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 on the marketplace absolutely bang one so there are four or five key networks we help them achieve those better and name the five just list them real quick the five metrics okay so straight off you start with uh the number of AD requests that's totally depend on on your traffic yeah uh the second is your match rate how many requests you send but how much did you get uh filled in your inventory the matches the next is your show rate how many ads will you actually show most people don't realize there's a big gram like 30 40 between as you show and as you fill right and then is your CPC how much is the Avatar is actually paying you for a click on the ad right how many clicks are you getting yeah and on average what are what are developers paying you to use your technology so we work on an entirely Revenue share based model anywhere between 8 to 12 is what we charge uh of the entire ad Revenue that the developer makes right uh yeah okay so got it so it's an ad rev mod it's a it's a person it's a transaction based take rate of eight to twelve percent what is the what what is the how many developers right now have made at least a dollar through your platform So currently we've had 1400 apps and games make money more money than they were before through our platform uh but that split across about 320 unique developers right because one developer makes multiple games and not collabs yep yep that makes tons of sense okay and what's the right question I just I'm not quite sure the right question to ask you but how do we measure if they've put in they're putting a large volume through you or not is is it just gmv yeah I think uh gmv is one way to look at it uh that's probably the best way to look at it right in the ad world it's called ad Impressions so the number of AD Impressions that flow through your platform you know we have a self-serve dashboard so for example last year 2022 January December we touched about 10 billion ad Impressions uh which is a very large number but you know uh like it's it's not that large in the adword right uh you know so we want to definitely grow like 50x from there well of the 10 billion ad Impressions that you help these 1400 apps optimize across these 320 unique developers what does that mean in terms of dollars right you know an ad impression is one thing but is it is that a hundred thousand dollars a billion of dollars going through your platform yeah it's it's uh it's a mix because cpcs determine uh you know the cost of an impression or the value of an impression of course and CPC is ready from us to India so India will be on the lower end and us will be high Blended maybe you can look at like maybe three to four dollars is what that means right so if you're doing like about 10 billion you might be making a gmv of 20 to 30 million dollars just ballpark yeah yeah yeah yeah and sorry the math you're doing there is you're taking 10 billion ad Impressions and you're assuming a click-through rate and then you're assuming a three dollar cost per click it works a bit different in the adword so it's calculated using a metrical CPM CPM is simply 10 billion thousand into three dollars so so you're using you're using it a 20 C or what is the CPM you're using so uh 10 billion by 1000 into three to four I see I see I see at three so it's not it's not three dollar CPC it's three dollar CPM the CPC might be like much lower maybe 150 in the 116 for that I see okay so just to make this all very clear and concise you've got 1400 apps that have used you across 320 unique developers over the past 12 months basically last year you tested 10 billion ad Impressions generating somewhere around 20 million bucks of gmv for these 320 unique developers of which you keep eight to ten percent of that 20 million bang on yeah ah very cool that's okay very cool tell me more about your team how many folks are full-time so we have about 52 full-time folks uh about 20 of our team is Tech uh about uh three to four folks in product um and the rest are just in in BD BD is about another 15 of our team uh and the rest is spread across Finance HR Support uh you know things like that yep and how do you you know when a new when a new developer signs up for your platform I'm talking about getting them activated right what do you know they have to do in the first seven days otherwise you're gonna they're gonna churn you're gonna lose them that's a great question so our customer is a very impatient customer you need to increase the revenue in the first 14 days if you don't do it the customer is gone uh he or she's gone to someone else or this they've disregarded your platform so we've got to do two things really well we've got to make the integration less than 30 minutes to our platform right currently it's five minutes so we kind of you know got there the second thing is we've got to make sure that the the developer Sees at least 10 Revenue increment in the first 10 days of doing work with us otherwise we're out of the business we have no chance to say interesting that makes a lot of sense now talk to me a bit about growth right if you're taking eight to ten percent to 20 million gmv today which is about a two million run rate where are you exactly one year ago do you remember I think one year ago we were at half of this oh wow uh and we invest in the team especially in Tech last six months has gone into investing in Tech uh we've got a solid product roadmap so I think there was a lot of folks on business we were more service oriented like I said the last six months we've also done really good work on GTM and going International one of the challenges being an Indian sort of company is are you based in India right now Chennai Bangalore I'm based in India in Delhi Pandora is known as yes of India but I'm in Delhi Delhi is not far behind and uh you know the companies headquartered in Dubai um were completely remote but you know there's always a challenge in for SAS companies in India to capture us and Europe and you know China and Japan these are the big markets the big Revenue value markets for us right I think we've done well in the last six months in capturing especially Europe and penetrating like parts of East Asia which are more value and take me back to that first year do you remember what total revenue was in 23 anyone uh Whirlwind I think it was like less than half a million um and that's mostly Services right it was very volatile right it was very volatile and you know this is going to be bad for ad spends in general microeconomic factors but we're particularly excited about this year because Publishers or app developers will struggle with uh making more Revenue which is why companies like ours come in and kind of say okay even if it can help you make 10 more we're extremely valuable in a recessionary cabinet right so so I think this year is going to be a very very pivotal year for us for two reasons one the product and second just going International yep yep very interesting last question here how are you signing up customers what's the growth strategy we're being very hacking um we've used a lot of email marketing we've used a lot of LinkedIn uh we've used a lot of tools for free on the net um like I said what's your favorite free tool to use uh a Chrome extension that lets you find people's LinkedIn email ID what's it called uh there are several so I don't want to name one but like we use signal higher we use lgm we've used a bunch of these uh and they just let you rank the right POC the right decision maker for us um and you know we can just pitch him or her to an email straight away very cool all right I shush on that note let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite book favorite book how you work uh 90 strategy 10 execution no no what was the name of the book oh Harry Potter Harry Potter like the oh Harry like Harry Potter sorry favorite Business book oh favorite Business book okay um forget the name of the book yeah that's a good one his almond act um yes okay number two is there a CEO you're following or studying foreign I follow you quite a bit uh to be honest and I'm not just oh God I'm so sorry so sorry for that no no because uh look I think uh two things right SAS is hot in India and also because I think what you guys are doing in terms of funding SAS is really interesting so I've been following you on LinkedIn quite a bit and your podcast as well so I would say right now top of mind you um but if I pick one person who I followed it was uh the Google India CEO from 2014 to 2020 which was Rajan yep number three what's your favorite online tool for building app product foreign number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night nine okay and what's your situation married single kids my recently my any kids no kids yet not yet and how old are you I'm 34. 34. last question is she something you wish you knew when you were 20. fall forward great quote from Denzel Washington right uh I think persistence is is important for falling forward is this kind of embodies that in a good uh in an articulate manner 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 Ashish thanks for taking us to the top thanks so much Nathan thanks for the opportunity one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1pm 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 our poo CAC LTV you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every Thursday 1 p.m Central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM Central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the Subscribe button below here on YouTube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live I wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the SAS World whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else I don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack Community for B2B SAS Founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathanlacka.com forward slash slack in the meantime I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube I'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows but I do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys's support all right I'll be in the comments see ya