If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Fascinating story of MediaAlpha, beautifully told by Co-founder CEO Steve Yi in 2016. He relates how the team navigated through various experiments to over $100 million in revenue. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your personal journey. Where are you from? Where
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Fascinating story of MediaAlpha, beautifully told by Co-founder CEO Steve Yi in 2016. He relates how the team navigated through various experiments to over $100 million in revenue. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your personal journey. Where are you from? Where were
Fascinating story of MediaAlpha, beautifully told by Co-founder CEO Steve Yi, relates how the team has navigated through various experiments to over $100 million in revenue. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your personal journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background? Steve Yi:
Sramana Mitra: People do comparison shopping all the time. Steve Yi: Exactly. Amazon does the same thing. When you look for a product on Amazon, they will actually have listings for competitive retailers. It’s a combination of insurance revenue and understanding that there is media revenue from your property that you can extract. In turn,
Sramana Mitra: In terms of your operating expenses, how many people were involved and what kind of a P&L did you have to support within that operating margin? Steve Yi: There was three of us. One person was working with us as a contractor who eventually became our VP of Sales. Sramana Mitra: How many customers were
Steve Yi: We were fortunate to become profitable within the second month. For that first month, we thought we could never make that math work. We were losing a lot of money in that first month. It’s specific to this business. You just have to go through that period where you’re willing to lose money. Sramana Mitra: You
Sramana Mitra: Each of you had worked on this travel startup before, and you had sold this startup. You got a little bit of money and were willing to put some of that money into starting something else as a collective group. Steve Yi: That’s exactly right. You said it much better and succinctly than
Sramana Mitra: What did you start next? Steve Yi: I next started a travel advertising company. After I left, it took about a year to iterate. I knew I wanted to have my own company again. I iterated on different ideas and different consulting projects. I, finally, got connected with a couple of people who I