Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship to $30 Million from India: Ankit Oberoi, CEO of AdPushup (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What happens with the AdPushup business? 

Ankit Oberoi: We just found a new office. Everybody is excited. Those four or five people who were working in a small room in the other company finally realized that what we have built is becoming a company. We got a new office. We got a lot of coverage on TechCrunch and other websites.

We said, “Let’s forget all of what we are hearing and start building the product.” We wanted to invest five months, but we ended up spending 10 months in building the first version. While we were building, we started a blog and ran some marketing to build a waiting list.

We invested a lot of time in building the first version, which was our first learning at AdPushup. In 2015, we launched our first version for AdPushup and saw tremendous success. We had the who’s who of media trying us out. 

Sramana Mitra: How were they finding out about you?

Ankit Oberoi: Through our blog. We were doing a lot of content marketing which is popular now. We were partnering with websites and blogs like Kissmetrics. We would guest post with them, talk about solutions, or educate people with A/B testing. We were getting a lot of these people from content marketing. 

Sramana Mitra: In 2015, you have a product in the market and you have a large number of publishers who are willing to try this out. Were they all paid trials?

Ankit Oberoi: Yes. We would give them a 30-day trial, but we started charging after that. We had about 1,500 people on our waiting list. We slowly started moving them to the product. We got about 100 websites within three months. Right after three months, I realized one of the biggest gaps. We were like, “Wow, can we release something like this?”

We made a big mistake in understanding the business-market fit. This was something that the A/B testing and the publishers were extremely particular about. They were increasing their revenue. Somewhere after the 60 to the 90-day mark, which is technically after one month of payment, people were unsubscribing and uninstalling the software.

We started asking the people, “If it’s working so well and you are making so much money, why are you unsubscribing?” In hindsight, that was our biggest mistake of not understanding the market well. People were finding the best ad layout, getting A/B testers, and then unsubscribing.

Although we had a very good product that was beneficial to the buyer, there was no business-market fit because the lifetime value of the user was so low. One month of revenue is financially viable to build a product like that and sell it in the market. Nobody would pay for it online.

That was our biggest failure in 2015. We were making money just in adding new publishers, but internally we weren’t confident. 

Sramana Mitra: How much money did you make from that pool of 1,500 that you had on the waitlist? How much of that did you monetize?

Ankit Oberoi: We got 100 or more people. Our waiting list was sequential. In our first or second month of business, we made about $30,000, which was not bad for the first or second month of monetization.

Our goal was to get to a million dollars within the first year because we did a lot of modeling. We went through a lot of public data about SaaS companies that had IPOed with $100 million-plus revenues and almost all of them were generating a million dollars in the first year.

That kind of result is a good way to see how much a business could become. We were aiming for a million dollars and getting $30,000 in the initial month. It was very successful for us but within a month, we realized that this was a problem. 

This segment is part 4 in the series : Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship to $30 Million from India: Ankit Oberoi, CEO of AdPushup
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