- What is your one-sentence elevator pitch? . . .
Retail
advertisers need Montavo’s retail MaaP to understand the direct correlation
between their TV and Digital advertising spend and their in-store sales revenue
and profits.
- How did you come up with the idea for your company? . .
.
We were
fascinated by the prevalence of advertiser-supported business models for a new
generation of Internet businesses. I started to dig into retail advertising and
the opportunities that web & mobile advertising technologies would create.
There were some really interesting plays but many were using coupons and that’s
an extraordinarily limited market – right around 5% of the total advertising
spend. The other thread we pulled on was the idea that digital advertising –
for all the “big data” and analytics focus – was justified using clicks and
unique visits and a host of other metrics. But not correlating ads to bricks
and mortar sales revenue and profits because the technology didn’t exist. So
that’s what we set out to solve. It’s an enormous opportunity when you can show
an advertiser exactly where their $100 million in digital ad spending went and
how that directly translated into consumers going to a physical bricks and
mortar store and buying their products or services. As the idea was that for the system to work,
the solution needed to be that the consumer never registered with the entity
the ad was viewed on or the advertiser themselves – i.e. the consumer does not
do anything different then then ever did in the past.
- The word that best describes your company culture is .
. .
Seasoned. [We
don’t issue learner’s permits and every one on our team has been here before.]
- How are you different from your competition? . .
.
We have the
simplest and clearest differentiation in the world: we are the only company
that can provide this data to advertisers and every advertiser wants this data.
- What is the biggest challenge you face? . . .
Really, I think it’s the sheer
magnitude of our opportunity. Sometimes that works against you. We’ve found an
almost unlimited supply of investors who will gladly write a check once the
product is shipping and the first customer deploys our solution. But you have
to get there. We’re closer to a biotech investment model: it’s an enormous
opportunity but it takes a little more effort and money/capital to get to
market then is the usual for a software company today. If you think of our kind
of analytics as being worth a very small fraction of an advertiser’s budget and
that global advertising spending is over half a trillion dollars per year, we
don’t have to establish much of a beachhead to generate very significant
numbers. So, our challenge has been in trying to demonstrate and show investors
an enormous opportunity, moderated with suitably conservative projections, but
a potential not dissimilar to Google before they shipped version 1 of Search.
- How much money have you raised to date? . . .
We have raised $1.5 million,
lifetime to date. We’ve recently secured a significant portion of our current
round and that guarantees the development of release 1.0 in the fall of this
year. Now we are just filling in the
additional capital needed to hire and run Sales & Marketing and Business
Development.
- If someone gave your company $3 million tomorrow, how
would you use the money? . . .
We’ve eliminated 95% of technology
risk (we’re down to execution) and are at a pure go-to-market stage, so we’d
spend on the product launch, hiring and supporting a sales team, and recruiting
a business development executive. Our singular focus is to establish a series
of toe holds with national brand advertisers and then we’ll leverage those
relationships into a broader market strategy.
- Why will your company be successful? . . .
There are three fundamental reasons:
1.
Compelling nature of our opportunity
– enormous market potential, no direct competitors, near ubiquitous demand for
what we have
2.
Proprietary technology – our service
is enabled by Montavo-proprietary technologies that serve as a strong
barrier-to-entry
3.
Strength of the Team – we are
building a team that: a) has passion for addressing a critical gap in the
market, b) has been through the start-up to wealth-creation phases before and,
c) has a combined depth and breadth of experience that is remarkable.
