Aug. 28, 2023

Marty Krátký-Katz, Founder of Blockthrough (Bootstrapped to ~$100M exit) | How Never Giving Up Leads to Product Market Fit

Marty (CEO of Blockthrough) is the definition of a “Founder Cockroach”—he can’t be killed. In this episode, he shares how after 12 years and 2 failed start-ups, he sold his company for nearly $100M.

I've known Marty since my very first startup days. In 2013, we started our startups at the same time. I watched him take punches to the face for years. I watched him eat ramen noodles for way too long. And I watched him build an epic company and sell it.

99.9% of founders won't be the next Steve Jobs. But 100% of founders can be the next Marty.

Send me a message to let me know what you think!

03:20 - Blockthrough's Backstory

06:44 - Breaking Into The Ad Tech World

10:13 - Dive In Headfirst

14:39 - Initial Challenges

18:29 - Pay As You Go Financing

22:07 - What Kept Marty from Giving Up

24:51 - The Turnaround

28:30 - A Unique Insight

30:54 - True Product Market Fit

32:11 - Recap

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Pablo (00:00): Marty, the CEO of Blockthrough, he's a really good friend of mine. I've known him since my very first startup days. In 2013, we started a couple of startups at the same time. If you want to understand perseverance, you want to understand resilience, look no further. I mean, this guy , I think of Marty as effectively, the founder cockroach. I mean, he cannot be killed. Believe it or not, in 2012 he started his first startup which failed. A year later he started his second startup with a cofounder. Then two years into that him and his cofounder, they start to have different visions and aren't really seeing eye to eye and they just can't get aligned. So Marty decides to actually leave his own startup. He doesn't give up though, he basically goes and right away starts another one He finds somebody else working on something in ad tech. He joins forces with him. He puts out product after product that doesn't really work. Finally, we're talking now eight years into his startup career – finally, he puts out a product that takes off like no other. He had to take a lot of punches to the face along the way. He had to eat ramen noodles for way too long. Honestly, that's what it sometimes takes. Welcome to the product Market Fit Show, brought to you by Mistral, a seed stage firm based in Canada. I'm Pablo. I'm a founder turned VC. My goal is to help early-stage founders, like you, find product market fit. Marty, it's a pleasure to have you here.

00:01:34.200 --> 00:01:34.799
Pleasure to be here.

00:01:35.700 --> 00:03:10.500
I've known Marty, actually, for a long time. We started off in Invest Ottawa in 2012, 2013. He was running a different business called Micrometrics. I was running Gymtrack. We stayed in touch ever since. After Micrometrics, Marty went off and played around with a few different ideas until he met someone who became his co-founder and went all in on Blockthrough. I ended up, actually, making a small investment in his company. I'm really happy. It was my one of one angel investments, which I made before joining Mistral. . Yeah, exactly, 100% success rate. I'm an incredible angel investor. I've had the pleasure in this case of really seeing the story more closely than a bunch of the other episodes we do on this show. I'm quite excited. Today, we're going to talk about a topic we've never really had before. It's quite different. The episode is going to be called, How to Not Give Up. Honestly, Marty's an amazing founder. He's got a bunch of different things going for him. I always thought one of the – one of the most insane things that Marty's got is he will not quit. This guy will go through walls. I think I really want to bring this out in this episode because it's obviously – relentlessness is a known, important feature for founders. It’s not an easy one. It's not an easy one to get. It's not an easy one to keep hold of. Frankly, it's not even easy to know up to what point, right? Some things really don't work. With all that being said, maybe, Marty, we can start in just that context, when you are – what state you're in, what's going on when you get introduced to your co-founder. Then we'll jump in.

00:03:20.439 --> 00:06:09.459
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You gave the background of my time with Micrometrics. Micrometrics was my second business. I'd started a company prior to that, which really is just a footnote. Worked on that for about a year. That was my first company after working a couple sales jobs straight out of school. First company was not a success. Basically, shut down after about a year, ran out of cash. Went into Micrometrics in 2013; 2015, we were going through a big pivot. Had early signs of product market fit with our first product, Micrometrics. Then it was clear that that there were some elements that we hadn't figured out. Without going into exhaustive detail, we were in 2015 going through that big pivot. The business was really focused on customer experience solutions for brick-and-mortar businesses, initially retail. The pivot we were going through was into the hotel space. I'd made the decision in 2015 that frankly I didn't find brick and mortar businesses that interesting. Had the opportunity to sell off my shares to my co-founders. Basically, in the summer of 20 – early or late spring of summer 2015, I became a free agent. Didn't really have a big win under my belt. Going into the summer was exploring a bunch of different ideas. Ended up meeting a brilliant engineer by the name of Chris Piper. Piper and I started kicking a few ideas back and forth. He actually had one, the kernel of an idea that he'd been working on, which was based in the – in a niche of the online advertising space. He thought he'd figured out a way to deliver ads through ad blockers in a way that could not be blocked. We both found that problem space very interesting for a couple of reasons. One is that we were both previous founders. We were both past business owners, and we can naturally understand that the open web is not – it's not free to operate. Publishers on the internet that make money off ads, they have to pay server fees, they have to pay writers, they have to create content. This was pretty ChatGPT, so there was a pretty non-trivial cost to doing that. In order to fund their businesses, they oftentimes need to run advertising. In most cases, that's how they make most of their money. If publishers aren't able to deliver ads to users, which ad blockers were preventing, then they just couldn't make money. That problem we could relate to, but at the same time, we were both Adblock users. We could also relate to the user side of it, which is that the vast majority of us Adblock users are not militant ad haters. We just are really annoyed by a handful of obnoxious experiences like pre-roll ads on YouTube. We're savvy enough to install a browser extension or a mobile browser to protect ourselves from those worst to the worst experiences. That's really how Blockthrough came to be.

00:06:17.338 --> 00:06:38.980
You're not from the ad tech world. You weren't, at least before this company. That's a crazy space. It's not a simple one. It's not one that outsiders get. I don't get it, to be honest. What were your first steps to figure out whether this was – just even how come this isn't solved, right? What do you start doing at that point once that kernel comes up?

00:06:44.689 --> 00:08:11.300
Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting dynamic because ad tech is a really complicated space. Once you start peeling back the onion, you realize that there's this old boys club of ad tech people that know the space and just keep starting businesses and churning them out. It can be difficult to break into the space because of how network-based it is and how complicated the space is. Certainly, that was a little – my first reaction was fucking ad tech, I can learn that. It ended up being more daunting than I originally thought. Maybe that naivety was in my favor. Yeah, it really took me a good two years before I really understood how all the parts were connected. It was certainly challenging. I think that on the one hand that was our advantage. We didn't see why the problem couldn't be solved. There was a lot of companies that got into the ad blocking, solving for ad blocking space. What's funny is the people who are most skeptical about the space were ad tech people. I would talk to them, and they would say, well, Adblock users don't want to see ads. That's why they're blocking them. That sounded intuitive to them, but to us as Adblock users and past business owners, we understood a nuance that was non-obvious to people in the space. Honestly, I think it was to our advantage that we didn't come from the space. I think one of the things we did really well is we surrounded ourselves by people, advisors mostly, who really did understand the space and whom we could learn from. I don't know if that answers your question. I got –

00:08:21.779 --> 00:08:27.660
It does. I mean, what's step one, right? Do you go out and have these discussions, did you already – do you jump in and say all right, let's build it.

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I jumped in and said, let's build it. I mean, so to go back to what you're asking, how did we know the problem wasn't solved? We did our research. We did some Google searches on who is working in ad blocking. We realized that actually, there were only three or four companies that had raised money, or a meaningful amount of money. These companies, we could actually look on publisher’s websites to see with our ad blockers – to see were they doing anything? Some of them were throwing a popup that said, please turn off your ad blocker, which frankly speaking as an Adblock user is a worse experience than showing me ads. We didn't feel that was really solving the problem. There was data suggesting that people – that those types of solutions didn't work. Users would bounce more often than they would actually respond to that. A lot of sites we went to might have been trying to circumvent ad blockers but weren't doing it well. Then honestly, the vast majority just weren't doing anything. For us, because it was a – even though it was B2B, it was consumer facing, we’d actually just go and check what do publishers do about this? Go through the top 100 publishers in the US and see this problem is not solved. I think once we got to that point, we looked at the market. We're like, well, these two other companies have more experience than us, and they've raised more money than us. I think we looked at it and said, well, if we're number three in a billion-dollar market, then we're – maybe that's a good outcome. Ironically, we ended up buying one of them, so acquiring one of those companies. Then the other one pivoted so many times that they don't do ad blocking anymore. We actually ended up being the winner in the space. It's funny how that played out. That's how we approached it initially and how we got into it.

00:10:07.960 --> 00:10:12.460
That's the research part. Do you start building something or do you start calling up publishers as step two?

00:10:13.139 --> 00:10:53.620
I mean, the answer's both. I'm a dive in headfirst guy, and Piper is the same way. He'd already started building before he even met me. He'd encountered the problem on his own, and he had a prototype. He was just looking for a non-technical co-founder to drive this forward. Basically, once we said, okay, let's do this, I just started emailing C-levels at ad tech companies. Probably had a bunch of conversations where I sounded like an idiot. As you know, I'm not afraid to do that. Yeah, I think my very first meeting was with the CEO of a company called OpenX, which at the time was the third or fourth biggest ad tech company in the US, or on the supply side at least, servicing publishers. I just was reaching out to random C-levels at ad tech companies, at publishers, and just trying to figure out – trying to figure out how the pieces connect.

00:11:07.340 --> 00:11:13.058
Yeah, that's my question. Was your goal to – you were going into these calls to try and sell, or were you going in to try and learn?

00:11:12.840 --> 00:11:13.058
Yes.

00:11:12.840 --> 00:11:13.058
Got it.

00:11:16.808 --> 00:11:54.259
Objective number one was learn. As a founder, I think most of us who have been in founders who sell roles, we learn that discovery conversations can turn into sales conversations very easily if you're not a douche bag and you're fun to talk to. If you tell them about a solution that you're working on, and they're like, oh, actually that sounds interesting. Then they will buy from you. I would just try to approach it from a hey, I'm a first-time ad tech founder just trying to learn about the space. We're working on a solution in this space. Just curious, is that something that makes sense to you? Some of those conversations turned into buying interest. They didn't turn into paying customers for years, as you know, and as I'm sure we'll find out more later in this episode.

00:12:08.419 --> 00:12:14.779
What was the feedback though, from one to 10, “Oh my God, you need to build this,” to “This is stupid. Go back to the drawing board”?

00:12:15.919 --> 00:12:35.220
Nobody said it was stupid, but a lot of people were skeptical, especially among the ad tech. I think publishers were more receptive, so our actual customer set. For context of people watching, our product is actually something that a publisher would deploy on their website. We were talking to ad tech companies to better understand how the pipes connect, and could we partner with them to use them as distribution channels?

00:12:39.519 --> 00:12:42.220
A publisher, to be clear, is like CNN, right, something like that.

00:12:42.730 --> 00:13:51.899
Exactly, yeah, so any website that makes money off ads as a publisher. CNN is a publisher, but also you can consider Kijiji or eBay a customer – a publisher because they also serve ads in addition to doing e-commerce. Yeah, when I say publisher that's what I mean. Ad tech people were more skeptical. I mean, they didn't seem to understand this nuance of Adblock users don't all hate ads. A lot of them were just like, oh, well, I don't want my advertisers or ad buying platforms that we work with. They don't want these users. I don't want to help you here. This is stupid. Publishers, and this is what kept us going is when we talked to publishers, yes, we'd run into one or two who didn't grasp that nuance but being able to explain it from the perspective of hey, I'm not an ad tech guy. I'm actually an Adblock user who has owned a business before. This is the solution that I would want as a user, and it is going to make you more money. We are only going to bill you a percentage of the money we make you. For you, it's free money. To publishers, that always made intuitive sense. I think that was – even though it took us a while to figure out how to connect the pipes, and again, we'll get to that, it was always clear that publisher – if we could build it, publishers will want it. It was a no-brainer from a publisher's perspective.

00:13:52.480 --> 00:14:35.379
Let's get into that. What you're landing on is almost this, what I'm calling, a bit of an obvious problem. What I mean by that is – I think back to Gymtrack. Every few months, somebody will message me and say, hey, I'm building this system to track workouts. What I gather from that is it's an – people probably want that if only you could build it, and so far, no one has been able to. I think in a sense you've landed on that in the ad tech world where from a publisher perspective it’s like, yeah, sure, I'd love to make money off Adblock users, . A huge percentage of my base I can't monetize, of course I want to monetize them. It really becomes about can you actually deliver that? What's your first approach? Most people listening here aren't from the ad tech world. Try and keep it as high level as you can but give us a sense of maybe what that first approach was like.

00:14:39.570 --> 00:17:43.329
I'll do my best. I think you put it really well, which is it's an obvious problem with a very non-obvious solution. Our initial approach, which I think I hinted at earlier, is that Piper had figured out a way to bypass or circumvent ad blockers in a way that would be extremely difficult to block, or in some cases, next to impossible. Basically, it was technology that could defeat the ad blockers. There were a few challenges with this and again trying to keep it high level here. Challenge number one is to really make it unblockable you needed the publisher to basically give you total access to their domain. Long story short, that's giving somebody the keys to the castle. Nobody was going to – CNN was never going to give that to a two-man startup out of Canada. There was a trust – to truly make it unblockable, there was this trust problem. Secondly, there was the question of well, where are we going to get the ads? Even people who aren't ad tech people are aware that there's this notion of programmatic advertising, ads that are bought and sold in real time, algorithmically. I'm not going to get under the hood there, but that would be the best place to get the ads from. There's also direct sold advertising, so publishers will sell ads directly. Then there's affiliate ads. There's a few different places we could do it from. Each of these ways of doing it leverages different technologies to be delivered, ad servers, ad networks, ad exchanges. There was a question of well, how are we going to do this in a way that's really scalable but makes the publishers a lot of money? Between 2015 and when we started the company in 2017, we probably tried three or four different ways of doing it, one with affiliate ads, another with these direct sold ads, another with programmatic advertising. There was always a technology compatibility issue. What I mean by that is that ad blockers don't just block the ads, they also block all the secondary technologies that make the ads valuable to buyers. That could be cookies for targeting. It could be attribution technology, technologies that measure whether the ad was seen, or whether it was clicked. That could be technologies that actually detect whether it was seen by a real human as opposed to a bot. It's one thing to get the – what we would consider to be visually the ad to bypass the ad blocker. It's a totally different set of technical problems for each of those secondary technologies. If you can't restore all of them in real time at all times, then either the ads will not be worth anything, they'll be worth pennies on the dollar versus the publisher's regular ads, or other non-ad block environment, or they might be detected as fraud. This happened a lot to a lot of companies who did ad block circumvention. Google would flag them for fraud. Then all the money would get clawed back. The publisher would get slapped on the wrist by Google. That is potentially – if it's more than a risk slap, it could be devastating to their business. There was actually a whole generation of ad block circumvention solutions like ours that started in that 2015 to 2018 period and either flamed out, failed, sold for pennies on the dollar, or ended up pivoting away.

00:17:54.279 --> 00:18:25.829
I mean, that's what I want to dive on because that's the interesting piece. You made it on the other side. You gave enough at bats to finally find something that worked. There's two years, right, 2017, 2015 to 2017, you're trying out a bunch of different solutions. None of them are really working. It's so frustrating, especially from a – you're like me. I mean, you're not a technical founder, right? You're more of a sales BD type. You're looking at this like, oh my God, can you just build the thing and then let’s sell it, right? How do you get through that? First of all, were you funded? I mean, how are you keeping the lights on, basically?

00:18:29.029 --> 00:19:06.630
That’s a great question. The answer is not really. What I would describe is our funding at the time, it was pay as you go financing. We would get an angel check one month that would buy us two more months. Then early on we got a government grant or two. That bought us another three months. We borrowed against our future trade credits. That bought us another three or four months. It was really between 2015 and late 2018, which is when we raised our first discreet round. There was this friends and family, slash angel, slash small VC writing 100K check financing. We probably, in that time span, raised maybe 600 grand over those two and a half years leading up to that 1.2 million round in September of 2018. Basically, we stretched out 600 grand or 700 grand in total over those.

00:19:19.690 --> 00:19:24.910
You're making a junior sales salary, out of school salary, keep the lights on.

00:19:26.390 --> 00:19:27.309
In in the best of times. There was a lot of moments where I deferred salary. There were a lot of moments where we had to pull 25 grand out of our ass to make payroll. We never missed payroll once during that time span; 2017 when we made our magical pivot, which we'll get to in a second, we were six people. We had some mouths to feed, but it was always like we –

00:19:32.200 --> 00:19:51.390
Did you or did you not use your credit card?

00:19:51.740 --> 00:20:13.230
Many, many times. The good news is that I built up a lot of points. I think I ended up getting a free flight to Australia to see my sister at some point. It was a lot of taking on credit card debt and a lot of shit like that. I had at one point in Angel. I was pitching them. I was telling him our story. This was as the pivot was starting to work again. We'll get to what that was. He was like, “Marty, you're a cockroach.” I was like, “what, what do you mean?” He is like, “Oh, you don’t – “

00:20:17.910 --> 00:20:19.589
That's my word. That's what I've been saying 100%.

00:20:20.509 --> 00:21:26.819
He's like, “You can't be killed. You just, you keep going.” I think that I've always viewed it from the perspective of the longer you stay alive and keep pushing, the higher the probability that you achieve the success that you're after. It's true that if it's a lost cause, yeah, you should cut bait and move on to something else. I think in our case, we talked about, the problem was obvious. Over time, we were still checking publisher sites. When I was selling to a publisher, I'd go on their site. I'd see they're not using anything, or I'd see they're using a competitor. I'd ask them, “How's it going?” They're like, “Oh, it sucks. We got flagged for fraud. We're shutting them down.” I knew from my conversations in market from looking at what publishers were using, the problem remained unsolved. Twenty-eight, to go back to 2017, what in that time span between 2015 when we started the company and 2018 when we found product market fit, we never had more than four months of cash in the bank. Twenty seventeen, I’m two years in. This is getting to me. Am I going to whiff on number three? How do I go raise money for number four if I didn't even get to revenue with my third business? Holy shit, that's a bad signal to investors.

00:21:35.400 --> 00:21:58.319
Is that what keeps you going? That's what I want to dive into a little bit. What do you have to tell yourself to keep going when you're pitching – on the one side, your product's not really working. You’ve got four months of runway. You're not really making any money. You're pitching an investor. I'm sure every nine out of ten of them are telling you just do something else, just probably what they would say a year and a half in. You’ve got to be no, I'm going to keep going. What’s that?

00:22:01.480 --> 00:22:01.480
Nine out of ten no's was a good week.

00:22:03.618 --> 00:22:06.720
That's it. What narrative are you giving yourself today?

00:22:07.380 --> 00:22:48.970
Yeah, I mean, I think we touched on it there. One part was we knew the problem was still not solved. We knew that publishers still wanted the product. They wanted a product that could do this. Lastly, I was on startup number three. I was approaching my mid-thirties. Desperately didn't want to go and get a job and to go back to all the few investors that we did have, friends and people who trusted us because they believed in us as people, not because the business was doing well performance-wise. I think that desire to not have to go back to them and be like, yeah, we failed, and we never made a dollar. The perspective shame was a big motivator. I wanted people to feel like they made a good bet by investing in Marty and in Blockthrough. If we had failed, if we'd shut the doors in mid-2017, that was not the case. That would've been a pretty embarrassing way to go out for me at least.

00:23:05.670 --> 00:23:23.329
Let me ask you this, actually, the flip side of that question. People invested in you already. You believe in yourself. You don't want to be a failure. Let's summarize it like that. How do you, in 2017, raise new money? How do you put yourself in the mindset of talking to somebody and being confident, which is what you have to do to raise even 25K or whatever?

00:23:27.329 --> 00:24:09.779
By 2017 we built – this whole time, even though we didn't have a product, even though we had iterations of the product that didn't work, I was selling the whole time. I was still talking to publishers. You fall flat on your face once or twice. You might feel like you've burned a bridge. If nobody still solved the problem, then you can keep going back to them when you finally figure it out. I was basically raising on hey, we've got this big pipeline. We've got this many millions of dollars and customers that have signed a contract and are still waiting for a product. There's still no solution to market. Hey, I didn't raise a million dollars on that, but it allowed me to string together – I think we got one check in that was six figures. That bought us four months. It was a lot of stringing stuff together based on hey, there's sales traction, and the product makes sense intuitively, we just haven't figured out how to connect the pipes.

00:24:24.480 --> 00:24:29.940
You weren't playing games. You had true belief in this. You felt like you weren't there yet, but you really did believe that you would get there.

00:24:31.059 --> 00:24:37.299
A hundred percent, I felt like we could do it. I felt like nobody had figured it out yet, but we could get there. Maybe I'll jump to what that was.

00:24:41.450 --> 00:24:49.618
Well let's do that. This is a happy story. I mean, you ended up getting acquired. Everybody was more than happy to have invested with you. What does happen in this 2018 period that starts to turn things around?

00:24:51.339 --> 00:26:58.900
Yeah, so the turnaround begins in 2017, that period of peak frustration. We’re trying to make this tech work. There are challenges with when you're hiding from the ad blockers, you have to do all sorts of funky technical stuff to make – to get the ads through. I had this realization. I think I was getting drunk at a bar after a conference with a publisher. He told me about the biggest ad blocker out there. It’s a company called Eyeo. They own Adblock, Adblock Plus, a few others. He told me that they had this acceptable ads initiative that they were working on with a bunch of publishers and search engines. The notion was that they arrived at the same conclusion as us, but from a different – from the other side. They had all these users using their ad blocker for free. They realized that most of their users – based on research that they did, most of their users were willing to see some light ad experience. They'd defined this acceptable ad standard, which was basically a lighter ad standard that the majority of their users would tolerate. Their business model was that they would go around to the Googles of the world, the search engines, and the social networks, and say, hey, if you can make sure that your ads adhere to this standard and you pay us a fee, we feel comfortable letting those ads through to our users. Basically, they'd had very mixed success with that by 2017. When I say mixed, what I mean is that they'd had near universal success with the social networks and the search engines. Google was using it. LinkedIn was using it. Amazon.com was using it, Yahoo.com. They had a lot of uptake. We noticed that none of the publishers we were trying to sell to, which were publishers in the open web, the CNNs of the world. None of them were using acceptable ads to monetize their users. We simultaneously thought that that was weird and potentially an opportunity for us. If we didn't have to hide the ads from the ad blocker, then there was no issue with making these secondary technologies work. Then we just needed to make sure that the ads actually met this acceptable ad standard. Long story short, it would get us out of the cat and mouse world where we need to hide stuff. We could then focus on how do we filter the ads to make them light enough that the ad blockers trust us and won't block our stuff.

00:27:09.079 --> 00:27:13.900
Why did it work with the search engines? Why was Eyeo able to do it with the search engines but not directly –

00:27:14.700 --> 00:29:25.180
That’s a great question. It boils down to the unique thing that we invented. Search engines and social networks tend to be what are called walled gardens. That means that they don't allow third-party ad buying on their sites. They have their own ad buying platform like Facebook for example, or Google. You're buying ads through Facebook or Google. You're not buying them through Adroll or some other third-party ad buying platform. The result is that they have total control over the quality of the ads that appear on their sites. Publishers in the open web do not – are not walled gardens. They do not have control over the quality of ads. They are serving ads that are basically bought and sold on these ad exchanges. They basically run an auction amongst all the ad exchanges that they work with. Those ad exchanges have dozens of ad buying platforms bidding on each ad through their pipes. The result is that they have virtually zero quality control over the ads. Are they animated? Are they video? Are they just a static image? One of the major requirements of acceptable ads is no video and no animated ads. Basically, a publisher, even if they wanted to work with acceptable ads, they couldn't use programmatic advertising because they had no way of ensuring that the ads met those standards. What our unique realization was, or our unique solution was that we – sorry, unique insight is the word I'm looking for. We could leverage the latest technology for – that publishers were using for online advertising to basically filter the ads. We could scan them and filter them in real time. We basically invented the first solution that could actually deliver programmatic advertising to Adblock users and monetize at similar rates as non-Adblock ads. As I think you know, we launched that in March of 2018. When we launched it, we had 28 days of cash left in the bank. This is fucking two and a half years in. We're limping across the finish line. I mean, we don't know that we've limped across the finish line, right? We're just like, we're launching iteration number four. I'm sure this is going to fail for some reason I haven't foreseen. Basically, we got $100 in revenue the first month, $1,000 the second month, 10,000 the third month, 20,000 the fourth month, 48,000, 96,000.

00:29:36.420 --> 00:29:43.339
That's when I invested, by the way, that email. I think it was the 40 to 100. I'm like, this is not . I’ve got to call this guy up.

00:29:44.599 --> 00:30:27.859
It was crazy, right? That's the funny thing. You don't realize that you've hit product market fit until you're three- or four-months in. You're doing $100 a month in revenue, $1,000 a month in revenue, that's great growth, but those are small numbers. It doesn't even pay one person's salary. Even two months in, we're at end of April, and we still don't know if this is working or not. We're just I guess this is still going to fail for some reason we haven't thought of. Of course, once you get to 50 or 100K a month in six or seven months, it's like all right, we've got something here. We actually ended up getting Adblock Plus’s parent company, so Eyeo, they ended up investing in us in late 2018. They saw our growth happening, and they're like, this is crazy. We're going in on this company. They ended up acquiring us late last year. Of course, you know the story, very good outcome. I think our average investor return was eight and a half X. Our very first investor did 25X, a friend from high school. He got rewarded for believing in us.

00:30:41.799 --> 00:30:53.180
That's awesome. That's awesome. I think we can really end it there. Maybe my last question, you touched on it, but maybe there's a bit more depth. I tend to finish with this question always, which is when did you really know that you had product market fit?

00:30:54.400 --> 00:31:34.720
I mean, it was, it was probably end of Q2. We launched in March. March, we did 100, April we did 1,000, May we did 10,000. Yeah, so I think June is like, okay, we did 10,000, We really need to hit 20 this month. If we do it, then we're there. I remember there was this investor in the valley. What was his name, Gokal [ph] or something like that. He’s a big-name angel. I pitched him the end of the year before. He sounded super interested. Then he pulled out. He was like, “Message me once you hit 20K a month.” I messaged him that month because he said he'd write us a big check. Then he was like, “Well, I've moved up. Message me when you hit 40.” The next month, I wrote him. I was like, “We hit 40, are you –“ He still kept pulling. He still found a reason not to go. It was fun.

00:31:47.670 --> 00:32:05.400
It's funny. Ad tech was so just looked down upon by VCs. You just can't get, for whatever reason, a great exit in the space and whatever. I think that was part of it. Yeah, ultimately you ended up doing it, I mean, virtually bootstrapping. You raised angel funding. I think in total you would raise maybe two million in total?

00:32:08.440 --> 00:32:10.359
Yeah, I think it was almost exactly two million in total.

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That's incredible. Well anyways, we'll stop it there. I appreciate you sharing all that. I think we delivered on the planned topic here, which is just how to not give up. This is what relentlessness really looks like, right? It's four months of cash, a month of cash for years , and basically no salary, some salary, credit card debt, just crazy things, right? If you think that you're solving something real, and it's just a matter of a bit more time, often it's worth it. I would argue the best founders have this characteristic. Actually, if I just zoom out a second, we're just talking about Blockthrough. You had failed startup number one, call it mixed startup number two. This was number three. This is almost a decade of relentlessness. It just takes shots at bat at some point.

00:33:11.839 --> 00:33:15.160
It was 12 years from first startup to, to first exit.

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Incredible.