Monetizing Premium Social App Ad Inventory and Scaling a Capital-Efficient Business: appssavvy CEO Chris Cunningham (Part 1)

Chris Cunningham is the CEO and co-founder of appssavvy, an activity advertising technology company. He also serves as co-chair of the IAB Social Media Committee and in 2010 and 2011 was a finalist for Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year award. Chris graduated from the University of North Carolina Greensboro with BA in economics

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Capital-Efficient Customer Acquisition, Company Building: ReTargeter CEO Arjun Dev Arora (Part 7)

Sramana: What was the compensation structure of your first employee? How did you balance cash versus equity in the structure? Arjun Dev Arora: We hired someone who was young with minimal relative experience. There was a small equity portion, but that person was involved on the sales side so we structured a very large upside

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Capital-Efficient Customer Acquisition, Company Building: ReTargeter CEO Arjun Dev Arora (Part 6)

Sramana: What does your competitive landscape look like? Arjun Dev Arora: It is very interesting. There are a couple of players who are working on the very high end of our market. They focus on e-commerce players who have 500,000 unique users. They are doing dynamic re-targeting. There are companies like Dapper and Criteo.

Capital-Efficient Customer Acquisition, Company Building: ReTargeter CEO Arjun Dev Arora (Part 5)

Sramana: You started this company in 2009. Could you talk about the companies ramp and what strategies you have used to achieve that? Arjun Dev Arora: Initially, a lot of our ramp was based on referrals. Eventually, we started to do some more formal marketing programs. We started sending out emails, we made AdWord buys,

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Capital Efficient Customer Acquisition, Company Building: ReTargeter CEO Arjun Dev Arora (Part 4)

Sramana: What is the technology behind ReTargeter that enables your clients advertisements to show up on the New York Times website? Arjun Dev Arora: The foundation of the technology is based on real time bidding. We buy an impression in real time on sites like the New York Times. When a visitor to an online

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Capital-Efficient Customer Acquisition, Company Building: ReTargeter CEO Arjun Dev Arora (Part 3)

Sramana: What type of companies were you looking for? Did you have a particular market segment you built your concept around? Arjun Dev Arora: Our segmentation was really built off pricing. We started selling the product at $500 a month. That automatically cut out a lot of the very long tail such as plumbers and

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Capital-Efficient Customer Acquisition, Company Building: ReTargeter CEO Arjun Dev Arora (Part 2)

Sramana: Once you had conceptualized ReTargeter, what steps did you take to get the company off the ground? Arjun Dev Arora: I had the pleasure of meeting some great people in San Francisco. Things at Yahoo were shaky. I asked to be laid off and unfortunately was not. There was a lot of attrition, so

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Capital-Efficient Customer Acquisition, Company Building: ReTargeter CEO Arjun Dev Arora (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  Arjun Dev Arora is the founder and CEO of ReTargeter, a company that serves ads to web audiences after they leave their clients’ websites. Prior to founding ReTargeter, Arjun was the head of business development of Yahoo Real Estate. Prior to working for Yahoo, he worked

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