How to Build a $5M Business in 18 Months (Without a Sales Team)

Speaker A: From the time we actually launched our SaaS product to the time we hit 5 million was 18 months, maybe. Yeah, it was really quick. And no sales. We had four employees, me and three engineers, so.

Speaker B: Hi, I'm Kia Johnson. This is the Design Rush podcast. Welcome to the show. Attitude Founder and CEO Jared Sigel joins us to unpack how he built a $5 million subscription business without a sales team and why rejecting the standard ad tech model helped Attitude stand out. Discover why breaking from the industry playbook can fuel growth and when loyalty begins costing the business. Before finding Attitude, you helped two companies grow but received little of the financial upside. How did that shape the company you built?

Speaker A: I think it's behind everything that I do. Uh, one of the strategies that I deploy a lot in our financial model and how we hire and how I treat my employees is to do the exact opposite of everything that I've experienced. Uh, and so what I mean by that is focusing, um, on a client, focusing on my employees, putting my employees first before myself, and making sure that, like, the people that are helping me grow my business are just as much along for the ride as me, myself, you know, as the CEO and the owner of the company. Um, but it also feeds into sort of the way that I approach business in general. Um, my market is dominated by a handful of very large companies with very old business models. And so the same kind of strategy do the exact opposite of what everyone thinks that we should be doing. Uh, I applied to our pricing model. So being the first SaaS company in my space, giving a lot of my tech away for free, things like that really, um, that's fueled. Fueled the growth of the business and also, frankly, kept a lot of my clients and employees happy.

Speaker B: Your team are the ones who are actually building the foundation with you. When did you realize, uh, being valuable to a company. Company was actually not the same as owning value? When was that sort of pivotal moment that you realized that?

Speaker A: My story is pretty interesting because for the first about year and a half, all the company was just me. All I did was consult for, you know, my clients at the time and charged by the hour. I was basically a middleman between my clients and the tech vendors that they were partnering with. And I had that aha. Ah moment about a year and a half into it where I was like, oh, shoot, I'm doing the exact same thing again, right? Like, I'm working my butt off, and I am making other tech companies a lot of money instead of taking control myself. And so I was really fortunate. This is kind of A wild story. But one of my early clients gave me his engineer because, again, it was just me at the time, gave me his engineer for six weeks and said, I want to move to a platform that you build. I will give you a free engineering resource. Go build it. And so me and this guy in Macedonia, uh, I haven't talked in many years, but built, uh, the very, very original version of what we call our cloud wrapper and tested it on this client and crushed it. You made so much money for this guy. And I was like, this is, this is awesome. Like, this is now what my business is going to be. Finally, I am in control of my own destiny. Instead of continuing, just help everyone else.

Speaker B: What is that saying? Um, if you build it, they will come. You kind of making me think about that. I think. Let's just, let's just double click on that right now because you're speaking about this and I actually do want to discuss it a little bit more in detail because you, at that moment, then also let consulting clients, you know, use Attitude's software for free for six months. Um, all those clients, and also later paid. I mean, what do you think actually made the product essential that you were able to achieve that?

Speaker A: I think there's two things. The most important thing was first off, like, my relationship, my personal relationship with all the early on, um, clients, which is, you know, I had been working with them for a year and a half to two years at that point, already helping them run their businesses, right? I've been written to multiple people's wills. Like, I knew their families, I was going on vacation with them. And so, like, they already intrinsically trust in me to help them grow their business, right? And so whatever. I was kind of suggesting they're like, cool, Jared says I should do this, I'm going to do it. Right? Um, but the second reason is, like, the proof is in the pudding, right? So if we're going to give away tech for free and then suddenly start charging for it, right? I mean, all of our clients, their bills, a lot of them, like, double, triple, quadrupled, like, they started paying me a lot of money, right? I had to prove that the value uplift was going to be there. And so when we got ready to actually charge clients a SaaS fee, we completely rewrote my original code. I'm not an engineer, by the way, so, like, it worked, but, like, it was, you know, written in a text edit file. I don't Even know what GitHub was like, the whole story, right? We completely rewrote It I hired a cto, made it super fast, made it better, improved a lot of the mechanics. So you know, when we were ready to charge, we said, hey, we're going to charge you, but let us prove to you that you're going to still make more money. Use the newer, the newer version of our product. Right. So we basically ab tested against ourselves. Kind of a wild thing, right? Normally you're testing against a competitor. We a b tested against ourselves to prove that the more expensive version net net was still going to make them more money. And so we had that trust. We proved it in the data and frankly like from a cost perspective, we were still 95% cheaper than the next best option. Yeah, they were paying us more but like they were still in our eyes still saving tens of thousands of dollars a month each. Right. Like it was still a no brainer.

Speaker B: But weren't you afraid? I mean, you know, 6 free balance would actually train your clients not to pay because this is a risk that you're taking.

Speaker A: So I think we learned pretty quickly and we've done this now by the way, with a lot of our products. Basically we have a new product that we're releasing on Friday and we're going to do the exact same thing and give it away for free in the beginning. But we're smart enough to tell our publishers we have no idea. This is my favorite line. We have no idea how much this is going to cost. We're going to give it to you, we're going to see how you use it, see if we can optimize cost. But at some point you're going to have to pay us for this. So just be with right. And uh, like as long as they're okay with that, then we'll add them to that test or whatever it may be. In the beginning, when we first started charging a SaaS fee, we did have like one or two, uh, clients. I don't know about this, Jared. Right. Like I got a great deal going right now. I'm barely paying you money and I don't really want to pay you much money. And so we really had to fight hard proving it with data that like it doesn't matter. You're paying us four times as much. You're making five times as much. So you net net you make way more money.

Speaker B: Say for example, like, even if like half of the clans refused, do you think that you would have changed something in that moment? Like what would you, your presence have been if that were to be the case?

Speaker A: Probably not, because we still would have made a lot more money. Um, it also came back to, like, having to grow a real business, right? And like a successful scalable business. I mean, look, don't get me wrong, there are some massive consultancies out there that are worth billions of dollars. But, like, you know, little old me and one other employee, we're not going to turn this into a 10, 20, 30 million dollar company to be consultants. Um, and so, like, if we were ever going to meet our aspirations of growing this business, we had no choice but to start charging more and make money elsewhere. Um, but for us, it was the decision of, do we want to be a tech company or do we want to be like a casual business? Right? And we very early on said, hey, we've helped other tech companies sell for literally billions of dollars. Why can't we do that for ourselves? Let's try this out and see what happens.

Speaker B: In your journey itself, you actually started up, not because you touched on this earlier, that you didn't know anything about this industry that you were getting into. I just want to hear a little bit more about that journey itself. How did you find yourself where you found yourself?

Speaker A: I was in the ad tech space for seven or eight years, um, before starting Attitude, um, and I had made two other companies. Like, one company sold for $1 billion. The other company raised multiple rounds at close to $1 billion valuation. Right? Like, and I was running revenue for these departments, like, I was in charge of the most valuable asset in this company. And so I was looking at that and saying, hey, it's at some point I got to start doing something for myself. But when I started, quote, unquote, started the company, I had no idea what I was going to do. And I just assumed that I was going to figure it out, you know, over time, right? And like, in that first year and a half that we spoke about how I justify my consulting fees to clients change like five times because every few months come out of update. And like, that entire business that I was just doing was gone overnight, right? Like, oh, now I gotta figure something completely new out. Um, and so I was pretty like, early on in small company. One, eventually two people, three people, whatever. Like, we were nimble enough where we could constantly change what our value prop was and so forth. But I think for me, it was that aha, uh, moment that I had where like, oh my God, our industry, every single vendor in our industry has the exact same business model. And every single vendor in our industry is fighting for the advertisers. No. Is paying attention to the Publishers, which to me is ironic because without the publishers, without websites, there's no, there's no ad like there's no inventory for ads to be served on. Right. And so I looked at, well, I'm going to pay attention to the part of the market that no one seems to care about, but it's frankly the more valuable part of the market. I'm going to offer a business model that no one thinks is um, scalable and I'm going to prove them wrong and I'm going to do it in a way where like it's going to be really hard for anyone to ever compete with me. That value prop. We're now seven years uh, into this full time journey here and in the company is still very much true. We're still the only one with our business model. We're still the only one that's fighting for the publishers, you know, on the client side of things versus the advertiser. So it's been a fun journey.

Speaker B: It's nice to see that you managed to keep the essence of that um, you know, going throughout, throughout your journey and throughout these years. That's pretty awesome. You were talking about the monies that you started making and you were obviously working with a very small team. And then obviously it was me, myself and I at first, um, and then you, you decided to embark the way that you did, you know, and sort of expand the way that you did. Now you reached $5 million in annual subscription revenue without a sales team. Why do you think the client referrals actually work so well or worked so

Speaker A: well having a friend recommend, you know, a ah, plumber, a dentist or whatever, you're like, you're way more likely to take their recommendation versus something that you just find on the Internet. And so I think like we heavily rely on referrals. I had a very simple strategy again early on we were charging by the hour, right, for our consultancy. And so it was refer me a new client that converts. You get 10 hours free of my work. Right. And we had clients that did that where like they got an entire year free of uh, support from attitude by referring us 20, 30 clients, right, of their people that they knew in the space. We're fortunate that we work in an industry where like it's like a trillion dollars in online advertising spend. There's maybe 10,000 people on the planet that work on it. It's a very small industry and so people have a lot of tight connections in our space where they were like, oh cool, I can make some like quote unquote make money or save money by making referrals. Let me hit up everyone I know in the space and start converting them right for you. And so by the time I was getting on these calls with our early clients, I didn't actually have to pitch anything. They had already done the entire pitch for us, and they just want to know what my price was and, like, frankly, get to know me a little bit and make sure they were comfortable with working with me. Right. And so we approach it in two ways. We approach it with our existing clients. Then we also went to the advertising platforms that were starting to make way more money through our technology. Right. Our technology allows publishers to optimize ads on their website. So I was going to these. These exchanges that were suddenly, like, become, like, exploding in revenue and saying, hey, you want to make even more money? Every company or publisher that you speak to that can integrate with you, they don't have the tech. Send them my way. Send them my way. I make more money, you make more money. Right. And so I had, like, 30 or 40 people out there selling for my company early on. Um, and like I said, referrals seem to be way more trustworthy, um, than a cold outreach. Right. Um, and so, yeah, we grew the company very quickly in, like, from the time we actually launched our SaaS product to the time we hit 5 million was 18 months, maybe. Um, yeah, it was really quick. Uh, and no sales. We have four employees, me and three engineers, so it worked well. Oh, we still do that, but it's a lot harder now at our scale. Everyone kind of already knows us at this point in our industry. And so, you know, it's a lot more about us selling versus someone just saying, hey, go, go work with Jared. He's a good guy, kind of.

Speaker B: But that's great because, I mean, you built that base, and of course, you know, people trust you and. And know your product, and they. It's an automatic trust. But you built that. You had to obviously build it from the ground up to get to that point. You're speaking about these 18 months. I mean, when you were going through these 18 months, was it like burning the midnight oil for you kind of thing?

Speaker A: Yes and no. It was easy because we were having a blast. Uh, it is a really fun DNA company, such a small company that is growing that quickly. It was like, every day we're like, oh, my God, we just made another $10,000. Like, what is happening? Right? Literally, there's four of us. We were literally burning the midnight oil. Like, we would be on calls 10, 11 o' clock at night on hangouts. You know, I got a beer in hand. We're just hanging out, but we're working on, like, what's the next revenue driver? How are you gonna make more money? Let's go find another client. Blah, blah, blah. Right. Our clients loved it early on, too, because we cared more about their businesses at that point than they did. We were so, like, I want to say desperate, but we were so eager to make money that we were working twice as hard on their business as they were. Right. And so a lot of those early clients, most of them still work with us, some of them have been acquired and, like, brought us into the next company and blah, blah. Uh, most of those clients are still with us. And if they aren't, we're still very close with them, which is interesting. Right. Even if they've left and done their own thing or whatever, we're still, you know, still in touch and still talk pretty regularly. Um, but yes, we were working very hard. We were very fortunate. Two of the guys did not. They weren't even married. They were single guys, right? Young 20s, me and the CTO, both married, but we hadn't had kids yet. No kids, but it was, like, really easy for us to say to our wives, like, hey, not going to bed right now. Give us two more hours. We got to work. We got to work. Um, it was a lot of fun. We had a blast early on. Absolute blast.

Speaker B: You're talking about the way that you're dealing with your customers. And so you had this really vested interest, you know, obviously eager to make money, but just also eager to, like, really show them what it is that you can do. Um, and there's a lot of power in that, you know, in really understanding your customer.

Speaker A: Yeah, we kind of tell our clients, like, just look at us as an extension of your team. Like, we're basically your employees. Use us how you fit. Um, and we, we definitely adopt that exact strategy, which is like 150 clients. Now, the next company, in terms of scale on our size, might be 2,000. Right. And, like, there's no way that they can provide a level of service like we are. Right. Um, and so we have minimums in place, and we were very picky and choosy on who we work with. Right. So, like, we actually get so much now now of companies wanting to partner with us, and probably 2 or 3% of them actually, like, meet our standards. Um, and we're picky just because, again, like, we want to, like you said, provide that level of Service. Because the second that goes, our businesses is just a business at that point. Right? Yeah.

Speaker B: As attitude. I mean, you help website and app publishers actually earn, uh, more from advertising. So I would love to find it from you. You know, when does chasing revenue begin driving, you know, their audiences away?

Speaker A: And especially right now, this is a very hot topic with explosion in AI and the impact of search results. Um, it is. Well, my traffic is down. I need to make more money. Right. And unfortunately, it's almost like a cyclical pattern. More ads you serve, more you piss off your users, the less likely they are to return. The less traffic you have, the more ads you need to serve. Right. And it's kind of a vicious cycle, Right. Um, and so we see this a lot where, I mean, I do this myself with websites, right? Like, if I go to a website and there's too many ads, I won't, I won't bother reading the article. I'll go try to find the information somewhere else. Um, and so that's definitely something that we talk with a lot of our, especially our enterprise clients, right, that have a lot of money off this. They're driving thousands of salaries off of ad revenue. And things like that is a little bit less right now means stability in the long run, whereas a little bit more right now means six months from now. You may be really struggling to figure out, um, where to go. It's one of those things where, uh, it's an interesting thing about the more ads you serve, the harder it is to go back. Whereas the less ads you serve, the easier it is obviously to add a little bit more. Right. And so, um, I think about some of our bigger, like, audience groups or like, content categories. We have gaming publishers. Gaming's a huge part of our business. If I'm playing a game, the last thing I want is an ad to pop up. Most of our gaming clubs do not refresh ads, or even a lot of them don't even serve ads when you're actually playing the game, right? It's only online ancillary pages and so forth. Same with like, news, right? Like breaking news and things like that. Like the last thing you want to do when you're reading about something like, you know, SpaceX stock just fell 30% in the stock.

Speaker B: Cool.

Speaker A: I don't want to be inundated with a billion ads on the page. I want to figure out what's going on because I just lost a lot of money in the stock market, whatever. Right. Um, and so a lot of our publishers approach the types of, like, different Parts of their sites, different types of content very differently to make sure that they don't rub people the wrong way.

Speaker B: When you're seriously engrossed in, if you're reading an article, you know, or if you're gaming, as you mentioned, to get that disturbance can be very annoying and as a matter of fact do the complete opposite as opposed to what you wanted in the first place is for eyes to be on there, for me to be a client, for me to be consuming what you're selling me.

Speaker A: Once you go down that path, it's almost impossible to go back. And what I mean by that is advertisers start to devalue your website and so if you start removing ads, you make so much less than you did before that now you're really in trouble. Right? And so you like once you go down that path, it's almost impossible to go back. So that's the first reason. Second reason is like what is the purpose of the site? And what, um, I mean by that is there's plenty of publishers and websites out there that are literally about the content, right? They're made content. Those are the ones that you're probably reading and like engrossed in an article. A lot of websites are made for ads. Uh, right. So like these people are creating these websites as a business to serve ads and make money. And so their focus is not really the user experience and a lot of them don't even care if you come back. They care if they're profitable on that one and only visit that they got from you. Right. And so it's a matter a little bit of like short term versus long term goals. Right. The ones that have better UXs, uh, less and less intrusive. They were around 10 years ago and they're going to be around 10 years from now. Right. The ones that aren't like users are going to leave. AI is going to eat them up. Right. Search results are going to devalue them or like deprioritize them and like they're not going to have business models anyways. Um, there's still like a quote unquote arbitrage to be made there where you can make decent, especially like a one or two person company, you can make a decent amount of money still spinning off these websites.

Speaker B: Which metric reveals that advertising revenue is rising, you know, while the business is becoming weaker? What specifically do you need to look at when you're trying to gauge that?

Speaker A: In our company we look at team metrics. So the first one is cpm. Basically how Much revenue making per thousand ads. And so when I made that comment, like, the more ads you serve, it becomes hard to back out. You get to a point where if you start serving a ton of ads, your CPMs drop so much that it's impossible to recover. Right? That's the first issue. And then the other thing that we looked at is revenue per session. Because what inevitably happens is like you may remove or add adds. Let's say you add adds to your site and um, your sessions, like how much traffic you get actually stays the same, right? You may still make less money. Why? Because people may get pissed off and they may not consume as many pages on your website, right? And so you're actually serving less ads. And so for us, our North Star is revenue per session. It tracks everything. Tracks how many people stay on your site, how many pages they read, how many ads you're serving, your cpm, your bounce rate, like all that kind of stuff that anyone in marketing is paying attention to. All that's captured within a revenue per session metric.

Speaker B: You've actually said that attitude's in app advertising business grew 15 fold in 24 months. What I want to find out from you is what do you feel publishers are still missing?

Speaker A: Okay, a few things in app is interesting to me because even though it's absolutely massive as an industry, companies like unity worth $300 billion or whatever the value is on the market, right? Um, it's still very much the wild west, meaning, uh, it's pretty much all towards gaming. No one really has any idea what these ads are. And it's also a little bit of a crazy cycle where almost all advertisers in app are the apps themselves. So it's like everyone buying from each other and just exchanging money and traffic, right? And so when I go back to like, what is attitudes, ethos and like our strategy with everything, it's the exact opposite of everyone else, right? So when we started thinking about app, we said, who are the, the, the app publishers that no one is paying attention to? And it's the good content websites, right? It's the, it's the news websites, it's the, the. Or the weather apps and things like that, right, that somehow actually do occupy most of your like, um, time on mobile devices, right? You don't spend like, you probably spend 90% of your time reading content and checking the weather versus playing a video game on your phone, right? But no one seems to be paying attention to them at all from a monetization from like an advertising perspective. And so we started Reaching out to those types of publishers and saying, hey, we're going to do the exact opposite of what you thought you had to accept in App. We're not just going to like let other apps buy on you, we're actually going to let you bring your own advertisers, just open it all up to you, uh, in our platform and let you see everything that is happening in real time. So who all the advertisers are, what all the settings and configurations are, who's allowed to buy, who's not allowed to buy, what the minimum prices are, and then also look at all the data in real time, like wheelie down for a second, you can see how much money you're making, any issues, et cetera, et cetera. And that really resonated with the more premium content publishers in app because they kind of just assume that either they have to go to these black box solutions or they have to completely rely on like a Google to give them all of their ads, right. Like an adsense or something like that, or an admob and app and that they have like no choice to actually like kind of control their own desk, indirect, sold and all that kind of stuff. And so we were the first ones to, to sort of build out that version of a platform on mobile app. And they said, we are going after the publishers there. When I say going after, like trying to sell them on our products, um, that no one else cares about because they think they're not valuable. Right. And we are finding tremendous value there. Um, and so again, like trying to build a business model that's the exact opposite of everyone else going after, um, a part of their market that is the exact opposite of everyone else reduces competition. But also I think fits in with our, with our whole story that we've been talking about, you know, for now almost a decade, which is crazy.

Speaker B: But do you feel that there's sometimes a bit of pushback, you know, with website publishers that are, uh, established in hesitating to invest properly in their apps?

Speaker A: Not anymore. Historically speaking, yes. Right. We work with a lot of major publishers on web and to us to win all of their app business is like, we want that. Right. That could be amazing. And historically speaking, most web publishers did not even care about app, right? If you, if you were born as a web publisher, app was just like, oh, we have to have an app. But like, who cares about it? We make no money from it. It's irrelevant. As people again start to freak out a little bit about AI and especially like Gemini being, uh, directly inside of Google search and how that's going to impact traffic on web, right? They're like, maybe we should actually focus on our app strategy. Right? And so we've had tons of our existing clients come to us after years of them saying, yeah, we're not interested, saying, all right, we're ready, guys, like, attitude, please, let's start serving some ads in our app. It's been a lot easier, um, as of late, it's also been a lot easier because, you know, now, two years into it, you know, we had, especially me Personally, I had 13 years of web experience. I had never worked in app before. I never worked at a publisher that had it. So when we first started going, I had no idea what we were doing. Kind of similar to when I started the company. Right? Um, and so now, years into, we're way more confident. We know exactly what we're doing. Our tech works, it's, it's, it's efficient, it's scalable, et cetera. So, like, those conversations that we're having with existing or potential new clients, they're going a lot smoother, um, now than they were, uh, two years ago. So that also impacts how much pushback we get. Right? But publishers are way more open to app now than they ever were before.

Speaker B: I want us to pivot a little bit right now because I'm coming to the end of the conversation, Jared, and I've got a question for you, and I want you to finish the sentence for me. The thing most CEOs, uh, are too scared to admit is.

Speaker A: This is a really good question. I thought about this. The thing that most CEOs are too scared to admit is that the people who help you grow from, like, 0 to 1 or 1 to may not be the people that help you grow from 2 to 10 or 10 to 20 or 20 to 30. Right? When I talk about, like, how I built a lot of loyalty and, uh, my early employees, and most of them are still with the company, but some of them aren't. Right? And it was a really tough decision to part ways of. People have been with me for four or five years and had really helped build this business into what it is. Um, but certain people, certain CEOs, too, are really good at going from zero to one. They like that initial, smaller but fast pace. But when things get a little bit more corporate and larger and so forth, they really start to struggle. And so identifying that is challenging because it's a very emotional decision for most CEOs, right? So I, I same thing with me, right? So like, there were some people that really shouldn't have been in my company anymore that it took me four to five years to finally make that decision on. Um, but boy, was it a breath of fresh air afterwards for, for everyone involved. The employees, for myself, for my, the rest of the staff remaining at the company and so forth. Because you, you have to, to, to take a business through each phase of its life, you have to have the right personalities, the right skill sets, um, et cetera. I think that's a pretty common thing, by the way, that I know a lot of investors say about CEOs, really, like certain CEOs are really good from 0 to 10 and then they struggle from 10 to 100. So it's true of everybody. Uh, but coming to that realization is really hard.

Speaker B: That must have been quite a hard truth for you to face.

Speaker A: Very emotional decision.

Speaker B: Not easy at all. Jared, thank you so much for chatting with us today on the Design Rush podcast. Really appreciated, uh, learning a little bit more about you and appreciated all the wonderful insights that you shared here today. Thank you.

Speaker A: Thanks for having me.

Speaker B: Curious about what top brands look for in choosing an agency. Tune in to our, uh, latest episodes where we reveal the decision making secrets of leading brands. Subscribe to the Design Rush podcast and stay ahead of the competition.

Speaker A: Be seen, be featured, be found. Design rush is the B2B media platform built for brand visibility and AI discovery. Ready to grow. Visit designrush.

Speaker B: Com.