The Story of a $9M Lifestyle Business: Kean Graham, CEO of MonetizeMore (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Now we’re talking 2015 and you’re trying to recover from this fiasco.

Kean Graham: This was the beginning of 2014.

Sramana Mitra: You did this $2 million in 2013 and early 2014, you had this fiasco. That revenue was basically being forfeited.

Kean Graham: Yes, all revoked.

Sramana Mitra: What was the recourse? How did you recover from this situation?

Kean Graham: We lost a lot of clients. We had a huge backlash. I essentially was the front man to answer any emails, calls, or Skype messages. I acted as professionally as possible. I was trying to keep any publishers who were still willing to work with us, because a nice thing about our offering is we increase ad revenue. Despite them losing a big pocket of their revenue, we can increase their future revenues to compensate for the loss. We set up one-off deals to give them credits equal to the amount that they lost. They essentially received free services for months, and in some  cases years. >>>

A Serial Entrepreneur’s Lessons Learned: .CLUB CEO Colin Campbell (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: It’s a very interesting angle to entrepreneurship that you shared.

Colin Campbell: I have a unique perspective in that I’ve done company after company. I’ve worked at a larger company. The interesting thing is you begin to see patterns emerge. This is where I’ve been able to learn a bit of a formula around how to start a company, scale a company, exit a company, and repeat the whole process.

For instance, on the starting of those companies, I talked about the technological shift and being able to move very quickly before the risk-averse companies move and take advantage of those shifts. The other thing that I’ve learned in business is coming up with an idea that’s scalable is absolutely critical. Technology is great for that because, obviously, you can scale technology in many different ways. The challenge with coming up with ideas that are scalable is you have a lot of competition. You have a global marketplace. The competition can be very intense. >>>

Building a Billion Dollar Unicorn: Outbrain CEO Yaron Galai (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You sold at the right time because after the iPhone and mobile advertising, the whole ad rate world just collapsed.

Yaron Galai: Generally, it did. We sold at a very pretty good time. I do know that just by talking to a friend from AOL that they kept running Quigo as an independent product until last year. Just recently, they sold it to one of the bigger ad platforms. They were extremely happy with the results.

Sramana Mitra: You had a good chunk of ownership in Quigo and you made good money off that transaction?

Yaron Galai: Yes, it was a good outcome.

Sramana Mitra: Did you have to go to work for AOL? >>>

The Story of a $9M Lifestyle Business: Kean Graham, CEO of MonetizeMore (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Talk a little bit about what was in the product that drove that much increase. What did you do in the product that allowed you to go to that level of scaling?

Kean Graham: Because the product is intrinsically scalable and because we were leveraging Google’s technology, we were able to take all these publishers that were only running Google AdSense and we were able to give them access to Google AdExchange, implement it for them, and then it would run on its own.

Sramana Mitra: You kind of became a value-added reseller of Google AdExchange.

Kean Graham: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: It actually systematizes your process greatly because instead of doing everything ad hoc, you had a lot of it productized. You just had to implement it. You were still operating in the business model of taking a percentage of the increase? >>>

Building a Billion Dollar Unicorn: Outbrain CEO Yaron Galai (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Given that was your observation and that was you interest, how did that manifest in the next startup?

Yaron Galai: In 2000, I started a company called Quigo. It was a mix of similar ideas that my co-founder and I had started working on independently. We merged it as one company. The idea was to look at the data of what people are consuming and based on that, provide links to what’s next. What it quickly became is what’s called now as contextual advertising. We started doing that around 2000.

It turned out that there was one other company doing something similar. It was called Applied Semantics. They had a little product called AdSense. Pretty quickly, Google acquired them and made it Google AdSense. We stayed independent for about eight years until we sold the company to AOL.

Sramana Mitra: The AOL acquisition happened in the 2008 timeframe?

Yaron Galai: 2007. >>>

A Serial Entrepreneur’s Lessons Learned: .CLUB CEO Colin Campbell (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You don’t sell directly. You sell through other domain name sellers like GoDaddy?

Colin Campbell: That is correct. We’ve gone to all the GoDaddy’s around the world. The largest company in China is Alibaba. They’re the ones with the largest distribution for domain names and websites. We sell through Alibaba in China as well. We find the largest distributors and work directly with them, and they promote the names through their clients. Since we’re .club, we did a launch party. We did it with 50 Cent. Are you familiar with 50 Cent and his In Da Club song?

Sramana Mitra: No, I’m not. >>>

The Story of a $9M Lifestyle Business: Kean Graham, CEO of MonetizeMore (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: It makes a big difference. At this point, were you still a solopreneur or were other people in the picture?

Kean Graham: There were other people in the picture. I hired my parents part-time. I outsourced certain operations to other people. We were looking into certain partnerships at that time. I was getting a little bit of help. It was in the early stages of that growth.

Sramana Mitra: How long did you continue with these two clients now?

Kean Graham: After two and a half years, that’s when things started to happen. Right before I was planning a trip to Easter Europe, we were able to sign a website called The Sims Resource, which is the largest website in the world released to The Sims video game. That was a really big client for us. There was a lot of opportunity to increase their revenue. By the time I was working on them, I was already in Russia. I was there for a month. >>>

Building a Billion Dollar Unicorn: Outbrain CEO Yaron Galai (Part 1)

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

Yaron came with a clear notion of how he wanted to recommend content and monetize those recommendations. It took, however, many years before the market caught up with his vision. It has now. The company is going gangbusters.

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?

Yaron Galai: I was raised in Israel. That’s where I grew up most of my childhood and spent my first 30 years. I served in the Israeli Navy for 7 years and then started startups.

Sramana Mitra: What year does that bring us up to? You said you worked in the Navy and then started working on startups, or was some of that interweaved while you were still at the Navy? >>>