Monetizing Premium Social App Ad Inventory and Scaling a Capital-Efficient Business: appssavvy CEO Chris Cunningham (Part 3)

Sramana: Selling brand advertising in social advertising has been challenging for many companies that also tried this model. Why did you succeed when they failed? Chris Cunningham: In order to sell a premium brand representation at the highest value, we created perceived value of advertising in social apps. That is critical because many other companies

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Monetizing Premium Social App Ad Inventory and Scaling a Capital-Efficient Business: appssavvy CEO Chris Cunningham (Part 2)

Sramana: When was the official beginning of appssavvy? Chris Cunningham: It officially started in November  2007. This was pre-Apple commercials. We were one of the first companies to create a name that had “apps” in it. There was not an application conversation market in those days. I did have an important lesson I learned during

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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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