How Appbroda CEO Siddharth Gupta grew Appbroda to $57.7M revenue and 88 customers in 2024.

guys launched in 2021 today he helps over 320 individual developers monetize their 1400 games he helped them process 20 to 30 million dollars of AD Revenue over the past 12 months of which he keeps he keeps eight to twelve percent so call it a two million run rate for the business that's up over 100 to year over year since last year and they're bootstrapped which we love he's targeting a million bucks in Revenue per employee which we certainly hope he hits the company's called appbrota.com hey folks my guest today is Ashish Agarwal he's worked 10 years in digital with five years at Google across play and admob and then fell in love with the app gaming publishing world he had no clue that it's a 20 billion dollar industry with 2 million folks creating amazing games and apps since then he's launched approda.com which helps you become your adopts or is your ad Ops expert or she already takes to the top foreign very excited big fan of what you do both with the podcast and of course your company so I'm really excited to keep this off well so you know all the questions right so so what what are you guys at right now in terms of Revenue let's just start with the big one uh we can't disclose exact figures but it's um we're just about 20 months old um and we're between the zero and five million dollar Revenue range already okay great we're bootstrapped we we haven't raised any round of funding uh and when did you guys launch what year we launched in 2021 right in the middle of the pandemic uh June 2021 is when we got started um it's a hell of a time to Launch yeah hell of a time to launched but honestly like unfortunately it worked in our favor because um all of our customers were based in in Europe and you know USA and different parts of the world and uh reaching them was was easier because of everything was digital right earlier earlier you got to take a flight from We're based in Dubai in India uh you know you would have to take a flight to meet your customers but that's not the case anymore so kind of work now before we talk about your product you mentioned in your bio that your goal is to hit one million Revenue per employee by 2026. that's how I know you listen to the show because it's one of my favorite metrics what's your Revenue what's your Revenue per employee today yeah um I think that'll be a bit of a giveaway but um I think we we're about you know anywhere between 20 to 50x away from that uh and how do you plan for that right how do you get your team focused on that number it's not a traditional business metric they might go Ashish why are we optimizing for Revenue per employee right yeah no I think that's a great question um I think we've in building our DNA the sense of a big Revenue goal but also being uh profitable from day one right uh being bootstrapped not looking for VC funding at the time when everyone was getting busy funding very easily in country like southeast Asia and India we want we we built it profitably so I think from day one whoever's joined us you know it's a natural question when you join a startup uh are you guys raising funding have you raised funding do you plan to raise funding and answers no we we think that you know as a SAS company we can be profitable we've done the maths we've you know we're an industry which is really large 20 billion dollars as you started at the top and uh we think that because we've been profitable and we've still been more service than brought up till now we think that we're going to get better at profitability right so that's kind of in the last 12 months what was the revenue split between service and SAS like percentage-wise yeah I think the last uh 12 months it's queue towards service within the last six months it's 80 product and 20 service okay got it last six months eighty percent product okay and and then I guess talk to me a little bit more about what the product does right what are customers paying you for today yeah so I think just a little background right so for everyone um it's it's a very large industry but it's it's sort of niche in terms of knowledge um ad networks have been around for a while um these ad networks like four or five of them like Google meta iron Source app login Etc they fuel the entire content and gaming industry to a large extent More Than People realize right uh the ads you see on your phone um now these tools enable the content creation there are about two million developers globally that actually participate in this industry by creating content and the way they make money the way they can fuel it back into creating more content is to ads um now the top four guys in this uh industry the ones I mentioned they only have sales or service teams that cater to the top two or three percent of developers right um and this is not an 80 to any industry what I mean by that it's not that 80 of the revenue is controlled by 20 of the developers it's more of 40 40 20. 40 of the revenue is controlled by the top but the remaining 60 is split between small and media sized developers right and there's a there's a very large knowledge gap on how best to utilize the tools in this industry to maximize your revenue from your app so what we want to do as abroad is we want to become a platform where you just self-serve you come you log in you you have an app you have a game whatever you have and you understand how best to use these products to reach from like a new like a person who doesn't know how to monetize his app or game to an absolute expert right like like the best in class I don't mean to cut you off but I want to get make this more succinct app developers are using you to get more customers app developers are using us to monetize better using ads 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 valuations 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 okay so you're a Marketplace you've got to get content creators like app developers and then Proctor and Gamble that wants to sell their toothpaste so uh what we're doing actually Nathan is ADD networks at the marketplace like you said so I can add more for example is a market of course gamble to a app developer like let's say a Candy Crush for example yep we are building on top of the marketplaces we're not disrupting the marketplace itself we're seeing the marketplaces aren't able to fulfill the knowledge gap between the two million developers that use the marketplace and how they use the marketplace right so they're they're something you know the developer in the marketplace or the marketplace themselves the developer pays us the marketplaces always have an interest in what we're doing so we have a partnership with Google we're trying to build one with iron source and app login they're very interested because the more we help their end customer optimize they make more money right so you're helping new game developer X um create more ad inventory get a higher CPC get a higher click through rate...