Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship to $30 Million from India: Ankit Oberoi, CEO of AdPushup (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How do you anticipate that? How do you know what to show whom?

Ankit Oberoi: That’s a data problem. We capture 30 plus parameters from the user, then create buckets where you can put analytical logins that can predict or help you decide which variation will do better.

Sramana Mitra: How did you acquire your beta customers?

Ankit Oberoi: I think we published on Betalist. Back then, they were charging $30. We paid that $30 fee and we got prioritized and relisted. We made a small website. We made one landing page. We went to a few forums online and even some Google forums, which I think was a partner in this category back in the day.

We spoke to hundreds of people and tried to explain the technology to them. Only around two or three people said that it was cool and wanted to understand what we were doing. That was how we got those two or three initial people to check us out. 

Sramana Mitra: What was your revenue model? Were you selling Software-as-a-Service?

Ankit Oberoi: Yes, but it happened months later. In those initial days, once we got to the point where we got those 3 or 4 people, we made it free. We just told them, “Let us try. This is an experiment for us. We think that this can be helpful. I keep complete transparency. I know you are trusting us with your revenue which is your bread and butter today.”

These people trusted us. In three months, we doubled their revenue. The moment that struck us is when we spoke to these users. One of them told us, “You know, my business is completely changed. Now, I’m going to hire more people. My topline has doubled and I’m going to invest so much back into the business.”

We could see these changes that we were bringing to the lives of these customers and their business. 

Sramana Mitra: What size of publishers were you working with?

Ankit Oberoi: There was a one-person company from Mexico who was making $8,000 to $10,000 a month. I remember a Vine website from India. That person probably was making $1,000 a month. I think it was between that range. 

Sramana Mitra: What happens next?

Ankit Oberoi: We got a strong feeling about the stuff that we were building because of this reinforcement from the users who were extremely happy. Their whole trajectory had changed because of something that we did. That was very inspirational.

What we realized back then, considering that I’m a college dropout, is that this is one way for me to get back to freedom. We thought of this as an additional way because this journey is more personal to us. We are giving back to the free web. The writers aren’t getting anything except for the ad revenue. They are sustaining themselves because of this.

That’s when we felt that we should invest more time into the business. We finalized the name of AdPushup. This was me and my early team members that I got from my previous business. We started building more technology. That was also when we started looking out to see if we could raise funds. This was in 2014.

We ended up spending two months raising an angel round. We raised around $600,000 from a bunch of angel technology investors for the likes of the founders of Slideshare. We also ended up raising with Kima Ventures, which is owned by French billionaire Xavier Neil. We also had a couple of technology entrepreneurs from the Mobile Tally, the software solution for accounting. We got a lot of technology entrepreneurs to invest. It took around 4 months to close the round completely. 

Sramana Mitra: Did you shut down the previous company? What did you do with the security services company?

Ankit Oberoi: It was still running but my co-founder and I got out of the management. We passed it over to the team which was running that business.  

This segment is part 3 in the series : Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship to $30 Million from India: Ankit Oberoi, CEO of AdPushup
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