The following interview is a conversation we had with Dan Rua, CEO of Admiral on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $28 Million Raised to Build the Future of Visitor Relationship Management
Brett
Hey, everyone, and welcome back to Category Visionaries. Today we’re speaking with Dan Rua, CEO of Admiral, a visitor relationship management platform that’s raised 28 million in funding. Dan, welcome to the show.
Dan Rua
Hey, Brett, thanks for. Thanks for having me.
Brett
No problem. Super, super excited to have you here. Let’s go ahead and talk about what you’re building today.
Dan Rua
Yeah. So Admiral, as you mentioned, is a visitor relationship management company. You can think of VRM similar to a CRM, but we focus on visitors, as in visitors to websites. And most websites don’t actually have a CRM for how to interact with their visitors. Most media publishers don’t have that. And so we created it. But, you know, happy to go into that more detail. It’s kind of our origin story, when appropriate.
Brett
And take us back to the founding of the company, 2015. Can you take us back to those days?
Dan Rua
Definitely. So to go back a little further. So my background, computer engineer, and then I was in venture capital for a couple decades. Did about 40 companies over a few funds. And one of the last ones I did was in the music streaming space. It was a pioneer of streaming before Spotify, called Grooveshark and groove shark reached 100 million users, 120 employees, substantial company. We end up selling that company over to the music labels, but grabbed the product team and spun them out to tackle a problem that we noticed. What we noticed was that there was a disruptive wave coming through that was around privacy user empowerment, really disrupting the core business model of the Internet, starting with ad blockers. That was kind of the tip of the spear, but then is, you know, grown into too much more.
Dan Rua
You know, it’s ad blockers, it’s data blockers, it’s death of the cookie, where the browsers are killing off the tracking. It’s privacy consent like GDPR and ccpa. And all of that is a massive wave that’s just kind of undercutting the traditional business model of the Internet, which means websites can’t just track people around the Internet and shoot ads at them. They actually have to stick their hand out and say, hello. That is more martech, if you will, than adtech. Right. Adtech is there to shoot ads very efficiently, whereas martech, or marketing automation is how do you talk to people and build some sort of relationship and hopefully some sort of value exchange over time that sticks. And so as we kind of dug into all of this, we felt, you know, that’s really what the Internet needs.
Dan Rua
If we’re shifting to this kind of privacy user empowerment world, then Websites need a way to build those relationships with their visitors. It didn’t exist already, right. There was no kind of HubSpot or Marketo or Salesforce built for media publishers to talk to their visitors. And so went and built it. And that’s as we call visitor relationship management.
Brett
I have a lot of questions that I want to ask there, but I want to go back a little bit and ask about something in your path. So I see you founded a company in 1998. What was it like to be founding a venture backed company in 1998?
Dan Rua
Oh man, that was exciting. Right? That’s a birth of kind of commercial Internet time. Stepping back from that, I remember being at IBM working on kind of early Internet protocol work and the first gopher clients to see a file sitting on someone else’s machine and then the first browser and so Mosaic comes along and you see a file on someone else’s machine. And that was just a game changer. And so anyway, fast forward then you get into a commercial web that was quickly exploding there towards the end of the 90s and heading into the early 2000s and there was no way to not create a company around that time. And so got together with some colleagues and actually my brother as well was a Co-Founder of that company, became CEO of that company.
Dan Rua
And it was interesting at the time we started it and very shortly there I also joined a venture fund. So I ended up joining up with the group that was out at Draper Fisher Jervitson and Tim Draper wanted to launch the first East Coast Draper Fund. And so in short order it was both launching of a company and joining Draper to launch this fun on the east coast in a very exciting time which was that kind of first Internet explosion exciting time.
Brett
But was it a painful time to be in venture? I’m looking at the timeline there for Draper Atlantic. It was 99 to 2002. That was right in the middle of a lot of pain. Right?
Dan Rua
It was a roller coaster to be sure. There was massive growth and explosive growth. You know, there was one deal that I led that we did the seed round on it and within 18 months it sold for 10x plus. It was just a just massive value creation. But then we also, you know, we’re on the flip side of the dot com crash and just, you know, all the sorts of entrepreneurial ingenuity that’s required to survive and thrive when the market, you know, turns 180 degrees.
Brett
Yeah, I can imagine. I can imagine. Now if we go back a little bit to Admiral Why do you think it was that no one was doing this? Why was no one building solutions for publishers?
Dan Rua
I think, well, going back to, again, back to this kind of core business model of the Internet, it had traditionally been to attach ads to content and pump out content. And if your content was good enough, then you had a business. But when you have that sort of model, there is no relationship between the parties. And in any endeavor, when there’s no relationship between the parties, you can find that they start to abuse the relationship. Right. And so on the publisher side, it became too easy for publishers to just pack in more ads or bad ads or what have you. And on the visitor side, it became too easy to use a blocker or to not care if the publisher lives or dies. And so there was this kind of sea change going on that the old model wasn’t going to work.
Dan Rua
Something new was needed, and all of the investment that had been going into the category had really been focused on that old model. We have billions of dollars of ad tech companies out there, and yet ad tech companies are built to shoot ads as efficiently as possible. They’re not built to build relationships. And so I think it was just this disruption happens, and so it opens up a new greenfield, which is how in the world was there no HubSpot for media publishers? I remember when were first talking about it, and I could remember from a venture standpoint, being in the boardroom and, you know, Picture the average SaaS company and you’re at the board meeting and the head of marketing comes in and says, hey, we got 15 million visitors last month. And you’re like, holy crap, that’s phenomenal.
Dan Rua
And you ask, you say, so how’d we do on getting email addresses or leads or what did that mean in terms of lead? And imagine the marketer says, well, no, we didn’t do anything like that. Like, you know, we’re hoping they show up next month and we, you know, we get another 15 million. It’s like it was just not part of the normal business model of the. Of the media publishers to think in that kind of relationship lead way that SaaS marketers and others have thought about for years. And so this disruption, I think, just is changing the model. So you needed a Martech solution for it.
Brett
I obviously read all the headlines about the bankruptcies in publishing, so I think vice is the big one that comes to mind. Buzzfeed. I think there were rumors. I can’t remember how that all played out, but what’s it like selling to a customer base that Seems to almost be under attack right now.
Dan Rua
So the nice thing is that overall, it’s not like people have stopped using the Internet. And so what you have is you still have voracious consumption, but you absolutely have kind of traffic moving around in the industry. And so you have winners and losers and all of that. And so it comes back to this question of who is really building the relationships that stick, right? If you built your model on viral social content and you had no sort of relationship with the visitor, you were just hoping that you were gonna always gonna get viral clicks from Twitter or Facebook and all of a sudden that changes, or you thought you were always gonna get search traffic from Google and that changes. Well then absolutely, you will have a rollercoaster ride of fortunes because you don’t control your most valuable asset, which is the visitors.
Dan Rua
Whereas the ones that have found a way to double down and invest in them, whether that’s a New York Times or Washington Post or many others that are using us, you know, that’s how you are going to survive and thrive in this kind of new Internet. When we look forward a decade, like the sites that are going to be the winners, they’re going to look a lot like, you know, registered relationship based sites instead of transient, you know, viral sites hoping for traffic hits.
Brett
Is everything going to be closed off then? Like when you visit the New York Times, are you going to have to put in your email address or what is that going to look like, you know, 10 years out into the future?
Dan Rua
Yeah, I think there’s going to be a wide spectrum. I think, you know, a lot of people do think in terms of kind of black or white on specific revenue models, right? Like an ad model versus a subscription model. And we see it differently. We think there’s a wide spectrum of visitors that have different value exchanges in mind and how they want to consume content. And not only at a visitor level, but on a per site basis. And so one site you might be okay with ads and another site you might not, or one site you might subscribe to and another site you might not. Or another site you might give an email address to another site you might not.
Dan Rua
And so the publisher ultimately needs not to like double down on a single value exchange, but rather a robust platform to kind of meet visitors where they’re at. And what you’ll find is there’s this whole journey that is involved, right? The journey from the very first anonymous visitor that on their first visit and you have zero relationship with them. At all the way to the maximum relationship. You know, visitor who has, you know, donated, turned off their ad blocker, given an email address, subscribed, downloaded, the mobile app follows you on social like, you know, that’s the ultimate relationship. And there’ll be a whole bunch of people in between those two extremes. And so you need a platform to maximize ARPU along that whole spectrum.
Dan Rua
If you went only subscriptions, just as an example, you know, great subscription companies achieve maybe 5% of the audience and 95% is not ready to pull out their credit card. And so what are you doing to maximize ARPU with the other 95%? And it can’t just be that you are going to piss them off in hopes that they subscribe. There has to be other ways that you again, build that relationship. Don’t ask to get married on the first date, right? Cultivate the relationship. Maybe they’ll subscribe in the future, maybe they won’t. But you’re kind of meeting everyone where they’re at.
Brett
Tell us about the first big publisher that you were able to land. Obviously, for every Founder that’s listening in, every operator that’s listening in, that’s always the hard thing, is getting that first big deal across the line. What was that first one like for you and what did you learn from that journey?
Dan Rua
First big one, you know, we definitely had a smattering of smaller ones. So, you know, our I.C.P. First off, I’ll just note, you know, we tend to think in three main segments. There is a kind of long tail self serve and we are self serve. So any publisher can come sign up and use us at the same time. We don’t spend a ton of people time there. It’s more about, you know, the platform serving those. Our people time is focused a bit more on SMB and enterprise. And so if you think of SMB, that is any topic, whether it is fishing or cricket or race cars, like there is a website with millions of people talking about that topic and then enterprise is the big guys.
Dan Rua
And we’ve been very lucky to now serve, you know, NBC Universal and Paramount, CBS and Gannett and News Corp and a bunch of others. So our ICP is at SMB and enterprise. And so now back to your question. You know, we had a mix of kind of early self serve and then SMB. And one of the nicest early enterprise deals for us was PGA Tour. They understood what were trying to achieve with vrm, with the concept of relationships. They’re a big believer in relationships. They start relationships, you know, when someone’s a kid all the way through to where they’re, you know, golfing in their 80s and 90s. And so they have a long view on relationship and so they adopted us, have been a great partner.
Dan Rua
They were one of our first and they are still with us to this day using all of our different modules. We have multiple modules. And so what was that like? I remember at the time it was an extensive RFP process. To be honest, we don’t have a ton of RFPs in this industry. A lot of the deals we win don’t really involve an rfp. But in this case, PGA Tour put out a very comprehensive rfp. And so I remember, you know, just kind of all night, you know, crash crushing to make sure we put our best foot forward and ultimately won that deal versus some great competition. But they’ve been a really good partner and you know, we remember to this day that they believed in us and it’s paid off for them. It’s paid off for us.
Brett
Did you pioneer the term visitor relationship management? Like was anyone using that in any different way or was that a term that you really came up with?
Dan Rua
Yeah, we’ve pioneered it. It is a term that is more of a category or concept, right, that every publisher has a VRM stack. It’s just that their VRM stack today, or when we started was kind of a Frankenstein of five different point solutions. And so they have a ad block recovery point solution, they have an email capture point solution, they have a subscriptions point solution, they have a privacy consent point solution, they have a first party data point solution. And so they’ve kind of cobbled together this VRM stack. But the problem is, you know, that’s five or six vendors to manage, it’s five or six tags to put on page, which screws up page load time and everything. And worst of all, it’s five to six vendors kind of fighting over the visitor journey.
Dan Rua
That it is one visitor coming and interacting with that brand and that site. But now there’s five decision engines trying to figure out when to talk to them about something. And so I’m sure you’ve experienced where you show up on a website sometimes and you get asked like three questions all at once. And that’s because these point solutions are stepping all over each other. And so we brought in this idea of listen, you have a VRM stack already, it’s just a mess. And an admiral. What you can do is you put one tag on page, it starts showing you A bunch of lost revenue and other opportunities that is actually free. And so we encourage anyone to get that to at least see what’s happening, because blockers and everything are breaking analytics.
Dan Rua
But then once that tag is on page, they can just flick a switch to turn on everything across the journey with one decision engine that can avoid overlap of engagements and all sorts of things. And it’s worked out pretty well so far.
Brett
So you didn’t have to convince customers that they needed a vrm, you just had to convince them that you had a better approach to vrm.
Dan Rua
Yes. And I would note, you know, we’ve really leaned into the land and expand model. So modeled off of HubSpot in a lot of ways. Right. Like, not many people buy HubSpot all at once. Right. They buy the sales module or the CRM module or the support module. And so we took the same approach. Each of those modules I’ve mentioned so far, such as adblock recovery or subscription paywall or email or privacy consent, each of those are individual modules that a publisher can buy. And so when you think about how we had to convince them, it’s funny because in the early days we would usually start talking because of one of those pain points.
Dan Rua
And then if a publisher, you know, got interested in everything we could do with vrm, they’d start pulling in other decision makers and we’d get really excited because they were really getting what were talking about with vrm. But then we realized fairly quickly that it was actually complicating the go to market approach because now you’ve brought five decision makers in the room and there’s a whole range of questions you’re now in hoops you’re jumping through. And so we pretty quickly came back to this land and expand and we said, no, let’s focus on solving the one problem that brought you here. That might have been ad block losses, it might have been you need a paywall, it might have been that you need privacy consent. Let’s do that for you and do it great and build trust with you.
Dan Rua
And then once there’s trust and we prove that we do what we say, hopefully you’ll flick a switch and turn on another module. But that’s kind of our motion so that we’re not selling VRM all at once as much as we are selling a pain point. But we are kind of preaching the VRM philosophy along the way. And I think we win deals because of it. Even if someone’s not buying the entire all modules at once, they Appreciate the kind of the road to expansion and really owning and getting that whole visitor journey under control that they can do with Admiral.
Brett
We always like to ask about the most important go to market decision that’s been made. It sounds like that may be it. Was it the land and expand decision and to double down on that side or what do you think has been like the most important go to market decision?
Dan Rua
I’d probably, I’ll pick out maybe three. One is the free tag that just shows your problems and your losses, that then you can flick a switch to turn on everything else. And so that’s been very valuable for us because one thing that happened with blockers in the early days is that they don’t just break ads, they actually break analytics and a mix of other things. And so there’s just a river of people that are like skating under the radar that the average web publisher doesn’t even realize. And so that was very nice. We got ourselves a really nice installed base just off of installing our analytics tag to understand the problem. Then once they saw the problem, they realized, geez, I’m losing $100,000 or a million dollars or whatever you had built incentive to go solve it with one of our modules.
Dan Rua
So number one, it was just the free tag approach. Then to your point, the land and expand has been very valuable. So we don’t have to sell everything at once. We can sell an individual module. And then the third, which I would say is just more tactical, is that by 22 we had established product market fit and we had some great brands using us and we brought on our first CRO at the time and in the process he brought in just even more and better discipline on the outbound motion and picking up the phone, driving the email and account based marketing way. And I would just say that, you know, the lesson there was no magic to it. The CRO and I often talk about it like it wasn’t magic, it was discipline to execute the game plan.
Dan Rua
And that had a really nice effect for us as well.
Brett
As I mentioned there in the intro, you’ve raised 28 million to date. What have you learned about fundraising this time around?
Dan Rua
So first off, were fairly lucky with the seed funding in that, you know, the found, you know, us as founders were kind of a known commodity because we had built Grooveshark, I had been in venture. So were able to start with institutional seed versus kind of cats and dog angels. And so I feel very fortunate to kind of start with a really nice strong institutional foundation. Then we grew off of that and ultimately ended up doing our growth round this year, which is a series A for us. And I guess my biggest lesson from this round of fundraising was just really dialing in the SaaS efficiency metrics. If I was to point to one thing that really, you know, got a nice competitive process going and ultimately closed a great round with great partners. It’s more about just the efficiency numbers behind our business.
Dan Rua
Right. So burn multiple, just really strong birth, you know, well under one on burn multiple, really strong NRR 130% plus, really strong rule of X, you know, 100% plus. And so just really dialing in those efficiency metrics was at least our secret to getting around done in a pretty tough market.
Brett
How did raising this round compare to raising the rounds you were doing in 1998?
Dan Rua
I’d say no comparison. Right. In 98 I was an absolute novice at all of it and that was kind of cats and dog angels to get started just to get some money in. Whereas luckily I had been on the other side of the table for a bunch of companies. And so it felt much more methodical this time around. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s always tough to fundraise, but there wasn’t, let’s say, the panic that first time entrepreneur may have in trying to figure it all out.
Brett
Final question for you. Let’s zoom out three to five years into the future. What’s the big picture vision look like?
Dan Rua
So really where we want to get with all of this, we built an amazing VRM system that has all the bells and whistles you might want to optimize a journey, right? Frequency targeting segments, first party data, all that sort of stuff. So we’ve got the, you know, the best mousetrap right now. What we haven’t done is unleashed 100% automation in it. And so this is some of the AI investments we’ve been making so that it’s no longer about what do I want to do with a given kind offer or with a given kind of visitor, or for this segment or this geo, but rather push the easy button and the journey system will take care of it. Just tell us what the goals are.
Dan Rua
The goals, maximum relationship, right, is that, you know, you’re getting email addresses, you’re getting ad blockers off, you’re getting subscribers, you’re getting privacy consent, you’re getting first party data and then our system will do it for you automatically based off of the, you know, expected conversion rates of each one of those, the value of each one of those based off of who someone is. Right. Because one, you know, ad rates to one person may be different than ad rates to another person, or the propensity to subscribe may be different for one person than another. From an AI standpoint, you can get yourself to a place where the journeys optimize themselves. And so that’s really where we want to get is we built an amazing mousetrap right now that you want to just put an easy button on the whole thing.
Brett
Amazing. Love the vision. I really love this conversation. We’re going to wrap here. Before we do, if there’s any founders that are listening in that want to follow along with your journey as you build and execute on this vision, where should we send them?
Dan Rua
Yeah, so our website is git admiral g e t a d m I r a l dot com getadmiral.com we’re on all the social platforms at getadmiral, LinkedIn, X et cetera. Also feel free to email me. I am danitadmiral.com having been both an entrepreneur and investor, you know, always game to kind of hear questions or be a sounding board for other entrepreneurs trying to. Trying to grow. But yeah, that’s where you can find us.
Brett
Amazing. I love it. Dan, thanks so much. It’s been a lot of fun.
Dan Rua
All right, thanks, Brett.
Brett
All right. That was awesome, man. You’re a great guest. That was a fun conversation.
Dan Rua
Super, Brett. I really appreciate it. Again, if you can send me the deck on.
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