A Serial Entrepreneur’s Journey: Moshe Vaknin, CEO of YouAppi (Part 5)

Moshe Vaknin: In the beginning of 2013, we did a shift. We decided that we wanted to focus on B2B. We didn’t change the core but rather than having an app, we said, “Let’s get to publishers who have a lot of users. Through their content, we’ll recommend to users.” Earlier, the dream was to build my own channel of inventory. That’s not a sustainable concept.

Sramana Mitra: It’s very expensive to build that kind of audience.

Moshe Vaknin: Expensive, and there’s no stickiness. Facebook has done a good job but with just discovering apps, it’s not enough. It was a pretty good shift. It was not easy because not enough data was available. We had to make the technology much more sophisticated to be able to make the recommendations to the users. When you promote an app, the ROI is very challenging.

To install an app costs $2. In order to drive and keep your users, you must find inventory that’s not expensive. There’s no way that the publisher will get the right CPM and the value on the return. That took us time to understand and learn. It was not an easy thing to do. When we started, Facebook didn’t exist. It didn’t exist in mobile. Just think about it.

Sramana Mitra: Amazing how things have changed in just so few years.

Moshe Vaknin: Exactly. Facebook came. We were not scared because we had a good story. 50% of the people will be on Facebook 50% of the time. There are other things to do. People watch TV on mobile devices, read content, and play games. We planned to go after the users that are not always on Facebook. We started to build relationships with big publishers of  photo sharing apps, security apps, and a lot of the utility and productivity apps that have hundreds of millions of users. They wanted to monetize and get revenue. They had a pretty good CPM.

We were able to get very big publishers join us. We had a reach of about 1.5 billion users. We started to build our technology focused on driving high-quality users for the advertisers. Big advertisers started to like us. There’s another opportunity here in the business as there’s another shift in the mobile. All of a sudden, advertisers are now not just looking at downloads. They were not interested anymore in ranking higher in the stores. They focused on quality.

Sramana Mitra: Stickiness – not just downloading but actually people using and sticking to the app.

Moshe Vaknin: Lifetime Value of a client has taken place. It’s a big thing.

Sramana Mitra: When you found that, was your technology equipped to deliver on that demand from the customers?

Moshe Vaknin: Yes, it is. Our strategy was to focus on big advertisers. We didn’t build the system for the long tail. We were able to capture very big advertisers. We’ve been working with the big agencies. We started to grow our business. Luckily, the business expanded very fast. We grew our offices around the world. We have about 11 offices today. We are close to a hundred people. We just moved to profitability. People here work very hard.

Sramana Mitra: How is the company set up? Is it operating mostly from Israel?

Moshe Vaknin: We have about 45 people in Israel and 26 in San Francisco. Then we have another five in Europe. We have a big office in China. We have four people in Indonesia.

Sramana Mitra: Where is the revenue traction coming from? What have you learned from the market in terms of the source of quality revenue?

Moshe Vaknin: When we started, we had about 70% of our revenue coming from the US. Today, it’s about 45%. There’s good growth around the globe. We see countries like Indonesia. They are now more exposed to apps. India is doing very well. The Russian market is back after a couple of difficulties on their economy. We see big advertisers from US like Uber want to go global. That’s the beauty of mobile. If you build a business, you can easily do it globally.

This segment is part 5 in the series : A Serial Entrepreneur’s Journey: Moshe Vaknin, CEO of YouAppi
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