Simplify

Frost Aprylo and co-founder Paul Harrison saw a massive gap in the ad tech market. Programmatic advertising—the automated, data-driven buying of digital ads—was taking over the industry, but it was concentrated entirely on large national brands buying through the big six agencies. Frost realized that local advertisers and smaller multi-location brands had no easy way to access this sophisticated technology. "We said we're going to go the other way. We're going to be the guys who bring programmatic to local," he explained. This meant building something fundamentally different: a platform optimized for high volumes of small, localized campaigns rather than a handful of massive national ones.

Simplify launched in 2010 and hit its first major milestone quickly—they crossed $1 million in revenue by 2011, just one year in. By 2013, they'd reached $10 million. The founding insight proved prescient: local advertisers desperately needed automation and scale. Within months of launch, they were running thousands of campaigns. By the time of this interview, they were processing "100,000 campaigns" in a single month, with half spending less than $100 a month and the other half spending up to $1,000 a minute. This volume would have been impossible with a manual, agency-driven model.

Simplify pursued two parallel customer acquisition strategies. First, they went after media companies—cable operators, TV stations, and newspapers—who wanted to offer programmatic advertising to their existing local sales forces. This was natural: these companies already had hundreds of relationships with local advertisers and needed the tech to bundle programmatic with search, social, and their own inventory. Second, they pursued multi-location brands directly: franchises, real estate companies, insurance agencies with hundreds or thousands of offices. For these customers, Simplify offered both a self-service platform and managed services ("we help them traffic campaigns"), where Simplify would set up campaigns for each location with geofencing and localized targeting. Half the revenue came from each segment.

The business model proved resilient. Simplify charges a percentage of ad spend—typically 9-16 cents per dollar for the platform fee, plus another 10 cents per dollar if the customer uses managed services. Despite this being a variable-revenue model rather than pure SaaS, the unit economics generated SaaS-like metrics: a net revenue retention rate of 130% annually. This meant that even if Simplify sold zero new customers in a year, they'd grow 30% just from existing customers spending more through the platform. The company expanded its product line strategically, starting with desktop display advertising, then mobile, and increasingly into over-the-top (OTT) and connected TV (CTV) video advertising—the future of TV. By the time of this interview (post-2017), they had 400 billing customers and were processing "well north of hundreds of millions" in annual ad spend, with revenue in the "north of 25, 30 million bucks" range annually.

In 2017, private equity firm GTCR acquired Simplify. Rather than cash out, Frost and Paul reinvested roughly half their proceeds back into the company, buying equity on the same terms GTCR paid. This aligned incentives and showed confidence in the roadmap. Post-acquisition, Simplify had 250 employees, was still growing revenue at 40% year-over-year, and had been cash-flow positive for three years—exactly the kind of asset a PE firm loves. The company was tracking toward processing $1 billion in annual ad spend within a few years. Frost credited much of this success to focusing relentlessly on business model design and building a strong culture, the two lessons he wished he'd understood at 20.