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Crossing the Desert, Hitting the Jackpot: Taboola CEO Adam Singolda (Part 6)

Sramana: At what point did you find your product market fit and business model?

Adam Singolda: In December of 2011. At that point, we felt we had the best engine in the world to predict what content people like to consume next. Most companies have 20 or 30 algorithms they will apply to do some sort of targeting, but none of them did a good job of video prediction. We had to do something unique and we developed EngageRank and Aggregated CPR. Those two attributes allowed us to blend together upwards of 1000 signals and select 3 or 4 things for recommendation. We knew that process generated high click-through rates. >>>

Trying to Turn Carriers and Retailers Into Google: Azzimov CEO Benoît l’Archevêque (Part 1)

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We normally only feature companies that have proven concepts in the Entrepreneur Journeys series. This concept, however, is not entirely proven. It is interesting and bold.

Sramana Mitra: Benoit, where are you from? Where were you born and raised? Give us some back story of the Azzimov journey.

Benoît l’Archevêque: It’s a rather peculiar story because I’m a French Canadian. I come from a very low class family from Montreal, Canada. I was actually raised by a plumber and my mother was a Customs Officer – very creative people but not really much into businesses. I was surrounded by people that never really did anything to create a company. They’re not entrepreneurs. I come from a weird place where I didn’t know, at a young age, what an entrepreneur was. The only thing I wanted to do in life was cartoons. I studied Art. >>>

Crossing the Desert, Hitting the Jackpot: Taboola CEO Adam Singolda (Part 5)

Sramana: What was your next milestone after 5min?

Adam Singolda: Our next goal was to attract big brand publishers. The problem was that I had no idea how to make money. We could not make it scale to the point of relevancy to big businesses. That is when I decided to leave the tech side of the business in Israel while I moved to New York. If you want to run a media business you have to be in New York, not doing so is the big risk. I moved to New York on May 23rd of 2009. Around the same time, we were very fortunate to have Lior Golan join us as the CTO. He had just sold his previous company and was a very good fit for where we were trying to go. He became my partner in crime. It was a life-changer for me to have a person like him to talk to.

Sramana: How was the company surviving at that point? Where you still living on the $1.5 million that you raised?

Adam Singolda: I raised $40 million dollars in total, and $6 million dollars were raised in the first two years. >>>

Student Entrepreneur to $10M+ Business: Blaine Vess, CEO of StudyMode (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What was the monetization model on that one? Were they monetizing well?

Blaine Vess: I don’t think they were monetizing as best as they could, but both of them were making money out of Google AdSense. Flash Card Exchange had a lifetime membership for $20 a month. If you paid, you would not see any advertising and you also got a bit of storage space if you wanted to upload images or audio to flash cards. When we bought it, we removed the premium membership because we’ve been focused on growth and getting people to love the site and the brand. Right now, we only make money on advertising. We’re eventually going to launch a premium membership where you can have the advertising removed if you pay, mainly because a lot of people have requested that feature.

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Crossing the Desert, Hitting the Jackpot: Taboola CEO Adam Singolda (Part 4)

Sramana: What story did you tell the VC? What was the vision?

Adam Singolda: We told them a similar story to what I expressed earlier but focused on video. It was the same premise that information should look for people as opposed to the other way around. I did not speak about content and discovery in general, instead I talked about video discovery. In 2007, video was a hyped topic in general. Everybody thought that a company capable of increasing video views would be very valuable because video had a far higher CPM.

I did not know what the business model was going to be. I did not know how it was going to work on different platforms. There was a lot of stuff that came after. I raised money on video and we stuck to that original idea for our first four years.

Sramana: After you raised money how long did it take you to launch your first product? What was the first product doing? >>>

Student Entrepreneur to $10M+ Business: Blaine Vess, CEO of StudyMode (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: But it did not pan out that way?

Blaine Vess: It did not pan out, but we learned a lot in the process – mainly about a lot of the things that we were doing wrong like not having employees. We had very high margins. We were making a lot of money and not really spending that money on growing the business. We didn’t have an office. It was a highly educational process for us. In 2011, after going through that process, we decided that we wanted to give it a try. That summer, we hired our first employee who was our office manager at that time. We hired some programmers and an in-house SEO person. We got an office. The process has continued since then.

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Crossing the Desert, Hitting the Jackpot: Taboola CEO Adam Singolda (Part 3)

Sramana: What was your frame of mind as you approached the angel investors? You had just left the Army and it sounds like you may have been looking for a bit of a break at that point.

Adam Singolda: At that time, I was considering two things. One was to do an MBA because I really wanted to move to the US. I wanted to have a chance to make a living and join the industry with a better chance of sticking to it. The other option was to start the company, but I did not have absolute confidence that I could do it. The investor recommended that I delay my MBA by a year to start the company. In the worst case scenario, I would still get my MBA, but on the upside a year later, we could potentially be building something great together. >>>

Student Entrepreneur to $10M+ Business: Blaine Vess, CEO of StudyMode (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: In 2008, you have got one acquisition under your belt. What happens next?

Blaine Vess: We ended up buying another site, which was called All Free Essays. It was another site that has been around since about 2000. It was not monetized at all. I had been reaching out to the owner for at least a year about buying the site. She wasn’t interested. I finally just made an offer of under $35,000 and she accepted it. The philosophy around that acquisition was the same as bignerds.com. We wanted the traffic and content. We were once again able to monetize it better than how it was monetized before we bought it.

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