798: Mobile Ad Tech Passes $100m in Revenues

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders

Nathan Latka

Ceo, Entrepreneurs, Founders, Software, Business, Entrepreneurship, Saas, Startups

4.6 • 683 Ratings

🗓️ 30 September 2017

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Harry Kargman. He’s a passionate entrepreneur who bootstrapped Kargo over 17 years into the leading mobile brand advertising marketplace. He’s obsessed with art, design and New York and has been helping steward the ad council in a partnership for New York.

Famous Five:

Favorite Book? – Only the Paranoid Survive
What CEO do you follow? – Elon Musk
Favorite online tool? — Skype, Slack and other product tools
How many hours of sleep do you get?— 6
If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “It’s going to be okay”

Time Stamped Show Notes:

02:08 – Nathan introduces Harry to the show
02:41 – Kargo is the largest brand advertising company for mobile
- 02:45 – Their focus is on high end brands that are highly creative
03:16 – Kargo is a technology company
- 03:43 – They built a technology that will make an ad on mobile a high end brand experience
- 04:12 – The ad renders perfectly on a mobile page
05:52 – Kargo works with around 98% of the major media companies and publishers
06:21 – Most of Kargo’s customers are Fortune 1000 companies
07:13 – Kargo charges as a technology play for publishers, like a SaaS model
- 07:28 – It is integrated into the media that runs on the platform
07:50 – Kargo also takes a percentage of media that runs through the platform
08:21 – Kargo is focused on quality as they’ve turned down a lot of publishers
- 08:41 – Kargo only has the best quality for advertisers
09:00 – The average cut Kargo is taking
- 09:25 – Harry shares how they’re taking the cut with the kind of service that they provide
- 10:29 – The vision that Kargo has is that they’re on equal partnerships
11:14 – In 2015, Kargo passed $100M in annual revenue
- 11:18 – The growth, year over year, is around 100%
11:56 – 2017 is a big year for Kargo where they’re building a technology that is new to the market
- 12:23 – Kargo has an AdLab that they try to bring to advertisers
13:11 – Kargo is 15-20% SaaS and 85% is media
13:22 – The goal for next year
13:58 – Total team size is 270
14:25 – Kargo will have a partnership with NBC in 2018
15:07 – Kargo is completely bootstrapped
15:32 – Before pivoting, Kargo was trying to build software and services for operators
- 15:38 – However, operators wanted to take 18 months to 2 years for testing which is impossible for startups
16:18 – Kargo just got into the water, expecting major media companies to sell their ads and media properties
17:36 – The Famous Five
19:12 – Harry’s wife, Jill Kargman of Odd Mom Out will be on tour

3 Key Points:

Develop a product that will make Fortune 1000 companies need you.
Regardless of the size of the deal, maintain equal partnership with your partners.
Stay bootstrapped as long as you can and as long as you want.

Resources Mentioned:

Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost.
The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences
GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more
Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience
Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments
Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible
Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books

Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	founder of cargo, it's all going to be okay, launched in 2000 and hustled like heck for about a decade
0:04.9	before seeing real traction. Now it's over 300 folks between New York, Chicago, LA, San Francisco,
0:10.3	London, Sydney, many other places, totally bootstrapped. They have 96% penetration on the top
0:15.3	publishers across about 300 properties who published about 60 to 70 major publications.
0:22.0	Almost all of the Fortune 1,000 largest advertisers use them as well.
0:24.2	About 20% of the revenue comes from a tech SaaS model to publishers.
0:27.7	The rest comes from their kind of direct spend cut they take, where they have almost,
0:32.3	they had about 100% year-over-year growth from 2000 and 2015 when they passed 100 million
0:36.9	bucks in total monies process through
0:39.5	their platform. This is the top where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number
0:45.2	two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're
0:51.1	making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers
0:55.2	they have. I'm now at $20,000 per talk. Five and six million. He is hell bent on global
1:00.8	domination. We just broke our 100,000 unit sole mark. And I'm your host, Nathan Latka.
1:07.6	Many of you listening right now don't have time to listen to every B-to-B SaaS CEO that I've interviewed.
1:12.7	If you want to get access to the database I've created with year-over-year growth rates, customer
1:16.7	accounts, margins, and many, many other data metrics and data points, you can go to g-et-l-a-tk-a.com.
1:23.8	Here's the thing, though, this database, I keep it to myself.
1:27.1	It's so freaking valuable.
1:28.3	And to preserve the quality of the data and make sure that the people that have access to it have a true advantage, I'm only letting 10 companies on each month.
1:36.3	So we're full this month, but you can go to Gitlatka.com to get on the waiting list for next month.
1:41.3	And look, there's big people on the waiting list.
	...

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