StackAdapt reached $400M top line after starting with custom software
“I've had stack adapt on this show. They're doing. Four hundred million dollars top line now, and they started with cost of software.”
Pecherskiy took his first $500 monthly salary nine months into StackAdapt
“My first salary was about, yeah, 500 dollars for a month, and that was maybe, like, you know, nine months into starting the company”
Pecherskiy: Building proprietary software over third-party platforms ensures startup independence
“Even though it took longer in the long run, it made us a lot more independent because we had a lot more control over how the product is built. So like the direction of not building on top of anybody else's land was an important one so that we can have that ind…”
StackAdapt landed an automaker as its first customer via one-page MVP
“One of the biggest validation for us came from just putting up a website explaining sort of the idea that we had, and it was like a one page website. And then amazingly, we had an inbound lead, like couple weeks later from large car maker, basically saying lik…”
Pecherskiy: B2B founders need deep domain experience to spot non-obvious ideas
“It's helpful, at least in a B to B space to understand the industry because the markets are so large. It's hard to know what's like an obvious idea and what's a more unique idea unless you understand the market really well.”
Pecherskiy: Adtech software requires blending self-serve software with heavy customer support
“What we quickly learn is that actually people want to use software directly, but they also want to have lots of support because advertising is, is a complex topic. We realized that Actually, we need to mix services with software in a way that clients still use…”
Pecherskiy: A feature built for one customer became core to StackAdapt
“In the beginning, like I remember thinking, I can't believe we're doing something for one customer. Like years later, I look back at this and this becomes one of the critical capabilities of our product. And one of the major reasons for of our platform, I woul…”
Pecherskiy: Customer excitement alone often leads to building unused software
“Sometimes you come to them and you say, would you want us to build this product? And they say, oh, that's great. That sounds awesome. And you take that at face value and you build it and never gets used. We've done things. We've built things like that. And it'…”
StackAdapt bootstrapped to $100M+ revenue because they failed to raise funding
“You know, we wanted to raise more money. We just couldn't.”
Pecherskiy: Growth plateaus stem from distribution, not running out of customers
“The markets are way bigger than, you know, we think. And sometimes it's natural as you grow to hit sort of like these plateaus. Where maybe you need to tweak, maybe you need to expand a little bit on, like maybe, maybe, maybe you need to invest in certain area…”
Pecherskiy: Startups that treat product-market fit as 'set and forget' will decline
“If you ever get to that stage, I think you can start counting days until things will start, you know, going backwards. It needs to be just always on discovery and evolution of value and the customer.”
Srugo: StackAdapt is generating over $100M in revenue
“You look at the early days of Athenian, you look at the early days of Stackadapt, right, which now is doing like a hundred million dollar plus in revenue, and it was effectively custom software.”
Pecherskiy: SaaS pricing models fail in media due to seasonal spend
“I think every every advertising or media company has to try to figure out SAS model. It just doesn't work because the nature of advertising businesses is very seasonal. So some, sometimes advertisers just want to spend Money in the summer, just sometimes in th…”
Pecherskiy: StackAdapt take rate is strictly below 50%
“It's definitely less than 50%.”
Pecherskiy: StackAdapt buys on CPM and sells on performance goals
“We, for example, as a company, we always buy media on, Cost per impression basis, but sometimes we sell it on, on fixed performance based goals.”
Pecherskiy: StackAdapt is the largest buyer of native advertising
“We are definitely the largest company when it comes to buying native advertising”
Pecherskiy: StackAdapt did $8.9M in 2016 and plans $20M in 2017
“We did 8.9 and this year we're planning to do 20.”
Pecherskiy: Advertisers Do Not Care About Platform Margins If CAC Beats LTV
“Nobody, nobody really cares how much Google what margin or how much money they make out of it. Because at the end of the day, if it drives sales, then like if at the end of the day, if your customer acquisition cost is lower than your LTV, then you're happy.”
Pecherskiy: StackAdapt Works with Around 400 Customers
“We work right now because of that seasonality you know, some customers come and go based on the time of the year, but we work with around 400 customers.”
Pecherskiy: About 90% of StackAdapt Customers Come from Direct Sales
“About 90% of them are from sales. So we are ramping up our inbound strategies but that's something we've grown up on, on inbound, but the challenge was that inbound attracts a lot of different types of customers, and it's, it became very hard to figure out whe…”
Pecherskiy: StackAdapt spends under $10,000 monthly on paid search acquisition
“Under 10 K. Okay. All just on search.”
Pecherskiy: StackAdapt fully weighted CAC is between $2,000 and $3,000
“It's about Two or three grand.”
Pecherskiy: StackAdapt payback period is probably within a month
“It's very short. . Oh, yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. The, probably even within a month.”
Pecherskiy: StackAdapt raised less than $3M in capital
“We raised capital. It was less than three million which basically meant that, you know, we have to always think of business fundamentals.”
Pecherskiy: StackAdapt founders split equity equally three ways
“So when we brought our third co-founder, we recognized that the importance of being equal founders, so we just split it three ways.”