Bootstrapping to $15 Million in Three Years: Connatix CEO David Kashak (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What happens in 2015?

David Kashak: In 2014, I started to look for more interns. I was able to get a few more interns. I really liked one of them, who became my first full-time employee. The product that we were building was a native advertising product. We built that with publishers in mind. The idea was if we can provide a good and easy tool for publishers to create, manage, and optimize this native inventory, we get a good publisher base. The demand will come.

That is our focus until today. Our main focus was to go and offer this to more and more publishers. At the same time, we started to expand and get more advertisers to come and run campaigns on our network. The more advertisers we get, the more the competition for the inventory. The CPMs that we are able to provide is going to continue and grow.

At that point, several companies entered the native space as real-time bidders. They’re looking to bid, real-time, on the inventory. That was the next step that helped us to get tremendous growth in the company. We were the first to integrate a few programmatic buyers who were bidding real-time. That allowed us to quickly grow our demand side.

Sramana Mitra: That’s interesting. That would make a big difference. Talk a little bit about three things. It sounds like you followed a very lean organization strategy. You had some interns who were prospecting publishers for you and then the interns were prospecting advertisers for you until this real-time bidding integration came about. How many people did you have by the end of 2015 – full-time as well as interns?

David Kashak: In 2015, we ended with $4 million in revenues. I had four full-time employees in New York. We grew the development team to five people by that time.

Sramana Mitra: In Romania?

David Kashak: Yes. The first thing that I did was to get consultants. These were people who consulted us part-time. They helped me with getting some more advertisers. By the end of that year, I already had a full-time sales person bringing in campaigns. That was the point that I also had Maggie, who joined at the beginning of the consulting.

A couple of months later, I asked her to join full time. Maggie is an industry veteran. She has a lot of relationships with many publishers. She is one of the people who made a big impact on the company. She started to bring us bigger publishers. We went from the small publishers to mid-sized. Maggie came in to bring in the big names.

Sramana Mitra: You said $4 million in revenue. How many publishers and how many advertisers?

David Kashak: We had about 500 publishers by the end of 2015 and 25 advertisers and real-time bidders.

Sramana Mitra: That’s pretty manageable. What I love about your story is that you did it with a small number of people. It’s a very efficient, well-executed strategy.

David Kashak: The reason that we didn’t fail is that we built it as we grew. The more money we were able to generate, I invested it back into the business. When we get more advertisers and publishers, our profits went up. I took this money and invested it back. That’s pretty much how we grew it. Many people ask me, “Why aren’t you taking investment?” Sometimes when you do that, that’s a recipe for failure. Many companies don’t grow that fast.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Bootstrapping to $15 Million in Three Years: Connatix CEO David Kashak
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