Bootstrapping to $15 Million in Three Years: Connatix CEO David Kashak (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: The thing that I keep saying in our business is that hyper growth is not a natural state. Steady growth is much more achievable than hyper growth. If you set yourself up for a situation with venture capital financing, where you have to, your definition of success is hyper growth.

You’re setting yourself up for a much lower probability of success than what a bootstrapped situation would put you in. With bootstrapping, you have more options. You can grow at your own pace. You can figure things out. You can experiment.

David Kashak: You can move fast. One of the biggest things that we did was at the end of last year, we introduced our video platform, which allowed publishers to start playing video in autoplay in those native ad units. That was a big change for the company from a technological point of view.

Running videos on websites is much more complex than just running articles. You need to know how to deal with video size and there’s a lot of complexities to that. We’re able to build that and teach the organization how to sell this. That’s when things exploded for us. Videos produce much higher CPM.

Sramana Mitra: When did you introduce that? Beginning of 2016?

David Kashak: We walked on it in November of 2015. We ran one campaign in video, and we continued to perfect the product. It was in March that we sponsored a conference where we announced that product. That was, pretty much, the time when things started to accelerate for us. It was in Colorado.

It’s a conference that happens twice a year. All the big publishers in the US come to this conference. It’s a very intimate conference because you have the chance to meet and talk with a lot of publishers. They have a very interesting part in that conference where the sponsors can have one-on-one meetings with publishers. That was the time we launched the product.

We had a lot of one-on-one discussions with publishers. We showed them this ad unit and how it works. The feedback that we got was very positive. At that point, things started to accelerate for us.

Sramana Mitra: Whose inventory were you able to bring on board after that conference?

David Kashak: We had Meredith and Tribune. We just launched before the conference with CBS Local. We met big publishers over there.

Sramana Mitra: Is Mail Online one of your customers?

David Kashak: Daily Mail, yes.

Sramana Mitra: They’re one of the largest inventories right?

David Kashak: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: This is the right point to ask you an industry trend question which is a very big problem for all these publishers. Even with very large audiences, I’m unable to monetize their inventory very well. As a result, these publishers are running businesses that are very unattractive businesses.

What is your take on that? How do you think this is moving based on what you’re doing? Native advertising has been pitted as one of the solutions to this angst in the publisher’s life. What are you seeing from the field out there? Is this actually checking out?

David Kashak: I strongly believe it is. A lot of times, publishers have to compromise and take different types of advertising that sometimes are not up to the standard because of monetization. The funny things is a lot of people ask me what I do and I say, “We are in advertising.”

The first reaction is like, “We hate advertising.” At the end of the day, the people behind the sites you go to need to be paid. Advertising pays for all of that. One of the big promises of native advertising is it makes advertising much less intrusive. A lot of times. you have a mobile app. You go to this article and there’s this message before you’re redirected to the article.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Bootstrapping to $15 Million in Three Years: Connatix CEO David Kashak
1 2 3 4 5 6