Breaking the Norm: Maxine Manafy, CEO of Bunndle (Part 5)

Sramana: Your real value proposition is mobile to mobile ads, cross network. Is that correct?

Maxine Manafy: Yes, and on top of that we have targeting capability. There is an ability to have all of this data and leverage the targeting to make sure the ads were properly matched. One of our clients may not know that security goes well with banking, but we can provide that for them because we have seen that match work well. We can help the advertiser spend less time and money by targeting the user who really wants that app.

Sramana: Who were your first customers?

Maxine Manafy: Our first customer was WinZip, which is a Corel company. They are still with us, and we love them to this day because they took such a big risk on us. I had tried to do a deal with WinZip at a prior company and it did not work out. I reached out to them when I started this company and I asked them if they would be interested in working with us. They were very open, and the terms were very different.

Sramana: When did you start making revenue?

Maxine Manafy: We starting bringing in real money in June of 2011. We raised money in June of 2010 and again in July of 2011.

Sramana: Between June 2010 and April, you said you did not have a real development team and that you used contractors. How did you find them, vet them, and manage them?

Maxine Manafy: I think contractors are a good use of seed money. That can’t be your code forever, but it will get you started. I did a lot of research, asked for referrals and looked really hard. One of my investors ultimately referred me to someone and he was very solid. He built the very first prototype. I also outsourced to a contracting firm with engineers in Romania. That was really just to get a back-end website up to enable me to get deals done quickly instead of manually. We don’t use any of that code base today. I used that code base to provide a minimum viable product.

Sramana: What happens after you started bringing in real revenue in 2011? What came next?

Maxine Manafy: I hired my first engineer. We continued to hire more engineers and built our analytics platform for our customers. Once we built that we developed the next generation of our SDK and installer. After that we built a self-service tool which allowed me to step back and not have to do a lot of that work manually. That allowed us to increase revenues and sell more.

Sramana: So at this point advertisers could go in and talk to publishers and make deals on your platform, and then use your platform for the integration?

Maxine Manafy: They would not even have to talk to the publisher. They could see the publisher listing there and send them a request. It made us more of a marketplace. At that point we had maybe 30 customers which was big for us. Now we have 150 in our network.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Breaking the Norm: Maxine Manafy, CEO of Bunndle
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