KEEP
Brian Wong graduated college at 18, moved to San Francisco, and took a business development job at Digg to recruit publishers for its button. After Digg started layoffs about six months in, he was let go in mid-2010. Starting a company became the natural next step, and he had an idea about rewarding users for achievements inside games.
Wong and his two co-founders built a working prototype on the side and pitched it to True Ventures after meeting an associate there. The pitch produced a term sheet for a small seed investment of $300,000. That was enough to hire only about two people, so the team pushed as far as they could on the money. They later raised a follow-on $300k round structured as an equity priced round, in which Wong sold about 20% of the company.
The model is a cost-per-engagement system. When a user finishes an action such as a run, a sponsored reward appears, and a brand pays only when the user claims it, typically sharing revenue 50-50 with the publisher. Wong said the engagement rate averages about 10%, which he described as a very efficient media model. Margins improved from about 55% to a projected 63% through back-end efficiency and different revenue-share structures for international markets.
Both co-founders eventually left the company, though they stayed on as advisors.
KEEP is embedded in almost 5,000 apps. Wong reported $11 million in total transaction volume for 2015, with a 2016 goal of $19-20 million and a 2017 projection of $33-35 million. Total capital raised reached $32 million by July 2016.
- •Tying the ad to a completed user action makes the placement feel like a reward instead of an interruption, which lets brands pay for attention that would otherwise be ignored.
- •Paying publishers a revenue share on incremental inventory they never had before gives developers a reason to integrate, since KEEP adds value rather than cannibalizing existing ads.
- •Charging brands only when users actively claim a reward aligns advertiser spend with real engagement, which makes the model easier to sell.
- •Improving gross margin from 55% to about 63% while growing volume suggests the platform's back-end efficiency scales, which strengthens the business as it grows.
- 1.Identify natural achievement moments in existing apps, such as completing a task or finishing a workout, where a reward would feel welcome rather than intrusive.
- 2.Offer publishers a revenue share that pays them for the incremental inventory you create, so they gain money and retention without losing existing ad revenue.
- 3.Price the advertiser side on engagement, meaning a claimed reward, so brands pay only for real user action.
- 4.Build a low-friction redemption flow, such as capturing an email to save the reward, that does not require users to install another app.
- 5.Track engagement rate and payout per engagement from the start, then use those numbers to set revenue-share terms for each market.
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