SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1001 Why People Pay Him 30% of Spend For His AdTech Platform
21 Apr 2018
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is the Top Entrepreneurs Podcast, where founders share how they started their companies and got filthy rich or crash and burn. Each episode features revenue numbers, customer counts, and other insider information that creates business news headlines. We went from a couple of hundred thousand dollars to 2.7 million. I had no money when I started the company.
It was $160 million, which is the size of many IPOs.
We're a bit strapped. We have like 22,000 customers. With over 5 million downloads in a very short amount of time, major outlets like Inc. are calling us the fastest growing business show on iTunes. I'm your host, Nathan Latka, and here's today's episode. Hello, everyone. My guest today is David Beniollio. He is the CEO and founder of a company called Real Content Network.
And he spent the last 25 years at the intersection of technology and marketing as a software designer, marketer, salesman, project manager, executive. And you know how it is. You wear all the hats when you're launching stuff. He's a startup junkie and loves creating new things. David, are you ready to take us to the top?
Let's do it.
All right. What does Real Content Network do and how do you make money?
All right, so Real Content Network works with both publishers, big publishers, digital publishers, and advertisers to deliver native campaigns, content, premium content in a lot of cases, at scale. So the insight that I'd had as a marketer, so back on the client side, was that getting past banners and even getting past Video advertising, the next generation for me as a marketer was native.
In the past, we'd call it integrated campaigns, custom campaigns.
Branded content.
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Chapter 2: What is the Real Content Network and how does it operate?
That makes more sense. 30 to 50. I didn't know why you were saying 50 to 30%. It's going backwards. 30 to 50. Okay. I didn't know that. Okay. So 30 to 50% is what you're taking. So just to be clear, if somebody puts, you know, you know, a million dollars through you, you're going to take between 300,000 and 500,000 yourself of that for packaging the content in the first place.
Packaging content technology. Obviously we run a technology operation for just sort of pulling it all together.
Got it. Okay. And give me a sense of, of kind of growth. So when did you launch the company?
Launched in 2015. Okay. Through 2015, it's interesting. So obviously you can imagine there were some pivots, right? So at our first iteration, we were trying to match, we were putting advertisers directly into a marketplace with these publishers. And then we would try to get them working together. The growth model there, we didn't find, it wasn't really moving fast enough. And
you know, advertisers weren't sophisticated enough to create and package these things on their own. So, um, it was relatively slow, maybe, uh, somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred, $150,000 in revenue in the first year. Um, and call it that's in transaction volume or your cut. That's in transaction volume, but that's just first year is piloting, right?
We're just getting, so you did like call it 40 to 60 grand that year in revenue for yourself.
Yeah, exactly.
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Chapter 3: How does David Benoliel define native advertising?
Today, we're into 2017, almost into 2018. We're on the neighborhood of 150 websites and transact somewhere in the neighborhood. Call it 100 million page views a month and generate over $300,000 a month or so, $400,000 a month in gross earnings that are running through the platform. So, uh, what does that mean?
Like, do I take 300 grand times 30% to get your cut?
Yeah, that would be, that would be an interesting, that'd be a good number.
So you're doing about, and that's monthly. Yep. Yeah. Okay. So you're doing about 90 grand a month. Yep. Yeah. That's great. Interesting. And what's the team size today?
We are six people.
Okay. Where's, and where's home all Canada?
Let's, Yeah, all in Canada. I have a partner. His name is John. He handles the biz dev side of it. I handle ad ops and product for the most part. There's some ad ops people and one person who handles content for the most part. There's a lot of work to be done there. And we actually outsource some of our development as well, basically in different parts of the world, actually.
And have you bootstrapped or have you raised?
bootstrap great that's good a couple friends helped out but i mean for the most part it's uh no real nothing nothing substantial in terms of funding and what's growth rate look like so december 2017 you'll do about 90 grand this month based off 300 000 going through your platform taking back 12 months december 2016 what were those numbers last year this time about a third of that okay so about 30 grand per month on call it 100 grand in volume
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Chapter 4: What is the revenue model for publishers using the Real Content Network?
Again, launched the Real Content Network back in 2015, did about 100 grand in volume through his platform as an ad tech platform. He takes about 30 to 50% each year. They grew that in 2016 to about, oh, about 30 grand a month in revenue on about 100 grand in volume.
And then fast forward to now, December 2017, doing about 300 grand in volume each month, taking about 90 grand for themselves as they invest with their team of six people up there in Canada in building up the tech to make this happen. a more efficient process, really, packaging custom-branded content to these publishers. They're working with 150 of them right now, totally bootstrapped.
David, thank you for taking us to the top.
Great, Heath. Great, man. Great meeting you. Thanks for reaching out. Have a great day.