Monetizing Premium Social App Ad Inventory and Scaling a Capital-Efficient Business: appssavvy CEO Chris Cunningham (Part 6)

Sramana: How do you price that model ? How do you sell an activity to an advertiser? Chris Cunningham: We actually don’t sell an activity to an advertiser. We sell them an audience. Our ad is triggered by activity.

Monetizing Premium Social App Ad Inventory and Scaling a Capital-Efficient Business: appssavvy CEO Chris Cunningham (Part 5)

Sramana: One of the activity advertising concepts you talked about was branded interviews. Would you provide more details about that concept? Chris Cunningham: There was an application called Social Interview. Users could post interview questions to their friends. It was almost like a gaming behavior. We took that interview and were able to get it

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Monetizing Premium Social App Ad Inventory and Scaling a Capital-Efficient Business: appssavvy CEO Chris Cunningham (Part 4)

Sramana: How long did you carry on with your initial business model, and what were your revenue ramps in the early years? Chris Cunningham: We went from 80 partners in 2008 to several hundred in 2009. We went from just under $4 million in revenue in 2008 to $9 million in 2009 and over $20

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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.