Leveraging Domain Knowledge and Network: Ari Paparo, CEO of Beeswax (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What does an average deal like Foursquare amount to? Are we talking enterprise deals in the millions? Ari Paparo: I don’t want to speak about Foursquare in particular. Our minimum deal size is $100,000 year and it goes up from there. We have customers in the high six figures. Sramana Mitra: As you

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Leveraging Domain Knowledge and Network: Ari Paparo, CEO of Beeswax (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Who are the customers? Who are the ones who want to run this kind of media buying? Ari Paparo: There are two kinds of customers that we’ve been selling to. One is media companies. A lot of media companies are selling ads to brands and to advertisers directly, but they’re not always using

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Leveraging Domain Knowledge and Network: Ari Paparo, CEO of Beeswax (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You moved on from there to work for Google? Ari Paparo: Yes, they kept almost everyone. Now it’s a powerhouse in advertising. A lot of Google’s success outside of search really belongs to DoubleClick. Sramana Mitra: Your career at DoubleClick was in product management? Ari Paparo: Yes, I was the Director of Product

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Leveraging Domain Knowledge and Network: Ari Paparo, CEO of Beeswax (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  If you have great domain knowledge and a domain-specific network, both of those can be leveraged to build excellent companies with reasonable amounts of capital and minimum friction. Beeswax is an excellent case in point. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are

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Bootstrapping an Ad Tech Company from Paris: Daniel Nathan, CEO of BidMotion (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: The $9 million in 2015 was your revenue or was it the gross spend of how your advertisers are spending with you? Daniel Nathan: It’s the gross spend but the average margin was pretty high. Sramana Mitra: From an accounting point of view, how do you calculate revenue? Growth spend is not revenue

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Bootstrapping an Ad Tech Company from Paris: Daniel Nathan, CEO of BidMotion (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting. When you got a bunch of companies going, how were you pricing? Was it a subscription pricing model or was it a media buying pricing model where you were taking a percentage of the budget you were managing? Daniel Nathan: We were doing arbitrage. We go a client and say, “We

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Bootstrapping an Ad Tech Company from Paris: Daniel Nathan, CEO of BidMotion (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You’re catering to French clients? Daniel Nathan: Actually, we don’t have any French clients. Sramana Mitra: Where are the clients from? Daniel Nathan: US – a lot of them from San Francisco. Sramana Mitra: How did you find these clients?

Bootstrapping an Ad Tech Company from Paris: Daniel Nathan, CEO of BidMotion (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What happens next? Daniel Nathan: My first company was not going to copy the technology I was building. They were not going to buy on CPM. On the other side, my company was not going to go to direct advertisers. The issue was that advertisers wanted to work with us directly because they

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