SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
679: Mobile Majority $25M raised, Acquires Qualcomm's Gimbal To Lead Mobile Ad Attribution Using Beacons w/ CEO Rob Emrich
03 Jun 2017
Chapter 1: What is The Mobile Majority and its business model?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per talk. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark.
And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. This is episode 679. Coming up tomorrow morning, I talk to Reply.io CEO Oleg Campbell. He tells us how to start a SaaS company with very little in savings.
Chapter 2: Why did Rob Emrich acquire Gimbal and what are its benefits?
good morning everybody my guest this morning is rob emmerich he's a serial entrepreneur currently involved in his latest venture as the founder and ceo of the mobile majority he's founded and served as chief executive of six startups and social ventures including road of life which distributed a 70 million dollar curriculum bulk which was acquired by deal yard in 2011
and boundaryless brands which is acquired in 2011 along with speaker site uh we'll link up to his show notes uh to his site directly at rob emmerich.com in the meantime rob are you ready to take us to the top sure all right so you you're juggling kind of a bunch of uh or you have juggled a bunch of different stuff let's uh let's just start with the mobile majority so what does it do and what's the what's the business model how does it generate revenue
Sure. So we actually just bought a company that was spun out of Qualcomm called Gimbal. And I don't know when this podcast comes out, but by the time it does, I'm assuming that we will have finished that branding merger. And so we'll be going by the trade name Gimbal. G-I-M-B-A-L.
Yeah. And this will be coming out. People are listening to this on June 3rd.
Chapter 3: How does data drive success in online marketing according to Rob?
That's what today is. We're recording it obviously way earlier. So Rob, you're changing the whole name. It'll be called Gimbal.
Yeah, so we are going to be taking on the name of the company we acquired for a variety of reasons. Probably most fun because they have the dot-com and we go with the dot-co.
Is this gimbal.com, G-I-M-B-A-L? Yes. Okay, so walk me through this. Why buy this business?
Chapter 4: What role do beacons play in mobile ad attribution?
What do you like about it?
Sure, so, you know... I'm of the belief that really what drives success in online marketing is data, specifically about people and about their intention, right? So online, it's been pretty well executed with cookies. So wherever you visit online, if you're shopping online,
There is a way to attribute spend to target specific people, target specific people that do something online based on their online behavior, and then attribute your spend to that person whenever their actions are. And my previous companies that you mentioned, most of them were in the e-commerce space. The fact is that more than 90% of all commerce still takes place offline.
And there's not really a good way to do attribution for offline. Cookies don't work.
Chapter 5: How did Qualcomm's innovation culture impact Gimbal's development?
Yeah, well, I mean, you're like when you go into Walmart, you're not using a browser, right? So the mobile phone ends up becoming sort of this bridge between the offline world and the online world. But we're missing an incredible amount of data for both targeting as well as for attribution. And at the end of the day, you know, I think online marketers are geniuses and those same
to do the same thing offline. And so there's no way to know, for instance, if a large auto advertiser is spending money to try to get people into either a local dealership or a national campaign, how effective was it? And so generally, the way that they measure those type of things is by mid-funnel engagement. They'll say something to the effect of not just how many people saw it,
There's a big problem with view abilities still. But how many people actually clicked?
Chapter 6: What was the deal structure for acquiring Gimbal?
And then they're getting smarter so that they're saying, how many people tried to locate a dealer? How many people built a car in the mobile app or whatever the medium was? And so that's as far as you can get right now as a large brand advertiser is an intermediate step. With the technology that we bought and the data that comes with it, we really bought it for the data.
We're able to now say for every campaign that we've run, this is how many people that saw an ad that ended up on a car lot.
and they were on a car lot for an hour and 15 minutes we're able to calculate things like dwell time and did somebody take a a um you know a test drive did they visit two or three other dealerships in the course of the next two weeks and so offline behavior ends up being an incredibly strong signal of intent
and it also ends up being a very accurate way to measure uh attribution rob just to be clear that technically the way you're doing this is with beacons i imagine right that's what gimbal uses right so um these are this is an example of one of the beacons that we manufacture got it and guys if you're listening to this on itunes you want to go check it out on youtube but rob's holding up one of those beacons so you can see what it looks like yeah so um
Beacons are, they use Bluetooth low energy and Qualcomm, you know, I believe that they had invested around over $100 million in this technology of basically ultra low battery consumption for a mobile SDK and also the hardware and the firmware that runs off of these beacons. But the only thing that beacons do that GPS doesn't is that they are incredibly precise, right?
So when we're working with GPS to understand the location of a device, it can be accurate 10 meters, 15 meters, something like that.
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Chapter 7: How does The Mobile Majority generate revenue?
With a beacon, it can get down to a centimeter, right? So it depends on the use case. If you're in a retail environment and you want to understand, for instance, the grocery store, if you have somebody that you were able to successfully drive to spread
aisle like was that particular ad effective um or message effective um that's where beacons become very important makes sense and rob when when you look at the gimbal deal i mean uh i mean and obviously it was a qualcomm was this like a subsidiary they were looking to offload and if so like how'd you get the deal and what i mean what'd you pay for it how'd you value it right so qualcomm spun out gimbal and i believe four other companies in 2014 as a larger um
of develop a culture of innovation in Southern California. Again, you know, I don't work at Qualcomm, so this is sort of what I understand from my interaction. And obviously that is one of the most incredible success stories that there is in our country about a technology company running. Sure. So they're a very research-driven culture.
And when they spun out the enterprise in 2014, I think it was, it's a challenge for big companies to innovate, right?
Chapter 8: What insights does Rob share in the Famous Five segment?
It's a big, big challenge for big companies to innovate. And they do that very successfully. I think it becomes harder as you get along that commercialization curve. So, you know, many times they'll have a piece of IP, like, you know, something that they built that they know has a commercial application, but it's not necessarily in the DNA of a big company to make, to commercialize it well.
They don't have that hustle.
Yeah. Rob, real quick. I don't want to run out of time on this because we only have 15 minutes. I want to talk more about your beginning story as well. Can you just tell me how you valued the asset? I mean, how did you look at the valuation?
Sure. In a sale, the only thing that matters is how much one party's willing to pay to the other. And so that was it. It was a market bid and we were bidding against some very large companies. There were financial considerations, non-financial considerations. It was a complicated deal.
Did you do it in terms of, don't tell me the deal size, but in terms of structure, I mean, was it all cash or did Qualcomm get equity in the majority or what?
Yeah, it was a lot of those different things. Okay, so it was a mix. Yeah, cash, debt, equity.
You got creative. Very creative. That's good. Now, total funding from the mobile majority, what, around 10 million bucks? I think we've raised around 25 million, right? Oh, 25 million, great. And when did you launch the company?
Right after I sold my last companies in 2011, I started working on this. We really didn't start actually operating until the beginning of 2012.
And how did you decide? I mean, you had success as a founder already. You had an exit. Now, true or false, you were totally financially set after your first exits, right? Or were you still trying to create a business to generate some capital so you were like, you know, paying your rent every month?
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