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Founder Interview

How INCRMNTAL Went From Zero to an $840K Run Rate in Five Months (Interview with CEO Maor Sadra)

Interview Date
November 10, 2021
Interviewee
Maor SadraCEO and Co-Founder
Watch
Watch the full interview

Company Metrics at Interview Time

Revenue Run Rate (Nov 2021)

$840K

Total Funding Raised

$2.2M

Gross Churn (2021)

0%

Team Size (2021)

12

Pricing (starting) (2021)

$1,000 per month

Historical Snapshot

These figures come from Maor Sadra's November 2021 interview with Nathan Latka and are a historical snapshot, not current numbers. The revenue figure is an annualized run rate rather than booked annual revenue. See INCRMNTAL’s current numbers.

Key Takeaways

  • 01Maor Sadra confirmed roughly $70K a month in revenue in November 2021, an $840K annualized run rate, up from zero as recently as June 2021
  • 02The company raised $2.2M across two SAFE notes with valuation caps: $1M in summer 2020 and $1.2M in early 2021, the second at a higher cap
  • 03Gross churn was 0% at the time of the interview, with no customers having canceled or downgraded
  • 04The team consisted of 12 people, all engineers except for Maor Sadra
  • 05Monthly pricing ranges from $1,000 to $5,000 per month depending on company size and features
  • 06The company was onboarding three to four new customers per week at the time of the interview
  • 07Apple's deprecation of the device identifier (IDFA) created a major tailwind for INCRMNTAL's incrementality measurement product
  • 08The company used a design-partner model with 10 early customers across three continents before launching its open beta
  • 09Maor credited his 20-year industry network for sourcing early design partners rather than cold outreach
  • 10The company was considering a Series A raise of approximately $12M to build out a US sales team and move toward a self-serve product

Company Metrics at Time of Interview

MetricValueSource
Revenue Run Rate (Nov 2021)$840KFounder interview, Nov 2021
Total Funding Raised$2.2MFounder interview, Nov 2021
SAFE Round 1 (Summer 2020)$1MFounder interview, Nov 2021
SAFE Round 2 (Early 2021)$1.2MFounder interview, Nov 2021
Gross Churn (2021)0%Founder interview, Nov 2021
Team Size (2021)12Founder interview, Nov 2021
Pricing Floor (2021)$1,000 per monthFounder interview, Nov 2021
Pricing Ceiling (2021)$5,000 per monthFounder interview, Nov 2021
Design Partners (Pre-Launch)10Founder interview, Nov 2021
New Customers Per Week (2021)3 to 4Founder interview, Nov 2021

Growth Breakdown

Revenue

At the time of the interview INCRMNTAL was running at roughly $70K a month, an $840K annualized run rate, a figure Maor confirmed when Nathan backed into it from a $2,000 average ARPU. He had been pre-revenue as recently as June 2021, and the company was adding three to four paying customers a week.

Customers

The company had a few dozen paying customers at the time of the interview, with named logos including Trainline, Fastic, and eToro. All customers were on paid plans, as the free tier was not being offered during the beta period.

Team

The team stood at 12 people in November 2021, with all members being engineers except for Maor Sadra. The company had no dedicated salespeople at the time, relying entirely on inbound demand.

Funding

INCRMNTAL raised $2.2M across two SAFE notes, $1M in summer 2020 and $1.2M in early 2021, both from angel investors. The company was in early discussions about whether to pursue a larger institutional round, with Maor citing a target of approximately $12M for a potential Series A.

Growth Strategy

Design Partner Model

Before building a finished product, Maor and his co-founder recruited 10 design partners across three continents, including companies from Finland, Germany, and Israel. These early customers shaped the product roadmap and validated the vision without requiring a pivot.

Leveraging a 20-Year Industry Network

Maor credited his two decades in digital advertising for enabling warm outreach to early customers and design partners. Rather than cold prospecting, he reached out to people already in his network, contacts that at the time ran from CEO to CMO, though he noted the buyer has since shifted toward marketing and data science roles.

Apple IDFA Deprecation as a Tailwind

Apple's announcement deprecating the device identifier used for mobile attribution created an urgent need for alternative measurement solutions. Maor described this as making INCRMNTAL the de facto solution companies had been waiting for, driving a surge of inbound interest.

Inbound-Only Go-to-Market

At the time of the interview, INCRMNTAL had no sales team and was growing entirely through inbound demand. Maor noted the company was even turning away introductions to prospective customers because they had more demand than they could onboard.

Flat Subscription Pricing Without Variable Components

INCRMNTAL deliberately avoided usage-based or performance-based pricing to eliminate any incentive for the platform to bias its own measurement results. Monthly flat-rate pricing between $1,000 and $5,000 was designed to keep the product trustworthy and the revenue predictable.

Best Quotes

“So basically, incrmntal was founded during Corona. What the company is doing is incrementality measurement, which is basically all about measuring the value from marketing spend. We're working with advertisers who could be either app developers or websites across e commerce, fintech, gaming, so on.”
“Apple basically deprecated what is called a device identifier that many companies use for marketing tracking. This killed the ability to actually do attribution properly, and our solution became de facto this solution companies have been waiting for. So again, even though we've been out in open paying beta only for a couple of months, now we're onboarding three, four customers a week.”
“I think given what we have in terms of all the fundamentals of the company means its technological story. It's a crazy inbound pipeline that we have. It's diversity of customers. It's breadth and depth. It's a high subscription cost, very high margins. No, I don't really think it's about necessarily that golden 1,000,000 ARR. I think it's trajectory that people care about.”
“So instead of going directly and developing a product and then offering to market, we reached out to people in the industry, hey, we are developing this. If you believe in the vision, be a design partner.”
“Yeah. We're at the point where we actually like, when people ask, hey, do you want me to introduce you to this client? We actually say no because we don't want to be convincing people right now. Like, there's enough customers reaching to us because they're convinced.”
“12 people. Everybody's an engineer other than me.”

What Happened Next

This interview captured INCRMNTAL a couple of months after its open paying beta launched, when the company had gone from pre-revenue in June 2021 to roughly $70K a month, an $840K annualized run rate. The figures here reflect what was said on the tape in November 2021 and are a historical snapshot. Visit the INCRMNTAL company profile on GetLatka for current revenue, funding, and growth data.

View INCRMNTAL’s current profile and metrics

Full Transcript

Chapters

Introduction and Company Overview

Nathan Latka

00:00Hey, folks. My guest today is Maor Sadra. He's got twenty years experience in digital advertising and can summarize his entire life in an Excel spreadsheet. Today, he's the CEO and co founder of incrmntal founded during 2020 in lockdown mode, which helps with incrementality measurement using causal models. Maor, are you ready to take us to the top?

Maor Sadra

00:17>> Yeah, happy to.

Nathan Latka

00:18Thanks for reaching You bet.

00:20Okay. So tell us what the company is doing and can you name one or two customers and how they're using the technology?

What INCRMNTAL Does and Named Customers

Maor Sadra

00:25>> Yeah, sure. So basically, incrmntal was founded during Corona. What the company is doing is incrementality measurement, which is basically all about measuring the value from marketing spend. We're working with advertisers who could be either app developers or websites across e commerce, fintech, gaming, so on. Some companies that I can name is Trainline, The UK train ticket seller, Fastic, which is intermittent fasting. And we're also working with eToro, fairly large FinTech company out of Israel.

How eToro Uses the Platform

Nathan Latka

00:57So how does eToro use you?

Maor Sadra

01:00>> So basically what they're doing is they're streaming their media spend and conversions data or marketing results. And basically the system allows them with a hit of the button to measure the value of their marketing spend. Means when they increase spend on a channel, did it actually create incremental value or is it just taking value from somewhere else, which is a common unfortunate side effect of marketing measurement. Interesting.

Nathan Latka

01:26Yeah, this is obviously a hard problem. Everyone's always fighting over attribution. It sounds like you're trying to solve that. Exactly. Very cool. Okay. And so what are customers paying on average per month to use this technology you've built?

Pricing Model and Subscription Structure

Maor Sadra

01:36>> Yeah. So we are pure SaaS monthly subscription. We really wanted to keep it flat. So basically our pricing is lying anywhere between $1,000 a month to 5 ks a month, depending on the size and features the customers want. It was really important for us to not have a variable component pricing because we didn't want to have a bias. We didn't want the platform to prove itself to customers and hence build them based on how much you're

02:01>> using spending and so on. So four packages starting from free to enterprise package.

Nathan Latka

02:07Okay. But sweet spot, you'd say is what? $2,000 a month? Something like that?

Maor Sadra

02:11>> Roughly. Yeah. I would say actually the majority of customers right now is enterprise, so bigger.

First Customers and Design Partner Strategy

Nathan Latka

02:15Okay. So maybe closer to 5 k instead of 2 k. Got it. Very cool. Tell me about your first customer. So you launched in 2020. How did you go to market? How'd you get that first person signed up?

Maor Sadra

02:25>> Yeah. So actually we were fortunate. So me and my co founder were both, I would say not first timers. So we've been around for a while. And when we started, we reached out to design customers. So instead of going directly and developing a product and then offering to market, we reached out to people in the industry, hey, we are developing this. If you believe in the vision, be a design partner. And so we were fortunate again,

02:49>> I would say thanks to Corona and Zoom and doing everything remote, we had design customers from three different continents. We had 10 design customers actually, big and small, gaming companies from Finland and then health tech companies from Germany and then of course Israeli ones as well.

Nathan Latka

03:06What does that mean, those design customers? Like what's the title of the people you were reaching out to and were you using LinkedIn or how were you reaching out to them?

Maor Sadra

03:12>> So most of them I would say came through our past network because previously I was CEO for an ad network called AppLift. It was two fifty people, 100,000,000 revenues, 15 offices around the world. So I had the network to actually reach out to people. People used to be, well, are typically anywhere from CEO to CMO, but now we see that the persona we're dealing with typically is either marketing persona or data science persona.

Nathan Latka

03:38Interesting. So got it. So you reached out to people who are using AppLift to say, Hey, I'm working on this new thing. You wanna test it out?

Maor Sadra

03:45>> No. I actually just reached out to people from my network. Again, twenty years in the industry. It's a lot of network.

Nathan Latka

03:50What did you learn at AppLift?

Maor Sadra

03:52>> I mean, when you say

Nathan Latka

03:52a $100,000,000 in revenue, was that GMV through the platform or your cut that you were taking?

Maor Sadra

03:56>> No, no, I would say, so AppLift was a media company. So, $100,000,000 was gross revenue running through the system. Cut was roughly 30 percent. That's the media world.

Nathan Latka

04:07Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I guess finish that story out for us. So I think you raised what, $10,000,000 to $20,000,000 bucks there. You did you sell that or what happened?

Maor Sadra

04:14>> Yeah. We sold it in 2019, actually. So I became CEO end of two thousand eighteen. And I would say Oh, you

Nathan Latka

04:20weren't a Founder?

Maor Sadra

04:21>> No, no. Joined it as a VP Strategic Development, got promoted to CRO five months later and ended up taking the CEO role where my only job was sell this company as fast as possible. That was some hard times. That's a different and a longer story.

Nathan Latka

04:37Yep. Yep. Okay. Got it. Did investors at least get their $20,000,000 back?

Maor Sadra

04:42>> Most of them.

Nathan Latka

04:43Okay. Interesting. So, so it was more like sort of a flash sale, get it done, move on to the next thing sort of deal?

Maor Sadra

04:48>> Very much. Very much.

04:50>> Okay.

Nathan Latka

04:51Alright. So so back back to current business incrmntal. So you bring your first customers on from your past network. You have a co founder, it sounds like. How many customers are you now working with today?

Maor Sadra

05:00>> I'd rather not name it because we're not to the point to actually name the any figures.

Paying Beta Launch and Customer Growth

Nathan Latka

05:05Do you have paying customers today?

Maor Sadra

05:07>> Yes. Yes. We do have paying customers.

Nathan Latka

05:09Okay. Are we talking, though, like mean, give me a range that you're comfortable sharing. We're talking, like, five or 500 or 5,000?

Maor Sadra

05:15>> No. So, again, we just launched Open Beta a couple of months ago. I would say we are a few dozens live on the platform.

Nathan Latka

05:21I see. Got it. And live on the platform, that's paying customers. And if not, how do you move people that are okay.

Maor Sadra

05:26>> Those are paying.

Nathan Latka

05:27Got it. So a few dozen paying. So call maybe 24, 36. When people use it for free, cause because you mentioned a free plan, what do you know they have to do on the free plan to activate, to increase the likelihood they convert to paid?

Maor Sadra

05:37>> Yeah. So actually right now we are not offering the free. So right now in beta, what we did is we offered customers that they can join for business or enterprise package. Luckily for us, so last year when we founded the company, something happened. Apple made an announcement that was incredible for us. Apple basically deprecated what is called a device identifier that many companies use for marketing tracking. This killed the ability to actually do attribution properly, and

06:05>> our solution became de facto this solution companies have been waiting for. So again, even though we've been out in open paying beta only for a couple of months, now we're onboarding three, four customers a week. Mhmm.

Nathan Latka

06:17Mhmm. Okay. Got it. That makes good sense. So beta launched recently. You're now adding customers. Now did you guys decide to bootstrap this or did you raise?

Fundraising History and SAFE Notes

Maor Sadra

06:25>> No. We raised. We did a basically a seed round on a safe.

Nathan Latka

06:29One

Maor Sadra

06:30>> of one was last summer. One was kinda like beginning of this year to kind of allow additional investors to come in. And, yeah, now the question is when or if do we do another fundraising?

Nathan Latka

06:41Mhmm. How much was the SAFE this year?

Maor Sadra

06:44>> 2.2 total. 2.2 total to date.

Nathan Latka

06:47Yeah, but how much just this year and then how much last year?

Maor Sadra

06:50>> Yeah, we did a million and then 1.2.

Nathan Latka

06:52I see, interesting. And did you just, you know, it's very common now to sort of let these things roll. Did you basically just sort of let one roll, Same paper?

Maor Sadra

06:58>> No. No. So, did a SAFE one and SAFE two, and SAFE two had a higher valuation.

Nathan Latka

07:03Okay. Got it. But still, one has come in and put an equity value on the business, actually priced the business. They both have caps.

Maor Sadra

07:10>> Exactly. Exactly. We use valuation caps.

Nathan Latka

07:13Tell me more about how think about funding moving forward. You mentioned maybe raising now.

Maor Sadra

07:17>> So again, I think now is interesting time. So like when we started the company, we did speak with VCs to think that maybe we can fundraise on a deck before we have a product or traction or anything. That was obviously a big fail. So we ended up raising from angels. Now it's interesting, but a lot of these VCs have been, you know, in contact with us continuously kind of asking how we are and what we are.

07:41>> And many of them like the story and they for sure liked us because we are experienced. Yeah. So now it's a question. Do we fundraise? From who do we fundraise? Where do we want to fundraise? Do we want to be in The States? Do we want to be in Europe? Do we want to be in Israel? Yeah. So it's like the questions that occupy our minds. Me and my co founder is something we're discussing with our

08:01>> board, and we'll probably make a decision somewhere in the next couple of weeks.

Nathan Latka

08:05Do you think you have to wait to break a million dollars in revenue or at least a run rate before you go out and do that raise to avoid like crazy dilution, or are you thinking you can get a good valuation today?

Fundamentals and the $1M ARR Milestone

Maor Sadra

08:13>> I think given what we have in terms of all the fundamentals of the company means its technological story. It's a crazy inbound pipeline that we have. It's diversity of customers. It's breadth and depth. It's a high subscription cost, very high margins. No, I don't really think it's about necessarily that golden 1,000,000 ARR. I think it's trajectory that people care about.

Nathan Latka

08:39I we can sort of back in if you have 36 customers at a $2,000 average ARPU. I mean, that would put you at, like, $70,000 ish a month right now in revenue. Is that accurate?

Maor Sadra

08:46>> Yep.

Nathan Latka

08:47So you think you can break mean, what? Got sixty days left in the year. Can you guys break a million dollar run rate by December 25?

Maor Sadra

08:53>> I don't know if that's a big question. I don't know. December is a hard month and we try to be conservative with any valuation If or

Potential Series A and Use of Funds

Nathan Latka

09:00you did go out and raise, how much would you try and target?

Maor Sadra

09:03>> That's a good question. Let's see what the market what the market brings.

Nathan Latka

09:08Well, you should never let the market tell you how much you wanna raise to grow your business. How much do you think you need to grow faster? And what would you invest?

Maor Sadra

09:13>> How much do we want to raise or how much valuation we want?

Nathan Latka

09:17No, no. You, you rate capital. How much do you wanna raise?

Maor Sadra

09:19>> I think we'll probably wanna raise one Sorry. Something like 12.

Nathan Latka

09:23Something like 12,000,000? Yeah. Interesting. Why is why 12,000,000? Where would you spend that?

Maor Sadra

09:30>> 12,000,000 will allow us to grow the tech team, establish a sales team, a SaaS sales team, specifically in The States where the market pretty much is. Yeah, that's pretty much the gist of it. We wanna take the product to completely self-service, means customers should be able to onboard themselves, integrate themselves, pay, subscribe, upgrade, and so on. There's a couple of other things within the product pipeline and that has to do with features that could be premium

09:57>> features to actually expand what we are charging to customers who are getting value from the product. Yeah, and at the end I would say for enterprise clients, even though again, we have an insane pipeline inbound, which is nice. For we are not doing sales right now, but for sure there are clients where we are better off if we are approaching them proactively and not waiting for them to reach to reach us.

Team Composition and Engineering Focus

Nathan Latka

10:19Of course. And so what is the team today? It sounds like no salespeople, but what's the total team today?

Maor Sadra

10:24>> 12 people. Everybody's an engineer other than me.

Nathan Latka

10:27Okay. Okay. That's a nice place to be. Got it. So any any feature request, just stick it in Slack. They put it in Jira. It goes live the next day. Right?

Maor Sadra

10:34>> Well, I have a cofounder, and we're equal partners, so everything is a decision between us. It's it's a very much customer oriented solution or a company I would say means that the design customers at the end dictated what the product is. The vision has never changed which is really really cool but what the product is and what the product is capable of I would say grew beyond necessarily what we originally expected and planned for.

11:00>> We never needed to pivot which is cool. We were like the luckiest people because of that announcement by Apple last year. I would say Corona for us and the whole lockdown was of course strange. I haven't seen my co founder in a year and a half, but it was incredible for us.

Revenue Growth from Zero to Today

Nathan Latka

11:15And Maor, when you talk about growth rate because of these announcements, because of COVID, because of Apple, if you're doing $70,000 a month today, where were you exactly a year ago? Do you remember?

Maor Sadra

11:23>> Zero. What are you talking about?

11:25>> Zero.

Nathan Latka

11:26Okay. So, you were revenue in November last year.

Maor Sadra

11:27>> Yeah. Yeah. I was pre revenue in June this year.

Nathan Latka

11:32Got it. So, you've signed up, you know, call it 24, 36 customers at 2 to $3,000 ARPUs all really in the last, call it, five, six months? Yeah. Can you you mentioned wanting to make that no touch. Can you make a $2,000 a month sale truly no touch? Won't someone always wanna talk to someone if they're spending that amount on a website?

Maor Sadra

11:52>> Maybe. Maybe. But again, the way we are planning it is similar to HubSpot. If you know HubSpot's flow, it's it's amazing. It's an incredible platform.

Nathan Latka

12:01Yeah. But HubSpot's number one thing we just signed up last week. I mean, I'm signing up for a $20 month plan and their sales persons were asking to get on a call with me. I mean, there's there's a lot of touch that HubSpot puts on their expansion.

Maor Sadra

12:12>> Interesting. I didn't experience this, and I grew to a two ks a month customer of HubSpot without any touch points. I did reach a touch point when I needed a touch point, but it wasn't sales. Actually, it was never sales.

Churn, Retention, and Customer Feedback

Nathan Latka

12:24Yep. Okay. Got it. So, got it. You feel like you can have that motion, be successful without a ton of salespeople and no touch fashion. We'll see if that works out. What about churn? Has anyone like paid you something and then, you know, either canceled it completely or downgraded?

Maor Sadra

12:39>> Not yet. Not yet.

Nathan Latka

12:40Interesting. If people do downgrade, what would the reason be?

Maor Sadra

12:44>> I would need to retrospect it when someone does.

Nathan Latka

12:48Okay. So, you don't have any clues in terms of like what is like, what churn indicators might be today, leading indicators might be today?

Maor Sadra

12:55>> Churn indicators could be, again, if someone is not understanding the insights the platform gives them. But to be fair, like, the results screen the platform provides literally is iterated every two weeks based on the feedbacks we get from customers. So customers are giving us a lot of feedbacks. That's, I would say, part of the beta right now. It's like you get on a beta, we will help you with the onboarding, but we want your feedbacks. We

13:20>> want to know what do you like, what do not like. Share with us results that you understand, share with us results that you do not understand. And this basically constantly helps improve our platform. And yeah, so that's kind of that at the moment. Are at the point where we yeah, sorry.

Nathan Latka

13:38You're the point what?

Inbound Demand and Turning Away Referrals

Maor Sadra

13:39>> Yeah, we're at the point where we actually like, when people ask, hey, do you want me to introduce you to this client? We actually say no because we don't want to be convincing people right now. Like, there's enough customers reaching to us because they're convinced.

Nathan Latka

13:56That's a good problem to have.

Maor Sadra

13:58>> Yeah.

Famous Five Rapid Fire Questions

Nathan Latka

13:59Alright. Let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite book?

Maor Sadra

14:05>> Flowers for Algernon.

Nathan Latka

14:07Flowers what?

Maor Sadra

14:08>> Flowers for Algernon.

14:11>> For Algernon.

Nathan Latka

14:12Okay. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Maor Sadra

14:16>> Peter Hamilton. He used to be the CEO of Tune and Oven forgot his last name, CEO of AppsFlyer.

Nathan Latka

14:22Number three, what is your favorite online tool for building incrmntal?

Maor Sadra

14:29>> HubSpot. I love it. Absolutely love it. But again, I not the engineer.

14:34>> Yeah, I got it.

Nathan Latka

14:35Number four, how many hours of sleep do get every night?

Maor Sadra

14:39>> Five or four?

Nathan Latka

14:40Okay. In situation, married, single, kids?

Maor Sadra

14:43>> Married kids.

Nathan Latka

14:44How many kids?

Maor Sadra

14:46>> Two. Two.

Nathan Latka

14:47Okay. And how old are you?

Maor Sadra

14:49>> 40. 40.

14:50>> That's question. The

Nathan Latka

14:52Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

Maor Sadra

14:55>> Buy Google shares, a lot of them, or buy Bitcoin.

Nathan Latka

15:01Guys, there you have it, incrmntal.com, helping advertisers understand attribution in a way more effective, a way, using a way more effective process. They just launched a paywall call in June, now have called a couple dozen customers at a $2,000 ARPU, $70,000 a month in revenue, again, from nothing about a year ago, 2,200,000 raised on two notes. They're gonna keep driving growth here and see if they go out and start a Q1 and target a 12,000,000

15:23series A round. We'll see if that happens. Team of 12 today, all engineers except Maor. Maor, thanks for coming on and taking us to the top.

Maor Sadra

15:29>> Thank you, Nathan. Cheers.

Nathan Latka

15:32One 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

15:57Central. Additionally, remember these recorded founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM Central. To 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

16:19big 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 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.

16:41Sign up for 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

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