Every argument clarity score on this site is built from rows on this page. Each
question and answer was assessed with names hidden, the host's own answers included, on
four things from 1 to 5:
directness (does it answer the question asked), coherence (do the ideas follow),
precision (concrete details and clear references), compression (says a lot per word). The weighted
mix (30/30/25/15) is the exchange score. A person's published score averages their exchange
scores on raw tape only, at least 8 of them, shrunk toward the cohort mean.
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Answered produced feed
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.85
Q Do you want to just be clear? Most people assume ad tech with like a transaction percent of spend model. You were a actual, not like a bullshit SAS company. You were like a real SAS company. It was real recurring revenue.
A Yeah, so let's talk about this because I'm, I'm passionate about it. So first of all, when I talk to companies and I say, they say that they're SaaS, I say, okay, do you have 70, 80% gross margins? Can you predict what your revenue is going to be for the next year or two? Do you think of things in terms of churn and MRR? And do you talk to me about COGS and talk to me about how you think through what goes into that number? And that's how you figure out oftentimes whether people are real SaaS or not. We certainly were a real SaaS company. Um, we were actually one of the only companies in sort of focused on the world of advertising that actually priced in that way. So we priced based on an annual contract commitment. Um, we had recurring revenue deals.
AI assessment note: “We certainly were a real SaaS company. Um, we were actually one of the only companies”
Answered produced feed
D 5 · C 4 · P 4 · Cm 4 4.30
Q So Jonah, before you sell to Oracle, what were you able to scale to over those seven or eight years in terms of total customers using the platform?
A Yeah, so we looked at it, I guess I'm trying to think of what our, of our pre-Oracle, pre-acquisition day, uh, customer count looked like. It was in the, it was certainly in the 500 plus, um, customer range, um, five, six, 700, something in that, in that sort of order of magnitude. I don't remember exactly what it was. We hit, we hit a point in the curve though, where, um, I think everything started sort of coming together, where we, The press that you were seeing about the space, about the industry was happening at the same time as you were seeing press about us specifically happened at the same time as sort of the winds were moving in a particular direction. And so as people began to say in 2015, uh, hey, maybe the wall quote unquote walled gardens should have measurement that's not themselves. Maybe we should have an independent company that's not selling the media. That measures Twitter or Facebook or YouTube or any of these guys, as that started to happen behind the scenes, we're actually working on deals with many of those companies, but all kind of ended up working well. The press hit at the same time that, that some of the business things that we had been working on came together. And I think that accelerated, uh, our business quite a bit.
AI assessment note: “It was in the, it was certainly in the 500 plus, um, customer range”
Answered produced feed
D 4 · C 4 · P 4 · Cm 3 3.85
Q Yeah. So that's helpful. Walk me through the expansion strategy though. So which pricing axes did you use to drive up that first year ACV?
A Yeah. So basically we were really focused actually not on expansion in the beginning, but we were really just for the first, I would say almost two years from 20 12 to 20 14 of just getting new logos. Frankly, we, we didn't honestly focus on expansion. Uh, it was something we talked about in board meetings with Mayfield and our feeling was we want to be a new logo machine. We want to be able to just generate new business, new business, new business, and really importantly, hold those companies with us. So low churn. So new logos and low churn were basically the only things we cared about with the belief that if we're providing value and they're not churning, over time we'll be We'll be able to increase our deals. We'll be able to add more to the package in terms of how we price things. We always look at it as package pricing. So we said, look, here's all this cool stuff that we can do for you. Now tell me what you want. And they would say, well, I don't really need this, but I definitely want that. And I definitely want that. And I definitely want that. How much is it? And we would say, okay, great. We'll come back to you and we'll give you a price for everything that you want. And we would basically package price that way. We didn't do We didn't put a matrix on our site. We didn't do a transparent pricing. We said, look, we're going to put together each deal is different. Each…
AI assessment note: “support level they want is different. The number of users they're going to have”
Partly produced feed
D 3 · C 4 · P 3 · Cm 3 3.30
Q Did you have expansion levers to pull? I mean, what was net revenue retention?
A So we looked at it, uh, um, we, we didn't play the, the churn games that people play in terms of the net revenue attention. So I, I got very into SAS and SAS metrics, um, over the last five or so years. Years prior to being acquired. And one of the things that people do is they, they come up with this sort of funny thing where they say, well, we'll, we'll look at churn, but then we'll look at how much money was added on top of it. And the, the total will somehow be more than a hundred percent. I never liked that way of looking at a business. I liked the idea that a hundred percent of your customers staying with you is the top that you can have. And then what are you lower than that? Cause some people are going to cancel for a variety of reasons. And that was how we always looked at it.
AI assessment note: “we didn't play the, the churn games that people play in terms of the net revenue attention”
