How Realcontentnetwork CEO David Benoliel grew Realcontentnetwork to $3.4M revenue and 150 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is David Benny I owe he is the CEO and founder of a company called real content network and he spent the last 25 years at the intersection of technology and marketing as a software designer marketer salesman project manager executive and you know how does he wear all the hats when you're launching stuff he's a start-up junkie and loves creating new things David are you ready to take it to the top let's do it all right what does real content network do and how do you make money it's a real content every works with both publishers with big publishers digital publishers and advertisers to deliver a native campaigns content premium content in a lot of cases at scale so the base the insight that I'd had as a marketer so back on the client side was that - you know getting past banners and even getting past video advertising you know the next generation for me as an as a marketer was native and you know I would always be we in the past we call it integrated campaigns custom campaigns whatever you wanted branded content and that was a real tedious process from both a strategy perspective so you'd have to go in and build custom content itself and and actually administrative leave is really difficult you have to find you know you know a sales operation where people won't have to go and meet with these publishers nail out a deal and those deals were across the board that you know they were yeah its performance elements to it you had CPM elements it's a flat fee and then and then you have to go and contract it and and there's no scale to it it was just extremely hard to take some piece of content and really distribute it so that was the vision of sort of bringing the two parts together and you know it's still you know it's still early days for natives I would say I think in publishers and advertisers are still trying to figure it out for the most part the industry tends to cycle back into a simple way to programmatically right now programmatic massive wave of there's a big these moves to programmatic mechanisms for by media and managing managing media so it's sort of starting to fall back into from a programmatic mode so David what's what's your model though what do you how are you built I was the way that we built is we take technology we have some of our own technology to help what we do is we package content and we kind of put it together with with great advertising whether it's pre-roll video or display style advertising and we bring those two pieces together to our publisher partners is this a salata lowers that performance base like percentage of spend kind of thing the publishers themselves make a percentage it's it's a typically a rev share scenario for a publisher so someone like post media here in in Canada has our code on page and essentially we're packaging together content or premium content plus great revenue opportunities and we bring that to them because ultimately they can't scale native on their own and our value prop is that we go to advertiser and give them 10 15 30 50 states at one day your key metric that you're looking at is not you know you know you know fixed SAS for every month over month it's more like what's your total transaction volume total spend you're processing each month is that right correct okay it's all based on gross gross revenues from from our advertising partners and what do you I know this probably changes and every deal is different with all the partners but on average I mean you take in you know a percent 10% 50% what are you taking out of the spend it's a little bit different than your typical display business where those those margins are very small we anywhere from 50 to call it from 50 to 30% is what we see you take like 30 to 50% of every dollar that goes to take 50 to 30% although that comes down to how much of our technology platform that publisher is really leveraging David are you saying 1/5 to 30% no five zero five zero to 30 to 50 yeah that makes more sense 30 to fit I didn't know why you were saying 50 to 30% it's going backwards they're at okay okay I didn't know that okay so 30 to 50% is what you're taking so just to be clear if somebody puts you know you know a million dollars through you you're gonna take between 300,000 and 500,000 yourself with that four pack getting the content in the first place actually content technology obviously we were on a technology operation just sort of pulling it all together got it okay and give me a sense of kind of growth so when did you launch the company lunch in 2015 okay through 2015 it's interesting so obviously can imagine there were some pivots right so our first iteration we were we were trying to match we were putting advertisers directly into a marketplace with these publishers and then we would try to get them working together that the growth model there we didn't find that wasn't really moving fast enough and you know advertisers weren't sophisticated enough to create and package these things on their own so it was relatively slow maybe some of the neighborhood of 100 hundred thousand dollars in revenue in the first year and call it that's in transaction volume or your cut that's in transaction volume but that's just first year as piloting right we're just getting so you did like call it forty to sixty grand that year in revenue for yourself yeah yeah exactly and and today so or into 2017 Oh into 18 we're on the neighborhood of a hundred and fifty websites and transact somewhere the neighborhood call it 100 million page views a month and generate over 300 thousand dollars a month or so four thousand dollars a month in in gross earnings that are running through the platform so what does that mean like do I take 300 grand times 30% to get your cut yeah that would be that would be a good number so your June about and that's monthly yeah yeah okay so yeah so you're doing about 90 grand a month yeah yeah that's great interesting and what's the team size today we are six people okay where's home all Canada yeah all Canada is a partner his name is John he handles a biz dev side of it I handle add off some product for the most part some ad ops people and one person who handles content for the most part it's a lot of work to be done there and we actually outsource some of our development as well and basically in the parts of the world actually and have you bootstrapped review raised boostrap great that's good we've stopped a couple friends helped out but I mean for the most part it's no real and nothing nothing substantial in terms of funding and what's growth rate looked like so December 2017 you'll do about 90 grand this month based off 300,000 going through your platform taking back twelve months December 2016 what were those numbers last year this time about a third of that okay it's about 30 grand per month on call it a hundred grand in volume yeah that's great and how many publishers how many customers are you working with now they're working with 150 publishers right now sorry yeah you said that okay that's out it's really interesting I mean I would say 150 sites that generate real traffic so one publishers themselves are there's aggregator there's groups right this our sweet spot what we found is somewhere in the middle of sort of a not a long tail but sort of mid to long tail publishers so the larger publishers have some yeah there's challenges in getting and getting engaged with them and they have they're still working with their own native strategy so what they what their editors want to do is sort of still sell their own voice through any native opportunities that they're running through but they do take some of our opportunities on boards that they will take some of the opportunities we bring to them but the guys are sort of day-to-day are in that mid pay limiters you know smaller size makes a lot of sense hey listen let's wrap up here with the famous five give at number one what's your favorite business book probably Zorba the Greek Zorba the Greek okay number two is there a CEO you're following or studying right now yeah I just finished that I just finished reading Elon Musk's book which is it which is a really interesting book it's kind of a massive eye opener in terms of how he gets stuff done and it's a very spirited discussion about whether he's more a visionary or an execution guy and I would lean more towards you know I I just see the way the way he made stuff might make stuff happen is brilliant no number three what's your favorite online tool today yeah shake I mean having a ton of fun with it a product perspective I probably love full story it's a great tool I think it's like one of these amis to let you see what people are doing whenever you're released product to market it's kind of very interesting and the whole Google suite is just you know it just works for me you know it just makes life so easy number four how many hours to sleep to get every night depends on what I eat that night I would say somewhere in the neighborhood of five to six okay guys we'll call it five and a half ish and what's your situation here it's single you have kids married three kids okay and how are you David I'm 47 years old 47 last question take us back 27 years what he was sure 20 year old self knew he's always shy knew what I you know the one mistake that I that I made a couple three times probably was doing too much at once you know you're just trusting yourself and your ability and just not having a plan B is the only way to really succeed you always sort of tend to create some kind of backstop opportunity where...