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.