Aditude: From Scrappy Consulting to 7-Figure SaaS – with Jared Siegal [447]

This is a machine-generated transcript.

[00:00:00] Omer: All right, Jared, welcome to the show.

[00:00:01] Jared: Yeah, thanks for having me.

[00:00:03] Omer: Do you have a favorite quote, something that inspires or motivates you?

[00:00:05] Jared: Sure. I'm a big country music fan. Big Luke Bryan fan. So in one of his songs he says, do what you love, but call it work for me. Making sure that I enjoy what I'm doing every day.

[00:00:17] Jared: I get personal satisfaction out of it is what, it's important to me and it's what keeps me motivated.

[00:00:22] Omer: Love it. Love it. So tell us about Aditude. What does the product do? Who's it for and what's the main problem you're helping to solve?

[00:00:31] Jared: Sure. So we consider ourselves a, like an ad tech monetization platform.

[00:00:37] Jared: More easily put, we like to think ourselves as the AWS for publishers. So we work with publishers, websites, any type of content creator, whether they're game sites news sites. Celebrity sites, we run the gamut and we help them with any of their needs as it relates to monetization. So that could be with reporting, that could be with literally serving the ads, video, whatever it may be.

[00:00:59] Omer: Okay, cool. And give us a sense of the size of the business where you, in terms of revenue, customers, size of team.

[00:01:05] Jared: Yeah. We're about 50 employees. We do about a hundred billion ad impressions on our platform a month. And we're in the high. Seven figures a year. In m in ARR.

[00:01:21] Omer: Cool. And I think you've raised like around 15 million for your series A.

[00:01:25] Jared: Yeah, we did series A in August, 2023 for 15 million.

[00:01:30] Omer: Great. And before all the people who are boot bootstrapping go, oh yeah, he got the money you actually went to. The first 5 million in a RR, you bootstrapped to that point before you raised any money, right?

[00:01:43] Jared: Correct. Yeah. We ran the business for about four years.

[00:01:48] Jared: Completely bootstrapped. I funded the whole thing.

[00:01:51] Omer: Cool. Awesome. So let's talk about your background and. What were you doing? How did this idea come about?

[00:02:00] Jared: My personal background, I've been in on like online publishing for almost 15 years, but before Aditude, always on the publisher side.

[00:02:08] Jared: So I worked at a publisher out in St. Louis where I met my wife. And that company, I was employee number 30. It was doing. Few million a year in revenue. Two years later, we were doing like quarter of a billion dollars in revenue. I was running the revenue team and the company sold to a private equity firm for almost a billion dollars.

[00:02:28] Jared: It was a whirlwind. I learned a lot. Very quickly, I. As happens with many companies that eventually sell big turnover in the leadership team. I left, went to another publisher started doing the same thing, literally just helping them monetize serve ads on their website. As they expanded the business into other lines, they started raising more capital.

[00:02:49] Jared: And I think I had a maybe a similar experience or motivation to a lot of founders, which was, I helped two companies basically raise one cell for a lot of money, and I personally walked away with almost nothing. And so once I saw that starting to happen a second time, I made sure that I protected myself and moved on and Hey, I'm gonna start my own business purely to control my own destiny.

[00:03:16] Omer: So you quit your job and you started consulting?

[00:03:19] Jared: Yeah. It was a little bit of an impromptu decision to quit my job. I did not tell my wife.

[00:03:26] Omer: No way.

[00:03:27] Jared: I went into work one day. I went into work one day, two and a half hour train from Long Island into the city. I. Got in early, sat down with my boss, asked for a raise.

[00:03:36] Jared: He said no. I said, cool, like spur of the moment. I quit handed in my laptop, took the train home, called my wife and said, Hey, I just quit my job. And she's what are you gonna do? And I'm like, I'll figure it out. Started out purely, Hey, I'm just gonna consult. For like friends that I've met in the space, a lot of companies that were spinoffs of, previous companies that I had worked at.

[00:03:57] Jared: And like over time I'll figure out what I actually want to do in life, right? I did go to school for entrepreneurship, so I knew I always wanted to eventually start my own business, but I had no actual idea of what that business was gonna be or what industry it would be in. And so I consulted, by myself for about 12 months. I hired one other employee and he helped me for another 12 months. And I just ran it purely as like an hourly consulting business. Send invoices monthly. This is how much I work, this is how much you owe me, and I scaled that business up.

[00:04:28] Omer: How big did that business get?

[00:04:31] Jared: We grew it to, I think around 30 clients and about 2 million. Essentially net revenue a year.

[00:04:42] Omer: Cool. Okay, so you've got about these 30, 30 clients. Where did the idea for SaaS business come from?

[00:04:50] Jared: Yeah so lemme think about it. I started in early 2019. Towards the end of 2020, I had two companies outta Blue offer to buy me.

[00:05:01] Jared: Buy my company. One was a video tech vendor and one was an actual ad exchange. And they just knew me because I was working with so many of their clients. And I was taken aback by that. 'cause I never, at that point, I didn't think I even had a company. I'm like, okay, I'm just consulting.

[00:05:17] Jared: I'm like, what do you mean you wanna buy? By my business, he means you just want me to be an employee for you. And they threw out some numbers that were frankly, like they were life changing numbers. And maybe, I'd say it's 2020. Maybe I should have taken it, I don't know. But I, I spoke with my wife.

[00:05:33] Jared: I called up one of my old professors from college who was working at like a senior partner at a VC firm and went through the opportunities with him and he was basically like, Hey. You're running a consultancy, your valuation is as good as the revenue you're generating, and that's it. So you have a decision to make.

[00:05:54] Jared: You can keep going down the same path and personally make a lot of money, but you're gonna be doing this forever. Or you can pivot your company into a real business, maybe SaaS and grow it much quicker and try to sell the business. And interesting enough. He is I think you should do the former and I wanna buy you.

[00:06:13] Jared: And so now I got a third offer and I was like, all right, this is getting outta control. I'm gonna do the, I'm gonna do the second thing. I'm gonna pivot to sas. I have no idea what that really means. I'm gonna try it out. And that's when I I called up my best friend. I was like, Hey, why don't you come on over, be our CTO, help me build out real products.

[00:06:29] Jared: Because up to that point, any tech that we had built. I built in a text edit file. I'm not an engineer. I built in a tech edit file and I was sending text edit files to our clients with just like raw JavaScript in it and saying Hey, push this to your site. I don't even know what that means, but push this to your site.

[00:06:48] Jared: And so that was, that call with that former professor, whether he realizes it or not, basically completely changed the path of my business.

[00:06:57] Omer: So you called your best friend and said, come on, you can be the CTO. We're gonna build this SaaS thing. I don't know exactly what that means, but that's what we're gonna go and build.

[00:07:05] Jared: Correct. But the most important thing to him, I said was right. He had a family at the time, and this is a big risk. Joining a startup, I was like, Hey, we're making a lot of money already. I can afford to pay your salary. What do you want? I. I'm like, let's do this together. I'm gonna give you equity in the business.

[00:07:19] Jared: Let's try to sell this for, a crap ton of money one day. Let's do it. And he said, okay. So he, a few weeks later he came, flew flew to my house. We sat down at my dining room table. We built the very first. Official version of our, what we call our cloud wrapper, our main product, and we started pushing it out to the market.

[00:07:40] Omer: How did you figure out what to build? A, a lot of people are in this sort of position where they're running a services business and they want to get into SaaS. They're not really quite sure what to, what the product should do. Because maybe as a services business you're providing so much to clients and.

[00:07:59] Jared: Yeah, we were doing a lot of different things. Yeah, we were helping with analytics, we were helping them with like billing, we were helping them with monetization and optimizations. It was a very I was fortunate, but it was a very clear answer to me. Okay. I was basically acting, eye Aditude was acting as a middleman between all of these publishers and several other third tech or third party tech providers.

[00:08:27] Jared: That, that were doing what I now do, right? And I was basically getting paid to help these other companies fix their product, right? And to me, it was basically me saying, oh, this is like the exact same scenario I had with the two former employers I had. I'm doing all this work and I'm getting nothing for it, right?

[00:08:49] Jared: I'm helping them solve these issues on behalf of my clients. Why don't I just provide that service myself? And I went to one of our very first clients said, Hey, I'm gonna build this out. I'm not gonna charge you for it. Will you test it? And if you test it, I want you to move all of your tech to me.

[00:09:07] Jared: And it was wild 'cause this is actually before I hired my CTO. He gave me his engineer for free for six weeks. We built it together because it behooved him. If this worked, he was gonna save a lot of money, and we built out the very first version. It crushed, it did incredibly well and I was like, awesome.

[00:09:26] Jared: This is what my business is gonna do. I, at that point, I didn't change my business model, but now I was like, cool, this is what I'm gonna focus on. This is the piece of tech. A lot of other things have come from that over the last five years. I. In terms of other features and products that we built out, but it was, I was very fortunate that a lot of my clients were dealing with the exact same issue with the exact same vendor.

[00:09:49] Jared: I was like, cool, I'm just gonna replace that vendor and do it myself.

[00:09:52] Omer: Wait, so many founders tried to get, if they're bootstrapping, they try to get customers to if they can fund the development. So you went further and you actually got an engineer from a customer.

[00:10:06] Jared: Yeah, so he gave him to me for six weeks.

[00:10:09] Jared: And eventually, again, this was me as an individual employee, like one person company. Once it started to work, I said, Hey, I want you to go tell all of your friends that are also working with this other vendor that they should switch to me and I'm gonna pay your engineer. He's gonna work now for me and he'll now support you on your stuff, but you're gonna pay me for his work and I'm gonna figure all of this out right now.

[00:10:36] Jared: He's my employee, not yours anymore. Thinking about this now, honestly, I don't think about this as that, that often. It was a crazy situation and he said, sure. He said, sure. So I got very lucky.

[00:10:46] Omer: Are you gonna have a good relationship with a client to be able to have that type of conversation?

[00:10:51] Jared: Yeah. A lot of my early clients, I had already known from previous jobs for quite a while, 5, 6, 7 years. And some of those early clients, talk about like building a services business and building up a good relationship, I'm literally in their wills, right? So if anything happens to their business, it goes to me, which is wild, not their family and things like that, right?

[00:11:12] Jared: So these are people that trust me. At least at the time trusted me enough.

[00:11:16] Omer: Are you serious?

[00:11:17] Jared: Yeah. If something happens to me, please take care of my business and my family. Which is honestly an honor. A little bit crazy. But I remember I have one, I have the very first message of a client that asked me to do that saved on my computer.

[00:11:30] Jared: It starts like, Hey, this is a really weird question, but would you be willing? So yeah, we I built up. Very close relationships with these people. 'cause I was talking to 'em like 6, 7, 8 hours a day on hangouts and stuff like that. And a lot of them were very similar businesses.

[00:11:49] Jared: So you know what worked for one, I could multiply and apply to everyone else.

[00:11:54] Omer: Yeah. And not only that, you started going on vacation with all your clients, but we'll talk about that a bit in a minute. So you built this product this initial one. And I think you said you had about 30 clients at the time.

[00:12:09] Omer: How many of them agreed to switch to the SaaS and start paying for it?

[00:12:14] Jared: All of them. And this is the lesson that I learned there. For another six, seven months, I gave the tech away for free. I still did the hourly consulting model with all of them, right? And I got to the point where these businesses, like I was hosting their websites, I was running all of their ads.

[00:12:35] Jared: They got just smart they create a stick sticky business model, right? But like I was as sticky as you get. Like these companies cease to exist without me at that point. And I was like, cool, I'm switching my business mile now you're gonna pay a little bit more. But this is why you should wanna do that.

[00:12:49] Jared: We have real engineers now that I hired, you're no longer working with this guy that sometimes good creates good codes, sometimes breaks your website, right? We're gonna constantly innovate and we're gonna use that money to build new features for you that you've always wanted, right? And so pretty much all of them right away.

[00:13:07] Jared: Agreed and just switched over a handful said, Hey, I wanna, I want you to prove to me that you can make me more money to justify the increasing costs. So we did a handful of ab tests against ourself, right? Like my original free version of the code versus our new paid version of the code. And we had to prove that like the lift was more than the cost.

[00:13:28] Jared: But eventually we got there. So we released. And pivoted to a SaaS model. In November of 2020, by February of 21, everyone was converted and we were scaling up the business.

[00:13:42] Omer: So February 21, you convert, you, you give it away for free, which often founders struggle. With that because they're like, either the, obviously there's pressure to generate revenue, but, and then you always hear the thing about charge for the product, the conventional wisdom.

[00:14:04] Omer: But in many ways, if you're solving the problem with the product, they already trust you and you're not charging them for the tech it becomes a no brainer for them. Just start using it. Even if they know down the line. They're not stupid, right? They know down the line. At some point there'll be some kind of, they have to pay something for the software at some point.

[00:14:23] Jared: And I made that clear to them too, right? Hey, at some point I have no idea how I'm gonna charge you or what I'm gonna charge you, but at some point I'm gonna charge you for this, right? Because at some point I have to grow my business.

[00:14:33] Jared: I can't just keep growing everyone else's business and mine. It's, making no money. The other thing was like, I used the consultancy part of the business to fund the tech. SaaS business, right? It was making enough money from all this ancillary stuff that I was doing for websites and these publishers that it could easily fund hiring 3, 4, 5 engineers, right?

[00:14:57] Jared: It could easily fund, my own paycheck. Any investments in tech, AWS, whatever we needed to like, invest in, there's plenty of cash around to, to do that, which is why I was like very hesitant for a while to, to stop that part of the business. And even to this day, we're five, six years later, I guess six years later, the consultancy part of our business still exists.

[00:15:22] Jared: It's no longer, 99% of the revenue. It's a smaller part. There are still clients that from way back in the day, that still pay us hourly to do all of these things for them so they don't have to deal with it.

[00:15:33] Omer: How long did it take you to get to the first million in a RR once you did start charging

[00:15:38] Jared: From a SaaS revenue perspective?

[00:15:42] Jared: This is gonna sound a little bit ridiculous, maybe four months. We got. We were able to scale up our business to such a large size by giving it away for free. That when we pivoted, it was like almost instantaneous. Oh my God, look how much money we're making, right? And our first year of pivoting from hourly to mostly sas, a little bit of hourly, we literally doubled our revenue.

[00:16:08] Jared: And so it was a very quick ramp up. But again, like our consultancy, by the time we did this, it was a legitimate business, right? Like we had enough clients where like we were one of the larger companies in our space. Even though we didn't have any tech.

[00:16:25] Omer: Yeah. Yeah. And the reality is that you wouldn't have been able to do that if you hadn't run the consulting business for a couple of years and solved their problems and built the trusts and all of that stuff.

[00:16:37] Jared: And had the funding to to do this all.

[00:16:40] Omer: Yeah. Yeah. And you, as we, we talked about earlier, you raised money when you were at the 5 million. Point and you were telling me it was like that was probably when we least needed the money. Talk. Talk to me a little bit about some of the challenges you had bootstrapping.

[00:16:59] Omer: So it's great, you've got this consulting revenue and you're using it to, to fund the SaaS development, but what was the hard part of bootstrapping this business?

[00:17:09] Jared: I think there's two things. There's the personnel part of it and then there's the. Like the financial future decision making.

[00:17:19] Jared: Okay, so from a personnel perspective, when we were bootstrapping by, we bootstrapping, I was bootstrapping the business, right? I owned 98% of the company. My wife owned the other 2%, right? So every dollar that the company was spending meant a dollar out of my own pocket, a dollar less that we were taking home that year.

[00:17:36] Jared: As we kept scaling up the business, the amount of money I went from making a lot of money to making almost nothing, right? So every decision we had to make, Hey, we have to hire this another employee. We need to, hi, we need to pay for this piece of software for our developers. Hey, our AWS bill just went to $20,000 last month, whatever it may be, right?

[00:17:56] Jared: All of that was like, shit, this is money outta my own pocket, right? And I even as we became more and more profitable, I ran this business as if every penny I. Like I was a nick and diving, I checked every bank statement every single day to review what was going on, and I questioned everything. And so there was definitely a lot of say, heated debates is a polite way to put it between me and the other executives and some of our employees. I'm like, Hey, why? Like, why the heck do we even need to spend this money? Like enough? Let's stop. Let's stop spending money. I just wanna make money, right? And the second part of that is okay, we are profitable.

[00:18:36] Jared: Like, where are we trying to take this? Because again, at the time, if we said, all right, we're good at 5 million. We don't need to grow anymore. Let's just run the business as is. I'm sure my other employees will love to hear this now, but that meant me and the two other executives could make a lot of money every year.

[00:18:53] Jared: We had no one that we were beholden to. We could write ourselves nice bonuses and say, Hey, we have a really nice life. Let's do this for the next 10 years. And so that was always a hot debate between the three of us of should we keep doing that or should we shoot for the moon? Should we raise capital?

[00:19:12] Jared: Take a little bit less now and hope that one day we walk away with a lot of money. And so that was the biggest like stress point and, what's the word I'm looking for? That's what impacted my decision the most. When we raised our series A, we got the offer. I feel like in February of 23 and I didn't close until August and it had nothing to do with like due diligence or any of that kind of stuff.

[00:19:37] Jared: It was like I literally couldn't make up my mind that I wanted to do it.

[00:19:41] Omer: You didn't wanna let go of the equity?

[00:19:43] Jared: Yeah, I didn't wanna let go. I'm like, oh, like I'm literally giving up a lot of my ownership in this business. I had my wife chirping in my ear as well, saying oh my God. What if this doesn't work?

[00:19:53] Jared: We just gave this all up. Plus the business was paying for everything personally, right? That's what small businesses do. Everything's a business expense. And so it was a big decision and every June I. I always host a barbecue at my house. I invite a ton of employees over, they fly out from around the country.

[00:20:12] Jared: I invite friends who are clients over some of those friends that have written me into their wills, right? And we host this barbecue. I cook, I love to cook and we just hang out and have a good time. And at that barbecue in 2023, I just. I don't know if I had enough cocktails or whatever it was, but I sat down with the two other executives and I was like, guys, I think we're gonna do it.

[00:20:32] Jared: I'm gonna take the money. And they looked at me and they're like, let's go. Let's do it. And so once I finally made up my mind, then the due diligence in that whole process of raising capital started.

[00:20:43] Omer: You're generating 5 million a at the time. There's no real pressure for capital.

[00:20:50] Omer: Like you said, it was like that was, you didn't need the

[00:20:54] Jared: money at that point. No. I think we had six employees. So you can do the math of like how much we were taking home. Yep.

[00:21:01] Omer: So what was the driver that even got you? Reaching out to VCs?

[00:21:10] Jared: Yeah, it's a good question. In the back of my mind, I always had this question of Hey, how much am I worth?

[00:21:16] Jared: How much is this business worth? I'm curious a little bit of curiosity and a little bit of what else am I not doing that I should be doing? What do I not know as a first time entrepreneur that I really need to know? And so when I did raise capital, this is a little bit of a bold statement to say on all of these VC calls that I have, but to every single one of them, I said, I don't need your money.

[00:21:41] Jared: What else are you going to give me? And the company that we ended up raising capital with had the best answer to that question.

[00:21:48] Omer: Let's talk a little bit more about that because you, we were talking about this earlier and you said that when people ask you about raising money. One of your first questions is are you profitable? Just explain that a little bit because I completely agree with that.

[00:22:01] Jared: So I know there's I've had friends that like literally, Hey, I have an idea. I'm gonna raise a ton of money at a crazy valuation on this idea. I'm gonna give up a ton of my ownership and hopes that I can actually make a business out of this.

[00:22:13] Jared: And what happens to most of those, right? Like the traditional VC fund makes thousands of investments a year and 95% of 'em fail, right? You're gonna end up in that bucket. To me, it was always like, Hey, I want to get to a point where if I raise capital, me personally and my family we're financially set.

[00:22:31] Jared: If something bad happens, I don't care. My employees are financially set right at that point when we raise capital. I always said to my wife, Hey, I'm not supporting us, right? I'm supporting all of these other families and their children.

[00:22:42] Omer: No pressure.

[00:22:43] Jared: Yeah, no pressure at all, but a lot of pressure.

[00:22:45] Jared: I definitely felt it at the time, but I have a lot of friends and one of my best friends right now is starting a comp or started companies trying to raise capital and it's the very first question I ask is are you profitable? No. Then why are you raising capital, right?

[00:22:58] Jared: Like, why are you going to a VC firm? Why aren't you trying to take out a loan or a credit line or something to turn this business profitable? So when you do raise Capital One, you get the valuation you want. Two, you keep the like you don't dilute yourself to a point where like it's no longer worth it to you.

[00:23:17] Jared: And three. So you're in control of a negotiation if you are profitable and you own it and you don't need the money. You can make whatever demands you want. And they may not, they may say, no, you're crazy. That's fine. You don't need the money. When you are struggling and you leave that check, because if you don't get that, you're gonna have to lay off your entire team and the company ceases to exist.

[00:23:39] Jared: They're gonna beat you up on VA valuation. It's exactly like the show on Shark Tank, right? Oh, you're not profitable. Cool. Your valuation just fell 75%.

[00:23:47] Omer: Yeah. I always say the further you can get bootstrapping, the more revenue you can generate. The more profitable you can get, the more leverage you're gonna have.

[00:23:57] Omer: Whenever it comes time to raise money and you as a first time founder, you then decide you're gonna raise money. You send like these cold emails to VCs. Most people might get a reply or two. You ha How many of the, how many emails did you, how many VCs did you email and how many of them replied?

[00:24:24] Jared: Yeah, I only set maybe seven or eight out.

[00:24:26] Jared: And all of them replied pretty much within 24 hours. And again, this is as I talk to friends who are thinking about raising, now, I have a very specific strategy that I talk to 'em about, which is one, do your research on firms, whether they're VCs, growth, equity, angel investors, whoever it is that you're trying to go after.

[00:24:46] Jared: People who have invested, I. Companies that are related to your company right in your space and have made money off of that. They've invested in a company and it's been a flock right? In your space. They're not gonna wanna invest in you. They've been burned, right? So find a company that has made a a productive investment in your industry.

[00:25:03] Jared: And then to be really bold in your outreach, right? So my emails to everyone, I don't remember them exactly word for word, but it was like four or five sentences, something like, hi there, first time entrepreneur here. No idea what I'm doing. I've grown my business with no funding to $5 million in net revenue.

[00:25:22] Jared: Imagine what would happen if someone told me what I'm supposed to be doing.

[00:25:26] Omer: I love it.

[00:25:27] Jared: And yeah, and every single one responded was like, Hey, we wanna talk. And when they heard my story of how I pivoted and I use basically a consultancy business. With one line of revenue to, to fund building out an actual tech company.

[00:25:41] Jared: They're like, Hey, it's really smart. At the time I was like, I wasn't really thinking of it that way. I was like, yeah, I guess it is really smart. But it was a very bold email. I didn't send like a bland here's my pitch deck. I never sent any pitch decks. And frankly, when I presented to them, I maybe had one or two slides, but it was mostly just me talking extemporaneously to them about my thoughts on the space, introducing them to some of our clients as well, to talk on our behalf.

[00:26:04] Jared: Probably very different than the average like outreach that they these firms experience. The other thing that. I did as a small business is like I didn't go after the Sequoias and like these major companies, right? In the space that everyone wants to work with. They're cutting checks are hundreds of millions of dollars.

[00:26:21] Jared: They don't care about my little rinky dinky business. At the time I went after firms that were smaller, 30, 40 people in the company, right? They probably have a billion dollar total fund across their entire network, right? And they do make these smaller investments. So I was very. Particular of who I reached out to, I found the right person, the person that made that previous investment in those firms and emailed that person directly.

[00:26:47] Jared: And I was very like bold, but also like very blunt in my email. And it worked.

[00:26:55] Omer: Yeah. And again, I think it goes back to your point about. When you're looking to raise money, are you profitable? Because you could never write an email like that when you're like, I've just built this product and I have no revenue, or I have two customers, or something like that.

[00:27:10] Omer: It's a completely different type of conversation that, that you're having. Let's a, apart from converting the existing clients from the consulting business to SaaS, how else did you acquire customers and grow?

[00:27:26] Jared: Until, I think like literally mid 20, 24. So for five years we never had any marketing or any sales.

[00:27:36] Jared: It was just me and it was all like, I built it in a way where like it was the cool club, right? Like you only got to work with us if you knew someone that knew me. And so all of our business came through referrals. All of it. Whether it was an ad exchange that I became friends with that wanted to integrate with the publisher that couldn't do it, they would make the referral, or one of my existing clients would make the referral.

[00:27:58] Jared: And for many years I had a a policy, I don't know, like a plan with my clients at Base said for every publisher that you get, that you introduce me to, that converts, you get three hours free. That was it. It was three hours free. And we had a few clients that just went nuts and they were like, I'm gonna introduce you to everyone I know so I don't have to pay for the next six months.

[00:28:21] Jared: And I was like, awesome. I could care less. Let's do it. And so I basically built this massive network of people selling Aditude and I never had to do any sales. So like deals were just I'm lucky, but they were just like literally falling onto my plate. And I was in a position where I could say, Hey, this deal doesn't make sense.

[00:28:37] Jared: Sorry, I don't think we should work together. Absolutely, this is what I'm gonna do for you and let's get going. The other thing that I didn't mention this to you before, but I, that I think is interesting is historically speaking, we no longer do this, but as I was building the business and I needed to fund it, everything was paid in advance.

[00:28:56] Jared: You always paid one month ahead of time. I was never sending invoices for March in April. On March 1st, I sent you the invoice for the entire month of March, guessing what you owed me. Any difference, positive or negative was credited or applied to the next I. Invoice. And that way I never had aging receipts and things like that, right?

[00:29:19] Jared: Like I literally never had a balance sheet where people owed me money. I was always ahead on everything.

[00:29:24] Omer: Did you ever get any pushback from that? Because when you started dealing with some companies and more bureaucracy, they're like, oh, we have this policy on how we pay in accounts. Hey, OBO does this and so on.

[00:29:34] Jared: Some of the larger publishers, and I'm talking about companies that you, every one of your listeners has probably interacted with versus some of these smaller shops. They definitely pushed back on me on that, and I basically said, if you wanna work with me, that's the deal. I'm not willing to negotiate.

[00:29:51] Jared: And I won. In most cases they're like, fine, I guess we have no choice, right? I was a little bit stubborn, but I was like, I'm literally not willing to negotiate with you on any of my terms. This is it. I have this contract signed with all my other clients. You got no choice. You gotta sign it.

[00:30:06] Omer: Why do you think you were able to do that?

[00:30:08] Omer: So obviously you're you're solving an important problem and you have a track record, you got these clients and so on. But was there like a, did you have much competition? Was there like other places they could go to?

[00:30:23] Jared: Yeah, and it still is, frankly, there still is, this is a pretty like online advertising.

[00:30:27] Jared: It's a. All quasi trillion dollar industry, right? There's a ton of companies in this space, including the behemoths like Google and Amazon, right? So why was I able to do it? And I think it was because how those people found, like those potential clients found me. It wasn't me reaching out to them and pitching them my services.

[00:30:44] Jared: It was someone that they knew that was already working with me saying, you have to use Jared, right? This was like Jared, not Aditude at the time. You have to use Jared. He's made me so much money, trust me. And that goes one of your friends telling you that versus a salesman telling you that it just goes way further.

[00:31:02] Jared: And so like the day I met a potential new client, I already had that trust built up with them, right? And that confidence

[00:31:10] Omer: that, let's talk about events. 'cause one of the things that you do. Is invest in events to, to build the business, grow the business. But when you start telling me about what that meant for you, I was like, what?

[00:31:25] Jared: Okay, this is where I've, yeah. I've done a really good job of integrating my personal. Passions and interests into Aditude and getting my employees to love what I love, getting my clients to love what I love, right? Early on we would sponsor events, major events by different ad exchanges and publications that like focus on throwing events for our industry, right?

[00:31:51] Jared: I would get up on stage. I'm person seven of 25, I'd do my five minute spiel. They would ask me questions that weren't even pertinent to me. I would get frustrated. I'd be like, Hey, this is a waste of money. And a little bit on a whim. Okay. I was actually flying to an event in early 2023. And on that plane, like 25 people were going to the same event, right?

[00:32:13] Jared: And I started talking to him. I'm like, Hey guys, would you wanna go to Disney with me this summer? I. And they're like, what do you mean? I'm like, yeah, I think Aditude is going to host a golf tournament. I love golf. I love Disney World. I'm obsessed with Disney World. If everyone that knows me knows I'm obsessed, and they're like, yeah, that sounds cool, right?

[00:32:34] Jared: So I started text Chain and this was in Feb March of 23. About two weeks later I had 15 people signed up. I'm like, awesome. I call up Disney. I reserve a ton of hotel rooms. I rent out some golf courses. And I set all of this up. I set up dinners, steak dinners and everything else. Me, like two employees and the rest clients, right?

[00:32:56] Jared: And we come back from it and we're sending, we're posting pictures on LinkedIn and all of this kind of stuff. And the feedback that we got on social was like, why wasn't I invited? I wanted. And tons of people who I've never even met or heard of in our industry are like, I wanna be part of this.

[00:33:10] Jared: I want, what is this? And so I was like my barbecues are always successful. This was successful. Maybe we should actually just double down and throw a ton of events, right? And so now 2024, we did what we call the Aditude Open five days, 40 something people, mostly clients. Two or three sponsors at Disney World.

[00:33:33] Jared: Four rented out restaurants for dinner, two or three rounds of golf a day in the parks, and I lead the whole thing. People follow me around, but I'm obviously obsessed with Disney, so I know exactly where to go at what time and stuff like that. And so many people reached out that they wanna sponsor it.

[00:33:50] Jared: And I was like, wait a second. We did this for a fraction of the cost of going to one event. One of our, one of these other companies throws, and we literally got these people in our room for four days in a hotel with us. Like we literally spent every waking minute with these people. Four, we're gonna, we're gonna double down again.

[00:34:08] Jared: So 2025 this year we went nuts. 50 something people. Really nice hotel. Tons of, like this shirt that I'm wearing, tons of swag given out and everything. Most of the people that came, we don't work with yet. Major publishers. And these are the decision makers at these companies, right?

[00:34:25] Jared: These are VPs and C-level people at these companies. And we took them to Animal Kingdom, then to Epcot and to two rounds of golf and to four dinners and boat cruises and all this kind of stuff. And we organized and threw it all ourselves. It became big enough that I actually became a travel agent on the side just to throw these events for us.

[00:34:43] Jared: I got my like cruise line agency number and all of that kind of stuff.

[00:34:47] Omer: Wow. So it's funny because like you go on, like the idea of going on a vacation with, I. Somebody like a vendor is it's almost like a timeshare thing. You're like, do I really wanna be stuck with them for a whole day where they're gonna keep pitching me on the timeshare?

[00:35:02] Omer: You better

[00:35:03] Jared: hope you like them.

[00:35:04] Omer: Yeah. Yeah. And so why do you think like people who weren't even customers were coming? Was it because. They when you did take customers and then you're going on social and sharing this stuff and they're seeing, wait a minute, like this person from that company spent all of this time with you, plus it's fun 'cause you're going to Disney World or whatever.

[00:35:23] Omer: Do you think it was like that sort of social proof?

[00:35:25] Jared: Yeah, I think they felt like, Hey, these this is, this looks fun, this looks cool. Why wasn't I invited? What's this exclusive party that everyone gets to go to? And so that. Certainly worked but also like people like a little bit of a break from reality, right?

[00:35:42] Jared: This is why I love Disney World specifically. Like it's literally its own world outside of the United States. It's like you, you're there, you suspend, suspend disbelief. Everything is possible at Disney. And so blew it out like a. A lot of adults really wanna go there without their kids.

[00:35:57] Jared: And this is also, by the way, this is how I signed our very largest client. Without even meeting him, I invited him and his wife to meet me at Disney World with my wife and go on a four day vacation together. Thank God we liked each other. We got along. He's now one of my best friends.

[00:36:11] Jared: And we hang out all the time. But it works. I do this kind of stuff all the time. If someone is worth, a giant chunk of money in your pocket, you better make sure that they feel, loved and heard and respected. And what better way than taking them on vacation

[00:36:26] Omer: And the silver lining is even if you didn't like them, hey, you're in Disney World, right?

[00:36:30] Omer: Yeah.

[00:36:30] Jared: Yeah. What do we care? We're still at our favorite place on Earth, so it's fine. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:36:34] Omer: Love it. I want, let's talk about the transition. So you raised your series A, you are. You're now having investors, stakeholders, there's more conversations about how to scale the company, your role, how that needs to evolve and so on.

[00:36:55] Omer: And at that point, you were still in the weeds.

[00:36:57] Jared: And to some extent I still am, but

[00:37:00] Omer: yeah. Yeah. And many founders, when this is a baby it's like hard to let go. And I think like with your case it was maybe an extreme example of that.

[00:37:11] Jared: Yeah. So when I raised capital I was doing the following.

[00:37:20] Jared: I was doing all invoicing. I was doing payroll. I was making sure that we were established in each state for tax reasons, right? I was paying our taxes, I was doing most of the code releases. I was dealing with all sales, all contracts all like a lot of the business, right? I. I, I wanna say 99%, but maybe 75% of the workload fell on me.

[00:37:45] Jared: And then my CTO is probably taking 20 of the percent, the remaining percent, and then 5% of across everyone else, right? And giving up like that responsibility. The reason it was so scary to me. And it's probably scary for any founders. Like you don't want someone to make a mistake that costs you money, right?

[00:38:04] Jared: You're doing a good job. It's what's making your business money. So God forbid you, you relinquish certain roles or responsibilities as someone else on their team. And like you, you relinquish invoicing, right? And they send the wrong invoices or the wrong amounts and you don't make as much money as you should have, okay. That's literally dollars out of your pocket, right? And so it, it took a very long time for me to work on that. I literally paid a management trainer for almost a year. I met every single week, and I would walk through with her. Different scenarios that were literally happening in my, my quote unquote office in my remote environment in my business with each member of my team.

[00:38:47] Jared: And she's even though she never met anyone else on the team, knew who everyone was, right? Like, how should I handle this? What should I do here? This person's not meeting my expectations. How? What do I do? And that was super helpful. But. There's been like a recurring story in my life, my work life, which is, some crazy external force happens and I have to make a major decision, right?

[00:39:12] Jared: And this is how I started relinquishing some there early on in my career, my boss, who actually now works at Aditude, went away on vacation and everything blew up. So I had to learn how to code and I had to figure out how to make us money, right? And that's how my career really.

[00:39:25] Jared: It took off in 24. I said, Lou, just a little over a year ago, I went on vacation. My wife was like, you're not working. I wanna actually enjoy this vacation. You're not going online. And so I met with my team a week before and I said, this is what you're gonna do. At the end of every day, just send me an email with the updates.

[00:39:48] Jared: Let me know what's going on just so I don't feel too far outta the loop. But you're not gonna hear from me. I came back the next week, business had grown, revenue is up, and I was like, I guess I can rely on these people, right? And that's when the floodgates. Opened, I started relinquishing a ton of, or offloading a ton of my responsibilities, especially on the business side, like the day-to-day operations side to other members of my team.

[00:40:15] Jared: Some of the stuff like invoicing, I still do because I'm a little crazy about that. But it's definitely gotten to the point where if I don't work today, we're fine. Unless there's an emergency, we're fine. It's a good place to be. It's a scary place to get to as a, like a founder led business.

[00:40:32] Jared: But the only way to do it is to just rip the bandaid off and go for it and hope that it works out. If it doesn't, okay, you come back and you fix things and you move on.

[00:40:41] Omer: But for people to really understand like how hard it was to make that transition. Like at one point you hired a couple of people who you were gonna start handing over to and what did they do for the first three months?

[00:40:55] Jared: Not much of anything because I was like, too afraid to give them any real responsibility. So I had two people on the business side to support me senior people, and they were probably working one hour a day. On like menial tasks that I was handing off to them. And that's when the investors came in and said what the heck are you doing, Jared?

[00:41:17] Jared: You got it. You gotta offload some. This is ridiculous. You're doing some of this stuff. You're the CEO of the company. Get someone else to do it. I'm like, oh, I can't. Eventually I did. A few months later they started ramping up really quickly, and now honestly their days are outta control and way too busy.

[00:41:34] Jared: And now they have to hire people to offload some of that work too.

[00:41:37] Omer: That's funny. All right. We should wrap up. So let's do the lightning round. I'm just gonna ask you seven quick fire questions. Okay. What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received?

[00:41:50] Jared: My mother, when I was applying for my first job, said always be a revenue driver, not a cost driver.

[00:41:54] Jared: I was debating whether I should go into the marketing department of a company or the revenue department of the company, and she said, I don't even know what this is. Go in the revenue department, trust me. And it was a very smart move.

[00:42:05] Omer: Love it. What book would you recommend to our audience and why?

[00:42:08] Jared: I don't really have a lot of time to read books.

[00:42:10] Jared: I'm so busy. Most of the books that I read are like crazy sci-fi stuff to relieve my mind of what's actually going on in the day to day. So I probably don't have the best answer for that one.

[00:42:21] Omer: Alright. Let's, what's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?

[00:42:26] Jared: Someone that tr that, that spends the time understanding each aspect.

[00:42:30] Jared: Of the business, right? Like it drives me nuts when I talk to other founders or executives at a company and they literally don't understand what their business does. If you ask me how a certain piece of code works that I've never seen before, I can go in and figure it out, right? If you ask me about how this other business that we acquired, how every little aspect of their finances is run, I know everything.

[00:42:50] Jared: And it's that where regardless of what the issue is, I can always chip in.

[00:42:55] Omer: What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?

[00:42:58] Jared: I have a very, I. Specific routine. I wake up at like pretty much the exact same time every day, make my bed, take the shower. I go on my walk with my dog into town, get the exact same cup of coffee from the exact same place, like my day, pretty much every day.

[00:43:14] Jared: For the last five years, it's been almost exactly the same. I have very few. I don't have much of a variety of clothing. I don't wanna spend time like thinking about what should I wear today, what should I do today? I wanna do the exact same thing. It might sound a little bit boring, but like same way like we're raising our child.

[00:43:31] Jared: She has the exact same routine. Routine every day and it helps her not be cranky and stuff like that. It helps as an adult as well.

[00:43:38] Omer: Yeah. Yeah. 'cause we can get cranky too as well. What's a new or crazy business are you'd love to pursue if you had the time.

[00:43:46] Jared: Yeah, so everyone is obsessed with, or it's, maybe it's a little calming down now, but the idea of ai, right?

[00:43:53] Jared: And okay, AI this, AI that. What I wanna do is try to figure out how we can use whether it's like chat GPT or one of these other tools and some machine learning to basically automate the actual innovation part of our business. We're spending so much, everyone's thinking about how you automate the day-to-day part of your business, but that's what makes us successful.

[00:44:13] Jared: And the second you start automating that or handing off a service as part of a business to a bot, like that's where things are gonna fall apart. But we have all of these ideas of things that we wanna test within our products from a development perspective that we don't have the resources to do without us going out and hiring like 50 more engineers.

[00:44:31] Jared: But that's where AI can really help us is like figuring out how to leverage that to build a new tech for us. Then our people can service.

[00:44:38] Omer: What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?

[00:44:41] Jared: Yeah. I dunno if it's fun, but I am a very motivated type A person with a very specific timeline.

[00:44:50] Jared: And there's a very specific reason why, and I share this with my employees. I don't share this often, but when I was young 23, 24 years old, I got diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, which is a a disease that. I'm lucky and fortunate enough I have it under control, but it can debilitate you and it can make you immobile.

[00:45:09] Jared: And when I got that diagnosis, I was in a position where I don't know how many years I'm going to have to be a productive worker and to support my family, right? And so like I'm going to take advantage of every minute that I have or I can, to work my butt off to make sure that my family's, taken care of.

[00:45:27] Jared: So I write a letter every year to all of my staff saying this is why I'm pushing you so hard. This is what I'm personally trying to achieve for myself and for my family, and for you guys. And I've I have a very specific motivation.

[00:45:40] Omer: Wow. Wow. I love that. Because and in, in many ways, it's like when you're pushing people and they know that there's this real.

[00:45:48] Omer: Personal thing behind you. It is okay, it's not just 'cause he's a pain in the ass and wants us to work. It's

[00:45:53] Jared: yeah. And honestly, maybe I use it to my vantage a little bit, but Hey guys, if I am Ms and I can do it. You could definitely do it.

[00:46:01] Omer: And finally I think we know the answer to this, but finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?

[00:46:06] Jared: Yeah, so definitely my, my, my wife and I love to travel. We go to Disney a lot, but we travel every year. We try to go to one place internationally. We spend a few weeks in Italy, a few summers ago. That was amazing. Disney World is, I'm obsessed. Go five to 10 times a year.

[00:46:24] Omer: Five to 10 times a year of course you do. ‘Cause you're taking away your cu Yeah. Yeah.

[00:46:27] Jared: We're taking our customers and golf. I'm obsessed with golf. I'm not nearly as good as I used to be. I played a little bit in college, but I find it very relaxing to, again, it's an escape from reality to walk the course for four and a half, five hours and not really think about the world around me and just be like, in nature.

[00:46:46] Jared: It's very nice.

[00:46:48] Omer: Love it. Awesome. Thanks man. It's been a pleasure. I really enjoyed the conversation. It was fun. If people want to learn more about Aditude, they can go to Aditude.com. That's not Aditude, but ad D Aditude. And if folks wanna get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

[00:47:05] Jared: It's just jared@Aditude.com.

[00:47:08] Omer: Awesome. Thanks. It's it's been a pleasure and I wish you and the team the best of success.

[00:47:13] Jared: Yeah, thanks for having me. It was awesome.

[00:47:15] Omer: My pleasure. All the best. Cheers.