How Adlive CEO Hammad Benjelloun grew Adlive to $745.8K revenue and 140 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is ben benjalone he is the founder of adlib technology the publisher's revenue monetization app he's a true digital native with financial markets background started his profession a professional career as a sales trader for lehman brothers in london before moving to dubai as an investment advisor and worked on a few tech deals where he had first contact with the digital world ben you ready to take us to the top yeah probably a good thing you got out of lehman huh so uh yeah i went out leaving a year before they went bankrupt and uh my manager had uh i thought something was not going going right and um you know what they felt chapter 11 of my birthday that was kind that's funny so how did you know you wanted to dubai what was in dubai uh actually we had an offer from an investment firm that was operating from dubai and the managing director just took the whole team with him okay interesting so is the case of ad live i mean was this a deal you were working on that fell through and then you just bought it yourself or no no no no no nothing to do basically the idea from ad life came to me from uh my experience with financial markets uh and more precisely is when i saw how a bloomberg terminal was doing amazing things to connect people and allow them to execute your transaction at a very light scale and um you know i just wanted to take that uh that vision to a different uh sector and different market so okay and this is the idea walk me through the company what's the company doing how do you make money so basically what we do is that we offer an app that helps publisher better monetize their revenue and what we offer is just a sas license so we don't take any commission on the media sales which is uh what every other company on the market is doing so we're a pure sas company that helps publisher make more money on their advertising and this is i mean specifically this is kind of header bidding optimization correct yeah this is what we started by do doing because ultimately the goal for ad lab is to build um a single platform that brings together media buyers and sellers uh but we had to to get to the market from one specific point of entry and um the reasoning behind starting with heather everything is that we wanted to solve publishers number one problem and their number one problem was monetization and there was heather reading opportunity and uh we just jumped on it that's great so um walk me through the sas model who are you charging the buyer or the seller only the seller we focus on publishers so every time there's a transaction we check with the volume and we charge a license fee based on the volume because this is where our costs are coming from but either they sell it a hundred dollar or five dollar unit which is the cpm cost per million we charge the same thing yeah okay interesting so what is the average seller paying you per month for your technology basically we have uh different uh client segment but on average is three thousand dollars a year okay three thousand a year okay great and then put this on a timeline for me when did you launch the company what year we we started company um in morocco uh where a country where i'm from and we started in 2015 and we privated because we were addressing first uh the agencies on a specific model that was uh the let's say the automated guarantee so we allowed agencies to buy direct inventory on publishers websites and when we wanted it was doing quite well and uh in morocco and north africa and when we wanted to to go to european markets and international markets we found that it was much easier and there were better business opportunity addressing it from the sell side on publishers and this is why we pivoted to header bidding and we moved to paris in 2017 and we're in station f which is the largest i think better startup in computer in europe you know i've interviewed i've interviewed you guys must be talking about me because i've interviewed a couple people from station f now at this point oh really i don't know if you've met any i'll have to go look in my notes and see but there it's come up at least four or five other times so that's that's great oh amazing yeah okay so so uh 2015 launch how many customers are yet not today now we're around we're we i think we reached 100 customers on last november and that we're increasing significantly and uh yeah that's why we are so how many today are 100 in november but how many 140 150 something around that 140. now can i take 140 times 3 000 acv i mean you're doing 35 grand a month yep and what were you doing exactly a year ago uh we were a year ago we were building the product okay so pre-revenue here we go yeah we're beta testing the product with a bunch of uh publishers that were helping to drive the right features and how did you get your first kind of 10 customers signed up on the platform the first type of the direct sales outreach which we don't do we quite won't do anymore uh very very low uh return investment and very very low conversion rates because the attack is a very crowded market and publishers get hundreds of emails a day my i can help you make more money bust your revenue i'm the best uh ad network in the place and we have a totally different strategy we focus on content and inbound marketing and this is where our even on your first even on your first 10 customers no no no i said those first 10 customers okay let me i want to dive deep on those though first before we move on so when you say direct sales you knew these people based off your m a work at lehman or like tell me specifically how you landed the first customer no the first customers were just some some people that we reached out to base but sure it's based on our crowdfunding how did you know to reach out to them we we started first we know the market okay we started with the french market so we this is our target we targeted the first french market because there was a big business opportunity there was a very low adoption rate of header bidding so our value proposition was huge for these publishers so what did you got to be specific with me here so french market but where you went to linkedin and targeted people what'd you search for specifically how did you find these people we we know the market so we we reached out for direct sales emails cold calls to to the to those people okay how did you get their phone number uh we uh we know how to get phone numbers well teach us that's why you're on the podcast okay so there are a few apps that allow you to get some phone numbers okay name one or two of them loose how do you spell it l l-o-l-u-s-h-a why do you say it so coily is it like illegal or something it's not illegal at all it's public why are you why are you why are you smiling like that when you say it because because those are some some our tricks you know we we're our growth hacking tricks well yeah again that's why i have you on the show okay so yeah and what kind of title were you targeting back then what person like what was their title at the company um revenue manager programmatic manager so digital sales manager so those are the the people we reach out to okay interesting and they were doing like traditional means and you said switch over to us to manage your ad spend or get more ads yeah or or they were doing something that was quite similar to our tech with like previous generation and they were paying very high commissions to the people who were managing that for them okay got it and we don't charge commissions so it's totally transparent yep that's great so how did you get the sellers though to sign up when you had no buyers yet you have a chicken and egg problem no we didn't on heather beating this is why we opted for heather bidding because there's no chicken egg we basically we connect to uh what we call ssps with our demon partner so they bring their demand and because we don't charge commissions they're more than happy to integrate with us because we had the technical bandwidth to do all the integration at our level with no work no efforts on their side so this is how we connect to them and those are connected to the buyers i see interesting okay so so this is the supply chain talk to me about how you've capitalized the business are you bootstrapped or have you raised uh we i bootstrapped until we got profitable because i managed costs very carefully and then we raised yeah okay so how much have you raised a date 300k okay 300 000 bucks from french investors or in the us yeah from french investors yeah okay and and what's the team size today today we're 17 people one seven yeah one seven all there in france no france morocco and russia france morocco and russia okay very good and i assume obviously now you're burning capital because you're investing is that right yeah we we develop more product but we we're targeting to be profitable again by march april april how aggressive are you being like how much 2019 how much are you burning today like 10 20 grand a month 20 grand 20 grand okay and where's most the spend going head count or sales product product yeah product how many of the 17 are engineers uh we have uh engineers working on the product we have eight people and then we have four people working on integrations and technical support interesting interesting yeah okay what about other economics so churn's critical in a sas company what's your turn...