Aug 29, 2017 · 30m · top-founders
766: This Company Used Evangelical Christian Mobile Data to Influence US Elections
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
Host Nathan Latka interviews Mobilewalla CEO Dr. Anindya Datta to explore how the company executed a strategic pivot from low-margin programmatic media buying into a high-margin B2B mobile consumer data SaaS platform. Datta outlines Mobilewalla's proprietary data sourcing architecture, lean global operations, and the strategic deployment of consumer mobile tracking in enterprise marketing and political campaign targeting.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Nathan holds 40.4% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Nathan as informed peer 5.2 Guest teaching 2.8 Guest disagreement 1.2 Nathan pushing back 2.3
speaking balance: gold is Nathan, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 13:27 Guest firmly deflects election winner inquiry
Anindya repeatedly refuses Nathan's persistent baiting about whether MobileWalla's presidential campaign client won or lost the election.
Hardest push from Nathan ▶ 13:18 Host presses on political alignment and campaign outcomeNathan directly challenges Anindya's confidentiality by pushing him to disclose if they backed the winning or losing presidential candidate.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 12:43 Guest explains algorithmic evangelical voter classificationAnindya educates Nathan on tracking 290 denominations and monitoring weekly church visits across 1,400 swing-state locations to define evangelical mobile audiences.
Nathan holds their own ▶ 23:47 Host deduces real-time GOTV mobile tracking capabilityNathan accurately outlines the exact technical mechanics of real-time polling booth monitoring, drawing direct praise from the guest.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Nathan as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Nathan pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Guest Background and Career Overview | 4 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Nathan prompts Anindya on MobileWalla's core value proposition and business model. Anindya walks through consumer audience generation and raw mobile telemetry data licensing. | |
| Monetization Models and Pricing Mechanics | 6 | 3 | 1 | 2 | Nathan analyzes the difference between pay-as-you-go audience batches and recurring SaaS subscriptions, accurately analogizing the pricing structure to API call metering. | |
| Data Sourcing Infrastructure and Tracking Pixels | 7 | 3 | 1 | 3 | Nathan immediately drills into COGS and gross margins upon hearing about data exchange partnerships, confirming the data acquisition is done via barter rather than cash expense. | |
| Early Strategy: Leveraging Media Buys for Data Access | 6 | 3 | 2 | 4 | Nathan presses on the cold-start problem of how MobileWalla secured early data access without leverage, pushing Anindya to clarify gross media buys versus net revenue take. | |
| The Strategic Pivot to High-Margin Data Revenue | 7 | 2 | 1 | 3 | Nathan synthesizes the strategic transition from low-margin media buying to pure data revenue, laying out the exact revenue trajectory and half-year drops across 2014 to 2016. | |
| Mobilizing Voter Segments in the Presidential Election | 6 | 5 | 3 | 5 | Anindya reveals their role in the 2016 US presidential election; Nathan repeatedly pushes to discover which party hired them and whether they won, while Anindya carefully deflects under NDA. | |
| Customer Segmentation, Distribution Partners, and Low Churn | 5 | 3 | 1 | 3 | Nathan breaks down customer segmentation between nine core SaaS clients and broader Oracle marketplace distribution, verifying enterprise churn dynamics. | |
| Lean Sales Operations and Zero Paid Marketing Strategy | 5 | 2 | 1 | 2 | Nathan investigates customer acquisition cost and sales cycles, learning that MobileWalla operates with only three quota carriers and zero paid marketing or PR spend. | |
| Global Workforce Architecture and Data Corpus Mapping | 5 | 4 | 2 | 3 | Anindya clarifies how their team in India performs manual point-of-interest mapping rather than standard outsourced engineering when Nathan asks about buyer segments like Walmart visitors. | |
| Real-Time Get-Out-The-Vote (GOTV) Tracking Capabilities | 8 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Nathan poses an incisive technical hypothesis about tracking polling place turnout in real time on election day, which Anindya praises as exactly how they powered GOTV operations. | |
| The Famous Five Rapid-Fire Questions | 3 | 1 | 0 | 1 | Nathan runs through the standard rapid-fire Famous Five format covering business books, CEO influences, and sleep schedules. | |
| Episode Recap and Upcoming Show Preview | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Solo host monologue recapping MobileWalla's financial milestones and promoting upcoming podcast episodes. |
Statements from this episode (15)
Acxiom and Oracle buy raw mobile behavioral data from Mobilewalla
“You know, large companies like, ah, you know, Axiom and Oracle, they just buy raw mobile data from us.”
Mobilewalla charges enterprise clients $25,000 monthly for raw data feeds
“When a large company will come and tell us that we want to know every month all the locations that you see people at, we tell them, okay, well, we're going to give it to you as a subscription, sign up for 12 months and pay us 25,000 dollars a month.”
Mobilewalla barters data with ad exchanges to access lucrative bid streams
“All, all, all barter. So we give them back valuable information and they in turn, let us look at their bit stream to be able to create audiences.”
Mobilewalla requires ad network clients to embed tracking pixels to harvest data
“What we have them do in order to be able to profile their users, we require them to put a little pixel, a little mobile wallet pixel in every ad created the surf, right? So when you are consuming New York Times content on your iPad, and an ad gets surfed to yo…”
Mobilewalla's ad pixel tracks location and infers user travel speed
“Not accelerometer now, Nathan, but it definitely includes location data. But you know, but even from location, we can judge speed, right?”
Mobilewalla operated as a key data arm in the 2016 presidential election
“I cannot give you details because we are under, but I'll tell you that we were a very key data arm for one of the major parties.”
Mobilewalla tracked church attendance to segment evangelical voters in swing states
“So, so the definition we were given was, take a swing state like Florida, right? And there are like, whatever, 1400 evangelical churches. So to be an evangelical Christian, you need to have been observed in an evangelical church at least once a week for the pa…”
Mobilewalla has nine subscription SaaS customers paying up to $41,000 monthly
“So we have nine customers who have subscription accounts, right? And they pay anywhere between 15,000 dollars, 8500 dollars a month to 41,000 dollars a month.”
Mobilewalla is a top contributor to Oracle's BlueKai digital data marketplace
“So we are one of the biggest contributors to the Oracle blue guy marketplace with the largest digital data marketplace in the world.”
Mobilewalla generates $250,000 monthly across SaaS subscriptions and audience data sales
“No, 150 gain in, in, in SAS plus a hundred gain audience.”
Over 250 different organizations purchase audience data segments from Mobilewalla
“So in the hundred gain audience, we have over. 250 different organizations buying from us.”
Mobilewalla is practically the only source of non-US mobile audience data
“We are pretty much the only source of mobile audience data outside of the US.”
Mobilewalla operates with zero paid marketing, SEO, or hired PR spend
“There's no variable, there's zero variable paid marketing spend. We've knocked down a penny of SEO. We have not, We don't have a, even a hired PR firm that is doing anything. So zero spend.”
Get-out-the-vote services generated the bulk of Mobilewalla's 2016 election revenue
“The biggest amount of money we generated in the election was for what is known as get out the vote, the GOTV part of the election, right?”
Mobilewalla monitored swing state polling locations in real-time for campaign teams
“What we did for this particular party, who spent way less on, feet on the street than the other party, we were monitoring every polling booth, every polling location in a certain number of states, And we were telling the ground team who showed up to vote and w…”