How Airtory CEO Ashwin Krishnakumar grew Airtory to $3M revenue and 60 customers in 2024.

guys his first company sold for 42.5 million bucks he made called a million bucks off that deal learned a lot about Equity cap table and eventually uh joined and built his own company called eritory.com launched in 2017 they're helping advertisers of the platform helps them manage ads produce ads uh they white label two ad agencies who haven't have end clients they make money off SAS services and utilization fees doing about 1.6 sorry about 120 000 a month right now in Revenue up from call it like 80 or 90 grand a month just a year ago so nice a nice grow at their profitable today they've raised just uh 400 000 bucks in their last seat around about 10 million post money valuation uh growing profitably which we loved hey folks my guest today is Julian frockman he's previously founded perk.com a mobile loyalty and rewards platform which was acquired by Rhythm one and ended up at taptica or Tremor he's now focused on improving the lives of agencies and Publishers by enabling them to quickly and easily create rich media and see to the ad units at scale uh he's doing this at airtori.com Julian you ready to take us to the top sure let's go all right um talk to me a little bit about a customer that's paying you today can you share their use case uh sure one one of our kind of most uh recognizable customers is the arena group and so they own Sports Illustrated they own um raid men's Men's Journal uh different periodicals like that and so for them essentially they use us because we're able to work with them to create custom ad unit templates that allow them to create kind of an enhanced experience on their websites that perform more highly for their advertisers and based off of our templated approach they're able to have a much higher performance and for them charge a higher CPM which is a higher cost per thousand Impressions they deliver and what is a company uh like Arena group pay you on average per month or year to use the technology um so for them it's it's kind of a mix of CPM and so for us like as I mentioned when I uh when I kind of signed up with you it's a mix of SAS services and utilization so for them I would say we're probably at like five to eight thousand per month it's not always the same I would say they're a little bit higher than average um okay but it's average my average might be something more like three or four thousand per month combined across SAS services and utilities utilization sorry yeah I mean we have some whales right we have one customer um that I that I can't mention necessarily that's uh 60 to 70 000 per month right but I would say on average it's like four to eight thousand do you think you can get that that biggest we won't name them but can you get that because customer over a million dollar Mark here in the next 12 or 24 months in terms of ACV um I think we can but I think you know the interesting thing about our space is we're a tool they utilize based off of their ability to be effective on sales for themselves so they happen to be a really effective sales driven organization and so they're growing 20 30 40 per year and so they on their own will grow to that amount likely uh but it's not necessarily based off of anything that we do like we work with them we help well you have to set your price you have to set your pricing structure up in a way that captures the upside as they're growing I mean that's a key moment here Founders mess it up all the time so how are you up you know if they grow it could be by number of seats it could be by some other number of AD campaign per month metric I mean what is the thing you're upselling against also you know again we're we're not like a pure SAS platform um so I know but utilization is the same thing right so utilization might be number of AD units what is the utilization metric you're you're selling against uh impression volume honestly there we go so it's impression volume so so if they if they grow themselves from a billion Impressions per year to a billion two Impressions per year they're naturally going to pay you 20 more yeah exactly yes that is that is 100 the case so we already have that in place because naturally based off volume we charge a certain impression uh CPM so that's that's what we have Keaton for for us we kind of like pride ourselves on trying to be not as SAS oriented which I know is like not not quite the focus of this podcast but I see a lot of companies in the ad Tech martack space trying to be SAS when they're not which I think is long-term a mistake uh and they do this because they think they can get better multiples obviously that may have made more uh sense in the previous economic world that we lived in versus today but some of the other players they like lock customers into annual agreements and monthly minimums and things like that that make the companies look more like SAS they can get those types of uh multiples If they raise or if they sail sell um but at the end of the day it's all based off a volume of Impressions like we're all just kind of like technology that people use to deliver ad impressions 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 the 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 evaluation this year now the secret valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different evaluations inside of your founder 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 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 raise they sold 22 percent of 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 valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna 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 evaluation 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 so why have SAS at all why not you said SAS services and utilization why not kill your SAS business um so we we have like just a taste of SASS and so it's white labeling right and so if a customer wants to not present the eritori brand or any of our other brands up front when they're delivering the ads either on the preview side or if they want to have uh API access for advanced reporting or Advanced creative uh interactivity on kind of their front inside then that's something we'll charge either a thousand or 1500 per month for and so that's basically our only SAS so they'll just be clear this would be like this would be like an agency that manage the ad spend for other customers if they want to show the process to their customers they might pay you to White Label eritory yeah or like they built out an ad and they don't want to say preview.eratory.com they want it to say preview.xyz.com yeah supposed to be like adtoro media some of these companies you list on your website scroll media yeah exactly I see okay interesting get put this on a timeline for us when did you launch this business uh six or seven years ago okay so what that would have been 20 2017. uh yeah yeah about okay so you get going in 2017 and have you bootstrapped later you decide to raise capital um so we raised friends and family and friendly Angels so we've raised 750k total half of that was at 2.5 million safe and half of that was at uh 10 million dollars safe what year was the 2.5 2.5 was during the first like two years from it's about 2018. yeah 2017 2018. and how much did you raise on the 2.5 so like 400 500 375 or so 375 400. okay okay and...