How Kiosked CEO Antti Pasila grew to $10M revenue and 12 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is anthony pasilla he is a mid 30s entrepreneur from finland living in miami he works in ad tech sits on startup boards and collects wine he's excited about improving things with technology and his industry agnostic now building kiosk.com auntie are you ready to take us to the top yes all right so what does kiosk do and how do you guys make money yeah we help online publishers all around the world to create high impact ad inventory so we have a technology platform for them to create better ad placements and we help them monetize that and we do a revenue share with the publisher from the monetized ads and that's how we make our money so it's not a sas model it's not really a sas model we have some who who only utilize the technology and take care of the the monetization themselves for so for them it's a it's a sas model but what for us for most of the most of the customers it's we take care of everything and we share the revenue okay and how many customers are you working with today [Music] probably like around 400 publishers around the world 400 publishers and when did you launch the company what year we originally started the company 2011 but we did a pivot there in beginning in the beginning so we started off with an e-commerce layer on images and videos so you can shop what you see that didn't really work so then we pivoted that into an ad model and and that rolled out 2014. okay very good and then in 2018 what were you able to hit in terms of total revenue uh 10 million or around 10 million okay now that was the revenue through your platform and that was your cut no that was the the the total revenue that we monetized so our cut is around 35 of that okay so you did about 3.5 million yeah and what percent of that would you say is sas versus transaction based percent of transaction uh today or 2018 i would say it's probably like 90 10 10 being the sas but it's going more towards the sas and we're actually uh taking the platform like making adjustments to it to take the business more sas in the future so we're expecting maybe 25 this year probably 50 percent 2020 and and uh or it could be it could even go much faster and what um how many customers say do you have only on the sas platform uh it's it's maybe around a dozen but there are a few big ones so so but it's it's a model that that mostly larger media houses like before because they have their own sales teams so they like to utilize the technology but their own sales team while as smaller mid-sized publishers they really lack their own sales team and they want help with bringing advertisers as well yep so you do 10 million through your platform 3.5 million in 2018 is your cut 10 of that so 350 000 you'd say is pure sas that's made up from 12 customers that pay you on average call it 2400 bucks a month or something like that yeah something like that yeah that's interesting and um when did you sign up your first sas customer like what was your revenue what was your sas revenue exactly a year ago uh it was almost it was almost zero it was this kind of like the the sas model is becoming now more interesting for publishers because they programmatic advertising has taken taken time and now it's kind of like maturized so so now when it's mature these publishers tools to do it do some of the stuff themselves and that's why they want to utilize our technology and their their sales force have you bootstrapped this onto your race capital we've raised capital uh the last last time we raised was in 2015 so how much raised today we haven't been uh it's 18 million in equity okay 18 in equity and those are mainly from finnish investors mainly yeah finnish and european investors but not really vcs at all all of all of our investors are really like entrepreneurs okay and what's your team size look like today how many people in the company yeah uh 25. oh 25 okay so healthy amount and is everyone remote or in one spot [Music] no most of the people are in in helsinki finland uh that's where our development and marketing and finance and all of that stuff is and then we have sales people uh all around the world so japan australia uk spain um very good and you mentioned i mean so 18 million dollars raised you mentioned the last round was a couple years ago but how do how do investors value the company if it's not kind of predictable sas revenue do they just look at transaction volume growth well they look at the they look at the transaction and also margin so margin is one of the most important things in in advect right now i would say you have to be able to keep your margins high and your own costs low you're talking about 35 the 35 yeah yeah so to be able to kind of like create so much value that you don't get squeezed into the to the zero percentage there are big like atm t when they bought up nexus basically it's pocket money for them so what they can easily do is they can go kill out the competition by saying that app nexus is basically free to use for publishers that they wouldn't take any rep share anymore hence they would kill a lot of same sized companies who used to be their competitor competitors uh so you need to be able to create value in other ways than just by doing real-time bidding and and those are the things that you create margin with so once you have the margin there and you can show that you can keep the that percentage while as you grow your top line then it looks good and the the second thing is that if you can keep your own costs your operating expenses low so there aren't that many i assume you're burning i mean are you burning cash today each month or no no you're breaking no no no no no no no we're we've been profitable for the last 18 months oh that's great like are we talking like a hundred grand a month how profitable uh uh a few hundred grand a month yeah so what do you do with that cash i mean as a ceo you got to figure out how to either reinvest it or just kind of let it sit in the bank account what do you do yeah we reinvest it of course and and we you know in our world you know the technology is old in 12 months so you need to constantly be looking at okay what's going to be the new new area where you can go and where you need to invest so we're constantly innovating products we probably kill 80 of them before they they hit the market just with through pilots we see that okay this is never going to have the float and we kill them but we need to invest it in in the company and also in new sales channels and and improving our existing business so anthony speaking about kind of sales channels when you look at your fully weighted cac to get a new sas customer what are you paying very hard to say it's it's those the sas customers we today have have all turned in from revenue share customers to to sas customers so we're not yet in that uh position where we could start to actually roll them in immediately as like self-serve sas customers we hope to be there during the summer and then the game is going to be totally different because our kind of like the the rpu from a new customer is quite high so we will be able to pay hundreds of dollars maybe even thousands of dollars for a specific size of publisher yep very good all right let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book uh zero to one number two is there a ceo you're following or studying uh many but jeff bezos number three what's your favorite online tool for building the company uh for me it's similar web number four how many hours i sleep to get every night i have a kid a year and a half old kid so probably four and what's your situation married single married okay and just one kid sorry i'm a kid yes okay and how old are you uh year and a half you ah me sorry it's cracking up here i'm 36. all right last question nancy what do you think i wish that was a year now what do you wish your 20 year old self knew uh lots of things but mostly you need to you need to kind of like fail to succeed and you need to you need to learn to lose to win that's probably one of the things that was the hardest to i it's only you have to go through it yourself to to know it guys an ad tech platform kiosk auntie founded it back in 2011 12 people on just the sas platform doing con call it 30k a month their bigger business is a again a volume one 10 million publishers or basically generate revenue through their sorry publishers generate 10 million dollars through their platform in 2018 they keep 35 percent of that so 3.5 million and only about 10 percent of that is sas right now so 350k that was zero obviously a year ago he's looking though at scaling the south side of things fairly rapidly they have raised 18 million bucks to drive growth profitable right now a team of 25 in finland and other remote locations too early to talk about other economics but anthony we're rooting for you man thanks for taking us to the top thank you very much have a good one