Sentient revenue, CEO Jonathan Epstein, team size, customer count, churn, and more in 2022.

this is the top where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of Revenue or customer base you'll learn how much revenue they're making what their marketing funnel looks like and how many customers they have I'm now at $20,000 per talk 5 and6 million he held on global domination we just broke our 100,000 unit soul Mark and I'm your host Nathan lka when I do webinar interviews or I give big speeches to thousands of people all over the world I usually will talk about data and sometimes show my dashboards like my SAS dashboard as I'm growing my SAS company the top inbox or my website dashboard which shows how I take Impressions to convert them into email leads and convert them into customers for Nathan la.com the funny thing is guys I build these dashboards with myself no developer and it's basically free and I use one tool to do it you can see the tool at Nathan la.com analytics I'll tell you more later in the show this is episode 66 6 and coming up tomorrow morning the pay you CEO comes on Lauren Deo and I get him to reveal how much revenue they've done hint it's above $150 million now the way they've done that is with a new risk assessment product to Grow Financial their financial services arm he was the ex PayPal CEO of Europe you don't want to miss it good morning everybody my guest this morning is John Epstein he is currently he just moved in a new role as the senior vice president for uh for inter interational at a company called sentient Technologies at sentient doai the maker of sentient Ascend the first conversionary optimization solution powered by evolutionary artificial intelligence EP Epstein has followed has been in many companies at the Forefront of technology and media including Gamespot which he was the founding CEO of OMC which was sold to Intel and GameSpy which was sold to IGN GN John are you ready to take us to the top absolutely let's go so you're like a nice breed you're not you're not the CEO currently of sentient but you've had a lot of success with your own companies prior to sentient at gam spot and gam spy correct yeah games spot games spy om IGN had a good exit as well good exay on the Forefront say that again when you say a good exit what's a good exit mean to you uh well uh it ranged anywhere from uh in the tens of millions into the hundreds of millions uh of dollars some were better than others and you know some of the startups didn't fair so well such as the nature of startups was uh was games by your baby were you founding a founding CEO Game Spot yes gam spy was the president actually it was more of a turnaround uh Game Spot had been sold to ZDNet and then CNET and uh had invested in GameSpy and uh when uh 2001 came and sort of the you know the website Market was uh Contracting I jumped over to help uh this CEO of Game Spy turned it around and achieved a pretty successful sale to IGN and what was the so I want to kind of dig more into your history these companies I mean are these gaming companies like the names would suggest um yeah you know yes and no so I I I have worked at an actual gaming company most of my life has been you know except for the last eight years was focused on U media and uh other elements related to gaming so um I started out at idg as a magazine publisher originally on the the technical side and then into in the multimedia space that's what brought me into gaming because uh games were the applications that really have always stretched um the mo stretched our PCS and our phones the most in terms of you know requirements for new features which back then was sound in cdrom um so Gamespot was the first really professional online reviews site for games um gam spy had a editorial element and also published content about games but it also had middleware and a software client um that was used for matching up players in server to server gameplay these days online gaming is you know part for the course but back then um you know it was uh people were playing quake and doom and it was kind of hard to find players uh if they weren't on your land and that so GameSpy had a really great piece of software that we then ended up licensing into games from folks like Electronic Arts um and uh two 2K Games and many other and John with it was so GameStop was your first kind of venture into entrepreneurship is that accurate yeah that's right and what how old were you when you did when you launched that what year was that um so Gamespot was launched in uh in in 1995 it wasn't my first startup um I had launched uh the magazine digital news and then I launched the magazine multimedia world but that was sort of Entrepreneurship for idg which is a great company that you know values and so just be clear you were working for that company and you launched those magazines under their brand that's right in terms of my own start up it was 95 I was 31 years old oh that's okay got it and walk me through you know a lot of the feedback I've got from the show and I like to keep close kind of tabs what my audience is wanting they say Nathan you can't just talk about billion dooll companies every day and I get a lot of those guests on CEOs of big companies they like to hear the beginning stories too what I mean what gave you the confidence in 1995 to leave your gig which it sounds like you had a lot of freedom on you were launching whole magazine Brands what gave you the confidence to leave and start Gamespot yeah so I guess it was a so for first of all I had great Partners I I think it it really starts with that people are what matter and there were two guys Vince bro who now runs this moment and and Pete demer who's one of the top um agile consultants in in the world I believe and uh these guys work for me and they were just a really great team and were those founding Partners though John were was it three co-founders so they it was the three of us that started gam spot right and the the original idea came from the two of them they wanted to call it G-spot though and I said I like it sign me up I'm the one out there selling media to largely female media buyers so I don't think so so so that was part of it I think the second one it was clear it was clear at the time hey this you know we had started putting we had put PC World online and multimedia World Magazine online it was clear this internet thing was happening and that if anything The Gamers were ahead of the curve in terms of their use of online and and then there was this problem and the problem was you know if you look at the IND idual video game or PC game their shelf life in the store it's pretty short but magazines had this really long lead time of two months like so by the time a magazine came out either the review had been written before the game was done or the game might have even been off the shelf so there was this this information Gap and we realized that online with the real-time nature of online publishing would allow us to you really serve the gamer Community better and not just give them you know John hold on I don't mean to cut you this is all still in a gam spot or have you transitioned into Game Spot this this was gam spot right okay well hold on wrap out wrap out the game Wrap out the gam spot story first so 1995 you launched it your 31 what happened did you sell it it went under what no yeah so we um so we took in uh uh we took in some external investment we ended up selling it in parts to Z Davis to their ZDNet subsidiary okay um in retrospect maybe a little early but it you know it was you know for for some younger guys and and I was the oldest of the three um it was a decent exit what you what did you sell it to him for or the assets um we sold uh we sold it for stock in cdet So at the peak it was worth about 45 million as an exit and by the time we were able to sell the ZD Net stock we're worth a little bit less than that so I think you know we view it as like we all got a pretty nice house out of the deal Y and and some track record and then you you take that Capital you snowball into a game spy which help bridge the information gap between kind of games on that by moving a lot of this content online not not quite I said I spent a couple years after having sold it to ZDNet first of all we ran it inside of ZDNet for a while and I stepped into an international role I really wanted to get experience in doing business in different countries and ZDNet had you know joint ventures it had wholly owned subsidiaries it had lenses in something like 30 countries around the world so I ran that for a while and then as you know 2001 happened and you know the Internet advertising Market dried up it was clear it was time to you know maybe go on again we had invested from zet into Game Spy I was on the board there and they made a very concerted effort to recruit me so I joined Mark surface interesting there and uh and then did it again it wasn't my my former partners at Gamespot were not super happy with this move since essentially was going to a competitor but uh such as the well well tell us how that worked you're you're a rational...