Hey folks,
First off – thanks to those who responded and gave us feedback on the first of this series. We’re going to improve the format to give you the most pertinent information on the company in the most concise way possible.
Below I’ve left you a full briefing on the business (“The Brief” section), but the most important task we’re working on is testing our current hypothesis which I’ve outlined below from problem to solution.
Testing Our Hypothesis
Problem
We’re honing down the problem space, but the main universe we’re focusing on is producing, managing, and deploying Ad Creative.
We’ve identified this space to be the only anti-fragile sector of ad-tech – no matter what the platforms do, no matter what public policies and perception become, brands will always have to product great creative.
Solution We’re Testing
We’re currently working on a specialized design/production marketplace for ad creative.
Demand Hypothesis
Our hypothesis is that brands have trouble scaling their creative production and need to tap into resources and tools to be able to keep their campaigns performant.
So far, we believe we’re correct about this. The series of tools we offer and how we approach are still in-flux, but the main hypothesis seems correct.
Supply Hypothesis
We believe that the model for paying for creatives is fundamentally broken. They’ve slowly become a commodity, even though the work that they produce (if done well) can have incredible gains for the brands they work for.
Our hypothesis is that with a new pricing model, we can ignite their creativity and help them produce incredibly high-performant work. You can read about the model here. We’d definitely love feedback on how clear this is to both brands and creators – so feel free to leave your 2 cents!
This will be a longer test as so far we’ve had no trouble explaining this and convincing creators, but we’ll have to keep an eye on quality over the long-term.
The Brief – June ’18
Product Discovery Calls
We’ve gone on a few discovery calls from small startups to some slightly bigger ones (e.g. WeWork) and starting to become much more confident that we’ve narrowed down the problem pretty well. This isn’t surprising since we’ve been dealing with it ourselves, but it’s a strong indicator.
Every single discovery call has started to become a sales call and we’re hoping some of them will become early users. Pretty excited about that.
Agency
Unfortunately, Alec Ross didn’t make it past the democratic primaries. We’ve learnt a lot from the team behind the campaign around politics, empathy, and social justice. If you ever have the chance to be part of that world, we highly recommend dabbling in it.
Some folks wanted to get a rough estimate of runway and revenue in these emails. Though we think that’s much more interesting post fund-raise, we’re happy to share!
We have 4 months of runway. This is assuming we make no more revenue starting today. We’ve been stable at 4-6 months of runway for the past year or so as we’ve grown, but expect that to fall to 1-2 months as we focus more on the product and stop selling agency services altogether.
How Can You Help?
We have three items we’d like to get done this month to stabilize revenue again, keep testing our hypothesis, and lock in some new revenue for the product so if you can help with any of the following – shoot us a note!
Connections to anyone running performance-marketing for their company – we’d like to do more discovery calls with folks and get early users.
Connections to any designers, video editors, or animators for the supply side of our marketplace.
Connections to any brand that’s just getting into performance and wants a partner to both buy their ads and product the creative for our agency.
Thanks for reading.
❤️,
Nima + the rest of the team