Diamond Auctions Online: Benny De-Kalo, CEO of Worthy.com (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Why did you do this particular company? What was the idea that you started with and why that idea?

Benny De-Kalo: It took me a while to come up with the idea. I’m a finance person. At one point, we came up with an idea to finance consumers and try to provide loans against high valuations with very low interest rates. We soon found that the bigger pain of the consumers is that they cannot resell high-value items. We shifted the idea from providing loans to helping consumers liquidate high-value items.

Sramana Mitra: Was there a specific high-value item that you were going after or a specific price point that you were going after? >>>

Diamond Auctions Online: Benny De-Kalo, CEO of Worthy.com (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.

I recently had dinner in Berlin with Alex and Suzi Zache, founders of Auctionata, an online auction house that has scaled to over $150 million in revenue. You can refresh that story here. Here’s another online auction story that is scaling nicely as well, specifically in diamond auctions. The company is at over $50 million in revenue.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Benny De-Kalo: I was born in Tel Aviv, Israel. I moved to New York after the military service, which is mandatory in Israel. I went to school in New York and >>>

Bootstrapping to $15 Million in Three Years: Connatix CEO David Kashak (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about ROI. Supposing I am Daily Mail and I have a huge inventory. I have 100 million readers. What is your proposal to me? What can you do to my site? In terms of monetization, how much can you deliver? If I gave you access to my full inventory, what can you do to my site?

David Kashak: The big promise is, first, we’re able to help you edit your site. You’re able to come to our platform and easily create units. >>>

Bootstrapping to $15 Million in Three Years: Connatix CEO David Kashak (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: The thing that I keep saying in our business is that hyper growth is not a natural state. Steady growth is much more achievable than hyper growth. If you set yourself up for a situation with venture capital financing, where you have to, your definition of success is hyper growth.

You’re setting yourself up for a much lower probability of success than what a bootstrapped situation would put you in. With bootstrapping, you have more options. You can grow at your own pace. You can figure things out. You can experiment.
>>>

Bootstrapping to $15 Million in Three Years: Connatix CEO David Kashak (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What happens in 2015?

David Kashak: In 2014, I started to look for more interns. I was able to get a few more interns. I really liked one of them, who became my first full-time employee. The product that we were building was a native advertising product. We built that with publishers in mind. The idea was if we can provide a good and easy tool for publishers to create, manage, and optimize this native inventory, we get a good publisher base. The demand will come.

That is our focus until today. Our main focus was to go and offer this to more and more publishers. At the same time, we started to expand and get more >>>

Bootstrapping to $15 Million in Three Years: Connatix CEO David Kashak (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let me summarize what I heard and you tell me if I got this right in terms of the key strategies that worked for you. You went after smaller publishers and accumulated a good amount of mobile inventory that was a collection of small sites. You went after advertisers who wanted to run direct response campaigns on these small advertisers’ sites. That’s how you put this ad network together and both sides of the marketplace came together.

David Kashak: Exactly. I basically started with the people who didn’t have anything to lose. If you go to CNN, they can’t give you any inventory. I believe that this is something that’s going to be engaging because it’s a type of advertising that’s non-intrusive. It looks like an article. It’s informative and provides value to the user. From the advertiser’s side, I couldn’t got to Bank of America because they’d be like, “Who are you?”. >>>

Bootstrapping to $15 Million in Three Years: Connatix CEO David Kashak (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What form factor would that be in? If you could provide something, you must have had a hypothesis of what that must look like?

David Kashak: Basically, I thought about developing a platform for them. Using that platform, they can easily create native units for their mobile sites. It’s going to be something that’s going to be engaging and non-intrusive for the user. It will also help the publishers make money.

Sramana Mitra: You left Conduit with this idea. How did you get this business off the ground? Did you bootstrap? Did you raise money? >>>

Bootstrapping to $15 Million in Three Years: Connatix CEO David Kashak (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.

Extraordinarily tight, disciplined strategy and execution has enabled David to build a tremendously fast growth company with a small team. A lot to learn!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

David Kashak: I was born in Israel. I grew up in Israel and studied engineering at Tel Aviv University. After studying, I started as a programmer in a cyber security company in Israel. At one point, they offered to relocate me to New York. That offer was very interesting because I wanted to get more exposure to business. I moved to New York. >>>