How Monetizemore CEO Kean Graham grew Monetizemore 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...