Serial Entrepreneurship in Ad and Content Networks: inPowered CEO Peyman Nilforoush (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What channels are most of your content distributed on? Is it social media? Is it Facebook?

Peyman Nilforoush: We assumed the same thing, that most of it will be on Facebook. However, it’s very specific to the kind of content. For example, we have a lot of B2B clients. A lot of times when you upload the content and you want to get engagement, you start by understanding from prediction.

Now we have a lot of data. As soon as our AI scans the content, we determine what kind of combination of channels, targeting, and title works. Right off the bat, it eliminates the waste of needing to go across the channels and test. It now starts on the targeted channels.

It also self-explores and measures engagement. We have vastly different results from the standpoint of where it ends up. It could be B2B content. One segment on Facebook is very effective between 9AM and 2PM. Taboola is effective on particular websites.

When you go to a customer and say, “This is where we deliver. This is the engagement.” They’re always surprised. The whole point of our AI is to take out the guessing game. Instead we let the machine figure out where it should be promoted to get the best result.

Sramana Mitra: What your technology does is essentially media buying across different online platforms where you can propagate this content?

Peyman Nilforoush: That’s number one. Based on the content, buy on the right channels to drive the highest ROI. Number two is what happens post-click. When somebody clicks on a piece of content that is being promoted, and they spend a minimum of 15 seconds, a CTA is presented to them.

That could be, “Book a Test Drive!” We happen to be the top vendor driving the highest email submissions for a company in travel. In certain cases, you’re just measuring brand lifts. The CTA asks the user if they’re more likely to go to this hotel, or buy this product.

This is a very critical part of content marketing that’s been missing. The marketer had a massive problem. The biggest problem is ROI. How do I show ROI? That is essentially what we’ve been able to build. 

Sramana Mitra: Do you charge on the basis of these 15-second views, or do you charge against the action?

Peyman Nilforoush: We charge for the engagement – CPE.

Sramana Mitra: The CTA.

Peyman Nilforoush: The 15-second engagement.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a 15-second content view; not signing up for something or doing an action.

Peyman Nilforoush: That’s correct.

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting. Based on what I know, you are above $5 million. Would you like to share any other metric?

Peyman Nilforoush: The company is bootstrapped. We’re high growth from the beginning to now. We’re at a place where we have a lot of brand customers. We’re at a place where a lot of these customers want to use us for everything they’re doing on their blog.

Essentially, we’re the module that they use to achieve their content marketing objective. That is where we’ve been spending a lot of our time and where we’re going in the future.

Sramana Mitra: What segments are you seeing adoption in?

Peyman Nilforoush: We started in B2B tech. Then we got a lot of traction in finance, travel, consumer tech, and auto. Every segment that you see a lot of marketers producing a lot of content, that’s where we see traction.

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Serial Entrepreneurship in Ad and Content Networks: inPowered CEO Peyman Nilforoush
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