AdGreetz Revenue & Funding (2024)

hey folks my guest today is eric frankly is the former president of warner bros tv distribution the ceo today of ad greets the industry's leading video personalization and ad tech martech platform that is disrupting a 768 billion advertising marketplace eric you're ready to take us to the top ready to take it to the top with you nathan good to be i'm pumped for the inside i'm pumped so we were talking before the show so let's say someone's listening right now with call between like 5 million and 10 million in revenue they see these ads on tv they go that's that's for big companies i can't afford that and they're bad ads anyway they're not even custom how can someone with 510 million bucks and revenue use ad greets to launch custom tv ads well we deployed to 26 channels which are facebook and google and email and app and everything that people have been doing for a while but the latest twist is in the u.s we're now doing this on a hundred streaming channels so for not a great deal of money you can test for a hundred thousand dollars and rather than seeing that generic ad we're now doing very specific ads so we can tell you where the local store is we're calling out cities we're telling you uh what what movie theater can you see elvis in and at what time and what's the address so rather than this and what's happening is we're doubling revenue for these brands just by american software company like let's say click up wants to use you to do marketing 100k test across 22 streaming channels what might their ad look like on these channels right so they're so their ad can look like believe it or not just by calling out a city town or village at the beginning of the ad people are so much more engaged so so for example it would say santa monica austin philadelphia have you ever text on the screen or it's a talking face like me and my lips are augmented it could no well it can be anything anyone wants and it wouldn't be lips being augmented typically um because that technology is still a little fuzzy so it can be voice over it could be talent on air so if they were shooting their next commercial they might say here are our 60 important cities and we're actually going to have our spokesperson nathan record 60 cities oh i see and then we push them all out and then we can make traditional television commercials now interactive by adding a qr code so rather than and everyone learned how to use qr codes during covid when we had to you know download menus when we would go out to eat so so now all of a sudden in the corner it says scan and you do that and you go right to their info page or whatever that brand wants so whether you're buying movie tickets or whether you're getting somebody from that click company to reach out and talk to you and i imagine click i imagine sorry during covet you probably saw a lot of expansion people needing this i imagine last time we spoke back in 2018 you had about 17 employees how many folks today full-time we got about 35 and we're you know in new york l.a philadelphia london paris uh kuwait city sydney australia we're so remote people are remote yeah i mean no we just have offices around the world and before that many offices with 35 people that's got to be expensive um not not really i mean well what happened to you know some people want to work out of offices and some people are working from home in those cities so yes it's a combination of remote and we workish type placements other than la where we have you know significant you know real office space did you raise eric did you choose to raise a bunch more money last time we chat i think you only had a 10 well not only but you raised 1.5 million in an angel round in 2011 right yeah so i think we're up to 12 million but nowhere we're breaking even and making money now so uh amen brother congratulations so so that's good but we're we're expecting there's a lot of interest in what we do now as the world has woken up and realized that this is a better mousetrap so whether it's you know giant brands whether it's giant agencies or whether it's these ad platforms that hire us so when they sit there and see oh these ads make us different than the 100 other channels in town oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with sas founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews i've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out i'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're going to get a different valuation a vc is going to pay a different valuation private equity firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when i hover over here right so the teal is what a vc would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on youtube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raised they sold 22 to their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of sas valuations and what you can get now inside of founderpath and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're going to go back to the youtube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform i hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview but how are you it's like if i'm a big brand procter gamble selling shampoo and i want to go into 80 different geos in the us the hard work for me isn't it is it isn't the hard work to go record 80 videos with the voiceover artist saying georgia wyoming texas i mean i thought that's what you helped with but it sounds like that's not what you do it is so the answer is yes and we've primarily automated the entire process the only thing we haven't done because the quality hasn't been great enough yet but we continue to test it and meet all those vendors is yes so we can build uh we did uh 25 000 versions of an ad for procter and gamble so how did you do that are you hiring the voiceover talent to read the hundreds of different ads so so we had 200 so the voice talent called out 224 different cities that we pushed the ad out to there were three retailers so we would be telling you to either go to target cvs or walgreens and there were seven days of the week and besides that everything else is graphic but but there was one ad featured a 20 year old woman the next a 30 year old woman the next a 40 year old woman the next of 50 and 60 year old woman and the same thing with men male voice over female voice over and all of those different versions added up to 25 000 and what we've done over eight years is take that incredibly robust process and figured out how to get it done you know in a day or a day and a half for something as bespoke as that that's wild okay and so how do you make is it just so you mentioned a hundred thousand dollar test are you just charging a take grade on whatever someone wants to put through you um well we're getting depending on the we either get paid a flat monthly fee in scenarios where we work for a brand or we're getting paid a percentage of ad spend or an additional cpm added on top of the ad spend depending on who our partner is and what the relationship i see i see so you're actively then measuring sort of gmv through ad grades yes yes so we're out there typically and or with our partners trying to show how we doubled their e-commerce revenue or how we drove eight percent increase at retail or or or a hundred 100 um increase at a retail will you share how much gmv is going through you today um you mean are you talking about ad spend are you talking about how much cash that we're we're bringing in no no not your not your revenue just ad spent through you um yeah we're probably now you have to remember in certain cases because we didn't want to disrupt the apple cart most of our clients already have their media buying agency so what we really do is we're the personalization strategist demo maker once it's signed off on creating those 100 versions or 25 000 versions then we work with the media agency and deploy it and then we automatically optimize and report on it so i would say that today we're probably at about 50 million dollars worth of media um but monthly or annually just annually just annually okay yep yep okay interesting and is that the key driver means that is that when you guys said annual goals is that what you want to grow is that the key thing well the the key thing now we well we have more and more clients more and more clients staying longer so more recurring revenue and then we have these partnerships so there's a broadcaster called nine in australia they're the nbc call it of australia so they now have 600 people out selling our product and they're bringing in their first clients because this is a three-month-old or two-month-old relationship we expect that they will deliver tens and tens of millions of dollars they do two billion in revenue and and we get a very significant or a good good portion of that of that revenue we have someone in the us with 62 sales people and they're out selling so they're again facing the same things that we've faced which is hey macy's hey any company usa let us explain why a personalized version is better but years later they're having a great deal of success but they're still only two or three months and then we're doing the same thing with people like amc and fox and all of these different entities so as the world embraces it more there are hundreds and hundreds of sales people around the world selling our product through our partnership and how many that 50 million in gmv that you'll do this year that you did last year how many customers was that through um probably 18 to 20 customers okay so you're boutique you're like a boutique ad agency with a productized ad service right you don't have bad margins yeah i mean where we yes and the you know rather than shooting a new commercial we're taking their existing commercial and coming up with a strategy to produce and deploy 100 or 20 000 versions or a million if it's email and uh and go out of things that look like letters and things that look like print dance and make them into things that are compelling that people engage with and that are activated by and eric when we spoke back in 2018 you shouted you know you had you know 10 11 customers you told me you did about 2 million revenue then are you still around that range are you much bigger we're going to do we'll do we'll do uh close to 10 million with with 20 plus uh clients this year yeah that's great because we hit the 10 million mark now people start um you know start coming in and saying you know you've passed this hurdle and we'd like to talk to you about investment opportunities and we're buying you would you sell the company sure but i don't think we'll probably sell until we you know probably quadruple the revenue but again you're not looking for a standard buyer you're looking for a strategic buyer you know so as we start to do this for fox you know rupert murdoch can wake up one day and says this differentiates my entire business i want to own this thing and and and and pay more than just your your your typical multiple against is that the plan because strategically well him and 100 other people that were work you know that were in various um phases of working with yeah that's very impressive 10 million revenue with 35 employees is 285 000 revenue per employee which is double most vc-backed companies so you're running a very efficient operation and by the way and a lot of them are consultant types not a lot but a half a dozen are the former president of warner europe the former president of warner aipac the former president of warner you know latin america um who were huge money earners and now go out and sell to their previous clients um and they get paid on a percentage of revenue for a long term so if they bring in channel four in the uk they're getting compensated for quite a long period of time because you can't afford to hire sales people like that because guys if you if you want to do you want to try these custom ads yourself check it out ad greets.com a really compelling way to get ads here and a channel that won't be as competitive as those ppc clicks at the top of google searches where there's perfect competition eric in the meantime let's wrap up here with the famous five number one last business book that you read last business book that i read didn't didn't number two is there didn't you you don't read business books right no because i do this from 6 a.m i finished last night with disney hot star in india at 10 45 so i crashed and got on the phone with my team in paris this morning yeah okay number two is there a ceo you're following or studying well i rather than reading you know the books you're talking about i'm a voracious reader and i read everything i'm primarily addicted to the apple news feed and all day long to the four people who help me prospect i'm sending them articles and stories and so on so the answer is you know i i look at everyone but it's not like oh elon musk i'm in love with him or something like that i'm looking for anything that's interesting and then what we do is write them letters and a huge percentage say i'd like to know more and then we meet with them with the goals smart strategy number three eric besides ad greets what's your favorite online tool for building the business um the simplest least expensive thing i've ever wandered upon rebump have you heard of it i i have this is in your e this is a very niche tool very few people know about this but it's an email follow-up tool and we used to have a human being when i wrote a letter to you because you were the cmo of macy's nathan we would have this human being who a week later would send email number two a week later if we hadn't heard back three and four all different emails and occasionally he would miss and we paid him a lot of money and we found a tool i'm making it up but i think it's 15 a month and it does the best job and and the percentage of yes i'd like to meet with you um through this tool is just you know is just off the charts yeah guys those of you looking to go buy a sas coming by the way rebump is like the perfect target small but very passionate customers like eric and it just gets the job done uh eric number four how many hours of sleep to get every night uh about six and a half okay and situation married single kids um married with to my same wife um and uh grown boys uh grown grown boys who live how many kids two boys so i have a 24 20 28 year old and my 28 year old's first movie is out at the festival circuit now and garnering great reviews so we're hoping oh fantastic you'll get some action on it very cool and how old are you eric um i am 64 years old last question something you wish you knew when you were 20 um i don't think i understood that every day whether you're 20 or whether you're 64 you get smarter and better at what you do and you know you don't know it all and you'll never actually know it all and even the bill gates's or the elon musks you know don't know it all and you just keep on learning and and becoming a better leader and uh and that's pretty much it is just guys enjoy there you have it enjoy every moment every day is a new one at greets.com will break 10 million in revenue this year with 35 employees really impressive unit economics they're profitable that's up from 5 million in revenue just two years ago so healthy growth right here they help you launch hundreds or thousands of customized ads across 22 different streaming channels for as little as 100 000 right but multiple variations you can name a date a time a a city a location a specific store or action you want people to take he's having a lot of success doing this right now with about 20 enterprise clients looking to scale eric thanks for taking us to the top good to see you nathan good luck to you one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1pm central additionally remember these 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