Jake Aaron Villarreal: Welcome to our podcast, From the Ground Up, where we interview startup founders exploring their journeys, their success, challenges, and lessons learned. We hope you'd be inspired in discovering what it takes to build a thriving startup. I'm your host, Jake Aaron Villarreal, and here with us today we have Andrea Breanna, CEO of RebelMouse. Andrea, welcome to the show.
Andrea Breanna: Thank you so much for having me.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Great. So a little bit about, more, more about Andrea. Um she is the leader of RebelMouse, which is a creative agency and AI enabled CMS platform for enterprise brands and media companies. The platform reaches 160 million people monthly. Before launching RebelMouse, Andrea was CTO of The Huffington Post. Andrea is also on the consumer advisory board of American Express and is an advisor to Lerer Hippeau Ventures. Andrea is proudly and openly transgender, and she lives with her wife and four kids in Brooklyn, New York. So before we dive in, I'm assuming you're in Brooklyn, but I'll ask the question. And are you originally...
Andrea Breanna: I am. I was born in Mexico City actually. So a long way from there. My mom's Mexican, um dad's American. And they all, they live in Oregon. I have some of my family in Mexico City. But of my family I'm the only one in New York other than my wife and four kids.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. Well as we talked about earlier, I'm also Mexican. Uh I oftentimes get asked, "do I speak Spanish?" And I've tried. I've lived in Spain and Central America and Argentina and keep working on it. Not probably as proficient as you are, but I love the fact that, at least Spanish is so prevalent in America now and all over the world. It's such a great language to have. It's, it's good, the diversity of multiple languages is I think very important, especially in [a] distributed world today where you can hire people all over. Um before we dive in about your personal um company journey, let's talk a little about you as a person. Tell us you know your personal journey uh today and kind of what, what shaped you to become who you are and what shaped you to become an entrepreneur.
Andrea Breanna: Yeah, well I was um born in Mexico City, and my dad is American. He was a journalist, um and so there's a love of journalism and reporting that's kind of like in the family. Uh that, since he interviewed Castro and wow, Allende and stuff like, he worked for UPI in Mexico. And it really, really, he enjoyed it a lot and it was very rewarding. But um you know, I have four sisters and paying the bills for everyone as a journalist is hard. So he actually went to Stanford and got an MBA.
So I grew up, as it was really obvious to me I didn't fit in, in boxes. I was a white Mexican growing up in California. They, I was exposed to a lot of racism. You probably have seen it too as a sort of white Mexican yourself, um that people felt comfortable saying things that they didn't think there was a Mexican in the car type of a thing. And so there was this sense of... And then since I was young so growing up in the Bay Area (because we were in Stanford for grad school, then San Jose and Palo Alto) and then going back to Mexico all summers, all Christmases you know. Um for me there's one part of my journey which has been knowing that I never fit in any box very well, and being a white Mexican that was a touch of it, of like realizing I don't really fit into the way people like to put boxes.
But then as I started to realize very early on that I was transgender, I also learned to hide it, to conform. I saw how, how people, how disturbing it was for people, how quickly they'd make fun of it, etc. So, but I knew who I was. And so there was an element of "Whoa, I really don't fit in these boxes."
And then second, my journey with technology started when I was young. The first time I... like I'm a founder who is you know a technical founder. So for me, my dad was going to Stanford, it was the 80s and personal computers were this new thing. And I was so lucky I got access when I was young, I was like 10 years old and we had a personal computer. And so the first thing I learned to code was actually in BASIC. And it was just a password-protected text file that I coded, right. The simplest possible thing. But in my family with, with so many sisters and my mom (I don't know if it's you know stereotypical of all moms or if there's a Latin mom thing), but there was no way you could have a private diary. Of course everyone would find it and read it. So there was no safe way to express who I was and am. Um but with this password-protected file was the first place I could write something and know nobody was going to be reading this. And then as the internet came, that was where I could express myself as who I am in a, in a safe-ish way. And so CompuServe, Prodigy, and America Online was the first time I could be Andrea, you know.
And so I fell in love with you know, what technology could mean to us, how it could transform our lives. Um I, I you know have this still, hope that technology can transform society in a positive way. So in my personal journey, um as soon as I learned to code I realized that that came with its own little new box and expectations. Like people would expect me to fix their printer or their like fax machine. I hate printers. I hate fax. I like, I don't... that's like... They also I found it very interesting as I became better and stronger at coding, they thought that I wouldn't care about UX or design or revenue. Because they had a box for a programmer and expectations there. And so my work, when you kind of fast forward and etc is uh...
To Huffington Post, I had several projects before it that putting projects online that went viral. And that's where I met Jonah Peretti in grad school at ITP. Jonah Peretti is the founder and CEO of BuzzFeed and he's a co-founder of Huffington Post. Um and he taught, he was teaching a class at ITP at NYU, which is the grad school I went to. Which is an excellent [place] for anyone kind of trying to figure out life. And you're privileged and lucky enough as I was to be able to get two years of your life to kind of go and do, use technology to create art. That is an amazing school, and it leads to a lot of businesses because great technologies usually begin as art or as a game, etc. So for me it was like the... and Jonah too, is contagious media. "How you can create something that gets shared by all and suddenly you know everyone knows about it."
Um and that led to Huffington Post. Where um what was very different about my role (and I think there's a lot of now, but in, in, in like 2005 it still today is rare) is that the CTO can own product. Usually that's very separate. And so normally the way engineering works, it's kind of almost like a "waiter versus chef." And usually tech is treated more like the waiter. Which means, "I know exactly what I want, bring it to me exactly what I ask for and on time." And that's actually, I don't believe, the best way to build technology. I think your best, best way to do that is when tech is in the position of chef. And so it's more like, "Look, I want it to be Latin and spicy. Um I like mushrooms and I'm vegetarian," you know. And that leads to creating much better product when engineering is at the table that way. Um and that was the basis of the HuffPost growth and success, was that tech would have that leeway and that control and power over product to be able to collaborate with editorial. And that really clicked with me. And so Huffington Post allowed me to do the sort of sweat equity time that led to a financial moment when the company sold. Which was very important um for me, but also it led to being able to start you know my company.
I skipped the part where my dad started a software company. So that was you know, part of the falling in love with technology and stuff. There was a mundane part as he started his company where I used to be the one who put every label on the disk, the floppy disks, those huge floppy disks. I put the label and it'd come a little crinkled and a little crooked. I'm like "Oh, I hope the company gets bigger than me putting the labels on it." Um but I did every role in that company until finally in college I was building the website and the digital side of it uh completely. Um but to be honest that didn't make me want to start a [company] cuz I saw the incredible stress and hardship that put my dad through. So when I started my company with RebelMouse, I at least was very eyes-wide-open in the kind of, the stress, etc. that um I would go through. But you know, there's, you can kind of know it, and there's nothing quite like feeling it.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, so no doubt.
Andrea Breanna: Anyway, that, that's how I got to RebelMouse.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: What was the inspiration [for] RebelMouse and what is it that it does?
Andrea Breanna: Well, in the end with HuffPost what I, what I built there was for one company. And it was CMS, is you know content management system. And what it means is, give content people the ability to update the site and create content. But what we did different from just do that is that we wanted to teach editors how traffic worked through it, and give them the opportunity... You know, there's a lot of people you meet in the SEO world that, to be totally honest, it's a little douchy. It's a little snake oil. It doesn't feel really great. Just doesn't... you don't know that they know what they're doing, right. And so it was really fun at HuffPost, we could win almost every phrase. We were in the top five for "sex," we won "Obama" during OB-... like we, it was crazy what we could win with that page rank plus content people who understood how to play the game in a best practice way, right? And so little things that like, we could beat New York Times. It drove them crazy. They could write an original story, have the big scoop, and then our take on it would end up winning over them in Google.
And, and there were a lot of things that New York Times refused to do. New York Times would never link out, right. So it was only their version of the story that you'd get when you were on New York Times. We immediately figured out actually, people, not just Google... you know, when you're doing Google, right, you don't think about Google's algo, you think "what's good for people?", that's what Google's trying to chase. So then you stop doing black hat stupid things. But you know, Google rewards what we do. Is like, when you came to our page, you'd see, if it's the tsunami or Eliot Spitzer or whatever it is, you'd see the photos from Daily Mail, from Boston Globe, from D-. We put it all together in a way that actually, people would prefer our page. Um and because you could get to all the others from it, you know, and we recognized that ecosystem. So there was a lot that we did to help editors understand it, and it was so satisfying for them.
So when we sold the company to AOL, I had to, I had to go to AOL as part of the deal. And so if I could have exited stage right with all the money, I totally would have, because I love startups and such. And AOL is like "what? AOL." But um, but it was an amazing experience. I ran product, design, and engineering for all of AOL's media properties.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow.
Andrea Breanna: So I had like 650 people reporting to me. It was an amazing opportunity to learn. I really, I really did value it that time. What became really apparent is that what I had built for HuffPost, when you look at high-value sites (you know, not the mom and pop shop, not just your little blog, but it's actually a business, real businesses running off of it), that world with how CMSs are built, it is... they're not really cloud-based. WordPress and Drupal, you put on the, in the cloud, you have to host it online obviously, but the software is installed. And then you have to maintain your own instance and maintain your plugins and all this stuff. So we set out to solve that. And just like what Salesforce did for CRMs, make it truly that by moving over to RebelMouse, you wouldn't just have a better, cleaner site today, but we could keep you modern. And that's what websites struggle so much with, is their incredible backlog of roadmap requests. And what could be done for a website when they're dealing with you know, at best, a team of five people. And how do you actually keep up with that backlog? So the short story, RebelMouse, we build really fancy, really fast, high-performance websites. And to do that we have a platform that we can, that we're really proud of, that's the best in the world, and then an agency that helps do all the strategy and customization work as well.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: So you have the business, business model is a platform, like a subscription paid monthly fee, and then services as needed additional to [that]?
Andrea Breanna: Yeah. So we, we live in the B2B world completely. So our, our clients are companies, not consumers. And they pay on average, it's 5,000 a month that we make on the SaaS side, right. So that means they end up pointing their DNS and they don't need to pay an AWS bill or a CDN bill (Fastly, AWS, all of that goes away) and they pay us. And that's our, the SaaS part, part of our business. Then on the other side we have services. So when you look at our company (I think a lot of companies are like this), you, you know, you close a deal and you look at its bookings value. They will do multi-year with us usually, because you do not want to switch CMSs frequently. It's a big painful thing. You do it once and hope you've made a good choice. So they'll usually do three to five year license. So if the license, let's just make the math easy, if it's 10,000 a month because of their traffic or whatever it is, then you can forecast that as $120,000 in the year, right. The 10,000 times 12. But you only capture the cash off of that usually per month, right, they're not going to pay the whole thing upfront, right. So the services side usually the bill... which is we do a redesign, a relaunch, all this stuff... that ends up being in the neighborhood on the low side of 10 or 20,000. But on the high side it's like 1.5 million of work we're doing.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah.
Andrea Breanna: And so that, that has been an important way to fund the business because that tends to be like upfront or very fast to get to the cash side of all that money.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. So there's you know, multiple platforms today in the market and cloud seems to be everywhere and applications are all in the cloud. What, who, who's your biggest competitors in the space you're in?
Andrea Breanna: Um well we have... the, the dominant player in our market is WordPress.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Okay.
Andrea Breanna: And it has its own ecosystem of vendors and plugins and people who are used to WordPress. And a very impressive company, you know, um it powers 30% of the web, something like that. Um so that's the entrenched market. That's the, most people are on WordPress, you know. Then the second version is Drupal. Both of those are in the old paradigm: you have to maintain your own instance and da da. So in the new paradigm there's Contentful, which is a much bigger business than ours. We focused on solving a lot of issues that are the whole thing, so that we deliver this super fast website. They provide developers with tools that make them more efficient. Contentful. So it's called a "headless CMS" is their approach. They, they've gotten, they, they're very big and very successful. And sometimes people will feed that into a WordPress front end. But that's kind of a competitor for us. Uh and then the other one that's the biggest one is people custom build their CMS.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah.
Andrea Breanna: So our, our, our biggest competitor actually when we're looking at a, is a CTO that wants to build everything from scratch themselves. That mentality usually prevents us from making, getting a deal done. A CTO on the other side who wants a good life, that's like "I can't deal with it, they have an endless backlog and I don't want to be the one on emergency call for everything"... Like a lot of our clients are CTOs who, who want to have a sustainable life, deliver a better product, and get the credit for it. And they, they are some of our favorite clients. But sometimes CTOs take a more insecure approach and it looks like we could replace them, and they get scared of that. But a lot of CTOs are like, actually you know, surprising but in a job role the best... like when I was CTO at HuffPost, we had Greg Coleman joined. He was a big deal. He was president of Yahoo, he had thousands of people reporting to him, he's a big deal in the industry. It's a lovely person and an investor in RebelMouse, I adore him. And when Greg got to HuffPost he was like "Andrea we got to, you got to make yourself replaceable. Cuz right now we need to pick you up in a Hummer and a military Hummer and make sure, cuz if you die we're all screwed." And this sounds scary, but "you got to make yourself replaceable." And of course it's scary to hear, but it made, it was, it made me a much better CTO. And so like, you actually build things in a much more scalable, maintainable way when you don't think of yourself as the necessary hero, right. But the building this team and, and structure. So yeah.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: It's really cool to hear that, you know. As a company when you're building a product and you go into market, you try and find out you know what are the best niches to, to build in and be able to really go deep in those niches. But you have a product that really could serve really companies in any sector. Um Huffington Post really more in the editorial space and public you know, producing content is one area. Do you have a specific area you focus in on?
Andrea Breanna: Well it is important to figure out where you'll be successful and how to you know, how to make that clear for people. Like "Where are, what are you good for?" And it can't be for everything. So you know um, for us, um the first thing is that they need to have a real budget right. If that's the, the, the thing we were interested in [at] the beginning is like, because it's very tempting: can it be self-service? Like Squarespace is a tremendous business. It's incredible the cash it produces. Uh and they solve, but they solve a very different problem which is like, "I have a tiny budget, $5 to $20 a month sounds expensive." So one part for us was figuring out exactly the, the, the size of the business that we want. So in that sense, you have to be spending at least 60,000 a year at minimum before it's a conversation with us, and usually it should be hundreds of thousands from there.
Um what we... there's two big focuses for us. One is all the publishers, so that's what Google calls them as well. And it's all the media companies sometimes say, but it's like where you're building traffic and selling advertising. That's a lot of our clients, and that's how we do so much traffic off the platform, is we have so many clients like an Upworthy, a Brit + Co, a Raw Story, at GB News. Like all these high-traffic media sites, and we have a perfect 100% match for them. The other companies though is like we have Penske, the truck company (the U-Haul competitor), and we have Ricoh, the printer company.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow.
Andrea Breanna: And a bunch of ones like a PowerToFly, which, which is a job board, where we power the marketing side of this for companies and help them win in organic SEO. For brands that is... [what has] fueled a lot of growth for us. Because for a little while there our brands were distracted: "Does SEO even matter? I'm just going to spend on social. Search is going away, it's all social." And now social is like kind of falling apart in a lot of ways with what Elon Musk is doing to Twitter, uh or I'm supposed to call it X I guess. But like, and then Facebook's core property of Facebook with Meta is really spiraled. So suddenly organic search really does matter quite a bit. And the implications of what you can build with a six-figure budget with AI is now tremendous. So it's really exciting, there's so many things you could never do unless you had like $5 million to spend in a year. And now with what OpenAI has released and all of the competition to it, what a website can do with that suddenly with a smaller budget (not a tiny budget, but a smaller medium-sized budget of that 50 to 200,000) can revolutionize an industry. So it's a very exciting time right now for that stuff.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Talk to us about AI. You know companies are trying to figure out what AI means to them, what it means to their digital side of their business. What is RebelMouse doing to help this?
Andrea Breanna: Yeah, so we have, we've invested a lot into AI since um, since I guess it was, it's a full uh 16 months of deep investment in AI for us. And um so there's, we think about it in a couple ways. One is research and development on all these tools that will make an editor or creator smarter and more efficient. We don't believe in replacing them. So far every experiment where you let AI go write articles or write content ends up being a very sad result. Like we don't think that's the right path. But where AI is tremendous is doing the stuff, for example for editors, the stuff they don't like to do anyway. Pick the right SEO optimized slug for it. Pick the right alt tag for that image. You know, pick that... There's a lot of optimizing content that most editors that are good at it don't enjoy, they just know is important. And very few editors are good at it.
So we've built into the CMS that their experience is now enhanced by AI so that the things they never were very good at doing just happen on click of a button. Like, so you can be totally SEO optimized. The right social headline, the right SEO headline, all of that stuff. Including images, which is really cool how you can... we do very creative things to look at an article and then use OpenAI to create the um custom prompt to Stable Diffusion and come back with 10 images that work for this article. It's really cool stuff we're doing there that is basically enhancing human experience for creators.
The other part of AI though is on the front end. So we've had two really big breakthroughs this year. One is that um, we're working directly with Google and the Google Ad Manager team. Um we found a way to use AI to boost programmatic revenue. And the results we're getting is awesome. It's 60% increase in eCPM and a 200% increase in RPM. Um and so it's, it's like it's very exciting. So right now there's a part of the company that with the CMS, when you think about it, you know there's... you display an article or a blog, and then you have the conversion units around it. Like "sign up" or "request a demo," or you have ads. And we're really good at serving those ads. So this has been a big breakthrough for us, that now we're like way better than anyone at it because of AI.
And the key is that we're collecting first-party data. Right now if you look at the state of publishers, they, it's hard enough with their roadmap to create a very fast perfect article page. But on top of it, to be collecting useful data about their users that can actually boost revenue, it's a holy grail that's very hard for any publisher to actually wrap their head around, "how, what makes it useful, what makes it real revenue?" So right now you can use AI to understand your users better, start mapping data about what they're actually into, and then that feeds into better ads and better recommendations for content. So those are the two things you want from someone on your site if you're a publisher. You want them to click an ad because the higher click-throughs you get, the more you're going to serve high value ads. So the really cool thing about this what we're doing is, it's not just getting higher value ads to the, to, to the front end and to the person reading the site, but they're better matched to that person. So click-through rates double as well. So it's good for the brands.
So that is what for us is, you, really AI thrives when you have data and a vision for how that data can work. And a really good way to start is thinking about how you can learn more about the interests, passions, etc., of your, of your audience and map that back to either serve better recommendation of content or serve better ads. And those are, those are the clear huge breakthroughs. The other piece that we're working on which we're really excited is use AI for what we call matching. So we have other customers of ours that do like for example lead gen, and so being able to take a lead as a person and define the things you know about that person, that what they like, what they're interested in, then you can do matching. So for PowerToFly we do matching for, they have a job and they need to find the best talent for the job. AI is tremendous at doing that type of matching. Another customer is an, they do uh you know, news about stocks and what you might want to invest in. So to understand the person's profile, what they're interested in, you know, and then being able to match that to the companies they should take a look at. It's really, there's just things you cannot do on level of personalization and matching between things without AI. So it's a very exciting world for what... when we look at you know, there's all these scary things about AI. And generally whenever we talk about AI with a client or a prospect, the first part is, "look, AI is as scary as it is exciting. And so if you're just excited about it and you're not scared, you're actually missing part of the picture." It is scary.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, a lot happening there in that space. Um you mentioned about um one of your clients with you know, having a job and then utilizing AI to find the best person. Walk us through that. Because a lot of... we're in the hiring space, we help companies grow and scale locally, internationally. Yeah. And we're always interested about you know technologies, but more so about AI and where there's, can be some real value for our customers, for us, for, for everyone in the ecosystem of building and growing companies. Um can you share more about that?
Andrea Breanna: Yeah, I mean it's a classic one for AI. Because if you think about the resume, it's a perfect semi-structured data right. It's like what your story is and your cover letter, your experience, you know, all of that is formatted differently. You need a human to go through and decide if this is a good match or not. And what AI can do is start to extract from a resume all of the things that you need to match. What are the soft skills implicit here? A wonderful example is like, when we were doing this, we did our first release. And so then the PowerToFly team would look and see, is this a good match? And they're like, "wait, this one doesn't seem it's a match for a writer, why did you recommend this candidate?" And it was a perfect one, because in the cover letter she wrote that she went to the Iowa, the... I forget the school in Iowa, it's like the number one writing school. It's like the... on... it's crazy school. She didn't list it in her resume formally, it was part of her cover letter that, that was part of her whole experience, that she was a marketer who was a writer. And the job was as a writer. There's a lot of things that are missed by this sort of semi-structured chaos of the data of resumes and of jobs. That AI, when you have a large pool of talent, you know... you're probably aware, but like, I know because my wife runs PowerToFly, so she's you know, so I hear all this you, and when we look at building our own company, the amount of unconscious bias that goes into missing the best candidate, you know, AI can really help you reconsider and think about who are the best people for this job and why. And so making that efficient, that sort of matching to a resume and a job, and give you the top 50 or top 10 matches, uh it's definitely a perfect example of how AI can help. This like, you still want a human in the end. You're not going to have AI decide to just hire the person and give [the] job, but you can make a human's job of sorting through a lot of applicants to find the best matches be very quick.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, and technology has been out for a long time doing this. It seems like it's getting easier and better and more efficient and more cost-effective as well. So really excited to see the, the continual innovation in that area. Um talk a little bit about your company. Um you went out and got funding, uh you built it up, you really built it up fairly well, built a big sales team, downsized, right-sized, built back up. What was the journey like? What, what were some of the lessons that you learned um when it comes to specifically going to market and building sales teams?
Andrea Breanna: Yeah, so I was lucky and privileged um with the way that HuffPost was successful. So raising capital was pretty easy right now, today, regardless of your story in almost 99% of the cases. Wow, raising is hard. So I was lucky with the time. There was just money pouring into startups, and VCs had a model of funding sweat equity people. So funding someone who had had a success in a startup, who was ready to start their own, that was just this like magic element where it was very easy for me to raise money. In retrospect, when you do raise money, then they expect you to spend that money. You don't just keep it in the treasure chest thing. There's these stories, I was always so impressed by that story of Slack raising an extra 200 million without needing it just for the treasure chest component of it. Like that was like "what? You can do that?" It's like, but that's like yeah, you have to be as hot as Slack to do it.
But um, we, I... What's the hardest thing is that you have to be confident as a, as a founder and CEO. So what's that confidence that is that right mix, right? You have people who "fake it till you make it," and you realize it was literally a scam. They never started making it, they just faked the whole thing. And you have Elizabeth Holmes and SBF and all of that. So but as a, as a founder, you do have to believe in what you're doing, and you have to judge when it's time to sell it. And it's so easy to say, and so hard to do. So I built my sales team up way too soon in my business. I thought it's enough. We've been in business for three or four years, we had real customers who loved us, and I thought it was time. I didn't, I, it's easy to blame investors, they didn't push me into the decision. They didn't force me, I'm very lucky with the board I have in investors. But in retrospect, we had an very expensive sales team built far too early. So it was about three years into the company, four years into the company, that we had a very big and very expensive sales team.
Um and as a company, we were burning $800,000 a month. So whatever amount you raise, it's always you think like "oh, I raised 10 million, I have so much money." But that could go in 10 months in a blink. Suddenly like, "Whoa, you don't." So I raised 21 million total, and we were about five years in, we were reaching the end of the 21 million, and we were raising 25. So we were going to keep spending because "now we'll raise 25, and that gives us a two-year runway of burning more, a million a month," right. And so that keeps you on track with the VC path. But we weren't hitting the numbers we needed to raise that 25. So when that fell apart on us, fell apart on me, um then I had a very personal decision. The board and investors [were] like, "Do you want to shut it down?" Because then I had like five months of cash left. "So do you use that time to you know, tuck in loose ends and say goodbye to it and shut it down?"
And for me, I love what we were doing, I did love the product. I hated the company at that time because it was so stressful. So I woke up every day with an impending sense of doom. Those, it was about three years of what I consider the hardest, hardest, most awful parts of my life as a founder/CEO, with that sense of literally an impending sense of doom. I'm sure the founders out there listening know exactly what I mean. It's not, not fun. And so we made a big transformation. We cut almost the entire sales team, cut a lot of the... the culture had been, had had gotten... we grew so fast and without regards to... I mean, VC-based fast growth companies, the truth is almost none of them have good culture. HuffPost's culture was like... everyone joked, it seemed like totally dysfunctional company, there was so much infighting, so much bitchiness, so much politics. But if the growth is there, everyone ignores it, um and just you deal with it.
But for me, it was really important to me to have a culture that I actually liked. And I had a bunch of frat bros and douchebags and sales people who were toxic that had happened. It creeps on you, but you kind of like turn your eye, blind eye, you apologize to others for it, but you reward the people who close deals regardless of their viciousness or whether they sold it correctly or any of that. So it took me... it ended up um, I found a CEO coach who was really like... it's like the only time I've ever had a therapist or a psychiatrist. She's amazing, Vera. And she kind of like helped me figure out how to prioritize happiness, make it... I like think in terms of abundance in ter-, instead of scarcity. And so now if you fast forward, we've had just these wonderful years where we have a 1% churn rate on employees. So we have the same leadership team today that was three years ago, but we've gone from 50 people to a little over 100. So we've grown it, but in this way where it's this very like caring and compassionate culture. And through the years, if there was ever a fight or tension between two leaders in particular, instead of ignoring it and just dealing with it, we really cared, and we really like worked it out. So I am very... I, I, I love that we have this incredibly positive culture and a happy life.
The hard part, and this is the tricky thing, is that if you get to like it a lot, it can become a lifestyle business very quickly. And then I have... well, I took 23 million dollars from my investors. If it's a lifestyle business now, and it makes all my clients happy and my 100 employees happy, and I have my brownstone in Park Slope, so I'm happy... that could go on for another decade and we'd all be happy. But the investors' 23 million would still be missing at the end of the 10 years. So the tricky thing we're on now is like, we've got to return, we've got to give them an exit now. We've got to figure out that path, not just a lifestyle company. And what I'm proud of is that the leadership team we're working with, very... I, I'm... it's very transparent for them that now when we go into this next year, we've done all of this calibration so that we've hit like a 20 to 40% growth year-over-year for the last three or four years. And now it's, where, where our focus is on the projects we're doing, that they are not projects that have a maximum um... what, what we look at is where projects have exponential growth instead of incremental growth. Um and that the breakthroughs with ad tech that we've done and with AI, we're excited about that. But that will be our focus this year as a culture. Now focusing on, can we do this holy grail of creating real growth, but doing it in a way that is actually like a good life, not just burning everybody out, you know. Which is what most startups do at the end, people are like, "need to take two years off because they were working 20-hour days," you know. Yeah. So that's our current, current objective, mission, and where, what we're going to try to do this year.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. Yeah, thanks for kind of pulling that all together. Um there was a couple things that you mentioned I want to go back to. One of them was you're working with Google. How was the, how did that transpire? What was the inroads to, to collaborate with Google?
Andrea Breanna: Well we've had a... we've been working on that relationship. Google's so big that it's like there's products everywhere and teams everywhere. So over the years when Google released AMP, we did a case study with them on the impact of AMP. And then with Core Web Vitals we did another one. And then with the GAM team it was a, a mixture of that sort of hard work on relationships and then getting lucky. So um we ended up having... there was like, actually I did a thing with Google on um, on their press side and PR side, talking about why advertising isn't evil. As a trans person, like how all these publisher stories that I wasn't able to see as a kid, that they weren't there, are now available, and it's because of advertising that they're free, etc. And that led to talking with the GAM team about you know, the struggles publishers have right now. And that the death of third party cookies is so scary.
And what we had to give them is some creative idea that was interesting, that connected to the problem they were struggling with. And if you work GAM, Google Ad Manager, the big huge "oh no, what's going to happen" is the death of third party cookies. You know, for two decades ad tech has focused on violating our privacy, and, and that's literally all of its technology for two decades is like, "If I abandoned a shopping cart somewhere, show me that item." Like that's where our ad tech is, you know. And you feel it, like it's listening to me. I mention a couch and I see it. And so that's uh, that's over. That's going to be over. It's not over today, but because of all the privacy issues from governments around the world, there's no way this is going to be okay to just be... and when that ends, it's a many trillion dollar brutal pain that now, and that's where we're helping Googs. There's got to be something positive. How do you turn this just pain and suffering into something that is actually a potential opportunity if you start getting ahead on it? And that's first party data or zero party data, at both of those. And where it's like, let's start doing things that are interesting.
So we feel really lucky, we have the platform plus agency where all these clients trust us. So we can, with Big Tech, come to them and it's less... Google doesn't pay us either for the SaaS or for them, for services that we do for them. But they pay us for research. Across let's take 10 properties, and if they all do this, what happens to their revenue? That type of a thing ends up being a really important piece for us where we can do that for technology companies and test across high value sites in a uniform way. That's really impossible for them. What they can do pretty easily is go get a case study from one property, but to see the same thing actually implemented across a bunch of sites that are of different verticals and everything, to collect in one research, is where we add value for Google right now.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Got it, that's really cool. And then I wanted to touch base on the build-out of the sales team. Uh you talked about if you were to do it differently, and I think you have done it differently now, is to build out a mini sales team. Talk about that.
Andrea Breanna: Yeah I mean listen, on, from a founder CEO perspective, you have to figure out what makes you happy. And for me for example, business travel, I have kids, I don't want to do business travel. I want to be with them. I want to spend my time here with my family. I hate business travel. So there's an element too is that I needed people who I felt really comfortable representing me, you know, that they have the right value system and everything. So I am so, so happy we have our, our CRO actually has a different title, Chief Strategy Officer. And that's on purpose because Chris Anderson is a name. And I love to do a deal with us, you have to sign a deal with a trans person and a game and like it's like we're pretty clearly, and we have conservative companies that use our platform, but you know they, they just check, "Are you going to get mad at us if we publish something? Are you going to shut us down?" And it's like "We are a platform, okay. So we, we can do that. Uh we, we, it's okay." But Chris has built this very... we have a very small team.
And the thing for me is that there's very few sales people that really care about... I mean sorry, the great sales people don't care about the sale. They care about the relationship. And they care about what does that person think of them one year after the deal is done. And that's where I, I had what I consider terrible salespeople at my company because they didn't care. Not all of them, but some of them you realize they didn't care at all. They're just taking the money, commission. They don't plan to see this person a year later. So I recommend for, for founder CEOs is to find someone that truly you feel like they represent your values. They're not going to differ from that. They're not going to be like... it's tempting to take a salesperson who's super aggressive and gets the deal done no matter what. But you really want someone that you feel good about at the end of the day, and that they really care about their relationship. And so now we have this small team um and it works very well. It's really wonderful. Now we're building it up though, because now we realize, "okay, now is when we should have had the larger sales team." But it's like, not four years into the company, it's 10 years into the company for us. So it's very personal to the company and the founder when it's the right time, but scaling that up can be fun when it's, when it is the right time, you know.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, no, that's really crucial. I think we, you know, we work with a lot of companies, early stage that have 500 grand in funding and $300 million in funding, they're more established, but going to market and getting customers is, you know, the challenge for every company. You know, get in front of them, make sure you have something they need, it's priced right, it solves a problem. And then replicate that with teams you can create, build, and they can execute on your strategy. Um and every company we talk to was always asking us, you know, "at some point I got to build out my sales team and they're not sure when, who to buy, who to, who to, who to add to the team, how many they should you know hire." And yeah, you know, then you have to ensure that they're going to actually know how to sell your product and there's some churn in there. So it's I think a challenge for every company, but I like the fact that you, you did it one way and you figured out how to do it a different way once you learned, and it's been very successful. I think that's some insights a lot, lot can learn from. You know, as ourselves, you know, we, we provide recruitment services and we provide HR services and a few other things, but um you know, when we do this podcast, all the guests that come on our show, it's truly for us to give back and so others can learn from it.
And when we get off the podcast, sometimes we have conversations with the guests of you know, "what's it look like in terms of your growth?" And um you know some are like, "Yeah we're going to scale up and you know we can bring you guys in, I think you can really help us out based on your niche," and some it doesn't really matter. But none of this is tied to our services in the podcast. And I'll share a story because I thought it was funny. We had got off a podcast a while back and you know one of the founders, I sent an email to after, and said, "Hey, you know what, look, you're really growing, it's great, happy you had on the podcast, that's being released next week. And you know, by the way, you know these are our services, be great to chat with you at some point if it makes sense." And you know, just sharing who we are, what we do. There's no contingency of the podcast and our services. And the response back was, "This email to me feels weird. Like this does not like, I feel like, like forget about the podcast." And like you... and, and I was like taken aback. Like my, that has zero intention of like... I'm just, we're providing a service. This is our sustainable business, but you know, [the] podcast is really about sharing stories. And um, I just thought it was interesting because you know, it's not just the sales team. And by the way, my, the intent for me is as, and you, you know this as a leader of a company, there's probably no one more passionate about what you do and your story and the services you can provide. And if you can get a sales team to communicate like you communicate, yeah it would probably be an A plus sales team. And it's about the long-term relationship, it's not about the transaction. That's how I feel too. And so I was kind of like "Wow, that was kind of putting me back on my heels" of, that wasn't the intent, but it was also, it was, it was an honest response, yeah, right from them. And it was, I was grateful for the feedback because maybe the feeling was that that was about the process and the transaction, and it couldn't have been further from the truth right. I just share that because our culture isn't that at all, it's really about that long-term relationship. And I think if you get the wrong people on the team that, that present your service or product in a way that is about the transaction, it's, it's a short-term fix for you know a long-term problem of continual revenue future.
Andrea Breanna: Absolutely. Absolutely. Totally agree.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: So anyway. Um I want to wrap up here with just sharing that really, really excited to, to have you on and can't wait to see what the future holds for you as you continue to grow out, grow out your business with AI. If someone wanted to find uh your company where would they go, and if they want to find you where would they go?
Andrea Breanna: Well we're in the business of websites, so we have a website we're proud of. It, it's fast, all those things. Rebelmouse.com. And we would all very much love... there's a little "request to demo or talk to us," whether it's strategy services and figuring out what AI means to you. Uh I will tell, say, in our first meetings we do a strategic sale, meaning you'll learn something and we're proud of that, even if you don't work with us. So um we would love to talk with, with you. andrea@rebelmouse.com is my email, which I get very behind on these days. Um I am on LinkedIn, Andrea Breanna, and I've abandoned Twitter because of my hate of Elon Musk. So you can find me sort of on Threads now.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Got it. Very cool. Well thanks for coming on. I appreciate you telling your story and telling your story of the company. And to all of, all our listeners for joining us today, I really appreciate you listening. Means world to me. My name is Jake Aaron Villarreal, uh host [of] the podcast and look forward to catching up with you all on the next episode. Until then, take care.
Before we wrap up, I want to give a big shout out to all the entrepreneurs that have joined to make this podcast possible. And for all the listeners for listening, it means the world to me that you chose to spend your time with us today. I'm your host Jake Aaron Villarreal signing off for now, but can't wait to connect with you all soon on the next episode. Take care.
This show is sponsored by Match Relevant, a company that helps venture-backed startups find the best people in the market. And they do it in three simple steps. First, they sit down with founders to understand their story. Second, they tell their story into multiple candidate channels. And third, they schedule interviews within 48 hours. Find us at matchrelevant.com to learn more about how we do it.
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