Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship to $30 Million from India: Ankit Oberoi, CEO of AdPushup (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about cracking into the larger publishers from a go-to-market standpoint. How did you get your first larger publisher to buy the product? How did that evolve?

Ankit Oberoi: I think the first five or ten was still easy because we were so connected in the ecosystem and had so many great investors who were connected. The first ten was easy, because we would just get them through introductions.

We had built a meeting list with all our investors. We had a sizable number, so there was a mailing list. Every time we would get a good publisher, we would just send an email to them to connect us to their contacts. After getting those 10 large accounts, the challenge was the repeatability.

How do you make the process repeatable and predictable? If I put this much, this is how much I would be able to generate. I think building that in our GTM was the tricky part. The first step was me going out and doing sales. We would do events. We would use paid ads.

Google search was beneficial for us. We started spending $3,000 to $4,000 and within four months, we were spending up to $40,000 a month. Today, we spend three-digit monthly AdWords revenues. Back then, AdWords was a great source because we could pick specific keywords that only publishers would search for. 

Sramana Mitra: What is the sales cycle? Do you sell by phone? Do you have to visit people? What is the average deal size?

Ankit Oberoi: If you look at the average customer today, our average deal size would be around $300,000 annually. In terms of whether this was the best of our sales, it would depend. For example, for slightly upper mid-market accounts – because of the lack of competitors and being underserved – there was a large need for publishers.

I think for the midmarket, we would still be able to sell through the phone. For the true enterprises, we would go and meet. We had a rule in the field that if you have an account above more than a certain size, the salesperson should push for a meeting because this would speed up the sales cycle.

The team was built out of India back then, so we would allow our people to book a flight to go to the location where the account is. That is the early days.

Sramana Mitra: Where was the geographical spread of the larger accounts?

Ankit Oberoi: With the upper mid-market, it was spread out all over the world. In enterprise, it was either in India or in the US. 

Sramana Mitra: So you needed a salesperson in New York to do those larger deals?

Ankit Oberoi: That’s right. In 2018, we started hiring full-time people in the US as well. We started getting a few team members in New York to be able to do those meetings. I was still working as an account executive where I go and spend a lot of time in the US to find customers and prospects. I go to those meetings to close them. 

Sramana Mitra: Was that Series A your only round of funding after your angel round, or did you raise more money?

Ankit Oberoi: With our experience of running a bootstrapped company for several years, we had very good unit economics. We were very frugal. We became profitable in the middle of 2017. For about three years now, we have been profitable. We are customer-funded and we don’t need any capital.  

Sramana Mitra: Wonderful story. I loved listening to you, and I love the way you have learned from the market. Thank you for your time.

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