The following interview is a conversation we had with Jared Siegal, CEO and Founder of Aditude, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $15 Million Raised to Build the Future of Publisher Monetization
Jared Siegal
Yeah, thanks for having me on.
Brett
Not a problem. Let’s go ahead and just kick off with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background.
Jared Siegal
Sure. So like you said, my name is Jared Siegel. I’m the CEO and Founder of Aditude. I kind of fell into this industry by accident, started college, going to an architecture program. I am a huge Seinfeld fan, and I think George Costanza got to me subconsciously and made me want to become an architect. Quickly realized that wasn’t for me, went to business school, couldn’t get a job, and luckily became friends with the founders@answers.com. And they taught me a lot of what I know about the space today.
Brett
How did that happen? How do you become friends with the founders of Answers.com dot?
Jared Siegal
So I was pitching actually a to teach a class. I went to school in St. Louis, and my senior year I was struggling to get a job. So I went to the entrepreneurship program, which is one of the departments that I got a degree in, and I pitched teaching a class to the head of the department. And he was basically like, hey, I think this is a really cool idea, but there are these two guys I think you should really meet first. They graduated from the program a few years ago, and they started this really cool company called answers. So he made the introduction, met them the next day. They offered me a job. I didn’t really understand what they did, and I accepted.
Brett
What was answers like at that stage or how big was the company? Because today answers.com is huge, right?
Jared Siegal
At the time, it was probably like 30 employees, maybe a little bit more. It was very much a startup. They had just actually acquired it. It was originally on the israeli stock exchange, and these two guys in St. Louis bought the company, took it private to St. Louis, Missouri. So it was very much like, the best way to describe it is if you’ve ever watched the tv show Silicon Valley. Of course, that was my life for, like, two and a half years.
Brett
It’s funny watching that show. I rewatched it again, like, probably a year ago. I’m like, wow, this is very accurate to a lot of the interactions I have and a lot of the conversations I have with founders. It’s almost offensive. I think sometimes watching it was.
Jared Siegal
Spot on for my, like, two and a half years there.
Brett
What did you learn from that experience and that time at answers?
Jared Siegal
Yeah, so, obviously, I learned a lot about the ad industry. How to serve ads, how to make money on the Internet. I learned how to code, obviously did not go to school for engineering, learn how to run a business, how to manage a team. I became a manager of a pretty large team very quickly there as the business scaled up very quickly. So it was a lot of different types of experiences that helped me become a manager.
Brett
What was it about advertising that caught your interest, caught your attention, and made you say, all right, I’m going to keep working on this, because I understand you moved into an ad focused role at the next company, and then obviously, you started an ad tech company today. Why advertising?
Jared Siegal
I think the most interesting thing to me is that there is so much traffic online that you can launch different tests or different ideas and within minutes know what the revenue impact is. Right. So I never had to wait and see if my work was making the business money. I never had to wait to see if my idea was crazy or actually worked. I could wait a few minutes and know exactly what I just did and if it was successful or not.
Brett
I love it. Now, let’s switch gears and let’s dive deeper into the company. So take us back to May 2019. What’s the origin story there?
Jared Siegal
Yeah, a few things. I was commuting upwards of five and a half hours a day back and forth to my job at the time, most of it, thankfully, on the train. And frankly, I got to the point where I just didn’t want to do it anymore. I’d rather quit my job and try to start something versus continuing to commute like that. So it was kind of a spur of the moment decision, Brett, where I walked in one day, I hadn’t even told my wife, went up right to the GM and quit, handed in my laptop and took the train back home. I had no plans on what the company would be or what I would be doing, other than the fact that I knew I was very good at adopts and I could probably make something out of it.
Jared Siegal
So early on May, June, July, whatever the rest of 2019, I basically just acted as a consultant. I reached out to a lot of friends in the space companies that maybe had spun off of answers or people that I had gotten to know at my previous job and asked them if they want to help. Pretty quickly, I grew the business, I think I call it a business. It was really, again, just me as a consultant to a point where by the end of 2019, early 2020, I was ready to start two hiring employees and figure out really what I was going to do.
Brett
At what point did you decide this is going to be a tech company and not a consultancy?
Jared Siegal
Thats a really good question. Its a very specific moment in my life. I grew the business 2019 to 2021. Me and one contractor. Hes now full time super senior in the company. But its really just the two of us billing by the hour. We had a decent amount of clients. And one day a VC firm approached me. They offered me a lump sum of cash to buy my business and required, obviously, that I stay on and to be frank, the amount of money that for me, I could have made that if I just put in a few more hours a day. I owned 100% of the, quote, business at the time, and whatever money was leftover, it was going in my pocket. And when I asked them why they offered me such a low amount, they made it pretty clear.
Jared Siegal
You’re a consultancy, you’re not a tech company, and you kind of have a choice. You can keep going and as a consultant, making good money and running the business this way, or you can try to pivot the business into some sort of SaaS play and go after a much larger amount of money. I spent all of like 1 hour thinking about it after that call. I called up my very good friend, now, the CTO at Aditude. I offered him a job and I said, hey, we’re going to turn this into a tech company. And that was it.
Brett
How did you survive making that transition? And the reason I asked, I’ve been running an agency business or a service business now for ten years, had like two runs at building tech and trying to do software, and it’s never worked out. I always end up just having to retreat back to our, you know, traditional agency model. And a lot of my Founder, sorry, a lot of my friends who have also founded agencies or their consultants, they’ve had similar struggles. I think it’s very difficult to make that jump. What do you think you got right and what did you learn from that experience in making that leap.
Jared Siegal
Yeah. So by the time we kind of converted from a hourly type of business model, mostly a SaaS business model, we had already built out a lot of tech, right? And a lot of our publishers were already fully reliant on our technology. And so that made it for sure a lot easier. Right. Basically, we’re offering our tech for free for upwards of maybe twelve months and continuing to charge by the hour for all of the support and maintenance of that tech. And so when we converted it saying like, hey, you no longer really have to pay us that much on the hourly side, but now you have to pass a recurring fee to use our technology, the actual cost of publishers didn’t really change that much, right.
Jared Siegal
To our clients, maybe it went up marginally, but the way that I justified it to all of our existing clients was, I’m using this money to continue to hire more developers, to build out better products so they can make more money. Right? And I moved very quickly there, where nearly every day were releasing more and more updates to what eventually became our main product, the cloud wrapper. And so it became very clear to our existing clients, like, okay, he’s not kind of full of it, he’s not just taking our money, he’s actually putting this to use.
Jared Siegal
But other than that, I think it really just came down to like, we had really strong relationships with all of our clients at the time, and a lot of them were just kind of entrusting me and Eric and Corey on the team with their kind of livelihood. Right? And if we said like, hey, this is the better model for you and this is the better path for Aditude, big trust in us, and were really lucky to have a lot of those original clients and nearly all of them are still with us today.
Brett
Something you said there I think is important is livelihood, because it really is the livelihood of these publishers, right. When you’re coming in and they’re trusting your technology, it has to work. And if it goes down for an hour or for a day, that can cost them a lot of money, right?
Jared Siegal
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I say this all the time to my wife. Every time I hire an employee, that’s another family that I’m responsible for. Every time we hire or we sign a new client, that’s another giant set of families that we’re responsible for. I don’t take that lightly. I should say it’s something in the back of my mind at all times and probably why I’m always so anal about ensuring our data looks good. And traffic looks good and monetization looks good. I think that’s also why so many of our clients respect what we do, is we don’t look at them as just like client. We look at them as part of our family. Right. Part of our business. And it’s something that we don’t take lightly.
Brett
You must sleep great at night then, with all that weight.
Jared Siegal
I think if you ask a lot of our employees and a lot of our partners, they’ll tell you that I pretty much never sleep.
Brett
Yeah, like, I can sense that from how you’re talking about it, but it makes sense. It’s their business that they’re really trusting you with. And I imagine if you screw up, the stakes are high. Right? I’m sure it’s a pretty small community. Everyone talks, so, yeah, you can’t screw up. When it comes to the ICP, what’s a normal publisher? What’s like the typical size of who you’re trying to work with or want to work with more?
Jared Siegal
Yeah. Obviously as we grow, that changes a little bit. We typically go after enterprise size clients. These are publishers that, whether they have one domain or a bunch of domains or even like apps and things like that, they’re doing hundreds of millions, if not billions of impressions and impressions a month. Right. The way that our business model works, it’s not the most cost effective for the long tail of publishers. It becomes more increasingly cost effective the bigger you are as a publisher. So typically we’re going after, I would say, like the mid size and larger size publishers. We don’t really cherry pick any content categories or anything like that. We do over index or whatever it’s worth in the gaming space and in the sports space, but we work with pretty much everything.
Brett
Are all publishers having a hard time right now? Or is that just maybe like the big media companies? For the last, I don’t know, two months. I feel like every time I go on LinkedIn, I hear about another publisher doing layoffs. Are those the publishers that you’re trying to target, or is that more just like the big mainstream publishers who are feeling that and dealing with that?
Jared Siegal
A little bit of everything. So obviously there’s some companies out there that probably have over hired, right. And are trying to just fill roles to fill roles versus hiring for absolute needs. It’s like we’re pretty stingy when we hire people internally. And so those clients or those types of publishers are actually great targets for us because they’re struggling, they’re trying to keep their costs down, and we’re an alternate solution where we can basically provide you 30 employees for the price of like half of one, right. But smaller publishers are struggling, I’d say in a different way. Like Google is becoming more and more price sensitive. The market is kind of indexing a little bit behind the economy. So as the economy retracts, advertising retracts. As the economy improves, advertising improves, but we’re always a few months behind.
Jared Siegal
So even though the economy is in pretty good state right now, advertising hasn’t quite caught up yet. So they’re struggling more. So and like, hey, we’ve just got to make more money and figure out alternate solutions to make money to keep the lights on.
Brett
When it comes to the go to market strategy, what does that look like right now?
Jared Siegal
So we primarily grew for the first, say, three and a half, four years through word of mouth, right. And so it was purely existing clients introducing us to their friends or people that they end up talking to, right. Or not even existing clients, but just friends in the industry making introductions for us. We only recently, six, seven months ago, started to hire some salespeople, some marketing and pr people. Now we have a quite a different approach. So we’re throwing our own events, we’re doing a ton of pr, we’re trying to get onto podcasts like this, and we’re trying to get our name out right. And that was honestly a big reason why we raised capital.
Brett
What’s working right now and getting your name out and what’s not working?
Jared Siegal
Yeah. So what is working is we are, in my opinion, like let’s seeing the market with a ton of content. We’re doing case studies all the time. This is my third podcast interview over the week. Done tons of roundtables as well. We’re doing our own webinars, so all of that is working. What is still, I’d say TBD is the paid side of things. So we’re kind of getting, I think, creative in terms of running paid advertising ourselves as an advertiser, not just as a company that helps other publishers advertise to try to stir up traffic to our website. Do lead gen things like that. That from what I understand, is a much longer life cycle, whereas just blitzing LinkedIn and other social platforms, which is tons of content, you get much more instant feedback.
Brett
What’s the marketing team look like and what have you learned from building out the marketing team?
Jared Siegal
It’s a small team. It’s just two people. We basically have a marketing lead and a PR lead or communications lead us to say they both are doing a million things for us. So all of our content creation, website design, all of our design work this for, like, all of our pitch decks and information that we hand out to publishers, all of our paid acquisition, all of our email campaigns, they do it all. We are, I think, kind of pushing the limits a little bit in terms of us launching our own events. So in the past, went to a lot of different, or eight, I should say, to go to a lot of different major advertising events all around the country, and in fact, all around the world. In 2024, we’re switching it and we’re doing all of the events ourselves.
Jared Siegal
So these two people on the team are helping me and the executive team basically create all of these major events around the country. We have our first one in April that we’re really excited about, and we have five more coming by the end of the year.
Brett
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Jared Siegal
Oh, geez. They would budget like 200,000 for that.
Brett
Okay. And then how are you? What’s that process look like? So you identify a city. I’m guessing you pick a good venue. How do you get people to attend? Because I feel like you’re getting these invites all the time to attend events. I think anyone or everyone’s you getting event invitations as well. And I think it’s just hard to get people to attend because everyone’s busy, everyone has a life. So what are you doing to create these events in a way that people are willing to take time out of their busy schedules to attend them?
Jared Siegal
Yeah. So I think it comes down to doing the exact opposite of what all these events are historically doing or traditionally doing. I’ve been to a million events where you’re locked in a big conference room. It’s the same people talking to the same group of people on the same topics, boring topics that no one really cares about. It’s cold, it’s dark. Right? We’re doing the exact opposite. So what we do is we get tons of publishers together to do a lot of fun things. So, like our first event that we’re doing this year, it’s 45 or so publishers, some of them work with Aditude already. Some obviously are prospects that we want to work with going down to Disney World, three days at the hotel, tons of parks, golf, dinners at famous restaurants.
Jared Siegal
What a better way to get to know everyone and understand what’s important to them than spending three days basically on vacation with them.
Brett
That’s awesome. I love the approach. What about your market category? How do you think about the category that you’re in today? And what category do you want to be in three years from now?
Jared Siegal
Yeah, so early on, were very much positioned as a header bidding company. And the header bidding space is pretty commoditized. There’s even some open source code there, so websites can frankly access it for free. And we tried to really separate ourselves. We always said, hey, no, we are not a header bidding company because we do so much more. We don’t just do this one part of the ad option. We have a content platform, we have a video player, we have analytics. We have a full development section of our business. And so where we are right now is kind of in a little bit of a nebulous space in that we compete with some other ad tech vendors, we compete with CMS platforms, we compete with analytics platforms where we want to be.
Jared Siegal
And this is why we describe ourselves as a monetization operating system, right. Is we want to provide everything a publisher needs to properly monetize that site.
Brett
How do publishers buy, like in the enterprise software world and like cybersecurity? I think a lot of them go to Gartner and they say, okay, who’s the best? And then they get their recommendation from, there. Are publishers doing the same thing, or what does that buying journey look like?
Jared Siegal
Not really. I’ve talked to Gartner in the past, but like, I don’t think that many publishers, especially the mid tier publishers, are paying that kind of money to do that research. A lot of it, frankly, is just a b testing, right? So if Aditude goes to a publisher and says, hey, I think we can make you 30% more money, right? Let us prove it. It’s kind of behooves them to say, all right, we’ll put you on 10% of our traffic and see if you actually make us 30% more in that bucket. Right. Some of it comes from, like I said, from testing. Some of it comes from, believe it or not, slack. There’s a tremendous amount of slack communities.
Jared Siegal
I’m proud part of like six or seven really large groups where people are asking all types of very specific questions every day, and I try to be pretty vocal there and answer their questions, offer them some help. I know a lot of our other employees do as well. And then some of it comes through word of mouth. So while I said there’s all these big slack communities, they’re probably a lot of the same people. The actual industry of serving ads online is not that big, right. It’s a pretty small community in general, maybe five to 10,000 people, at least here in the United States. And so everyone kind of knows each other, right?
Jared Siegal
And so if we find a publisher that we want to talk to, and we notice that they’re connected to another publisher or another person that we know, we’ll kind of try to take advantage of those relationships or even offer or ask for other advertising platforms so exchanges themselves to put us in touch with publishers.
Brett
How do you infiltrate these communities and not be that guy or that woman who’s, like, just being annoying? I’m in a lot of groups, and, like, it’s so annoying when you just see someone who’s clearly selling, but I also see the people who are selling, but they’re doing it in this very clever way. Like, they’re just like adding so much value that people are almost like, begging to, like, give them business, it seems. I’m guessing that’s the approach.
Jared Siegal
Yes. If you go into some of these slack channels, I never actually pitch act. I will, in fact, sometimes go out of my way to answer questions that make it so they don’t need to use us. Right. But I try to be so friendly and so informative that people do reach out to me, or at least they remember me. Right. So, like, I had a call today with a pretty large publisher. Oh, I remember all the questions you were helping me answer on slack a few months ago. Right. Because you never know when that’s going to come back to help you.
Brett
A lot of the founders listening in and just founders that I talked to, they’d be your, the conversations I have, like, okay, well, that sounds like a cool idea, but what about attribution? How do we know if we spend all this time in these slack groups that it’s going to lead to business, and how do we trace that back? How do you think about attribution? Or are you just focused on adding value and the customers will follow from there?
Jared Siegal
Yeah, I think it’s the latter. Honestly. It’s not like I’m spending hours and hours a day doing this. Right? My average day is probably 16 17 hours of work. If I spend 20 minutes a day answering random questions on these different slack channels, that’s a good use of my.
Brett
Time when it comes to funding. As I mentioned there in the intro, you’ve raised 15 million to date. What have you learned about fundraising throughout this journey?
Jared Siegal
Yeah. So obviously I’m a first time entrepreneur. Never had to raise capital before. The process was a lot longer than I expected. It was a lot more legally intensive than I expected. Right. The actual fundraising contract was a few hundred pages long of stuff to go through. But the biggest thing that I learned from it is what makes me successful as a leader, what makes Aditude successful as a business, and also what’s important to me personally. Right. When I raised capital, that meant for the first time ever, I was giving up equity in my business. Right. Even though this may mean that we grow faster and we make more money, it also means potentially less money for me. And so it was a really big decision to actually raise capital. Right? We were profitable and we still are a profitable company.
Jared Siegal
Its not like were going after money to keep the business afloat. We were going after money to help us reach goals that we otherwise couldn’t reach. And it took me probably four months to really wrap my head around that and say, its okay. I am willing to take on that funding, Trey.
Brett
So I talk with a lot of founders, and as Im preparing for interviews, sometimes im like, that is the dumbest name. I cant pronounce it. I have no clue how to say it memorable at all. Yours is the opposite. It’s an epic name. It’s very clear what industry you guys are in. It’s very memorable. What was the process like? Did you just come up with that name and you had it right there? Like, how did you come up with such a great name?
Jared Siegal
First of all, thank you very much. So we came up with a name in 2015, believe it or not. Eric, who’s our CTO, he was my roommate at the time in St. Louis. And were thinking about starting some company at some point. And we kind of just sat there for like a few hours, had a few beers, played some video games, and all of a sudden we’re like, Aditude. And we incorporated the name in 2015, never did anything with it, and obviously took advantage of it in 2019. But it kind of just came to us before we even knew what this business was ever going to do.
Brett
That’s awesome. I feel like great names either take like 1 minute or they take like six months and a bunch of money and all this time spent coming up with the name. So that’s funny to hear where you guys fall there.
Jared Siegal
Sure.
Brett
What do you think’s been the most important decision that you’ve made to date in the company? Hiring people.
Jared Siegal
So the first two and a half years, like I said, maybe even three years, it was 95% me, 5% Corey. And I was unwilling to offload work on to Corey. Part of that was I was afraid to really trust my career to other people. The day that I hired Eric was a really big moment for me because it was the first time I hired someone, a big salary in an executive position in this company I’m trying to build. When I saw that pretty quickly go, well, I’m talking like two or three months, that barrier was broken down and I just started hiring people because I saw, hey, there’s a clear path here for me to offload some of the work that I’m doing to other people, but also for me to actually increase my own productivity by having people support me.
Brett
One other question I was going to ask on the fundraising side with the investors were these ad tech investors, Robert?
Jared Siegal
To some extent, they had made one other investment in a company pretty similar to us. And I did obviously speak to them before taking the money to ensure that they had a good experience. But they’ve had a lot of major exits that obviously enticed me. I think the biggest thing that led me to be to work with this company. Volition, who’s our investor, is that they spent so much time trying to learn about what we do and how we can make more money. It wasn’t one of those companies. They’re not a type of company. Like, we’re going to write 1000 checks a year and hope that, like three of them work right. They only write like ten checks a year, and they spent a really long time vetting each one of their investments.
Jared Siegal
And they’re very involved from the day that they make that investment. I talked to our board members almost every day. So that was kind of an eye opener me, because I didn’t think that existed. And that’s really what put me over the edge to finally make that decision of, okay, I am willing to give up a piece of this business that I’ve worked so hard on to these other company because I understand that they are not just giving me money, they are trying to help me grow this business.
Brett
Let’s imagine I come to you and I say, Jared, I want to build an ad tech business. I’m not going to compete with you, but I want to sell into a similar market. Based on everything you know about this space, what would you recommend to me? Like, what would be the number one piece of advice that you’d give me.
Jared Siegal
In terms of what line? Like what industry within our space to focus on or just how to run.
Brett
A business more on, like the Persona and selling the publishers.
Jared Siegal
Got it. I think the most important thing that I’ve learned over the years in terms of what has led to our success, why publishers like working with us specifically, is taking each job, each relationship personally. So this is not just a, I wake up at 08:00 a.m.. I clock in, I do my job and I clock out. It’s gotten to the point where like I’m written into some of our publishers wills, we’re friends with their families, we spend time with them outside of work. We get to know them extremely well because that helps us better inform them on their business decisions. And it’s not just me, all of our employees are like that.
Brett
Right.
Jared Siegal
We become very ingrained with these clients day to day businesses and we become almost members of their team as well. So the most important advice and give you in terms of a Persona is to be the nice company in the space, right. Not a company that’s just out for yourself. Be a company that is trying to protect and fight for the publishers and make money that way.
Brett
It’s funny, I have the same thing. I have a lot of clients who’ve become friends, and I have one in particular that I did being the best man at his wedding. And I always tell that story about, yeah, clients can definitely become friends.
Jared Siegal
Yes.
Brett
One up to me though, completely. You’re in their wills.
Jared Siegal
Well, how do you like that?
Brett
Wow, I gotta level up. I thought the wedding was like the peak. I thought you couldn’t get any better than that. But this is a new level I’ve learned.
Jared Siegal
Awesome.
Brett
Final question for you. Let’s zoom out three to five years into the future. What’s the big picture vision here? What’s it going to look like?
Jared Siegal
Yeah, so we raise capital for I think two reasons, maybe three, a little bit for marketing.
Brett
Right.
Jared Siegal
And we’re going to grow marketing, spend money on marketing, obviously a lot for hiring more employees so we can continue to build out more tech, we can move faster and we can onboard more publishers, but the majority of it to make acquisitions. So we want to start acquiring companies that are in our space. Tangentially related, whether it’s other advertising platforms like exchanges themselves to similar types of companies as us, but maybe in other regions, so we can break into other continents. But really the big goal, and we got interviewed recently on tv, actually, and our CTO said it really well. Like, we want to become the largest ad tech company on the planet. And so we have a very specific goal in mind. Volition has a very specific goal in mind.
Jared Siegal
We’re going to grow this thing as fast as we can, as profitably as we can, as big as we can, to the point where we are the big dogs in the space. And hopefully one day, a little selfishly, I can sell the business, make some money, and have a nice life.
Brett
Amazing. I love it. Jared, this has been a lot of fun. I’ve really enjoyed it. I think our audience is going to really love this story as well and love learning from you. Before we wrap up, if there’s any founders that are listening in, they feel inspired. They want to follow along with your journey as you build the world’s biggest ad tech company. Where should they go?
Jared Siegal
Go to Aditude.com.
Brett
Awesome, Jared, thanks so much. Really appreciate it.
Jared Siegal
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you.
Brett
This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, Silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B Founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. And for the latest episode, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening, and we’ll catch you on the next episode.
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