How Appbroda Reached $2M Revenue Helping 320 Game Developers Optimize Ad Monetization (Interview with Co-Founder Ashish Aggarwal)

Introduction and Company Overview

Nathan Latka

00:00Guys launched in 2021. Today, he helps over 320 individual developers monetize their 1,400 games. He helped them process 20 to $30,000,000 of ad revenue over the past twelve months, of which he keeps he keeps eight to 12%. So call it a $2,000,000 run rate for the business. That's up over a 100% 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

00:23hits. The company is called appbroda.com. Hey, folks. My guest today is Ashish Aggarwal. He's worked ten 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 $20,000,000,000 industry with 2,000,000 folks creating amazing games and apps. Since then, he's launched appbroda.com, which helps you become your ad ops or is your ad ops expert. Ashish, you ready to take

00:47us to top?

Ashish Aggarwal

00:50>> Yeah. Absolutely, Nathan. Very excited. Big fan of what you do, both at the podcast and, of course, your company. So really excited to kick this off.

Revenue Range and Bootstrapped Status

Nathan Latka

00:58Well, 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.

Ashish Aggarwal

01:04>> We can't disclose exact figures, but it's we're just about twenty months old, and we are between the 0 and $5,000,000 revenue range already.

01:13Okay. Great.

01:13>> We're we're bootstrapped. We we haven't placed any round of funding.

Nathan Latka

01:18And when did when did you guys launch? What year?

Launch Date and Pandemic Origins

Ashish Aggarwal

01:21>> We launched in 2021, right in the middle of the pandemic. June 2021 is when we got started.

Nathan Latka

01:26It's a hell of a time to it's a hell of a time to launch.

Ashish Aggarwal

01:29>> Yeah. Hell of a time to launch, but honestly, like, unfortunately, it worked in our favor because all of our customers were based in in Europe and, you know, USA and different parts of the world. And reaching them was was easier because of everything was digital. Right? Although you earlier you had to take a flight from we're based in Dubai and India. You know, you would have to take a flight to meet your customers, but that's not

01:53>> the case anymore. So kinda working our favor there.

Revenue per Employee Goal

Nathan Latka

01:56Now before we talk about your product, you mentioned in your bio that your goal is to hit 1,000,000 revenue per employee by 2026. That's how I know you listen to the show because that's one of my favorite metrics. What's your revenue what's your revenue per employee today?

Ashish Aggarwal

02:08>> Yeah. I think that'll be a bit of a giveaway, but I think we we're about, you know, anywhere between 20 to 50 x away from that.

Nathan Latka

02:16Okay. And how

02:17do 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?

Ashish Aggarwal

02:25>> Right. Yeah. No. I think that's a great question. I think we've built in our DNA the sense of a big revenue goal, but also being profitable from day one. Right? Being bootstrapped, not looking for VC funding at the time when everyone was getting VC funding very easily in countries like Southeast Asia and India, we want, we've built it profitably. So I think from day one, whoever's joined us, you know, it's a natural question when you join

Profitability Philosophy and No VC Funding

Ashish Aggarwal

02:50>> a startup, are you guys raising funding? Have you raised funding? Do you plan to raise funding? And the answer is no. We think that, you know, as a SaaS company, we can be profitable. We've done the math. We've, you know, we're in an industry which is really large, $20,000,000,000 as you said at the top. And we think that because we've been profitable, and we've still been more service than product till now, we think that we're gonna

03:12>> get better at profitability. Right? So that's kind

Product vs Service Revenue Split

Nathan Latka

03:14the last twelve months, what was the revenue split between service and SaaS, like percentage wise?

Ashish Aggarwal

03:20>> Yeah. I think the last twelve months, it's due towards service. But in the last six months, it's 80% product and 20% service.

Nathan Latka

03:28Okay. Got it. Last six months, 80% 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.

How Appbroda Works for App Developers

Ashish Aggarwal

03:37>> So I think just a little background, right, so for everyone, it's it's a very large industry, but it's it's sort of niche in terms of knowledge. Ad networks have been around for a while. These ad networks, like four or five of them, like Google, Meta, Iron Source, AppLovin, etcetera, they fuel the entire content and gaming industry to a large extent, more than people realize, right, the ads you see on your phone. Now, these tools enable the

04:03>> content creation. There are about 2,000,000 developers globally that actually participate in this industry by create creating content. And the way they make money, the way they can fuel it back into creating more content is through ads. Now, the top four guys in this industry, the ones I mentioned, they only have sales or service teams that cater to the top two or 3% of developers. Right? And this is not an eighty twenty industry. What I mean by

04:31>> that, it's not that 80% of the revenue is controlled by 20% of the developers. It's more of fortyfortytwenty. 40% of the revenue is controlled by the top, but the remaining 60% is split between small and medium sized developers. Right? And there's a there's a very large knowledge gap on how best to utilize the tools in this in this industry to maximize your revenue from your app. So what we want to do as appbroda is we want

04:57>> 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 noob, 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

Nathan Latka

05:15Ashish, sorry. I don't mean I don't mean to cut you off, but I wanna get make this more succinct. App developers are using you to get more customers?

Ashish Aggarwal

05:23>> App developers are using us to monetize better using ads.

Nathan Latka

05:27Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this. You love watching these interviews with SaaS founders, but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 interviews I've done manually. Saves you a lot of time. Well, we've done this. We've built it into the beautiful interface inside of Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second. But you log in, you connect

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06:14gonna get a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation, Private equity firm is different. If you're gonna 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, 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

06:36is not built off random data. Again, you guys hear these interviews on YouTube. All these datas are built from real time valuation data points founder share with us on the show. So traction 1,200,000 seed round three point seven raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna see companies that have sold the whole business. Well, here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the

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07:50jump back into the interview. Okay. So you're a marketplace. You've gotta get content creators like app developers and then Procter and Gamble that wants to sell their toothpaste.

Ashish Aggarwal

07:59>> So what we're doing actually, Nathan, is add networks at the marketplace, like you said. So, like, an AdMob, for example, is a market

Nathan Latka

08:06Of course. That connects Procter

Ashish Aggarwal

08:08>> and Gamble to app developer, like, let's say, Candy Crush, for example.

Nathan Latka

08:11Yep.

Ashish Aggarwal

08:12>> We are building on top of the marketplaces. We are not disrupting the marketplace itself. We seeing the marketplaces aren't able to fulfill the knowledge gap between the 2,000,000 developers that use the marketplace and how they use the marketplace. Right? So there there's some So who's paying you?

Nathan Latka

08:27The developer in the marketplace or the marketplace themselves?

Who Pays and Ad Network Partnerships

Ashish Aggarwal

08:30>> 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 AppLovin. They're very interested because the more we help their end customer optimize, they make more money. Right?

Nathan Latka

08:44So you're helping new game developer x create more ad inventory, get a higher CPC, get a higher click through rate on the marketplace?

Ashish Aggarwal

08:53>> Absolutely. Bang on. There are four or five key metrics. We help them achieve those better.

Nathan Latka

08:58And name the five. Just list them real quick, the five metrics.

Ashish Aggarwal

09:01>> Okay. So straight off, you start with the number of ad requests. That's totally dependent on on your traffic.

Nathan Latka

09:07Yep. What's the second?

Ashish Aggarwal

09:08>> The second is your match rate. How many requests you send, but how much did you get filled in your inventory? How much

Nathan Latka

09:15The match rate. Filled.

Ashish Aggarwal

09:17>> The match rate. The next is your show rate. How many ads did you actually show? Most people don't realize there's a big drop, like 40% between ads you show and ads you fill. Right? And then is your CPC. How much is the advertiser actually paying you for a click on the ad? Right? And how many And clicks are you

Nathan Latka

09:33on average, what are what are developers paying you to use your technology?

Revenue Share Model and Take Rate

Ashish Aggarwal

09:38>> So we work on an entirely revenue share based model. Anywhere between eight to 12% is what we charge of the entire ad revenue that the developer makes. Right? I see.

Nathan Latka

09:49Yeah. Okay. So it's it's got it. So it's a ad rev mod. It's a it's a per it's a transaction based model. You're taking a take rate of eight to 12%. What is the Yeah. What what what is the when it how many developers right now have made at least a dollar through your platform?

Customer Count and Apps Monetized

Ashish Aggarwal

10:05>> So currently, we've had 1,400 apps and games make money more money than they were before through our platform. But that's split across about 320 unique developers. Right? Because one developer makes multiple games and multiple apps.

Nathan Latka

10:17Yep. 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 putting they're putting a large volume through you or not? Is is it just GMV?

Ad Impressions and GMV

Ashish Aggarwal

10:30>> Yeah. I think GMV is one way to look at it. 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 10,000,000,000 ad impressions, which is a very large number, but, you know, like, it's it's not that large in the ad

10:54>> world. Right? So we wanna definitely grow, like, 50 x on that.

Nathan Latka

10:58Well, of the 10,000,000,000 ad impressions that you help these 1,400 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 $100,000, a a billion of dollars going through your platform?

Ashish Aggarwal

11:14>> Yeah. It's it's a it's a mix because CPCs determine, you know, the the cost of an impression or the value of an impression.

Nathan Latka

11:22Of course.

Ashish Aggarwal

11:23>> And CPCs vary 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 3 to $4 is what that means. Right? So if you're doing, like, about 10,000,000,000, you might be making a GMV of 20 to $30,000,000. Ballpark. Just ballpark.

Nathan Latka

11:39Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. And sorry. The math you're doing there is you're taking 10,000,000,000 ad impressions, and you're assuming a click through rate, and then you're assuming a $3 cost per click.

Ashish Aggarwal

11:50>> It works a bit different in the ad world. So it's calculated using a metric called CPM. CPM is simply 10,000,000,000 divided by thousand into $3.

Nathan Latka

11:58So yeah. So you're using you're using it to a $20 c or what is the CPM you're using?

Ashish Aggarwal

12:03>> 3 to $4. So 10,000,000,000 divided by a thousand into three to four.

Nathan Latka

12:07I see. I see. I see. Yeah. Three so it's not it's not $3 CPC. It's $3 CPM.

Ashish Aggarwal

12:12>> Oh, yeah. It's CPM. The CPC will be, like, much lower. Maybe $1.15 to $1.16 for that.

Nathan Latka

12:17I see. Okay. So just to make this all very clear and concise, you've got 1,400 apps that have used you across 320 unique developers over the past twelve months. Basically, last year, you tested 10,000,000,000 ad impressions generating somewhere around $20,000,000 of GMV for these 320 unique developers of which you keep eight to 10% of that 20,000,000.

Ashish Aggarwal

12:36>> Bang on.

Nathan Latka

12:37Yeah. Ah, very cool. That's awesome. Very cool. Tell me more about your team. How many folks are full time?

Team Size and Structure

Ashish Aggarwal

12:42>> So we have about 52 full time folks. About 20% of our team is tech, about three to four folks in product, and the rest are just in in BD. BD is about another 15% of our team. And the rest is spread across finance, HR support, you know, things like that.

Nathan Latka

13:01Yep. And how do you you know when a new developer signs up for your platform, talking about getting them activated, right? What do you know they have to do in the first seven days? Otherwise, they're gonna churn, you're gonna lose them.

Onboarding and Retention in First 14 Days

Ashish Aggarwal

13:13>> Yeah, it's a great question. So our customer is a very impatient customer. You need to increase their revenue in the first fourteen days. If you don't do it, the customer is gone. He or she is gone with someone else. Or they disregarded your platform. So we've got to do two things really well. We've got to make the integration less than thirty minutes to our platform. Right? Currently, it's five minutes. So we we kind of, you know,

13:36>> 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 ten days of doing work with us. Otherwise, we're out of the business. We have no chance to say.

Nathan Latka

13:49Interesting. That makes a lot of sense. Now talk to me a bit about growth. Right? If you're taking eight to 10% to 20 million GMV today, which is about a 2,000,000 run rate, where are you exactly one year ago? Do you remember?

Growth and International Expansion

Ashish Aggarwal

13:59>> I think one year ago, we were at half of this.

14:03Oh, wow.

14:03>> But with a smaller team. And we've invested in the team, especially in tech. Last six months has gone into investing in tech. We've got a solid product road map, so I think there was a lot of focus 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

Nathan Latka

14:24Are you based in India right now? Chennai, Bangalore?

Ashish Aggarwal

14:27>> I'm based in India in in Delhi. Bangalore is known as the Silicon Valley of India, but I'm I'm in Delhi. Delhi is not far behind. And, you know, the company's headquartered in Dubai. We're completely remote. But, you know, there's always a challenge in for SaaS 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

14:49>> the last six months in capturing especially Europe and penetrating, like, parts of East Asia, which are more value. Mhmm.

Nathan Latka

14:56And take me back to that first year. Do you remember what total revenue was in 2021?

Ashish Aggarwal

15:03>> Whirlwind, I think it was, like, less than 500,000.

Nathan Latka

15:07And that was mostly services. Right?

Ashish Aggarwal

15:09>> It was very volatile. Right? It was very volatile. And, you know, this year is gonna be bad for ad spends in general, macroeconomic factors. But we're particularly excited about this year because publishers or app developers will struggle with making more revenue, which is why companies like ours come in and kind of say, okay, even if we can help you make 10% more, we're extremely valuable in recessionary climate. Right? So I think this year is gonna be

15:32>> a very, very pivotal year for us for two reasons. One, the product, and second, just going international.

Customer Acquisition Strategy

Nathan Latka

15:37Yep. Yep. Very interesting. Last question here. How are you signing up customers? What's the growth strategy?

Ashish Aggarwal

15:42>> We're being very hacky. We've used a lot of email marketing. We've used a lot of LinkedIn. We've used a lot of tools for free on the net. Like I said,

Nathan Latka

15:52every What's your favorite free tool to use?

Ashish Aggarwal

15:55>> Chrome extension that lets you find people's LinkedIn email ID.

Nathan Latka

16:00What's it cost?

Ashish Aggarwal

16:01>> There are several, so I don't wanna name one. But, like, we use SignalHire. We use LGM. We use a bunch of these. And they just let you find the right POC, the right decision maker for us. And, you know, we can just pitch him or her through an email straight away.

Nathan Latka

16:16Very cool. Alright, Ashish. On that note, let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, favorite book?

Ashish Aggarwal

16:22>> Favorite book, Harry Potter.

Nathan Latka

16:24How you work?

Ashish Aggarwal

16:27>> 90% strategy, 10% execution.

Nathan Latka

16:30No. No. No. What was the name of the book?

Ashish Aggarwal

16:33>> Oh, Harry Potter. Harry Potter, like Harry Potter, like the

Nathan Latka

16:38Oh, Harry, like Harry Potter. Sorry. Favorite business book.

Ashish Aggarwal

16:42>> Oh, favorite business book. Okay. The one from Naval Ravikant. I forget the name of the book.

Nathan Latka

16:48Yep. That's a good one. His his almanac. Okay. Number two, is there a CEO you are following or studying?

Ashish Aggarwal

16:56>> I follow you quite a bit, to be honest. I am not just

Nathan Latka

16:59saying Oh, that god. Am so sorry. So sorry for that.

Ashish Aggarwal

17:01>> No. No. Because, look, I think two things. Right? SaaS is is hot in India, and also because I think what you guys are doing in terms of funding SaaS is really interesting. So I've 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. Yep. But if I pick one person who I followed, it was, the Google India CEO from 2014 to 2020, which

17:23>> was Rajan.

17:24>> Yep.

Nathan Latka

17:25Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building appbroda?

Ashish Aggarwal

17:31>> Interesting. I think LinkedIn for sure.

Nathan Latka

17:34Number number four. How many hours of sleep do you get every night?

Ashish Aggarwal

17:38>> Nine.

Nathan Latka

17:39Okay. And what's your situation? Married, single, kids?

Ashish Aggarwal

17:42>> Married. Recently married.

Nathan Latka

17:44Any kids?

Ashish Aggarwal

17:46>> No kids yet. Not yet. Don't mind about any of that.

Nathan Latka

17:49And how old are you?

Ashish Aggarwal

17:51>> I'm 34.

17:52>> 34. Last question.

Nathan Latka

17:53Ashish, something you wish you knew when you were 20.

Ashish Aggarwal

17:59>> Fall forward. Great quote from Denzel Washington. Right? I think persistence is is important. Fall fall falling forward is is kind of embodies that in a good in an articulate manner.

Nathan Latka

18:10Guys launched in 2021. Today, he helps over 320 individual developers monetize their 1,400 games. He helped them process 20 to $30,000,000 of ad revenue over the past twelve months of which he keeps he keeps eight to 12%. So call it a $2,000,000 run rate for the business. That's up over a 100% 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

18:33hits. The company is called appbroda.com. Ashish, thanks for taking us to the top.

Ashish Aggarwal

18:38>> Thanks so much, Nathan. Thanks for this opportunity.

Nathan Latka

18:41One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. 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, ARPU CAC, LTV, you name it, they share it. And the buyers try and make a deal live. It is fun to watch every Thursday 1PM

19:07Central. 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 SaaS world, whether it's an acquisition, a big

19:29fundraise, 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 SaaS 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

19:51for that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty 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

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