I mean? So we have goals, you know, like what is the revenue per team member?
And then if it starts getting out of whack, then, you know, you have to, you know, either create more revenue or be like, hey, look, are we being as efficient as we possibly need to be? But yeah, I mean, that's kind of how we think about it.
Yeah, I mean, people spend my highest cost is engineering and product because...
know fundamentally like we have certain business models that are the way to kind of think about mode is like we actually have three different divisions in our business we kind of have like a media uh division a mobile division which is our core business and then we have like now this like money division which is kind of like some of the stuff we're doing within like the financial services space but um and some of those divisions are way more profitable than others because they're almost like you know be able to use the resources like i'll give you an example like
When we were trying to find new revenue outlets and after that whole thing, debacle in 2022 that we had, that we had to kind of really pivot the business and find new revenues, we realized, Hey, you know, we have like 45 million emails that people, uh, you know, came into our service. And what do we know about this? Do you like to earn and save?
Okay, let's create some newsletters to basically tell them about earnings and savings. And now that's a mid seven figure a year business for us with extremely high gross margin, because all we're doing is doing something that like literally would just be an afterthought as a business person. Like I wasn't even monetizing emails at that time. And then it's turned into something.
So that's kind of like, obviously that business line, maybe they're way more offensive on like sales and kind of getting new advertisers in. But the core business, you have to invest in research and development. If I wanted to operate just for pure profits, only profits, we wouldn't need the amount of engineering and kind of product team that you have.
But now we're very disciplined on like, okay, how do we spend and where do we want to make those investments? And how long are we willing to wait before an investment comes in return on a specific product area?
And I think the other thing, too, is 2022, the way you operate your company, 2021, 2022, with the soft banks of the world kind of funny and $200 million rounds, it was like growth at all costs. Yeah, growth at all costs, IPO, whatever. And then all the growth investors were basically underwater. Whatever you do, don't try to profit.
Just don't make money.
Whatever you do, don't make any money. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Invest your valuation off. And now it's the opposite. Yeah, now it's the opposite. And I don't know. We had to change a lot of our... like even the payback cycle, like we used to wait like six to nine months before we even got breakeven.
And now it's like 45 days or less, you know, that we wait to basically, you know, turn a profit on the acquisition costs of a user versus, you know, six to nine months.
Yeah, I mean, it's both. I mean, you're getting inbound calls for sure. But I think anytime that you're setting up a new business line, you still have to go. I mean, it's like attention, attention. There's like so much happening at all times. And I think that, you know, you need to be able to pierce those new channels. And also it creates competition too, you know, in that sense.
So I think like for us, like,
we are getting approached uh a lot of like you know partnerships and inbound but we're also looking at you know what are other ways that we can grow our business and again going back to this that concept i mentioned to you like that's something that wasn't even my brain like a couple years ago which is like this idea of like you know i'm in the business of like the moment that that action occurs our revenue kind of ends right and uh and that's fine you know but um
If you could capture the lifetime value of someone through a product that you build that people like, so that could be a game, that could be a utility app, whatever.
and that business in itself already has good cash flow, then you're basically creating like this insane kind of roll-up strategy and you're kind of sending your consumers into a new product, you're getting those consumers and you're creating a really strong network effect. And I think that's what you saw with Facebook and acquiring Instagram or acquiring WhatsApp.
And not every acquisition needs to be a multi-billion dollar acquisition. What we've seen a lot of opportunity has been like, there's just these random teams, man. Like we bought this product earlier here in January, had 150 million installs, you know, about 2 million daily active users and, you know, like nine or so million monthlies.
And the app was like doing like $4 million, almost $4 million in EBITDA a year, right? Team of four, team of four people, right? And overseas, total cost, 15K a month. And I was just like,
as possible you know and then we vetted it like we went through the diligence vetted it we came up to a deal term it was under 3x even i like the purchase and uh you know there's these opportunities out there right you just got to find them and then now we're growing that product double its revenues you know we kind of took all of our insights and now we're creating that network effect and so it's basically kind of your users to that
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