PubVantage
Declan Carney, a 25-year advertising and media veteran who previously served as SVP of SaleOps at InfoUSA (managing 125 sales reps and close to $1B in gross revenue), saw a clear gap in the ad tech market. While Google's DFP (now Ad Manager) was excellent at handling direct and programmatic campaigns, it left publishers struggling with remnant inventory monetization through passback tags—a process that was manual, error-prone, and inefficient. The market needed a better way.
In early 2015, Carney partnered with Greg Freeman, a tech expert from Canada with experience working in Vietnam. Rather than consolidate in one location, they built a distributed team: Carney based in Houston, Freeman in Canada, and a 15-person development team in Hanoi. This structure, while unconventional, proved effective. Freeman would spend months in Vietnam building the product while Carney managed the business side. They created a SaaS platform with a universal passback tag that allowed publishers to handle multiple demand partners efficiently, charging on a usage-based CPM model (roughly one penny per thousand requests).
Acquisition came primarily through word-of-mouth and direct outreach within the ad tech community. With one dedicated sales development person and participation in industry conferences, they built a customer base that grew 30% year-over-year. By September 2018 (the interview date), they had 30 paying customers, up from roughly 22 customers the prior year. The typical customer paid around $4,000/month (representing approximately 100 million requests monthly), though some smaller publishers paid just a few thousand.
Their acquisition strategy proved sustainable: a fully weighted CAC of $24,000 per customer with a 6-month payback period indicated healthy unit economics. The 10% annual revenue churn was acceptable—primarily customers who returned to DFP—and reflected the product's niche positioning (it wasn't trying to displace Ad Manager, only supplement it). However, the hard-to-explain product required personal touch and direct sales rather than scalable marketing, limiting growth velocity.
With the ad serving business performing well at $120K MRR ($1.44M ARR), Carney and Freeman began splitting the company in mid-2018. They engaged a brokerage to sell the original ad server business (valued at 3-10X revenue depending on buyer and terms) and launched All One, a unified reporting platform addressing an even bigger pain: consolidating fragmented ad data across vendors. All One started with 5 beta customers paying approximately $2K/month, with expectations to reach $6K/month average as the product matured. The capital from the ad server sale would fuel aggressive sales and marketing expansion of the new venture.
- •Deep domain expertise from a 25-year veteran identified a specific, high-friction problem (manual remnant inventory management) that existing tools actively ignored, creating defensible product-market fit in a niche.
- •Usage-based pricing aligned incentives with customer value delivery—publishers only paid proportionally to requests processed—making the product self-justifying and reducing sales friction for cost-conscious buyers.
- •Word-of-mouth traction combined with one dedicated sales development person and conference presence proved sustainable because the problem was acute enough that satisfied early customers became natural advocates within a tight-knit community.
- •The distributed team structure (CEO in US, CTO in Canada, engineering in Vietnam) minimized overhead while maintaining quality, enabling healthy unit economics ($24K CAC, 6-month payback) on modest MRR that funded sustainable 30% YoY growth.
- 1.Spend 6+ months in your target industry as a practitioner or embedded observer to identify a specific workflow problem that existing category leaders have deprioritized or cannot address without cannibalizing their core product.
- 2.Design a usage-based pricing model that ties cost directly to the customer's outcome metric or volume driver, making ROI immediately transparent and reducing buyer hesitation for cost-sensitive segments.
- 3.Hire one high-conviction sales development person embedded in your industry network and commit to speaking at 3-4 industry conferences annually; measure success primarily by inbound referrals and word-of-mouth velocity, not outbound email volume.
- 4.Build your team geographically distributed (not consolidated) to minimize fixed costs while retaining execution quality, allowing you to reach cash-flow breakeven faster and fund growth without external capital.
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