Sun, Star & a Pale Blue Dot: AdPushup’s Untold Story

A curious child, an ambitious boy, a blustery adult and a tranquil man… Ankit Oberoi’s life has been dotted with umpteen emotions. But there was one episode which transformed the founder to the core, and pushed AdPushup on the right trajectory culminating in its $70-million exit. Find out…

2016

It was a sudden sun storm for AdPushup. And it was wild. Ankit Oberoi’s universe started furiously dissipating under the impact of the raging flares. What was alarming was the speed at which the events were unfolding.

“What’s happening? This doesn’t make sense,” wondered Oberoi, who was born with a hyper-curiosity streak, which helped him perpetually question ‘who, what, when, where and why’ of everything around him, be it objects, situations, humans or products. As the geeky kid grew up, he fell in love with computers, online games, internet, the freedom to carve an identity, and yes, the unexpected financial gains. In 2005, the class 9 student used to make around Rs 1.5 lakh every month through his web hosting business.

What, though, fascinated the young boy most was the speed. It was thrilling. It was exhilarating. And it gave him a sudden rush of adrenalin. He ran the business for three years, and sold the profitable venture in 2007. The next year, he started an information security business along with his school friend. By 2013, the bootstrapped venture expanded across four countries, and Oberoi was selling software to government law enforcement agencies. The restless adult was now dissatisfied with the staid nature of the business. The next year, in 2014, he started AdPushup as a weekend project along with the same school buddy, and sensing a big opportunity, both the friends doubled down.

The speed of the venture was indeed astonishing. The pace at which the angel round was raised was equally staggering. In June, the cofounders didn’t know any angel. Four months later in October, they raised $632,000 from 50 angels! Some of the learning in the short four-month funding journey also happened at a brisk clip. Sample this. In one of the funding pitches, all the founders were asked a pointed question. “What is one thing that an investor looks at,” was the query raised by an investor.

The reply came in all shapes and kinds — from product, size of the market, founder’s pedigree, product-market fit… — but none was remotely satisfactory. “What matters most is exit,” said the investor. “Do you have an exit plan,” he asked. Like others, Oberoi too didn’t have any. Though he was quick to add one. In the last slide of his investment pitch titled ‘exit strategy,’ the young founder put an animated picture of Uncle Scrooge, who was plunging into a large pool of money. Oberoi’s speed of learning was astonishing.

Speed Thrills But…

Ironically, two years later in 2016, speed was turning out to be Oberoi’s biggest nemesis. To make matters worse, the ‘five Ws’ in his armoury vanished. Suddenly, he felt impotent.

“Am I too brash? Is this all happening because of me? Am I responsible,” he questioned himself as he quickly started getting sucked into a vortex of self-doubt. “Why is my friend leaving me? Is it because of me,” Oberoi started questioning every move, every step that he had taken since his entrepreneurial debut.

The college dropout was facing the biggest crisis of his life. In fact, for the first time in 19 years, Oberoi felt that he was slipping into depression. And the heat was too much to handle for the serial entrepreneur. On personal front, his cofounder and school friend — who had been an integral part of Oberoi’s entrepreneurial journey since 2007 — wanted to exit. On the professional front too, things were messy. The business was meandering, the original blockbuster product had flamed out, the new version was nowhere in the sight, a bunch of investors wanted an exit, and employees were leaving in droves. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong.

Back in 2015, everything went right. Or it seemed so. After the successful seed round of funding, Oberoi dared to be over ambitious. The original product — advertising revenue maximisation platform for desktop and mobile websites — was doing reasonably well, had generated enough traction among over 80 publishers, and there was a waiting list of over 1,500. Everything was going smooth, and the future looked perfect.

Then came an unexpected twist. The young founder decided to make a ‘better product,’ and he decided to do so on war footing. His tech team gave a realistic timeframe of four months for the rollout. “Well, that’s good. In four months, we will be amazing,” he said to himself. Three months later, came the first reality check. The product was still not ready. The original four months got stretched into a year.

The final product, though, started on a big bang note. Around 150 clients signed up and started using it. “It felt amazing. We mailed all investors, we celebrated with the team,” recalls Oberoi. The best thing about the new version was the impact. Within two weeks, the revenue of most of the users shot up by a staggering 30%-40%. “We thought we had hit a jackpot with our software,” he says. In fact, one of the users from Spain ended up investing in the company! “We are sorted,” says Oberoi, who now thought of preparing for the series A round of funding. Adpushup was fast emerging as the new bright star in the SaaS universe, and the sun was shining bright.

Forecast is Overcast

After three months, though, came the unexpected eclipse. While running database queries, Oberoi discovered a fall in users. The numbers were dropping. It started with one big website, and then others followed suit. The cocky founder thought that the dip was a tech problem. “I was super confident that there could be no issues with the software,” he says. After a few weeks, Oberoi was forced out of the denial mode. Most of the clients had left.

The founder panicked, and started making frenetic calls to his customers. What he discovered was startling. Though the users loved the product, they reckoned that the software had served its purpose and was no longer useful. “I realised the stupidity,” he says. Though useful, the software didn’t bring in recurring revenue as it failed to add on to its original value. Oberoi, who already had inbound interest from a bunch of VC funds, decided to fix the problem.

The task, though, was not easy largely for two reasons. First, the founder didn’t want to raise more money. Though Oberoi did his best to bring down an already low rate of burn, absence of a new round of funding unintentionally sent a wrong message to employees. Many thought that the company was about to shut, and started exiting. Second, over the next two years of continuous struggle, Oberoi mulled to return the money raised from backers. In August 2016, he had raised Series A round from Japanese adtech company Geniee, Purvi Capital and existing investors. “It was our moral responsibility towards the investors,” he says.

Though the intention was noble, it added on to the perception of the outsiders, and insiders, that the ship is sinking. Subsequently, almost half of the team left. Thirdly, for two long years, Oberoi undertook a series of iterations in his quest to make a product which could add a long-term value in the life of his customers. The wait was acutely stressful, and it only brought to the fore the differences with his cofounder which simmered for years but never exploded.

After intense and prolonged introspection, Oberoi got to the root of the problem. “It started with me,” he says. “My way or highway doesn’t work,” he confessed, alluding to his style of working, which had no room for the ‘other’ point of view. “I was maybe a little too brash,” he says. Two words which summed up his life since childhood were ‘speed’ and ‘fast.’ Ironically, Oberoi never realised that the same words would end up dictating his life rather than defining it. “I was always in action. Speed, speed, speed, and fast, fast, fast…that’s it,” he says. “I was more authoritative than democratic,” he adds.

The collateral damage of insane speed was unimaginable, and unintended. “I was not able to take key people along,” he says, explaining what went wrong in his relationship with his cofounder and close friend. “I should have sat down with him, spent more time, got him along,” he rues, adding that most of the times he was not listening to people around him. “We had been working together since 2007, and the discontent was gradually building up,” he says. The problems in the business, though, precipitated the crisis.

Hope After Despair

The dark cloud, though, had a silver lining. One of the backers bought a personal development programme with ‘Landmark Forum’ to help Oberoi understand himself better. “I would have never spent Rs 25,000 for such a programme,” he says. The results, though, were startling. Oberoi started viewing things in context and had a rounded perspective of things. Though the first six-eight months after the programme the pendulum swung to the extreme end — Oberoi became too democratic in his style of functioning and excessively indecisive — things stabilised after the formative months. He had a mature conversation with his cofounder, and both decided to part ways. Interestingly, there was no ill-will, hatred, or malice. Though the cofounders parted ways, the friends stayed friends. The love and respect remained intact.

Meanwhile, Oberoi finally managed to get his silver bullet. The new version of ad revenue optimization had all the features that doctors ordered and the customers wished for. Oberoi shares the agony and the mental toll that he had to endure before the rollout of the new version. “We were very close to giving up. Maybe six more months,” he says.

What helped the founder was his immense grit, honest introspection, and a fortunate rediscovery of the five Ws. What also aided immensely in making a personality transformation, Oberoi points out, was the philosophical meaning of the ‘pale blue dot.’

Oberoi explains. In a photograph taken by the Voyager 1 space probe in February 1990, Earth’s apparent size appeared as less than a pixel — a pale blue dot. In his book published in 1994, astronomer Carl Sagan shared his interpretation of the ‘pale blue dot.’ “From this distant vantage point,” he wrote, “the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different.” He elaborately decoded the significance of the ‘dot’. “That’s home. That’s us…the aggregate of our joy and suffering…every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant…every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam,” he underlined.

Sagan’s inspirational insights resonated strongly with Oberoi. During all the low moments in life, he explains, he just needs to look at things from the lens of ‘pale blue dot,’ and every problem looks momentary. “Our problem is small. We make it big,” he says. Oberoi now talks about the big picture for the founders. First, never start a venture for money. It can’t be a big motivation. Second, take long-term bets. Short term, as the name suggests, has a short shelf life. Third, listen to everybody but do what is right for the business.

Fourth, if there are cofounders, then the role of each must be sharply demarcated. If extremely high authoritative decisions are wrong, then extremely high democratic decisions are equally wrong. “Strike a balance,” he says, adding that the cofounders must thoroughly match their strengths and weaknesses. Lastly, one can’t start building a business by thinking of exit. “The end game is exit but it can’t be the starting point,” says the man who recently sold his venture to Softbank-owned Japanese marketing tech firm Geniee reportedly for $70 million. “Endearing and enduring business,” Oberoi reckons, “can only be built if one starts looking at things in context, and has a balanced perspective. “Do push-ups along with lunges. Focus on the whole body,” he signs off.