AMP Live

Eddie Vaca had spent a decade working in digital media and video—from selling his first digital publication at 26 to AOL for $25,000, to running ad operations at RMG Networks, to spending a few years at Ustream (which sold to IBM for $130M). By 2013, he was 33 years old and saw a massive opportunity nobody was addressing: live video was exploding across the internet—Twitter bought Periscope, Facebook launched Facebook Live, YouTube was building YouTube Connect—but the biggest problem was distribution. "Seeing is to drive tuning outside of sports is extremely hard," Eddie explained. He decided to break off from Ustream with a team and build the infrastructure to solve it.

Eddie and his team bootstrapped AMP Live in 2014, raising only $100,000 in a convertible note from friends and family. Rather than chase venture capital, he kept the operation lean and focused on what mattered: building a product that could deliver live audiences at scale. The core insight was simple but powerful: instead of broadcasters trying to figure out how to get viewers themselves, AMP Live would tap into its network of major publishers—AOL, Yahoo, the New York Times, Forbes—and place live content directly in front of their massive audiences.

Eddie's sales approach was pure hustle. He used Growth Box for outbound prospecting and personally ground out deals with enterprise customers. The product's value proposition was undeniable: if you're doing live video—a concert, webinar, conference, runway show, anything—he'd guarantee you viewers at a set price. Charge $15,000 and you'd get 325,000 live viewers. Charge $2,600 for 15,000 viewers. The math was brutal and transparent: roughly a $46 CPM when broken out as a cost-per-view. What made it work was that Eddie's team didn't just set it and forget it. "Our product is only going to go so far, and you need the brain power of the actual people behind it to pull those levers to make all these optimizations in real time," he said. Real people, real-time optimization, guaranteed results.

The enterprise direct-sales model worked. By 2015, AMP Live had generated $1.3 million in revenue in its first full year. Customers included Microsoft, Salesforce, Martha Stewart, Home Depot—major brands that needed to drive live viewership. In Q1 2016 alone, they did "a little bit over $600,000," and Eddie was confident about hitting $3.9 million for the full year. The product's simplicity—a slider on the pricing page, guaranteed viewer counts, no surprises—resonated with brands tired of traditional media's opacity. Eddie's insight about replacing TV ad buys proved prescient: a $21,000 spend for 475,000 viewers beat what CNBC was charging for equivalent reach.

At 35, married with three kids and running on five hours of sleep a night, Eddie had built AMP Live into a real business. He wasn't chasing hype; he was executing on a clear, repeatable playbook. His final piece of advice captured his philosophy: "You can't do it by yourself. Surround yourself with great people. It's about your team and not you." From a $25,000 exit at 26 to a multi-million-dollar SaaS business by 35, Eddie proved that persistence and picking the right problem—connecting broadcasters with audiences in an increasingly live world—was the real play.