SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
MonetizeMore Bootstrapped to $5m Run Rate in AdTech Space
18 Aug 2020
Chapter 1: What is MonetizeMore and how does it operate in the ad tech space?
We accept the revenues on behalf of the publishers and some we don't, especially the big ones. So the 3 million is an estimation of the ones we don't as well. In June, we were close to 400,000.
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Now look, I never want money to be the reason you can't listen to episodes. On the checkout page, you'll see an option to request free access. I grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. Hello everyone, my guest today is Kian Graham. He's the founder and creator of a company called MonetizeMore.com, which empowers ad monetized publishers. All right, Kian, you ready to take us to the top?
Absolutely. Okay. So walk us through this. This is obviously in the ad tech space. Is it a SaaS platform or is it a different monetization strategy?
It's a SaaS plus a service. So it's kind of like a combination.
Okay. So help us really understand that. Over the past 12 months, if you add up all your revenue, what percent was SaaS versus service?
It's combined for most publishers. So it kind of breaks down. We have starter publishers, which resells a demand source that is like the premium version of AdSense called AdExchange. We have Pro, where we sell an auction technology. And then we have Premium, which is a white glove service.
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Chapter 2: What percentage of revenue comes from SaaS versus service for MonetizeMore?
Okay. Describe one of the customers that pays you. Can you name one?
Yeah. One of them, boardpanda.com, Lifehack. We're big and growing in the LATAM region. So we have a lot of big Brazilian pubs, for example. And we typically focus on the premium end. That's kind of a difference versus our competitors. We go for the larger, more sophisticated publishers.
So BoardPanda.com, again, big publisher, art, photography, animals, funny, featured, all this stuff. Are they a LATAM-focused company?
No, they have traffic from all over the world. They're based in Europe.
So how do they walk us? Do they sign up with you guys? How do you help them?
So before they were running Google AdSense to monetize their ad inventory. And then we started working with them. We've replaced their technology with our auction technology. And rather than Google just competing for their ad inventory. We created this auction where Google competes against Facebook, Amazon, Index Exchange, all these different bidders.
Our technology chooses the highest bidder and places the advertiser in the ad placement. And we do that for hundreds of millions, sometimes billions of ad impressions. And that creates a large revenue increases. And we take a revenue share of that.
I see. And is the rev share the 5% of your business that you call service or the rev share is the SaaS part of the business? It's the SaaS part of the business. I see. Okay, interesting. So just to be clear, Monetize More helps publishers like BoardPanda pit Google against Facebook against other sort of platforms in terms of helping them get the best CPC or CPM. Yep. Interesting. Okay.
And so I guess give us some context here, what you're a geological company in. Sorry? When did you launch the company? What year? 2010. 2010. Okay. And then did you bootstrap or decide to raise? Bootstrap from the beginning. Bootstrap. Love that, man. Very cool. And what's the team size today? How many folks? Over 160. Okay. 160 people spread out through the world or what do they look like?
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Chapter 3: Who are some of the notable customers using MonetizeMore's services?
And there's a lot of people that are bringing these sorts of teams in house to do ads because of this sort of ad tax where there's platforms like you that sit in the middle. Now, to be fair, I've heard of other founders where they're charging way more than 15 to 20% sitting in the middle. So I would say that you're pretty competitive there. But how do you think about that?
Yeah, yeah, for sure. Some really push on the revenue share side. You know, negotiation is really important in our industry. However, you know, we compete with quality. You know, I spoke about our auction technology, our reporting platform. We have other tools that are not offered by our competitors. And that's really what we bring to the table is that quality. We're a product led business.
And, you know, we want to compete on quality rather than price.
I think that makes good sense. And so how many of these publishers, how many of these customers are you working with now today? Over 300. 300. Wow. Okay. Got it. So just to fill out earlier, when you said you had 500 sellable leads come in and 160 qualified, was that in like June or what was the time they just came in?
That was last month.
Yeah. In June. Okay. And so of the 160 using your sales reps, about how many will you close converting to new customers?
Of those, we had a sell through of 26%. So that would give about like 40.
Yeah, 40 new customers. That's great. Okay, wow. So you really grew your customer base a ton in June. I mean, you went from 260 to 300 customers.
Yeah, things are really popping. It might be pandemic and the pie definitely shrunk during the pandemic. However, we've really hit our stride. We kind of had a big kind of growth mark in Q4, which continued into 2020.
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Chapter 4: How does MonetizeMore help publishers optimize their ad revenue?
Okay. And give me a sense of volume you're processing. So in June, how much ad spend went through your platform?
Overall, in June, there was... About 3 million.
About 3 million. Okay, great. So how do you, I mean, how do you get like 3 million? How do you turn that into 10 million and 30 million? Is that like, how do you, let's just say you can't add any new customers. You can only expand accounts. How do you get a larger portion of the inventory from those publishers?
And how do you win that inventory over from them using, you know, and selling it directly to Google?
Yeah. Well, typically what happens, especially with the large publishers, is they only want to start a little bit, right? They want to do like a split test to see if you can outperform what they're currently running. So they'll start you at 10%. And then once you kind of prove that you can make them more money, then they'll expand you more and more. So it's about winning this split test.
Sometimes we're doing split tests against competitors. So it's about winning these split tests. It's about having very efficient technology. So we're not slowing down the page. You know, about having these other upsell tools. Like, for example, another tool that we recently launched is called Traffic Cop, and it detects and blocks invalid traffic.
So it prevents these publishers from getting banned by, say, Google AdSense and losing all their unpaid ad revenues overnight.
Don't some of these publishers, though, intentionally use some of these bots themselves to drive more clicks to their sites, specifically so they can monetize more?
Yes, some of it is pump-induced. And we have to be, you know, kind of investigators to make sure we separate the ones who are genuine versus the ones who are not. And our traffic cop tool is part of that. We've also come up with other type of violations that publishers can do on purpose, like we call ad setup policy violations.
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Chapter 5: What is the company’s strategy for growth and customer acquisition?
We're talking top 1,000 ad monetized publishers. Our BHAG is to have 25% market share of the top 1,000 ad monetized publishers, and we're building solutions that are better fit for these enterprise publishers that are very sophisticated and need to be approached in a different way.
And so help me under, so, so people are going, okay, I wonder if, I wonder if Kean can execute that. They're going to think, well, okay, well, what has he grown out historically? So if you're doing 300, 400 grand a month today, what were you doing a year ago? Do you remember?
A year ago we were at, for June, it was around 225.
So you still even have growth, even though sort of COVID has, you know, you know, just shocked the world.
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. We've grown despite COVID in Q1. We were at close to around double revenue growth. It slowed down a bit for the pandemic, but we're still rolling along and still have that momentum from the growth back in Q4.
Besides your SEO strategy, you mentioned your YouTube channel. Are there any other channels you're using to drive growth? Again, you had 500 leads come in in June alone.
We also have a free Chrome extension called PubGuru Ad Inspector. And what it allows publishers to do is they'll run it on their actual site that is ad monetized, and it'll crawl the whole page, find any errors, any warnings, any revenue opportunities, and it'll make very specific recommendations for their site to realize those opportunities or fix those errors.
There's actionables of how to fix each one of those. And some of those are natural upsells to our products, right? We detect they're not running any IVT detection. then we will upsell Traffic Cop. If they're not running any auction monetization, which you call header bidding, then we'll recommend PubGuru header bidding.
There's a lot of natural upsells within there that we've also been getting a lot of leads from. And the audience that's running PubGuru and Inspector has been growing consistently week to week.
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