Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Ranker CEO Clark Benson (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: When did you launch Ranker?

Clark Benson: We launched it in August of 2009.

Sramana Mitra: When you launched, what was the reception in the market?

Clark Benson: We launched the site with 20,000 lists on it. It started getting traffic. It took a few months to get search traffic. I’m not very good at hyping things. Back in those days, the idea was you launched, and Mashable and TechCrunch gave you early adopters. This was the case back in those days. I wasn’t very good at that. We got an article in TechCrunch, but I don’t think it led to anything huge. We didn’t have a lot of buzz.

One of the things that I did when I saw what was happening is I would work 10 to 11 hours in the office with my small team, then I would go home and learn about search engine optimization. I learned SEO  over a span of six months by reading blogs, testing things on Ranker and building specific content. Our traffic started growing solidly from Google search.

Honestly, it never really stopped. When we launched the platform, we architected it properly from an SEO point of view. That baseline has continued to work as we’ve grown and scaled. Now we’re 75 employees of which 30 are on the editorial side.

Sramana Mitra: What is the business model that you have zeroed in on?

Clark Benson: At this stage, Ranker is still making most of its money from third-party advertising. We’re going to do about $20 million in revenue this year. About 80% of it is third-party advertising. We’re building a direct sales team. We also make a little bit of affiliate money – about half a million in affiliate dollars. We’re at a run rate that’s at a little bit higher than that. We’ve built a solidly profitable business.

We’ve got a couple of million dollars in EBITDA this year based on third-party advertising. Although people will tell you that that’s not a great business model, if you can achieve either a really strong niche in a market or if you can achieve some really big scale, it can be a nice business. We’ve chosen the scale path.

Sramana Mitra: What is the total amount of money that you had to put in to get to this level?

Clark Benson: I ended up having to put on over a million and a half of my own money. We’ve also raised $6.1 million in outside capital.

Sramana Mitra: At what stages did you raise? At what metrics?

Clark Benson: When we got to a million unique visitors, we were able to raise our first angel money. We raised about $400,000 in 2010. Then in 2011, we grew the traffic to 2.5 million unique visitors. We were able to raise our first real round for $1.3 million. Then we raised another $2 million round in 2013. At that point, we were at 10 million unique visitors. We had some revenue. We were maybe doing $1 million in revenue. About two and a half years ago in 2014, we raised $2.3 million. At that time, we were doing about $6 million.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Ranker CEO Clark Benson
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