Bootstrapping with a Paycheck: DudaMobile CEO Itai Sadan (Part 5)

Sramana: What was your next deal after Webs.com?

Itai Sadan: Our next deal was with Yahoo small businesses as well as with an Intuit company. We have since done deals with companies like Google.

Sramana: What was your deal with Google?

Itai Sadan: In 2012 Google had a marketing initiative to get small businesses to go mobile. We co-branded our editor with Google, and we gave all Google customers their mobile sites free for one year. At the end of that first year, everyone that we were able to retain remained a DudaMobile customer. That was a very good deal that brought us huge branding and a large amount of customers. Seeing our brand next to Google’s brand was very powerful. Google essentially let all of their AdSense, AdWords and Analytics customers know about this initiative.

Sramana: You were primarily focused on OEM or white-label partnerships to this point. Did you have any other revenue models that you engaged in during that time?

Itai Sadan: At a certain point we looked at all of our partnerships, and we realized that our brand was known well enough that we could begin to employ a direct sales model. We just needed to put our platform on the web directly and begin to acquire our own customers. We started doing that in August of 2011.

During the first three months we saw mild growth, and at the end of the third month, it suddenly skyrocketed. It actually grew faster than all of our partnerships combined. We did not expect that, and it was quite phenomenal. It was clear to us that this was going to be the future of the company. We essentially went full circle because the initial concept behind DudaMobile was to be able to go direct to the SMB. The initial deal with AT&T lured us into OEM and white label deals, but when we returned to the direct sales model, we were able to own the customer relationship without a revenue share. We essentially owned our own destiny at that point. We did not stop doing business development deals. We simply evolved to operating with a two-pronged sales approach.

Sramana: How did you generate leads for your direct website customer acquisition? Did you use Google PPC?

Itai Sadan: It was driven by paid channels as well as organic growth. Our brand reputation really helped us with our organic growth. Once we did start advertising, we also focused on our SEO rankings. Once we focused on our SEO approach, we were able to get our SEO listings elevated rather quickly. Paid channels are important as are organic channels. We use PR, social media, PPC, and affiliate models in our paid acquisition channels.

Sramana: What do you charge for your direct sites?

Itai Sadan: We have a freemium model. You can built a site for free and we will place our own advertisements on the site. Those ads are generally promoting DudaMobile although we do have some advertising networks. Our freemium model does not support our premium features. For users who do not want advertising and would like access to our premium features, then we charge $9 a month.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Bootstrapping with a Paycheck: DudaMobile CEO Itai Sadan
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