Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship to $30 Million from India: Ankit Oberoi, CEO of AdPushup (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Did you bring in not just Google’s ad server but also other vertical ad servers? Were you also running an auction on your end across all those different ad networks?

Ankit Oberoi: Not only did we bring in those ad networks but we also brought in those ad networks on different ad demands which a publisher could now source. They could also control how the auction was happening using a simple visual platform, which they couldn’t do in the past.

That incremental revenue by running that auction was something that would go away if the publisher would stop using that product. If somebody would stop using our product, they would see declining revenue and they would have to come back again. We were very happy when our customers did that. It reinforces your belief that your product should add value. 

Sramana Mitra: Was that a subscription revenue business model or were you now taking a percentage of the ads that you were selling?

Ankit Oberoi: Back in 2016, we were only charging for the subscription. It was purely SaaS, so we weren’t charging for any web shares. Our money has evolved over the years. In 2017, we started giving that flexibility to the publishers where they could do a revenue share model.

The way we position is that Mailchimp is linked to how many emails you are sending. It’s tiered-up. The core value proposition of publishing is still the software that we built. 

Sramana Mitra: So it is a SaaS company. 

Ankit Oberoi: Yes, we would give the pricing option for our web share, but the position is software-oriented. Going back to 2016, we got this sort of going. It was early stages and as I said, there were a lot of changes brought over the years.

By that time, we got some interest from a SoftBank subsidiary company working in the publisher space. They are growing fast. They have an IPO now in Japan.

They reached out and we ended up doing a series A round where we saw part of participation from this subsidiary called Geniee and a non-equity partnership from Microsoft Ventures. We got $500,000 in a year from them and we used every penny of that. 

Sramana Mitra: What was the total series A round?

Ankit Oberoi: We haven’t disclosed it, but it was around $2.2 million. 

Sramana Mitra: What happens next?

Ankit Oberoi: It was in 2016. It was not very clear. We barely had some sort of a business market fit. One of the things we were struggling with was how we would go out into the market because the content marketing strategy was great for small publishers.

Now the way we designed the product was not for small publishers. It was for large ones. While we had a working product, our go-to-market was still built on the old one. They weren’t coupling together. This was something that we didn’t immediately understand. Back then we did not know how big the market was.

In 2017, we started to understand that 20% of the publishers consume 80% of the market. These are the verticals they exist in. These are the segments and this is how the decision making happens. We had no formal understanding of all that. SaaS was also evolving.

In 2016, there were a few great SaaS companies, but it wasn’t as large as you see it today. Once we started getting a hang of it, that’s when the business started growing. 2017 ended up being a good year. 2018 was an exceptional year in terms of growth rate. 2019 was 10x revenue.

We hit the $10 million somewhere in 2019. We are projected to hit $13 million this year. The inflection point was that market learning which we got in 2017. We started using that to go to specific accounts and bring back the sales engine.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship to $30 Million from India: Ankit Oberoi, CEO of AdPushup
1 2 3 4 5 6 7