Hey folks,
Thank you to those who introduced us to relevant people as we were going through testing our hypothesis. You can find a short description of the results of our qualitative analysis below!
This month our focus shifted towards looking at new markets as we came to the conclusion that the Creative Ad-Tech market just wasn’t a big enough market.
Analysis Result for Ad Creative Space
We spent the majority of the last month speaking to CMOs, Performance Marketers, User Acquisition Managers, CEOs, and founders to understand their process when it comes to Ad Creative management and production.
Our hypothesis was somewhat correct – some teams have issues when it comes to maintaining, managing and producing good creative. We were even able to close a few deals as part of the process! But those teams are almost all at the bottom of the market, and they “graduate” from having that problem as they raise money and scale their business.
Though, it’s certainly possible to maintain a product that tackles the bottom of the market – it’s unfortunately a small market that we judge to be not at venture scale.
We’ve decided to pause doing new sales for the product (and slowly stop servicing existing users) over the next few months.
The Brief – July ’18
New Markets
Now that we’ve concluded that we won’t be in the Ad Creative business in the near future, we kicked off a process to start looking at new markets and products that meet the following criteria:
Founders relate to the problem enough that they’re willing to spend 10 years working on solving it.
Market is large enough (or growing fast enough) to support a venture scalable company.
We’ve so far looked at (and moved away from) Real Estate Tech. Two markets we’re looking at in August are Consumer Tax-tech, and Ed-Tech.
We’ll keep you posted when we land on a strong hypothesis for either of these markets.
Agency
We were able to close 2 new deals in July for the agency that’s helped us capture enough revenue to be a bit more comfortable again.
We’re certainly looking to add in new clients as due to some unexpected expenses (mostly legal), we’ve eaten through a large portion of our runway.
Ideally, in August and September – we close another 2-3 clients that will help us build a strong base of revenue that supports testing and building new products.
How Can You Help?
We’ve got two simple asks from you this month:
We’re looking for companies that need help running their paid budgets for our agency. If anyone’s scaling their budgets, or just getting into paid advertising – we’d love to speak to them.
If you believe we should be looking at a specific product/market area - feel free to point it out and we’ll add it to our list!
Thanks for reading.
❤️,
Nima + the rest of the team.