Zito
Stefan Goss arrived in San Diego after leaving Switzerland and a stint as a professional skydiver, and as a foreigner he couldn't easily get a job. He and a few partners started making money online by buying Facebook ad space, collecting visitor information, and sending users on to free sample offers. The model was simple: they spent about a dollar to acquire a user and made about $1.25 back, and the cash came back within roughly 15 minutes.
The first version was a lead-generation arbitrage. The team collected first name, last name, email, and phone number, then sold those leads to buyers. Margins were around 20 to 30 percent, and the business was self-funded and kept reinvesting profit into ad spend. Google search was tried but cost about $20 per click, and buying pharma lists was judged too expensive and difficult.
The breakthrough came when a large client asked for diabetics specifically and said it would pay about $8 per lead instead of $1.25. Rather than sourcing data, the team added a question to the order form: 'Are you diabetic?' About 14 percent of respondents said yes, matching the US population, and the leads became worth roughly $8 each. The team scaled this into a question-based model that asks eight to ten questions per visitor and uses the answers to raise lead value, including for car insurance and dozens of other categories.
Samples.com sold leads efficiently because the questions revealed high-value attributes that advertisers would pay for. The hard part was technical: with hundreds of possible questions, the system had to decide which question to ask and which advertiser to match, and Goss estimated about seven billion possible combinations. Zito was designed to solve this for other publishers, with auto-optimizing question sets and a platform rewritten from scratch. Publisher pricing and the revenue share were still being tested at the time of the interview.
Samples.com reportedly processed about $39-40 million in top-line revenue in 2016 against $20-25 million in ad spend. Zito was set to launch on June 1, 2017, with three beta publishers and more than 200 advertisers. Goss said the company's CPMs ran from $400 to $2,200, far above the $5 to $20 typical of AdSense, and the product was offered free with no long-term contracts. The team planned to test whether question-based registration could complement paywalls and ads for publishers.
- •Samples.com's lead value rose because a few survey questions turned generic traffic into targeted, high-value audiences that advertisers would pay more for.
- •Acquiring users for about $1 and recovering that cost within minutes let the business reinvest quickly and compound without outside funding.
- •Solving the question-ordering problem with proprietary tech gave the team a defensible edge that competitors hard-coding questions could not match efficiently.
- •Zito leveraged an existing advertiser base of over 200 buyers, which made it attractive to publishers who lacked their own demand.
- 1.Start with a cheap paid traffic source where your cost per acquired user sits below what a targeted buyer will pay for it.
- 2.Add one qualifying question to your funnel and measure whether answers change buyer willingness to pay before building anything larger.
- 3.Once a qualifying question works, expand to a short sequence of questions and test which order gives the best response rates.
- 4.Build a buyer pipeline before offering the product to publishers so that every new publisher has advertisers to sell against immediately.
- 5.Test revenue-share terms with a small set of beta partners before committing to a fixed pricing model.
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