How Monetizemore CEO Kean Graham grew to $120M revenue and 300 customers in 2021.

hello everyone my guest today is kian graham he's the founder and creator of a company called monetizemore.com which empowers ad monetized publishers all right uh keane you're ready to take us to the top absolutely okay so walk us through this this is obviously the ad tech space is it a sas platform or is it a different monetization strategy it's a sas plus a service so it's kind of like a combination okay so help us really understand that over the past 12 months if you add up all your revenue what percent was sas versus service it it's uh combined for most publishers so it kind of breaks down we have uh starter publishers which uh resells a uh demand source that is like the premium version of adsense called uh ad exchange we have pro where we sell an auction technology and then we have premium which is a white glove service and this is all intertwined with our reporting platform called pub guru that gives them the deep stats to help them dig in and come up with a new ad optimization for their ad inventories so again if you look at all your revenue over the past 12 months what percent of that revenue would you say was sas uh that would uh with a sas combined that would be about uh over 95 oh got it so 95 sas with a little bit of service yeah i see okay describe one of the customers that pays you can you name one uh yeah like uh one one of them uh boardpanda.com uh lifehack uh we're we're big and growing in uh the latam region so we have a lot of uh big brazilian pubs for example uh and we typically focus on the the premium and that's a kind of a difference versus our competitors we go for the larger more sophisticated publishers so boardpanda.com again big publisher art photography animals funny featured all this stuff are they allowed am focused company uh no they they have traffic from all over the world they're based in europe so how do they walk us do they sign up with you guys how do you help them so uh before uh they were running google adsense to monetize their ed inventory and then uh we started working with them we replaced their technology with our auction technology and rather than google just competing for their inventory we created this auction where google competes against facebook amazon index exchange all these different betters our technology chooses the highest better and uh places the advertiser in the ad placement and we do that for you know hundreds of millions sometimes billions of ad impressions and that creates a large revenue increases and we take a revenue share of that i see and and is the rev share the five percent of your business that you call service or the rev share is the sas part of the business it's the sas part of the business i see okay interesting so just to be clear monetize more helps publishers like board panda pit google against facebook against other sort of platforms in terms of helping them get the best cpc or cpm yep interesting okay and so i guess give us some context here what you're launched company in i'm sorry when did you launch the company what year uh 2010 2010 okay and then did you bootstrap or decide to raise bootstrap from the beginning bootstrap love that man very cool and what's the team size today how many folks over 160. okay 160 people spread out through the world or what do they look like yeah all over the world uh 100 remote 100 remote interesting so i mean what is that like were you remote before covet or you just went remote we were always remote the division from the beginning was to go remote it was me for the first three years and the the reason i started the business was to live a location and schedule free lifestyle that's a good way to live it uh how many engineers are on the team uh about 25. 25. so what what do the rest of the folks do what are the other 120 do a lot of the others are in ad optimization kind of like customer success uh working directly with them you know account reps uh doing ad optimization for them uh helping them with their in-house ad operations teams to make sure that they get the most out of our technology and ultimately hit their ad revenue goals and kian do you have any quota carrying sales reps or no uh we have uh sales reps uh however it's based on commissions there's no ots got it got it so it's there is no full-time salary it's all based on commission uh there's full-time salaries uh plus commission oh there is okay so how many how many sales reps do you have where there are commission components uh we have five five okay what walk us through that process for a second how do you make sure that you fill their calendars with with hot leads well so we uh one of our biggest competitive advantages is our content marketing and we get uh over 95 percent of our leads from inbound so we have a very active blog we have a lot of evergreen uh pillar posts and uh you know the traffic is coming in we have very active on social media we're answering questions on forums uh we have an active youtube channel and uh we're we're getting uh constant leads and we're hitting new records actually recently these months in terms of the sellable leads that are coming in how many uh uh last month we were 160 and that's out of a total amount of leads of over 500 so we're rejecting most of them because we're on the premium end and we reject for traffic reasons uh for policy traffic quality all that we're very picky um ignore the other components except just traffic volume how many how much volume does a blog have to have well first of all sorry are you selling to the yeah the blog is who's paying you the blog is paying you a percent of the revenue increase that you drive is that right exactly okay not total ad spend just only a percent of what you increase over the baseline for for some yes uh for others it's their programmatic revenues which is they're unsold at inventory what they don't sell directly i see okay so you you of the 500 leads that come in you only picked 160 to sort of work with what's the traffic cut off what's the minimum traffic a site has to have to work with you so for starter it's uh half a half a million page views per month for professional that's 10 million pages for months and for premium is 20 million page views per month okay and i imagine each of those plans you take a lower and lower percentage of the programmatic revenue uh typically the baseline is between fifteen and twenty percent uh in ad tech things are negotiable so uh the larger track volume makes it more negotiable yeah yeah how do you so like we had bill wise on with with media ocean right and one of things he told me is he feels like he's got a massive advantage because of the amount of volume he works with he can really charge like a low low low percentage because of volume and there's a lot of people that are bringing these sorts of teams in-house to do ads because of this sort of ad tax where there's platforms like you that's in the middle now to be fair i've heard of other founders where they're charging way more than fifteen to twenty percent sitting in the middle so i would say that you're pretty competitive there but how do you think about that uh yeah yeah for sure some really push on the the revenue share side uh you know negotiation is really important in our industry however you know we compete with quality you know i i've spoke about our auction technology our reporting platform we have other tools that are not offered by our competitors and that's really what we bring to the table is that quality we're a product led business and uh you know we want to compete on quality rather than price i think that makes good sense and so how many of these publishers how many of these customers are you working with now today yeah over 300 300 wow okay got it so so just to fill out earlier when you said you had 500 sellable leads come in and 160 qualified was that in like june or what was the time they just came in that was last month yeah in june okay and so of the 160 using your sales reps about how many will you close convert to new customers uh of those uh we had a sell through of uh 26 so that would give yeah about like 40. yeah 40 new customers that's great okay wow so you really grew your customer base a ton in june i mean you went from 260 to 300 customers yeah things are really popping it might be pandemic and the pie definitely shrunk during the pandemic however we've really hit our stride we we kind of had a big kind of growth mark in q4 which continued into 2020. why did growth shrink when when for example target have to spend more money to drive clicks to their e-commerce brand since they can't rely on foot traffic anymore there's aspects of that but overall like in programmatic a lot of them are big brand advertisers that really kind of slash their display advertising funds and uh overall when the ad spend pi shrinks that means uh you know there's less money for overall for publishers to earn so the uh rpms which you which you call cpm so the revenue per thousand ad impressions those uh decreased overall starting in the middle of march i i see okay and give me a sense of volume you're processing so in june how much ads been went through your platform uh overall uh in june uh there was uh uh about three million about three million okay great so how do you i mean how do you get like three million how do you turn that into 10 million and 30 million is that like how do you exp let's just say you can't add any new customers you can only expand accounts how do you get a larger portion of the inventory from those publishers and how do you win that inventory over from them using you know and selling it directly via google yeah well take a look at what happens especially with the large publishers is they only want to start a little bit right they want to do like a a split test to see if you can outperform what they're currently running so they'll start you at 10 and then once you kind of prove that you can make them more money then they'll expand you more and more so it's about winning this split test sometimes we're doing split tests against competitors so it's about winning these split tests it's about having very efficient technology so we're not slowing down the page you know it has to be seo friendly uh it's about having these other upsell tools like for example another tool that we recently launched is called traffic cop and it uh detects and blocks invalid traffic so it prevents these publishers from getting banned by say google adsense and losing all their unpaid ad revenues overnight don't some of these publishers though intentionally use some of these bots themselves to drive more clicks to their sites specifically so they can monetize more yes some of it is pum induced and uh we have to be you know kind of investigators uh to make sure we separate the ones who are genuine versus the ones who are not and our traffic hop tool is part of that uh we've also come up with other type of violations uh that publishers can do on purpose like uh we call it ad setup policy violations and it's things like hiding ads off the page uh refreshing ads very aggressively things like that so we have we have technology that can now detect it and provide that information to the publishers and then there's there's certain things that we see that we know that it's pub induced and we deal with it accordingly because uh it's uh it can get pretty nasty and we don't want to hurt our partnerships with google and uh all the other ad networks so i land in ink and they auto play a video in the footer which i'm never gonna scroll down and see does that count as an impression or not uh that is an ad impression we do tend to stay away from the video sticky ads uh they're very intrusive and you know they're kind of more short-term thinking we're more of a long-term uh you know uh bootstrap company that uh wants to go with lesson truths of ads that you have you know you continue to grow your traffic and and get returned traffic so uh we we stick with the lesson truth of ads three million through your platform in june 2020 so last month across 300 publishers that are using you if you take again between 15 and 20 20 of 3 million would be about 600 000 in revenue to the company in june is that accurate uh no so um when i say three million because we we accept the revenues on on behalf of the the publishers and some we don't especially the big ones so the three million is an estimation of the ones we don't as well uh in june we were uh close to uh four hundred thousand okay so got it so on three million going through your platform whether you know you recognize it or not uh you you still made about 400 000 bucks so that you could reinvest in your engineering grow your team support everybody and keep building new tools like this traffic tool yep exactly we're we're pouring in a lot of resources into our engineering team to have the best product in the attic industry that's great okay so so as you think about growing the company over the next 12 months is it going to be more of a strategy of winning more business from current customers winning more of these a b tests right or is it going to be go you just mentioned record record month in june 40 new customers is going to be adding new customers all together yeah so that keeps on flowing in uh we're still gonna be winning from that but the big strategy is enterprise we want to go for the big boys you know we're talking top 1000 ad monetized publishers our our b hag is to have 25 percent market share of the top thousand ad monetized publishers and we're building solutions that are better fit for these enterprise publishers that are very sophisticated and need to be approached in a different way and so help me under so so people are going okay i wonder if i wonder if keane can execute that they're going to think well okay well what is it growing out historically so if you're doing cost 300 400 grand a month today what were you doing a year ago do you remember uh a year ago we were at uh i for june it was around 2 25. so you still even have growth even though sort of covet has you know you know just shocked the world oh absolutely yeah we've grown despite covid in q1 we were at close to uh around double uh revenue growth uh it's slowed down a bit for the pandemic but we're still rolling along and uh still have that momentum from uh the growth back in q4 besides your seo strategy you mention your youtube channel there any other channels you're using to drive growth again you had 500 leads come in in june alone we we also have a free chrome extension called pub guru and inspector and what it allows publishers to do is uh they'll run it on their actual site that is admonitized and it'll crawl the whole page find any errors any warnings any revenue opportunities and it'll make very specific recommendations for their site to realize those opportunities or fix those errors there's actionables of how to fix each one of those and some of those are natural upsells to our products right we detect they're not running any ivt detection then we will upsell traffic cop if they're not running any uh auction monetization which you call a header bidding then we'll recommend pubg header bidding there's a lot of natural upsells within there that we've also been getting a lot of leads from and the the audience that's running pogba and inspector has been growing consistently week to week so when you add up all of these sort of strategies to bring customers in right these great mouse traps what would you say that your cac is to acquire a new customer where you're making you know a grand a month from them yeah so because we're mostly inbound uh when we calculate cac we include all our fixed costs of the whole marketing department and that comes to 150 dollars that's great yeah so many ceos don't do that because they want the cat to look the best but the what i say is listen do like fully weighted cat could take all your expenses last month and divide by all your new customers that's your worst case cac and then you can do a version that's only your marketing team and then you can do also do a version that's like only your paid spend for example but you choose to use just all marketing salaries expenses support of a chrome extension all marketing yep yeah yeah we even cut up slack all that yeah it's definitely worth case well 150 bucks to get a new customer and they're you know you're making on average across 300 customers about what is that 1300 50 1400 bucks per month on average per customer the math works yeah yeah yeah we're we're quite profitable and uh you know we we we have a conservative growth we're you know we're doing the long play but uh you know we're turning it up as we grow to to more aggressively go for especially these large publishers so how do you think about this as a personal do you own the majority of the company are you 100 owner 100 base equity what does that mean uh we have stock options for our executives oh got it fair enough fair enough but you okay so you have 100 base yeah that's what i meant so you could really choose to do whatever you want to do with the company so you could launch a plan where profits are distributed as dividends you can just let profits you know pile up in the bank account you could pay profits out to this you know the executive i mean how do you choose to handle profits as a bootstrap founder with full control yeah so right now we're keeping it within within the company you know there's a lot of reinvestment one of the ways that we reinvest our profits is uh we buy content websites that are ad monetized apply our technology and then we increase the ad revenues immediately uh and we get you know the full increase rather than a percentage of the increase and we have a growth hacking team that also increases the traffic so that's been a really nice return uh in terms of dividends you know i've never taken dividends for myself you know i live uh pretty frugally and happily uh as a you know kind of nomad entrepreneur that travels around the world as we see the christmas lights hung above your window behind you with sort of you know uh you know homemade curtains right yeah yeah exactly yeah i'm from a small town so i'm i'm happy with the simple life i love that and on 400 000 bucks in in sort of top-line revenue each month i mean how much are you taking to the bottom line would you say before you go spend money on acquisitions uh so uh yeah we're not gonna disclose that the bottom line stuff but uh yeah we we've been profitable every year uh uh every one of our 10 years and i i can say that um this year we're on track to be the most profitable we've ever been congrats that's great last question before we wrap up what's churn look like i imagine you probably measure churn by you know if someone decreases the amount of spend through you it's obviously a revenue churn if they leave you completely it's full churn so how would you measure churn yeah so uh we have revenue churn and customer return uh uh revenue churn we measure that as you know the publisher goes down to zero for uh 60 days and uh that is 2.25 percent uh per month so far this year but keep in mind uh we had a big one in march uh we had ten percent churn in march so you know that one heard that kind of increased it usually it's close to the one percent our customer churn is one point two percent per month so far this is not it yeah so you've got about 20 churned basically on a logo and revenue basis annually yeah something like that yeah interesting that's great very cool let's wrap up here uh kean with the famous five number one favorite business book never split the difference number two is there a ceo you're following or studying russell brunson another bootstrapper i love that guy uh and you're great too i love i love there's this flock of entrepreneurs like no one really knows about i'm doing my best to try and get you guys out in the public more so people can realize there's another way to do it you don't have to be like vc you have to chase a billion dollar evaluation all right number three what's your favorite online tool for building your company google drive we heavily use it all the different tools and we apply a lot of automation number four how many hours of sleep are you getting every night around eight hours and situation married single kids newly single new lisa there you go guys listen up newly single and any kids any kids running around or no nope all right and uh how old are you i'm 34. 34. last question what are you wishing you when you were 20. to hire my cto or about two years earlier than i did guys there you have it monetize more serving 300 publishers right now as their customers those publishers put 3 million in terms of ad spend earned through their platform of which kian made four hundred thousand dollars on top line revenue just in june from that so the company's doing north of called a four or five million dollar run rate in terms of revenues all bootstrap which you love and highly profitable he uses profits to go buy other content websites and run them internally with his growth hacking team they've got a total team about 160 25 engineers as they look to continue to scale with healthy economics 150 bucks to get a new customer pay back obviously less than a month there kian thank congrats on the growth thanks for taking us to the top thank you so much