On a Personal Note… A Reflection of 2022

Posted on December 15, 2022February 21, 2024 by Laura Goldstone

On a Personal Note… A Reflection of 2022

December 15, 2022 |

Laura Goldstone

2022 was a year of reevaluation and, in some cases, reinvention. As a society, we all reflected on our personal lives, our careers, and the economy, in a movement toward rebirth that permeated every decision.

In 2022, the advertising landscape also underwent reevaluation. Media plans were examined as closely as ever, with budgets and campaign decisions put under the microscope. Differentiators like attribution and data transparency, especially post-campaign analytics, became qualifiers that determined whether a vendor would be included on a future buy or not. Each campaign became a milestone in every customer relationship. Advertisers scrutinized each decision and let the data speak for itself.

“Our strategic consultants work with partners to implement audience learnings by tailoring strategies toward accounts’ preferences, making post-campaign insights more actionable than anywhere else in the industry.”

Thankfully, AdDaptive thrived in the limelight. Our Campaign Analytics and Site Analytics are second to none, providing more detailed breakdowns of your audience, campaign, and metrics than any other B2B solution’s offering. Our team found its stride playing the role of strategic consultant to our valued partners, discussing how to implement lessons about your audience to better tailor your strategies toward their preferences, making post-campaign insights more actionable than anywhere else in the industry.

On a related note, in April, we published an article on Digiday entitled “Why reporting and insights are the differentiating factors for ad tech providers,” and got to discuss the use of analytics in a Q&A with Media 7 / The ABM Report, furthering our position as a trusted thought leader in the industry, particularly on the topic of analytics.

“By choosing vendors that can provide industry-leading analytics insights about target accounts across channels and campaigns, agencies increase ROAS and push accounts through the funnel more effectively and efficiently, achieving business goals beyond a single ad.”

As always, AdDaptive also did a bit of internal evaluation. We know who we are and where we want to be, but when external forces shift, we shift with them to align our strengths with the best way to serve our clients’ ever-changing needs. While we like to stay agile and make tweaks along the way as needed, we reflected deeply in 2022 and made a few major updates to elevate our brand. This year, we released a new logo and design set and created a new website from scratch. Our sleek new logo’s rounded edges and gradient give us a modern edge, and the progression of the logomark’s three lines from left to right represent our emphasis on analytics, funnel movement, and growth, intrinsically linking our identity with our design for the ultimate brand cohesion.

Our new website uses our logo and design elements in a more integrated fashion than ever before: The new messaging structure better aligns with our brand story, starting with the reason you should partner with us – the positive impact you can derive from our differentiated analytics – then moving into how we fuel these analytics, from our ability to reach your target audience with accuracy at scale to the way we recommend varying your media mix for a full-funnel, multi-channel advertising approach. Our new design and messaging elements convey our identity in a way that better captures the direction we’re moving in, setting us up for long-term success.

It has been a joy to work with our co-founders and the rest of the marketing department – Kevin O’Malley, Patrick Shea, Shannon Majumdar, Alexandra Singer, Helen Neely, and Matthew Shore – to ensure strategic alignment from the logo’s conception and the website’s creation to the ongoing execution of all related content as we continue to elevate the brand in fun and exciting ways.

We were thrilled to pair our design updates with an industry event by unveiling our new logo as the Premier Partner at the Digiday Media Buying Summit in Palm Springs, CA, this past October. We love to sponsor this conference each year and to discuss market ongoings with attendees each time. Staying up to date on industry trends is key to our success; immersing ourselves in the industry and speaking directly with clients and prospects helps us intimately understand their challenges and opportunities so we can serve them best.

We also were excited to participate in our first Forrester Wave report in 2022. AdDaptive was named a Contender in The Forrester Wave™: B2B Advertising Solutions, Q3 2022 report. The evaluation analyzed the 14 most significant B2B advertising solutions across 28 criteria spanning current offering, strategy, and market presence. AdDaptive earned its highest scores in the criteria of product vision, market approach, innovation roadmap, and cross-channel capabilities. AdDaptive also received the highest scores possible in the business publications and creative development criteria.

We believe this solidifies our position as an experienced, consultative partner to B2B agencies. We were excited to see our stance among the other companies evaluated in the report and to use the data in the assessment to explore opportunities for future technological advancements.

“AdDaptive is a good fit for B2B organizations with in-house media teams and media agencies with B2B clients,” Forrester stated in the report. According to the evaluation, “AdDaptive knows how complex and sophisticated B2B advertising can get…”

Amidst these milestones and industry ongoings, we recognized that evaluating data to make better decisions is not just a 2022 trend. It’s an effective way to work – period. So we built the ability to make future decisions into the tweaks we made this year, looking at ways to better integrate with our customers’ systems, how to organize our internal resources to leverage our strengths against market opportunities, and what changes the environment might bring us in the future that we can work into our decisions today. We are currently testing some innovations and updates, and we look forward to releasing the ones that make the most sense for our audience and the industry in 2023.

While announcements about the exciting new products we’re working on will have to wait (!), we can celebrate the fact that we relaunched our monthly marketing newsletter in the fall of 2022, adding a chance to communicate with our community each month about relevant and timely topics and trends. (If you haven’t already, sign up in the footer of our website.)

And at the end of the day, we had fun. We enjoyed working together and embodying our company values of excellence, innovation, diversity, empowerment, collaboration, and community. We figured out better ways to work together across teams internally and with clients and partners externally. We volunteered our time (including an incredible opportunity at Cradles to Crayons) and hosted company events both virtually and in person (from candle-making to a day at the racetrack and everything in between!). We got to add new dimensions to our ever-changing company culture with memories that are sure to last.

Most importantly, this year and always we’re grateful for you. If you’re looking for a partner, let’s chat. If you’re already our customer, we thank you for your continued partnership. If you’re here for thought leadership, we hope you found something enlightening and useful. Regardless of how or why you arrived on this page, we’re glad you’re here. And we look forward to sharing new successes with you in 2023.

-Laura Goldstone, Senior Director of Communications and Branding Strategy

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2018: Year In Review

Posted on December 28, 2018September 16, 2022 by Laura Bakopolus Goldstone

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2018: Year In Review

December 28, 2018 |

Laura Bakopolus Goldstone

We’re not just another advertising company. And this year, we discovered our purpose.

Of course, we’ve always had a purpose. A mission. A vision. Since our company’s inception, we’ve stood for something. There was a reason we were created, developed valuable technology, attracted top talent, grew, formed prolific strategic partnerships, and profited. We’ve evolved since the beginning, but our core purpose has stayed the same. This year, we got to reflect on what that was and why it mattered.

First, it goes without saying (but I’m going to say it anyway) that purpose always matters. ANA named “brand purpose” the marketing word (or phrase) of the year. Simon Sinek’s Find Your Why is a fantastic literary resource that illustrates the value of discovering, exploring, and acting on your purpose. And trends show that millennials want meaning in their work and are actively seeking workplaces that can provide context and fulfillment. Purpose gives people a reason to do what they do and makes them feel good about doing it every day. When you wake up in the morning and get ready to go to your office, you feel content because you know your work is important. You feel valued and empowered. You are making a difference. Purpose sometimes gets lost on people; they think a job is just a way to make money and that life happens outside the office. But that approach negates a large percentage of your waking hours and a huge chunk of your life. Your work is not separate from your life – it is a major part of it. For some people, their work defines them. For others, it is a way to make use of their talents and passions. If you don’t have passion, your work may be empty, or you may feel unfulfilled. You may not even be able to articulate that feeling – you may simply long for more but not know which direction to move in to find it. Purpose fills in all the blanks and motivates us to do something, do more, and do better. Purpose deconstructed as such makes it more digestible and helps us understand what it is and how to find it. How do you decide how you spend your time? Chances are your decision is justified by your purpose.

At AdDaptive, our purpose has always been to create a technology that helps companies target more effectively and efficiently, which in turn helps customers receive ads that are relevant and timely, thus decluttering the ad tech stratosphere and improving society’s relationship with digital advertising. But we’re not just another advertising company. We don’t cut corners, we don’t deceive, and we care about more than the bottom line. Internally, we live out a second purpose simultaneously, which helps us reach our business goals: We aim to make our employees feel happy and empowered. When our team members want to start a CSR initiative or try something more independent or strategic within their roles, we evaluate our budgets and company needs, then work with them to figure out how to make it work. Because we’re strategic about what we can allow and how we implement our employees’ passions, we make sure we are always aligning with company goals and making decisions that benefit both our corporate brand as well as the individuals that make up our workforce. In that way, we are able to empower our employees to challenge themselves, try new things, and live out their passions, all while strengthening our corporate footprint and benefitting our brand. Allowing our employees to actualize their purpose is part of our purpose, which creates a harmonious and innovative collaboration among AdDaptive’s team members.

Members of various departments at AdDaptive volunteering at Boston Children’s Hospital.

This purpose is two-fold. On one hand, we have a commitment to our employees. We see their devotion to our corporate mission, and watch them as they develop and use our technology to achieve our clients’ goals, thus improving our industry standing and strengthening our corporate brand. If the individuals on our team succeed, our company succeeds. The other part of this purpose is the external factor – why our company exists. In business, you often have to be able to articulate why your company exists in one sentence, to prove your concise understanding of your company’s core mission. AdDaptive exists to provide a better technology solution for digital advertisers (mostly in a B2B setting), benefitting both the brand and the recipient of the ad. When our technology delivers ads efficiently, minimizing wasted impressions and increasing ROI, we feel we have succeeded. We want your ROI to increase as a result of using our technology, because it means we have fulfilled our purpose. We have served as the essential tool that will improve your advertising strategy and provide consumers with ads that are relevant to their needs and behaviors.

This year, we got to see the two elements of our purpose reach new heights in parallel. Our company had a banner year and achieved its highest monthly revenue yet. Our existing strategic partnerships developed while new ones were forged. Our company is growing steadily, achieving new goals month after month. When reflecting on this success, we turn to our employees – the ones who make it all possible. All of our departments grew this year. Employees launched new community engagement initiatives, sustainability projects, and CSR programs. New divisions branched out from existing departments, enhancing the collective skill set of our team. Our employees were happy with their individual and team accomplishments this year, and our company made great strides in developing our technology and maintaining strategic alignment. In other words, we fulfilled our purpose this year.

For the year ahead, find your focus. Start by considering these vital questions:
* What fuels your work?
* How do you decide how to spend your time?
* Why do you do what you do?

As a leader in your company, you should also ask yourself how you are giving context to your employees. Do they know where they fit into the company’s strategy and direction? Do you communicate your company’s mission and vision to them and provide them with opportunities to innovate and grow? And does your company maintain alignment to a single purpose that drives its decisions and strategies? The end of the year is as good a time as any to take a step back and evaluate your company’s strategic alignment, industry position, and resource management, as well as your communication with and leadership of your employees.

Purpose needs to start at the top, fueling the company’s strategy, then must be allowed to permeate every corner of the office, providing context and meaning to all employees. This will help your retention and acquisition rates, draw top talent, align your strategies, and provide your company with a cohesive vision for the future – all while empowering the people who are helping you achieve your corporate goals day in and day out.

—

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Leadership In Ad Tech

Posted on June 5, 2018September 16, 2022 by Laura Bakopolus Goldstone

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Leadership In Ad Tech

June 05, 2018 |

Laura Bakopolus Goldstone

I sat down with AdDaptive’s co-founders last week to explore the story of our organization. As AdDaptive’s new Content Marketing Manager, I want to focus on crafting a narrative that follows our company’s journey from the idea two coworkers had a decade ago to where we are today – and where we will be tomorrow.

Everyone likes to hear about a growing company’s opportunities and challenges, but I wanted to dig a little deeper. I think the real feat would lie in the ability to capture Patrick’s contagious energy as he recites the technological iterations that were made along the way to perfect our product, or Kevin’s passion as he praises the culture and talent of the close-knit team around him. If I can effectively portray how inspired our co-founders feel when they talk about the formation and evolution of this company, you will walk away having gained intimate insights into how AdDaptive came to be the programmatic powerhouse it is today.

Leading through Change

Leadership in ad tech is inherently challenging because of the landscape itself. Advertising technology changes at a rapid rate; as Kevin put it, “Every six to twelve months, there’s something new to address or create or change. You’re never done.” This ever-changing industry requires its players to be adaptive (pun intended) and innovative. Automation can help free up your staff to focus on evolving your company’s strategy to keep up with the changes, and “valid data drives better marketing automation.” Surprise: Valid data is always going to be the backbone of every concept at AdDaptive.

Beyond automation, AdDaptive vows to always push the envelope. There’s always going to be something more you can do, something better you can create, something more efficient you can develop. AdDaptive aims to always be at the forefront, never growing complacent, always exploring what more we can do and how much better we can be. Automation allows us the time to think strategically and develop new tools and solutions that will keep influencing the industry and benefitting clients and customers. It is important for the leaders of an ad tech company to establish that direction so their team members have the time and resources to make the moves that truly make a difference.

An avid poker player, Patrick explained that “you can do everything right at a hand of poker and still lose – that’s part of the game.” We at AdDaptive try our hardest to do everything right, and we make micropivots along the way to refine our business model and strategy. But if the timing isn’t in your favor at one point, it is up to your company’s leadership to decide how to steer the ship. Do you power through and stay true to your vision? Do you pivot drastically? Do you make little tweaks until you get it right? Preparing for these situations and then being flexible when they arise is often what sets apart a successful leader in ad tech.

Timing, then, must be integral to consider, in a market that changes constantly. Patrick stressed the importance of timing and building a team that is flexible enough to adjust as necessary. Luck plays a role, too, but perhaps in a different way thank you think: Patrick defines luck as the place where preparation meets opportunity. You can’t control the timing of the market, the timing of competitors’ moves, or the timing of clients coming in or out of the picture; what you can control is how prepared you are to handle these situations when they arise, and what you ultimately choose to do when opportunity strikes. Leaders need to set this tone from the get-go and keep reinforcing it as the team expands and evolves.

The People Behind the Technology

Culture is an absolutely crucial factor contributing to a successful workplace today. Employees need to be engaged, they need to feel valued, and they need to be trusted to do their jobs. Ad tech leaders need to have a pulse on the culture of the workplace and uphold it across all the changes a company may experience. For example, AdDaptive started with two people – Kevin and Patrick. When they added a third employee, he became one-third of the culture – a huge stake in the game. As the team grew to 10+, the culture shifted a bit, mainly in terms of internal communication or the processes by which work got done. Now, at over 30 full-time employees, AdDaptive is navigating its evolution expertly in the name of culture. Kevin reinforces that idea: “Our proprietary technology is our leader, but if you don’t have the right people behind it, none of it matters. So, we find like-minded people to help execute on our mission.”

We don’t necessarily find someone who is an expert in one narrow area, Patrick noted, citing the changing nature of the industry. What do you do if the business pivots? In this day and age, the broader the skill set, the better. AdDaptive seeks out employees that possess a wide breadth of talents and skills, who understand the platform and marketplace (or can learn it), and whose personality and drive fit with our team.

I was very intrigued by the importance Kevin placed on passion. He said that someone he would identify as a good addition to our team doesn’t necessarily have to be passionate about banner ads; rather, he just has to be passionate about something. AdDaptive is collectively passionate about being the best in the industry and changing the status quo. How can we continue to embody that persona if the individuals that contribute aren’t passionate? For example, Kevin noticed that I had a lot of theatre on my resume. I had performed in shows since I was six, I had studied it in college in addition to communication, I had worked in arts administration, I had taken side jobs in box offices just to be surrounded by the theatre, and I had completed extensive training in acting, playwriting, and dramaturgy. Even though it had nothing to do with ad tech, he liked how passionate I was about theatre, and knew that could (and did) easily translate over to the workplace.

Choosing a team is one of the most difficult yet important parts of building a company from scratch. You always hear people say, “Hire slowly, fire quickly.” That may be true, but there is so much more to “hire slowly” that gets lost in the adage. It’s not just about speed – it’s about culture fit, passion, drive, motivation, potential, interest, empowerment, and trust. And if you don’t have people that fit the bill, you won’t be surrounded and supported by the right people to propel your company forward without your having to explain what to do or how to do it.

Humble Beginnings

Another ingredient to the recipe of a successful startup is, of course, the people who started it all. Kevin and Patrick were coworkers at a company years ago, when they had an epiphany and realized they could do something innovative to deliver more efficient results to customers. Instead of discarding the thought to the back of their minds, they did what so many of us wish we could do but instead demote to the bottom of our to-do lists: They took action. They stayed in the parking garage late at night building a new technology. They worked nights and weekends, not just to discuss their vision but to make it a reality.

About a year later, they had created a technology that was a game changer to the programmatic advertising landscape. They committed their careers to this vision, working from home to try to establish their new business. They had adopted a handful of clients when they realized they needed to expand their team in order to grow. They hired someone to manage the advancement of their proprietary technology, which doubled revenue in about a year’s time. The staff quickly grew to double digits, including a sales team that brought 60% growth from 2015-2016, which is when the company truly found its stride. Since then, AdDaptive has grown dramatically in revenue and has over 30 full-time employees.

Throughout the years, AdDaptive has stayed true to its vision and has maintained its culture, two feats neither easily nor often achieved in the ad tech space. A company’s culture tends to emulate the approach taken by its leaders; with Kevin and Patrick at the helm, there’s no wonder AdDaptive is always looking towards the future, keeping up with the speed of innovation, and driving the best technological solutions possible. Leaders can’t exist without followers, and luckily for those at AdDaptive, Kevin and Patrick empower their employees to contribute every day and be vocal about ways to improve the operations and technology pushing us forward. If data is the car and AdDaptive is the driver, you can be sure AdDaptive will continue revolutionizing the industry and surprising us all with advancements they’ve been preparing for all along – and that is thanks largely to the leadership that is fueling the engine.

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A Conversation With Patrick Shea (PODCAST)

Posted on May 1, 2018September 16, 2022 by Laura Bakopolus Goldstone

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A Conversation With Patrick Shea (PODCAST)

May 01, 2018 |

Laura Bakopolus Goldstone

One of AdDaptive’s two co-founders, Patrick Shea, recently had a conversation with Nathan Latka, the driving force behind The Top Entrepreneurs Podcast, in which he divulged information about AdDaptive’s history, success, and future.

The recap is below, but you can listen to the whole podcast here (read: spend 15 minutes with Patrick and you’ll learn all you need to know about AdDaptive Intelligence).

Q: Tell us about the business. What do you do and how do you make money?

A: We’re a B2B marketing platform focused on account-based marketing for the display space. We work with publishers and agencies to help them better target their B2B audiences using offline data that we’ve mapped to the online world.

Q: And how do you connect those two online and offline points?

A: We look for any point that can give us a common locator – a lot of it is location data we gather from mobile partners – and we use that in conjunction with offline data from the traditional direct marketing world, including business addresses and other firmographics about a business, and that’s how we go about creating a link between the two. We use other sources, as well – the standard DNS lookup sources, the WHOIS database – and some email data as well to triangulate the audience.

Q: So are you paying folks to look at your backend data sources and fill out the sets?

A: No, actually it’s all proprietary – we do it all ourselves. We do partner with Digital Element and other offline data companies like Digital Element, Virtual DBS, and Dun & Bradstreet to round out our offering, but the actual matching process is proprietary.

Q: Makes sense. And is it a pure SaaS play?

A: We’re not SaaS at all, actually. I’ll give you a little bit of a history of the business and explain how we got there. My co-founder, Kevin, and I worked at an enthusiast portal together a while back. He ran sales, I ran ops, and this was around 2009. We saw the world was moving toward data, toward audience targeting, and the real-time bidding environment provided the liquidity to start doing these things at scale. So, we built a product initially for publishers to help them gather all their first-party data, realize who’s going to their site and what those patterns look like, and then reach out and target them, primarily as an audience extension play. That morphed into a greater focus on B2B, which morphed into creating our own unique data asset. And once we had that, we had a compelling story to go out to ad agencies as well. Currently, our business is entirely B2B. We do work with B2B publishers, like TechTarget or Spiceworks, and directly with ad agencies and brands as well.

Q: And what’s the model?

A: Our model is all CPM-based – all media consumption…. With publishers, revenue is very recurring because we basically become a partner, become an extension of their digital strategy. The effect with the agencies is to complement what they’re trying to do with their trading desks already by giving them a targeting solution that they can’t get elsewhere. That’s really why we’ve been able to have sticky relationships with agencies. It limits some of the exposure that you see with a typical IO-based business.

Q: What’s IO?

A: Somebody that’s just churning over deals from agencies over and over again.

Q: Okay. So you’re basically creating inventory and charging CPM for these folks to reach the audience that you built?

A: Exactly, and the way we look at it is we’re really charging them for the data. But the way the data is, in our opinion, most efficiently transacted in this space is by combining it with impressions, with all of the targeting, and with the analytics everything that comes afterward. Our platform measures which companies are going to a client’s site and other account-based analytics – which companies are downloading white papers, generating leads, things like that. And then we couple it with the targeting component as well, and it’s very heavily automation- and AI-focused so we can maintain a very lean team to execute it.

Q: And are we talking $100 CPM? Do you have a general range you play in?

A: We’re in the mid- to high- single-digits. $7-$9 CMP is where we go to market. With some of our biggest customers, that comes down a little bit.

Q: Yup. And can you give me a general size of how many impressions you’re delivering monthly?

A: Monthly, it’s in the hundreds of millions – somewhere around the 300 million range, but it varies per month. We’re heavy in Q4. We’re working with about 220 clients and may close the year billing about 225. (Editor’s note: This podcast was originally recorded in December 2017.)

Q: What does that mean, billing 225?

A: It means we have about 225 individual clients, so each publisher counts as a client, and each ad agency counts as a client, but each of those could be working with 50 or more brands.

Q: Got it. And you were going to talk about team size?

A: We have 35 here in the office and we have 5 contractors as well – all local in the Waltham, Cambridge, Boston area.

Q: Great. So have you bootstrapped this thing or raised capital?

A: We bootstrapped it right from the start – we’ve never taken any funding.

Q: That’s great. Now, if I do that 300m impression number and divide by 1000, that brings it down to a CPM of basically 300,000, I can multiply that by 8 or 9 to kind of figure out your revenue – is that accurate?

A: Yeah, we’re a little bit seasonal, but we’re in the double-digit millions for revenue.

Q: To be clear, that’s not volume going through you – that’s actual revenue – cost of goods sold?

A: Yes.

Q: If I multiply that, that’s $2.7 million annually I think, right?

A: Actually, that was monthly, not annually, so we’re somewhere in the 300,000 monthly impression range.

Q: Then you’re doing billions of impressions annually.

A: Absolutely.

Q: Interesting. Tell me more about funding history.

A: We’ve been completely bootstrapped from the start – never took any funding. In the beginning, it was just Kevin and me. We had a few good connections in the space at the time. We started running campaigns as a purely managed service, which we then parlayed into hiring a contracted tech team, building a platform, establishing a DMP, getting that out into the publisher space. We focused on the Boston market especially, taking advantage of our network. And then we reinvested as much as we could to grow the company, team, and technology.

Q: And what year did you cross the million-dollar mark in revenue?

A: We were just shy of million-dollar mark at the end of 2011.

Q: Three years after launch is pretty good.

A: We actually started in 2010. So, in 2011, we ended up just shy of a million. Then we doubled it the following year.

Q: That’s good. And then can you round that out for us? In 2016 what did you guys do total? What’s your growth rate year of year?

A: Our growth rate year-over-year is 40-50%. We doubled since the end of 2015. We’re in the double-digits in millions.

Q: But you’ve broken the $10 million mark already.

A: Yes.

Q: So, what do you do with the company? Do you want to keep doing this kind of model where you have to go close and win deals? It is pretty predictable revenue, since you’re charging on the CPM basis and the renewing. But do you ever want to get into the SaaS model or anything else or no?

A: I think there are players in the space: DemandBase is probably the closest competitor to us – they have a similar offering, but they go with the SaaS model to execute it. And I think there are a lot of advantages with that model – the revenue predictability and things like that, though you sacrifice a bit of margin; and you go to clients instead of agencies, so it doesn’t take advantage of our immediate strengths. So, I could see a path towards getting there, but what we really want to do right now is take all the technology that we’ve built that serves the agencies incredibly well and use that as a path to get closer to clients and provide them value. At this point in the company’s lifecycle, that value can flow back though the agencies. If we’re giving them additional intelligence on who’s going to their site, what companies are interacting with them, and how that dovetails with their sales funnel, and have that affect agency spend, that’s great for us for now. And we can use that to build a stronger relationship directly with that client in the future and figure out a way to marry the two. So, we might be doing a lot of the same things as a SaaS business would do for a client, but we’re getting the money through a different model, which has its benefits.

Q: It is pretty predictable though, right? Are you retaining more than 80% of your customers year over year?

A: Well over. In terms of a significant customers, we had a few decreased their overall spend, but we never really lost one. That’s always a risk, but it is fairly predictable. The customers where we did see that decrease were really remnants of the early stages of the business where it was a more basic offering. As our business evolved, and as their business evolved, we went in slightly different directions. We’re able to still provide some value, but as things have changed, we now focus in other areas. But in terms of our sweet spot, we really haven’t lost any.

Q: And these are clients you can afford to put that touch on – at 225 customers and over $10m in revenue, that means each one is paying at least $3700 a month on an annual contract – so you can afford to put that touch on it.

A: Right.

Q: Interesting.

A: When it was just the two of us, we were trying to manage a few hundred media campaigns and try to grow the business and hire and everything else. We put a lot of effort into automating the whole process early on. We have 35 employees here now, but we don’t have any traffickers or campaign analysts on staff – most of that is done programmatically with our algorithms and APIs and things like that. We’d probably be closer to 60 people if we hadn’t done that and spent the time earlier on to build those routines and tools. So that also lets us put our people more focused on the client rather than the day-to-day tactical churn.

Q: So how do you “make yourself rich” from this?

A: Nobody wants to pay taxes twice, so we try to be as efficient with the fundamental economics of the business. But we try to put as much back as we can right now; we’re pleased with the revenue numbers that we’re at, but we’ve got a long runway in front of us. We’re still trying to hire as quickly as possible and do things like take more space, we have a few hardware deployments to make and things like that. But there’s always going to be some left over. For our long-term plans, we could certainly see getting nice and close with a potential strategic – that could work out for us.

Q: Would you sell to DemandBase and Chris?

A: We haven’t had those conversations yet. I’d rather beat Chris and DemandBase, to be honest with you.

Q: They’re between 400 and 600 customers, they’re getting close to breaking $100 million in ARR. It’s a good target to go after.

A: I agree and that’s sort of the advice I get from everybody else. Find the biggest guy in the room and go try and take him down. So that’s how we’d view it. We can continue to run a profitable business and grow it and make it really big. At that point, maybe somebody else that’s strategic may want to step in. But we’re well away from any sort of IPO conversation or anything like that. We have a profitable, growing business.

Given that we’ve never taken any funding, we’d probably treat it a little bit differently. I can’t put myself in the shoes of a funded founder, but we care strongly about sustainable growth and building a business that’s going to be here in 5-10 years, and not trying to run right down to the razor and roll the dice and see what happens. We’re trying to moderate aggressive growth with stability.

Famous Five:
1. Last book you read: The Leaders Bookshelf
2. CEO you’re following: Elon Musk & Jeff Bezos
3. Favorite online tool: LastPass
4. Hours of sleep per night: 6 or 7
5. Advice for 20-year-old self: I was 20 in 2005, and I was playing a lot of online poker then. In 2006, it all went away, so I would tell my 20-year-old self to never leave the poker table for the entirety of that year!

Hear more about co-founder Patrick Shea’s view of the healthy economics, sustainable growth, and cutting-edge technology at AdDaptive Intelligence: “The Boston Poker Player Turned B2B Advertiser Breaks $10m Revenue Mark.”

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Empower Your Employees To Become Successful

Posted on January 4, 2016September 16, 2022 by Addaptive Intelligence

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Empower Your Employees To Become Successful

January 04, 2016 |

Addaptive Intelligence

A big thanks to Carol Roth for highlighting a little of what we’re about at AdDaptive. We hope you are as excited for 2016 as we are!

Here is Kevin O’Malley’s outlook which has always provided a motivational environment for AdDaptive employees:

Delegate & Help Others Succeed

“Many small business owners are control freaks that have a tough time letting go. When running a business, this is an absolute track to failure. There is not enough time in the day for owners to have their hands in all aspects of the business. The best way to run a successful business is to empower your employees to become successful. Recruit and train smart, motivated employees and give them the autonomy to get the job done. Your employees will flourish and so will your business.”

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