How Adjinn CEO Giancarlo Giansante grew Adjinn to $2.3M revenue and 50 customers in 2019.

hello everyone my guest today is giancarlo giancente he is the uh he's focused on bringing transparency and value in the ad tech and data environment worlds together he believes in the necessity of common language across digital marketing and he works at bridges language gap facilitating clear transparent communication across digital marketing actors at his current company adjan john carl are you ready to take us to the top yeah thank you for inviting me today okay tell me about adjen what's the company do and are you guys a sas company well it's a nice project at least from my point of view it's um it's uh uh trying to to to fulfill a need that we saw in the digital market in the digital advertising field actually uh we felt that there was a big lack of competitive information in digital everyone knows about their campaigns their activities what they are doing but they are not actually comparing with the others brands or other actors so coming from my marketing studies and my past in analogic agencies because sometimes and i started being a journalist in a paper newspaper actually so we we thought that was important to bring to the digital world uh this point of view you know this benchmarking thing so we provide basically to every kind of brand every kind of agency or every kind of publisher's data from a competitive point of view so every brand can know what's what's going on with the other brands with their competitors so just be clear if two car rental brands like expedia or let's say hertz and rent-a-car are both running ads the rent-to-car marketing people can go see all of hertz old ads and see what performed is that accurate totally totally and where what are your data feeds where are you getting the hertz data it's usually not public yes it's our our technology which we developed uh in the last years and it's uh quite vanguard i will say which we are able to to navigate it's somehow it's uh the same methodology of google uh the only differences in the features in the revenues are still a bit different from google and igen but the methodologies sorry just to be clear so specifically where do you get your data what is your data source my data sources our technology so our technology what it does is to navigate every day in all the websites that are supporting digital advertising so you're scraping yeah okay we have spiders that are navigating every day in every publishers and our spider is able to spot the the advertising and separate from content i see okay and then is this a sas platform do publishers pay you per month for on this yeah yeah and what do they pay on average per month well it depends for we are in more than 30 markets so on average the average i would say that it's around two three four hundred euros per month okay so call it maybe 450 us dollars per month and put this on a timeline for me when you launch the company we launched the company in 2016. and how many customers have you scaled to today we are around 50 clients okay five zero yeah five zero and uh but actually we have two business models so we have like our own countries where we operate directly with clients like we do in spain italy portugal or other countries or we can have a big and strong alliances with the very important actors in in other markets that are just buying our data feed and then they they they do the the commercial this year but is it is it is it all sas yeah okay so can i take that can i take 50 customers times 450 us dollars per month you're doing about 22 000 a month right now yeah yeah and what were you doing exactly a year ago uh what i was doing a year ago the revenue wise well we we are growing constantly around the 50 period and the first the first three years okay of the of the life of the company so you you were doing about 30 maybe 13 000 well no you were doing like 15 000 per month a year ago yeah and where did you get tell us how you got the first 50 customers how did you sign them up well has been uh really nice because it was just um we that we built the company in spain we are based in madrid even if we are operating worldwide and i was i was working in nielsen uh in the online division so i had to chance i had the chance to and to know uh a lot of important clients and people from all southern europe so was your first client someone you worked with at nielsen yeah no actually when i was at nielsen i got to know to all the important clients in southern europe so we we create a beta partnership program with imagine and we start to talk with the clients with potential clients uh asking them to help us in which sense we were proposing them to to to buy a license for one year with a nice discount and they were also included in our beta partnership program you're talking about nielsen or the new company no no i already imagine so how did you make sure that you didn't conflict any agreements with nielsen if you're essentially selling your first customers no no i was i went out from nielsen 2013. so okay my question though is the first the first people you sold how did you find them the literally tell me the story of the first customer you closed i told it was condensed publishing yeah you know and it was just like that we went there with our uh mock-up with our minimum how did you know how did you know who to go to at conde nast well because uh they used to be my clients and nils okay that was my question so your first client your first client did come from relationships you built at nielsen so you knew who to contact yeah yeah yeah yeah i kind of knew all the sector in the southern europe and in europe now so we had a lot of contacts and we had the product so we start to go to potential clients which as you said uh we're already in our radar and we said okay do you want to collaborate with us during our first year so clients have been our r d department so we opened we opened a live communication line with them so they have a nice disc they had a nice discount to to get the tool and on the other hand they were having a dock features which is like quite strange for a pure sas business understood so or have you bootstrapped the company or raised capital no we are still uh independent and controlling 100 of the so no you've raised no capital no okay so bootstrapped and how many people are on the team today 16. all in madrid no we have two peoples in portugal one in the netherlands and one in sydney now australia okay so madrid and remote and then churn is critical in any sas company what's your turn today churn it's really low uh to say that we are around five percent per month not per year okay and that's revenue turn per year uh sorry can you repeat is that revenue churn per year or logo churn per year no no revenue revenue okay revenue trend per year because it's it's quite it's quite difficult for us to lose uh clients because our data is really important for them so the the big decision is to start to work with ajin or not but when they start they tend to be really loyal because they can transform our data and money because imagine if you are an agency and you have to to do a tender for a big brand well you can go with an automatic competitive research which can be really different yeah so conde nast conde nast will pay you your 450 bucks a month or whatever they pay you and you will essentially give them data so that they can then go close hurts number one competitor as a new advertiser on conde nast don't tell me i see okay talk to me about um how aggressive we're being on growth so to get a new 450 a month customer what is your fully weighted calc well we we are a bit a bit strange because we are not looking for growth in the money from the mining point of view of of course we want to be sustainable as i said before we we didn't have any capital and we are just working and with what we are selling to our actual clients which to me it's really special thing so i i i really don't care about the the morning growth i care about clients i care about giancarlo just to be clear the way you scale a company is you is you know how to go get new customers and so you do you i mean do you have a fully weighted cac includes things like your team salaries in charge of closing deals or onboarding new customers i mean do you know what your fully weighted cac is or it's just not something you track i don't track this because now our focus for 2019 it's just to open as possible markets because we test the product we know the margins we know more or less how can it work what's your margin like 87 well it could derive to 90 in some cases okay um so now it's just to replicate it in across all the countries in one of our two models so or working directly with clients who set up a team and everything or just uh making some nice agreement with the big partners that are really strong any plans to raise capital uh not for 2019 but we we are preparing for 2020 and are you are you break even today or burning cash no no we were break even since the first year break even so how do you actually actually we are profitable not a lot but we we had green numbers by how much like a thousand dollars a month or something no well the first year was like 5 000 in...