How Sourcepoint CEO Ben Barokas grew Sourcepoint to $20.5M revenue and 500 customers in 2024.

Source Point launched in 2015 after a 400 million dollar exit that was admill to Google uh now working on a sort of three-tiered pricing plan what folks can pay him on a on a volume of API call a plan a pure SAS plan which is traditional C and unlocking features and then lastly what percent of spend is Source Point helping you protect they take under one percent call it take rate on that they're growing nicely they raised recently A series C in 2020 for 17 million bucks they've got a team of 60 evenly distributed call it and uh nice a go to market plan leaning on a lot of his ex-teammates from Advent as they look to scale to 50 million this year will be a stretch goal but definitely in 2024 serving 500 customers today hey folks my guest today is Ben brocus he's the co-founder and CEO at Source Point now leading the Strategic Direction it's a data privacy companies for digital marketing he's got a proven track record of growing companies that transform the digital content industry founding and leading the preeminent supply side platform admill to its acquisition by Google for reported 400 million in 2011. he then served as general manager of global Marketplace development team prior to that he drove business and operations for jump TV and AOL Ben you ready to take us to the top sure let's do it buddy all right your bio said 400 million reported okay that was in 2011. I mean can you create Clarity there was that is that confirmed is that close enough I mean it's all about how do you do your fancy accounting there's uh there are bonuses on top of the cat price that was paid that were given to employees and so it was significantly above that in terms of uh price but it's also you know what what gets recorded in the purchase price is the complexity of the uh of the exact price but yeah that was uh that was startup number three and we did we did quite well and I'm I'm uh you have co-founders here or so founder no co-founders co-founder uh different Brian I have a co-founder currently named Brian Kane who was also my chief operating officer at admel but I co-founded that business with the gentleman named Brian Adams uh also an incredible operator engineer and product person uh yeah we founded that company in 2007 exited in 2011 this one after three years at Google founded in 2015 have been rocking and rolling almost eight years uh and it's been a great journey that's great now at admill did you were you guys pretty Capital fishing or do you raised a bunch of money to grow that company we raised a bunch of money and we have had a history of working with the best and most incredible venture capitalist how much had you raised at admode 40. okay four well that's not terrible so if he's 40 and you sell for four how many you read companies all the time today that you know they raise 100 million they sell for 100 million no one makes any money that doesn't work out really well it doesn't work out well so when you say a bunch of money just to be clear again that's I would call that pretty darn Capital session it was a good one for everybody yeah where I come from 40 million dollars is still a bunch of money it's not 400 million it's one point eight billion but 40 million in most people's minds is a bunch of money yeah well it's all it's all relative is how we like to look at it here on the show let's talk about Source points so was this a problem that you had at admode you said I need to leave and actually just build this for everyone else or how did you identify this problem oh no I I mean I think data privacy is one of those things that has been building for the past three four five decades I mean data is the lifeblood and is the oil of what runs the digital Enterprise today uh and and the understanding that from a user perspective uh most users don't um understand what the value exchange by giving their data away uh and more and more that data can be stolen or utilized in ways that um that the individual user doesn't want digital advertising digital marketing made a lot of this data available and there are a number of Brokers uh that don't act responsibly like good digital citizens don't act ethically and don't keep that data secure and so while I was at Google after we almost created the problem while there we developed a protocol called real-time bidding and the rtb protocol enables marketers to bid on individual users based on their data profile and that made data available on just about everyone uh understanding that you're in thousands if not hundreds of thousands of data graphs around the world might make you feel uncomfortable at any rate we knew that the that the digital media ecosystem needed to clean up its Act and we wanted to provide a solution and that's what we did and we created the best solution in the world for large-scale digital Enterprises to evaluate what their data privacy risk is and provide a series of tools in order to mitigate that risk and act in an ethical and good citizenship so Ben we'll go back and get the back story here on the first customer second customer Etc but help us understand today as the company stands if you know you just described a product well for a customer that wants to pay for and use the product today what sort of Market are you serving what's the average ACV would you say 100 bucks a million bucks something in between yep something between call it a hundred thousand dollars a year in annual contract value um and and our clients are the biggest media companies in the world oh what's going on there YouTube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with SAS Founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews I've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built the into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out I'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for evaluation this year now the secret valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different evaluations inside of your founder path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SAS company you're going to get a different valuation a VC is going to pay a different valuation private Equity Firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when I hover over here here right so the teal is what a VC would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on YouTube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points Founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raise they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of SAS valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your evaluation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform I hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview what do you price against in terms of your utility-based pricings and number of seats number of data you know number profiles protected what do you price against it's more about implementation and volume so we serve the digital Enterprise and so in terms of how we integrate it's on every website call every initiation of an app with an SDK and so however many times you're pinging us to launch our platform is how you pay for one of our products I think another product is a pure SAS play and a third is about how much of the spends that we are helping you uh protect if that makes sense so um product one and two of three are very SAS based models based on volume and evaluated data and one is really on the percentage of uh overlap that we protect and and that third one that you're talking about percent of spend that you're protecting are you taking like I said it's a traditional take rate model there percent of spend or no yeah um but it's basis points so with companies that spend you know hundreds of millions of dollars of marketing in buying advertising or buying data to inform addressability we we depending on how much your spend is we take basis points in order to protect that spend and make sure that you mitigate risk as it relates to placing messages on places that it shouldn't or uh purchasing data that hasn't been evaluated in the program when you say basis points though you're talking like under...