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Bootstrapping an Ad Tech Company from Paris: Daniel Nathan, CEO of BidMotion (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What did this company do?

Daniel Nathan: Groupon for video games. I went there for the summer. I said, “We’re going to become an incubator and build multiple companies around video games.” I said, “I’m going to build a mobile ad network specialized in video games.” We started with three people in 2012. After one year, we were about 100 people and raised $20 million.

I was a minority shareholder because most of the shares was owned by the incubator. I learned a ton. I met great people. I worked with Germans and Germans have a reputation for good reason. They know how to execute. I’m very passionate about technology so I wanted to dig more. That company was more of an agency than a product and tech company. I pitched another idea to the incubator which was more of a tech company to buy ads in real time. They liked the idea so they give me $100,000. I was with my co-founder. After one year, I went back to them with $2 million in profit. >>>

Greece Has A New Atlas: Marine Traffic CEO Demitris Memos (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How many of those customers do you have? Is that a much larger customer base?

Demitri Memos: In total, we have just over 4,000 paying customers.

Sramana Mitra: There is a lot of SMBs that need to track and that includes all kinds of smaller operators.

Demitri Memos: There is also service providers who use our service for lead generation.

Sramana Mitra: Do you have a sense of what is the TAM for your service? If you were to scale this over the next five years, how big can this get? >>>

Bootstrapping an Ad Tech Company from Paris: Daniel Nathan, CEO of BidMotion (Part 2)

Daniel Nathan: After I studied Finance, I tried working in Finance. I did six months internship as an M&A Consultant in Deloitte. I really hated it. I was going to the restroom four times a day to sleep half an hour. They gave me a contract to work full time. I said, “I think I’m going to follow my passion and keep on doing Internet stuff.”

I went back to school and built another company. I did some research about the coffee machine. I understood that when you buy cheap coffee machines, 80% of the cost is actually the cup because the cup costs more than the coffee. I said to myself, “Why is it so expensive?” You had to pay somebody to change them, you had to build them, and import them. I said, “I’m going to call the coffee machine companies and tell them that I’m going to offer, for free, the service of changing the cup.” >>>

Greece Has A New Atlas: Marine Traffic CEO Demitris Memos (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: So the company was registered in London but you were still operating out of Greece?

Demitri Memos: Right. Ironically, the decision at that point was to register a company in London for stability and better access to the markets. Next year, my partner will be moving to the UK. He’s leading the sales team in the UK where we have an office. This was a very abrupt and interesting change in my life as you can imagine. Marine Traffic had immense potential for growth. It had already gained traction as a free service. The challenge was to convert that traffic to monetized services. We worked pretty hard on that. At the same time, I was learning and trying to build the company. Building the product and the company at the same time with no prior experience in either SaaS or this sized endeavours was a real challenge and still is. We’re still learning everyday. >>>

Bootstrapping an Ad Tech Company from Paris: Daniel Nathan, CEO of BidMotion (Part 1)

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

Europe is imploding. Entrepreneurs are its only hope. Daniel Nathan is building a really cool company based in Paris.

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?

Daniel Nathan: I was born very close to Paris. I was born in 1988. My parents were not entrepreneurs, but I always wanted to create my own business. I started my first company when I was pretty young. Our city was not such a great city to live in. To go to Paris, you had to take a train. It was pretty dangerous to take that train. >>>

Greece Has A New Atlas: Marine Traffic CEO Demitris Memos (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Were you doing this for a green shipping company or an idea that you came up with yourself?

Demitri Memos: Our third partner had already started that.

Sramana Mitra: How did he get plugged to you guys then?

Demitri Memos: He was introduced by a mutual friend. He had built this website on his own in his basement. At the same time, he was teaching at a university here in Greece. What he did was he created a map, and he offered the map to anyone with ship position data and who could connect to the service to send the data. The data was displayed on the map as a mash-up. >>>

Greece Has A New Atlas: Marine Traffic CEO Demitris Memos (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was the e-learning business that you were trying to raise money for? Who were the customers? What kind of e-learning are we talking about?

Demitri Memos: It was corporate e-learning. The idea was that we were to provide a platform with some content.

Sramana Mitra: This was going to be for Greek customers? What customer base were you designing this for?

Demitri Memos: We weren’t that wise. We focused on the Greek market. We thought of raising money in Greece for the Greek market. We failed to raise capital as access to capital in Greece was terrible at that time. It’s a bit better now but it’s still not easy to get money. We failed with that. The recession started to hit. There wasn’t really any corporate customer in Greece that was interested in developing their personnel. That was the end of our e-learning journey. We ended up with nothing. Our next stop was social games. >>>

From an EIR Experiment to a Fast Growth SaaS Company: Joe Kinsella, Founder and CTO of CloudHealth (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: How much did you do in 2014?

Joe Kinsella: We don’t disclose our revenue numbers.

Sramana Mitra: How many customers did you close in 2014?

Joe Kinsella: We went from nine customers in 2013 to around 60 in 2014. It grew to 300 in 2015 and we’re 600 plus now.

Sramana Mitra: What is your pricing model?

Joe Kinsella: It’s a percentage of spend. Companies consume cloud infrastructure. We needed some way to approximate the complexity of what we do for >>>