appbroda

Isheesh Agarwal spent 10 years in digital marketing, five of them at Google working across Play and AdMob. While immersed in the ad tech world, he had an epiphany: the app gaming industry was a $20 billion market with roughly 2 million developers creating content, yet almost nobody understood how to properly monetize through ads. The top ad networks—Google, Meta, Iron Source, AppLovin—only had sales teams serving the top 2-3% of developers. The remaining 60% of revenue-generating developers were left in the dark, creating a massive knowledge gap. "There's a very large knowledge gap on how best to utilize the tools in this industry to maximize your revenue from your app," Isheesh explains. He saw his opportunity: build a platform that democratizes this knowledge.

appbroda launched in June 2021, smack in the middle of the pandemic. Isheesh and his team were based in Dubai and India, but the timing actually worked in their favor. "All of our customers were based in Europe and USA and different parts of the world," he recalls. "Reaching them was easier because everything was digital." Rather than chase VC funding—which was flowing freely in Southeast Asia and India at the time—Isheesh chose to bootstrap. This decision shaped the company's DNA from day one: profitability first, aggressive growth second.

The first year (2021) was volatile and service-heavy, generating less than $500K, mostly from consulting work. But Isheesh had a clear product vision: become the self-serve platform where any developer—from complete novice to expert—could understand and optimize the five key metrics that determine ad revenue success: ad requests, fill rate, show rate, CPC, and CTR.

Growth came through scrappy, direct outreach. Isheesh's team built a playbook around email marketing and LinkedIn prospecting, using tools like Signal Hire and LGM to identify and research the right decision makers. Cold email became the engine. "We've used a lot of email marketing. We've used a lot of LinkedIn," he says simply. The product made activation easy—integration took just five minutes—and crucially, it proved immediate ROI. Developers had to see at least a 10% revenue increase within 10 days, or they'd churn. This forced rigor around onboarding and product value.

The inflection point came in the last six months of 2022. Isheesh made two critical investments: doubling down on tech and investing heavily in product. The revenue mix flipped from 50/50 service-to-product to 80% product, 20% service. International expansion accelerated, particularly into Europe and East Asia. Year-over-year growth jumped 100%+. By contrast, the early service-heavy model was a constraint—it didn't scale and limited positioning as a SaaS platform.

The team grew to 52 people (roughly 20% tech, 3-4 product, 15% BD, rest support and ops). Isheesh remained disciplined on unit economics and profitability, rejecting venture capital even as the business demonstrated strong traction.

appbroda now helps 320 developers monetize 1,400 games. Over the past 12 months, those developers processed $20-30M in ad revenue through the platform. appbroda takes an 8-12% revenue share, translating to roughly a $2M annual run rate—100% growth year-over-year. The company is still bootstrapped, with zero external funding. Isheesh's stated goal is to hit $1M in revenue per employee by 2026. Today, the team is roughly 20-50x away from that metric, but he's betting that deeper product investment and international scaling will close the gap quickly. 2023 is positioned as pivotal: app developers will struggle in a recessionary ad market, making optimization tools more valuable than ever.