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 be inspired in discovering what it takes to build a thriving startup. I'm your host, Jake Aaron Villarreal, and here today to talk with Martins Brutkin, or rather Martins Bratuskins. I think I'm saying that right?
Martins Bratuskins: Yeah, that's fine.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Okay, great. Founder of Monetizr, a Techstars-funded startup which has raised $4.5 million in funding. Martins, welcome to the show.
Martins Bratuskins: Great to, to be here Jake. Very excited.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Great. Let me give you a little background on Martins. Martins is the founder and CEO of Monetizr. He plays a leading role in the company, helping to move the operations to the US, uh onboarding major game studio customers. Uh they recently raised $4.5 million in funding and their product helps enable game publishers to create new revenue streams. So Martins, we're going to dive into your company and the problem it solves, and we'll get into a lot of that. Um but before we get started, tell us a little bit about where you're currently located and how did you get into the startup world?
Martins Bratuskins: Um yeah, great question. So um I'm originally from Riga, Latvia. Uh it's a small country in the Northeast Europe. Um and um yeah, I essentially I grew up here and I studied uh both here and then in Germany for a while. And then um yeah, I was working, uh actually I studied civil engineering, funny enough. Uh so civil engineering, for some reason I, I always felt like I like to, I want to build stuff and uh that's, that was kind of my passion and still is. And that's why I figured, "Hey, let me study civil engineering because that will enable me to do... to build stuff." Uh but then I started working for a like a very nice company in that space here, uh but very quickly I realized that that's not exactly what I want to do. And then I was there for less than two years and then somehow I started going to these um hackathons, startup hackathons. Like these 48-hour events where you know you come, a couple people uh join together in a team, build something within 48 hours. And uh yeah, first one that I went to was a total disaster, it was like totally didn't work out. But then I went to a couple more and then eventually that kind of... that was what I needed to start my startup journey in the early days.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah that's great. So civil engineering to computer science, did you actually learn how to code in school or learn it on your own?
Martins Bratuskins: Actually I, I don't know how to code. Uh so yeah, my... actually my, my uh bachelor's degree says that I'm a like a "bridge and road engineer." Actually like that kind of a engineer. So I, I'm not a coder myself, but uh I have learned... at least in the early days I, I spent a lot of time like trying to understand what is needed uh to run a startup. And of course like a tech startup needs uh tech capabilities and then programming and stuff like that. So I, I feel like I can, I know, I understand enough to be able to speak with developers, speak with technical people, but at the same time of course uh if it gets too deep then I'm probably not the right person to have that conversation.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, I hear you. Yeah, I think it's important you know as a CEO you don't need to know how to code, you just have to understand the operations, the company and the strategy, and uh a lot of other aspects that go into a startup, you know. Um Riga is a place that I've also been to. I did a world travel with a backpack and a laptop and a camera and a notebook and just went solo for a year, which was an incredible experience. But one of my best experiences was in your hometown. Um I had met up with some random tourists and we just went around the country, had a blast, and what a great part of Europe. I love that area. The Baltic states are incredible. So you're the first uh um startup that we've had on, on, on the show that's from that part of the world and excited to hear the globalization of kind of where you started and, and how you distributed to the US and different parts of the world, but we'll get there.
In terms of the company you're at today, Monetizr, before this did you start other companies or was, was this your first experience?
Martins Bratuskins: Uh no, this is uh I would say that this is my like a second startup. Uh and then of course I've worked in various companies uh before, but um this is my second startup. The first, first one was a big failure. I made basically made all the mistakes in the book, like everything. So I, I feel like that was a very good experience to have. Um but yeah, essentially not to say that we haven't made mistakes also here, but at least I feel like that was my first crash course and then this is my second.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Gotcha. Well you learn from your mistakes and sometimes that's the best experience you can get so you can apply that to the new companies you join. Now, when you started uh Monetizr which was launched in 2016. We say a startup, but you know, funding and growing, um really startup to me is a company that's still evolving. So when you started, I think you have an interesting story. Correct me if I'm wrong, you left your paying job with your co-founders to start Monetizr. Is that accurate?
Martins Bratuskins: That is accurate. Yes. We um, we knew that we want to do something together. Um we uh built prototypes with like uh with no-code solutions back in the day. And I remember those were like Zapier and, and IFTTT [If This Then That] and Shopify and like various services that we could kind of plug together and like create a POC of a product. And then um yeah, we, we actually uh, we in the very early days we were testing various market segments. Uh our idea was essentially that, that uh we will help mobile game publishers to, to monetize their games through merchandise sales. Kind of like creating custom merchandise for, for both big and small publishers because that was something that was usually available for you know very successful game publishers, big, big IPs, but not for smaller ones or mid- middle tier. So we u- that was our first business model that we uh decided to, to, to tackle.
And then to... and yeah, we, we applied to various startup incubators, accelerators in the US. We knew that we wanted to go to the US and uh for a while there I remember it was like, "Hey, it doesn't look promising." But somehow yeah, we didn't lose hope and uh uh sooner or later like essentially we, we started having these conversations. And I remember that there was this one like a relatively small accelerator uh like in Cincinnati, Ohio, um that uh we really bonded with the, the managing director there. And I would say that he's probably the one big reason why Monetizr is in existence today, because he somehow believed in us and he said, "Hey guys, it seems that you're onto something, we have this program here, come here." And that's, that's how we got to Cincinnati, Ohio.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Interesting. Now, was that part of Techstars or is that something different?
Martins Bratuskins: That was something different. That's, that program is called UpTech, UpTech Ideas. Um and um yeah, they're based out of Cincinnati. Uh and um we, we, we had a couple of offers but somehow we prioritized this relationship. We felt like, "Hey, this guy gets us, uh we need to go there," because relationships have and are very... have been, still are very, very important in our day-to-day life. Um and uh yeah, we went to Cincinnati and spent like a little bit more than a year there. Um and it's just like funny how, how this, this whole thing comes around. Because back then I remember we were like essentially doing a gaming startup, um and many people, like pretty much everyone uh that we met in Cincinnati through the mentorship programs and through like various other activities, that everyone was like, "Hey, but why Cincinnati? It's like, it's not a gaming place, it's like, you know, it's, it's a weird choice for a couple of Latvians to go to Cincinnati, Ohio to start a gaming company." And uh they're correct. That was a like... I mean, somehow a coincidence. But like after now... now, just like... okay, there's plenty of stuff in between that we'll, we'll get into, but u- now our biggest client is based in Cincinnati, Ohio, which is Procter & Gamble. They're headquartered there. So it's, it's just like somehow comes... this whole thing comes around.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, they say proximity sometimes is the most valuable aspect of a company. If you're in Silicon Valley it might be access to investors, if it's the Midwest it could be you know you're in the automotive industry. Uh depends on where you're located in the world. But that's great you've made those connections, and the network I know is important. Um walk me through the initial idea about Monetizr, where it was at and then where it's at today. And if you made a pivot, what that looked like. Because we work with a lot of startups and I, I don't think there's one that hasn't gone through some form of a pivot that's transformed who they are and what they do today versus when they started.
Martins Bratuskins: Great question. Um yes, so like I explained before, so our first business model was essentially we, we were going to help game publishers monetize their games (hence Monetizr) uh through um custom game, game-branded merchandise products that we would automate the production and um kind of do that part. And um and that was our, yeah that was our business model. We um, that was when we were, went to Cincinnati and also when we l- then a little bit later joined Techstars and moved down to Atlanta, Georgia. That was our business model. Uh we onboarded actually quite a few game publishers onto our product, which was uh like integrated into their games. We, we made an SDK, the Software Development Kit for iOS, Android and for Unity, um that game publishers could integrate. Um and um uh our product was made for game publishers to, to make more money from their existing user base by offering them exclusive limited edition merchandise products that they could buy directly from the game. Uh so that was the business model.
We, we tried... I mean, there's plenty of things that we tried within that business model. And it did work with those publishers that had, that created a very deep integration with the game, and where the, the products were like exclusive and they were unlockable after you reached a certain level. So it had this level of exclusivity to them. Uh some publishers did like this um like a limited edition uh merchandise products, like t-shirts with a specific design that maybe had like um specific number printed on the back here that said, "Hey you, you own the t-shirt number, I don't know, 57 out of 100 this design." Things like that, that worked. And the sales results and the conversion results were good for those publishers who did that deep integration.
But the problem that we always had was that um, this only addressed, this, this, this addressed the, the, the super fans of the game. You know like, the, in the gaming space they're called "whales." Like these people who are, you know, spend lots of time, lots of money within that game. And uh the problem was that for game publishers, even especially for the bigger ones, uh it was almost never priority number one to integrate a solution that only serves like a, I don't know, top 1% of their audience. Yes, very important audience, but you know, there's a 99% of the audience that this solution doesn't really help or monetize. And uh that was um, yeah, we struggled with this with, for a while. Uh because we had these mixed signals like "Hey, everyone wanted to do that. Everyone wanted to be like Angry Birds with like a big gaming brand and have like swag and stuff." But when it came to actual integration and dedicating your, your developer resources to, to make the integration, which was easy but still you know, we needed, that needed to be done, it was never a priority.
And that was for us as a company, it was just like heartbreaking all the time. Like it is these mixed signals: "Hey, we really want to do it, but not now. We really want to do it, but not now." And I feel like you know we were also telling ourselves that "no, no, no, it's gonna happen, it's gonna happen." But u- eventually we just realized that it's something that unless we figure out how to address a bigger part of the audience, not just like the top one or two percent of the player base, but something closer to 100%, we realized it's probably not going to be a priority for any big publisher. So and that, that's the thinking that led us to the pivot that we eventually did in 2020.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: So just to clear that up, you had a nice-to-have product but not a need-to-have product. And within that scope of that game publisher, it was for them an ability to raise or build revenue into their platform or their, their application, their game. Um but you were actually shipping a product in the process of a t-shirt or something that was connected to that game for their fans that would buy it online, and you guys would generate revenue out of that model. But then that at some point didn't quite hit the levels you needed or wanted, and so then you, you made a change, right?
Martins Bratuskins: That's correct. And I, I mean, I, I still believe that there's plenty of games that would really benefit from that model, uh because we, I love that model. We had created like... there I remember there were a couple of these um, these um very, very high-class game developers. Uh like one of them also had just gotten an Apple Design Award, you know like Apple does these uh um essentially for, for the best app of the year or game of the year kind of re- awards every year. And they had just gotten that one. And they were very picky, like very this perfectionist type, and they had integrated our product in such a nice way. Essentially they, they showed us the way how it's supposed to work. And that was so nice and it was like "Hey yes, there's these people that get us," and then actually the sales in those games were very good.
But yeah, we, we just realized that these bigger publishers who look at their game economy more from a "hey, but just a pure numbers perspective," it just, it was never going to be a priority because it was a nice-to-have. It was like "hey, we can always make I don't know, like a web store somewhere outside of the game that would just be quicker, and other people could do it and stuff like that." And that, that feature of having it inside the game and having the possibility to pay with Apple Pay or Google Pay right within the game without leaving it, it was just like not as important for them.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Got it. So talk about the new revenue model, the new product that you pivoted to. And when you talk about a pivot, what goes into that? I mean, how... some people talk about a pivot, but it's really just a language change of how they're presenting their product and to a different audience. But sometimes it's actually rebuilding a new product or integrating new technology that you didn't have before. What, what was the pivot like for you and what did that include?
Martins Bratuskins: Yeah. Um so from, from the very early days, I remember when we uh when we got accepted to Techstars, we were, you know, they, they do this great job of matching each company together with various mentors from the ecosystem. And um they did that also for us, so I'm very, very happy and grateful for that. Um that network is still great and we still keep in touch with all of the people, so it's, it's great. But I remember that when we were pitching that first uh, first business model, this merchandise business model to them, um one thing that kept coming up and again and again and again was that "Hey, you guys essentially have built a product, you have built an integration into these games that has a certain amount of audience, but you're only monetizing the top one or two percent." So like I said before. "And there's like 98% that you don't address, right? Like what, what's up with that?"
And it just happened to be that many of our mentors were coming from a marketing background. Uh especially that was in Atlanta. So many had worked for Coca-Cola or Home Depot or Delta or you know, one of the big companies uh down there. And um yeah, so they were always kind of like nudging us to explore that marketing aspect of our product. That "hey, you have this audience, you have access to this audience, but you're not doing anything to it. I mean, there's plenty of brands that are trying to get into gaming and trying to reach that audience. So why don't you do that for them?" That was, that was thing number one.
And then thing number two was, I remember we had a... from time to time we went to these gaming conferences and uh I, I very vividly remember, remember that the one in Helsinki, Finland, uh where we met the people from SYBO. And SYBO is the company that makes a game called Subway Surfers. Subway Surfers is the most downloaded mobile game of all time on the mobile devices. And I remember talking to them and also pitching that merchandise product. And also them saying like, "Hey, we have, from time to time we have these like big and small brands reach out to us and want to kind of somehow integrate into the game. I mean you have there like some kind of products inside the game, but why not make them the branded product?" And that was like a lightbulb moment for us. For my co-founder and I, we were like, "Hey, this is exactly what the mentors have been telling us to explore. And this is now one of the largest game publishers in the world telling us that that's something that they might be interested in."
So that was that light m- lightbulb moment when we took a real, really deep look into "hey, this, this, this old business model it's not scaling or not working as well as we expected. Um maybe it's time for a change because like it, we needed to do something." And then this, this conference in Helsinki, that was a Pocket Gamer Helsinki conference I think in 2020, late 2020. When we were like, "okay, I feel like now is the time."
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, so Procter & Gamble you mentioned is a client. What's the use case for them and what specifically do you do with them, and, and why gaming for them? Walk me through that use case so that it's clear to the listeners of how your model works today.
Martins Bratuskins: Yeah. So essentially uh our product is... so right now, Monetizr is an ad tech product uh where we have, we have two sides of the marketplace. One is the, the advertisers, like the big brands, the CPGs, the Procter & Gambles of the world. And the other side are game publishers. And our product sits between both of them. So right now what we do is we go and we sell um to the CPGs of the world, like Procter & Gamble brands, uh we sell these in-game activations. And then we uh, our product is integrated into many, many game publishers. And now we also have the big ones that we couldn't get across the finish line before, uh like Voodoo and TapNation and like those very, very big ones. Um and on the game publisher side, it is a uh new revenue thing for them.
But how it actually works, what's the big difference between what Monetizr does and what typical in-game advertising looks like? Um that's the question that brands always ask me. Uh and the big question is that um, there's a couple... I, I think like the timing is now when big brands are understanding and starting to realize that gaming is a media channel. For a very long time they were kind of writing it off and saying that "hey, this is uh just like for teenage boys in their basements and, and yada yada yada," something like that. That was definitely an assumption that many people had before. And then somehow COVID hit, and uh gaming... if I'm not sure if you, you remember, but like in the media everything was going down, but like gaming was that one thing that now it was clear that "okay, that is picking up," right. And then I feel like that was that moment sh- that shift, mind, mind shift uh like change and shift for the, the brand owners and advertisers, that "hey, this is a media channel. People are using it, not only teenage boys, but everyone's using it." And the data proves it, like the average gamer is like 38 years old and like the median income is like I think like 60 something thousand. So it's, it's not your stereotypical gamer.
So what we offer for brands like P&G, we offer this uh uh reach of Gen Z and millennial audiences inside a network of mobile video games. And the format is... our format is a multi-touch format, so that it's not a one ad that pops up somewhere in the gameplay, right, that is just like uh... that the one that when it pops up then you, you wait for that X to show up. Um that's, that's the typical in-game ad, period. And we were like, "okay, no, that's, that's not the experience that we want," because we also, we've had, we've built games and apps before, and that's like a necessary evil almost. So we asked ourselves, "how can we, hey, here's this brand that wants to reach and engage with these gamers. How can we make it so that the brand helps players instead of annoys players?"
So what we did is we created these, these opt-in formats where the player can choose to play with the brand. There's like a uh, this, this pop-up button that shows up somewhere on the main screen of the game once the campaign is activated. Uh then if the player chooses to opt in and engage, then they click on that button, then this branded uh offer wall shows up where there's uh let's say the brand banner and then various objectives that the player can complete and get branded rewards. Those objectives include uh branded mini games, quizzes, surveys, uh also branded videos, things like that. Once the player completes any one of those objectives, they receive an in-game reward uh or also a in, in some cases we also offer branded coupons. Let's say you get x amount of dollars off some, something. Um so that, that's essentially that the flow. The players can choose to opt in with the brand, play the branded experience, and get a branded reward inside the game. That's what we do now.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. How big is the market?
Martins Bratuskins: Yeah. Uh I mean right now it's uh, the, the game, the game advertising market right now sits uh around um I believe like it's 170 or something billion dollars right now. But almost none of that is typical brands, right. Like the uh, it's a very, very small percentage of that budget is actually spent by, by ad, right, by you know brands, advertisers. Most of that money is spent within the industry of one game publisher advertising in another game, game right. Like so that they can get uh users from one game to another. "Hey you make a new game, you advertise in other games to get users to your game." And that's something that game publishers are not very keen on, but that's like a necessary evil that they do. But, but what, where is the opportunity is that these CPG brands and these you know big advertisers, they don't necessarily want to take players away from the game. They just want to engage with the players, give them some value so that they can build relationships with those players. And that's where we come in, where essentially we enable these big advertisers to place their uh interactive experiences inside existing video games at scale. Um so that players can engage and uh get rewards from specific brands that they like. And from a budget, like from a market and, and a business perspective, I feel like there's a huge opportunity for growth. Because these big brands have not really advertised in games in a, in a meaningful way before. So I feel like that is a blue ocean opportunity to enable them to buy these experiences at scale.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: So the business model now is the ad- advertisers are spending money with the publishers who are making revenue off of where they're being, they're placing those ads. And you guys get a percentage based on having the marketplace platform.
Martins Bratuskins: Yeah, we essentially, we do a rev share with the publishers. So our pitch to the game publishers is, "Hey, we will be your brand sales team essentially." You know you can, like the big, big, big publishers they have their own brand sales teams. But the vast majority of publishers, even very big ones, don't. And it's a new, new, totally different area that they have to hire new gr- for. And it is, it's expensive and it's, it's just something that they can do but it's, it's difficult. But they're, if we partner with them, we essentially become their sales team. Uh we go to these big brands, we say, "Hey we have inventory like, let's say in the US we have approximately 78 million uh monthly active users that we can reach within the US only." Um, um and yeah, that, that's how it works.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. So it takes effort to do that. How big is the team? Where you located today as an organization? Are you global? Are you European?
Martins Bratuskins: Uh yeah we have, we're mo- quite now, like right now we are 10 people full-time plus um I think like four freelancers, all like part-time employees essentially. So not, not that big yet um from a team perspective. Where we're based, we have yeah, we have people in the US, we have people in, in, in the UK, in Finland, in Latvia. So we're pretty distributed. Um yeah.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. You know, the idea of a product is kind of one part of the business, but getting the right people is, is, is critically important. I mean it's really the magic behind the company and the resourcefulness, the, the intellect behind which you're creating, you're building, and ultimately trying to scale. Um what have you learned about hiring and where, what, what are some of the insights that you can share with the audience that you've optimized that work for you?
Martins Bratuskins: Hiring. I feel like that's the area where we're learning so much uh and we've made again so many textbook mistakes uh with, in regards to hiring. That yeah, that's, that's a, that's a tough one. But I feel like the, the main learnings for us has been that um we should hire people who are um like f- first of all, we should strive for A+ players. So if we uh, we don't feel like that person is an A+ player, then it just, it's sometimes it's a very hard no. Because, "Hey, you need that position, you need someone to do that job," and you're like, "Hey, here's a candidate. I mean they're kind of good. They're technically good at this and this and that. But I mean, if you don't have that 'hell yeah' feeling, then yeah it... it has always resulted in us losing time, losing money, and eventually not working out with that person anyways." So it's like uh what we try to do now is we try to hire based on this um, of course like we you know, we have a, a process. We actually follow the um... there's a book, Who, which talks about the hiring process and like very specifically details what kind of uh interview questions to ask and how to organize that process. We try to follow that process in the hiring part of things. And then um and then only if the player we really, after all those questions, we feel like that person is an A+ player, then we will go forward with them. And so that's the hiring part.
Then once, once that person is onboarded, then we uh set out very clear Objectives and Key Results that uh we want together, we work on them together with that person, that we want to hit within the first 90 days. And uh the 90-day mark is also the mark where of course we will know whether or not uh we will, we hit those objectives that we set out in the beginning. But also we let the whole team vote anonymously whether or not they feel like, "Hey, this is an A+ player that you want to work with." And then uh that's a, that's something that we learned that we somehow need to do. Because again, we had mistakes where we hired some people that were somehow very nice to the founders, but not that very nice to other people. And especially when you're working remote, sometimes you don't catch that. It's sometimes it's very difficult to catch those interactions. And then you start getting these mixed signals from people like, "Hey, what's up with that person?" And you're like, "What? No, everything's fine." So like these kind of things we real- like we learned that we should be very picky. We should be really, really picky. We should be uh demanding in terms of um result, and we also should be taking every, all the team's uh opinion into account when uh when deciding who to work with or who to continue working with. Because that um, yeah. I feel like we've made very many mistakes in all of these areas uh and trying you know, trying to improve.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, you know it's one of the things that I think every company goes through. Um there's multiple playbooks of how to do it. But when you actually have to make a decision on a person uh you know there's different aspects of that decision. It's emotions, connection, relationship. "You know, they do enough, maybe not as much as you want, so let me hold onto them." And ultimately you want to... sometimes it's not who you hire, but who you fire that helps your company grow. So that's what we've seen uh when, when COVID hit, it was... everyone went remote. They had to, and distribute. And you know, a lot of companies have kept that mentality, like they love being remote and distributed and it's working for them. Uh we had to pivot as well and we started working with companies in the US and we started working with companies internationally. And you know, all of a sudden in San Francisco you could hire out of Brazil or you're you know in Canada you could hire from Argentina. So the world in a lot of ways got smaller, which was great um for our business, which is recruitment.
But you know we also learned a lot. One of the things that we learned was that companies that are startups that are local in one country but want to grow in another country oftentimes don't have the, the person in place that understands the compliance of how to hire in a certain country, yeah from state to state. Um so there's this been, there's this growth around fractional HR people or fractional CFOs, which we as our pivot had to implement into our services. So now we're seeing a lot of companies for a fraction of the cost being able to you know hire without having to think about the headaches. And it's been really interesting to see um innovation come out of it, from not just a product perspective but services. And ultimately helping companies get off the ground without the high cost, which I think is, is important to, to kind of look at. So the company today, you're distributed, you're in multiple countries. Um what, what's next for your organization? Is it just about you know, continuing to sell and get product placements in place for your publishers? Um what's, what's kind of next on the innovation road map?
Martins Bratuskins: So we have u- that, that's one of the things where I've learned over these years that our team is very creative, we love to build stuff. So the, the key is actually again, saying "no" to like 99% of the initiatives. Which is very hard because you know, people are excited, they like "hey, I had this great idea and blah blah blah, and it could fit this and that and that, and then we could get another niche uh or like another type of client on board and blah blah blah." Which is... and I, I love that you know, like that's, that's initiative, that's this, this um you know, these stars in people's eyes, and like people uh people are really, really passionate about these things. And it kind of kills me that I need to be that one of the people that kind of shut most of it down. Because then we just lose focus. And uh we've lost focus before, and I've seen so many founders and like fellow founders uh who essentially lose the business and they go bankrupt because they are just like... without hitting product-market fit, they lose focus and they start doing too many things at the same time, and then it all doesn't work out. So yeah, saying no to things is, is a hard thing, especially when like definitely nine out of 10 is an answer, is a no, that's even harder. Um yeah, but, but regarding the next steps of the company, um our, our big next step is uh to grow the number of enterprise clients that we have. Our goal is to get to five companies you know, like these kind of multi-billion dollar advertisers, CPG companies. First, uh first, first, we are really right now for the next um at least six months definitely, um we are focusing on the CPG category only. And then uh we are going to run these tests with the uh QSRs or restaurant category as well, where... because we've seen like some good, good insights from, from those businesses as well. And then uh then um a couple of other verticals.
But essentially go vertical, what we want to do is go and grow vertical by vertical. And of course keeping in mind that, that we have to kind of move in lockstep. We have a sales, demand sales team (meaning the team that sells to brands, advertisers, it gets the money in) and then we have the game publisher sales team who are bringing on board new publishers and making sure that we have enough inventory uh to meet the demand. And this is kind of a thing where we can't... it's a chicken and egg problem, and we can't get a very huge big other without making a big, big leap also on the publisher side. So uh kind of like balancing those and making sure that we are uh continuously, as we're scaling up, continuously delivering uh uh the you know, value for publishers and the fill rates for publishers, and also being able to grow the inventory for brands. Because those big brands, once they start scaling up, they are... by scale they really mean scale. It's not some like "hey, let me increase like some 10% here or 5% there." No, it's like 10x-ing things, 10x-ing things or, or 100x-ing things over a very short period of time. It's difficult. So that's, that's one big challenge that we're, we're facing right now actually. Yeah.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Got it. That's great. Well, sounds like you got some good opportunities to work on. And, and, and as you build the company, um, Monetizr uh spelled M-O-N-E-T-I-Z-R is um you know, a great company. Um, Martins, if someone wants to find you or the company, how would they do that? Where should they go?
Martins Bratuskins: Yeah, so they could just go to our website uh themonetizr.com. T-H-E-M-O-N-E-T-I-Z-R.com. And um yeah, there's a my contact information on there. There's a chat, web chat as well there. So that's option number one. People can also find me on LinkedIn and all the other social media networks. So uh yeah, many, many people... I'm very, I, I try to be very active on LinkedIn. So if you, if you have any questions about uh the, I don't know, the dos and don'ts of startups that, where I can help, or some, some kind of network where I can help, please reach out. I'm, I'm very happy to, to help any founder, to also you know brainstorm about their business ideas or, or things that are not working, trying to figure things out. Like I said, I love to build things. Um I, I am, I, I love that community of, of founders, of both, both Techstars but also like bigger than Techstars, not just Techstars network. I love the being among the community and trying to really help other people reach their goals. And like I, I, I personally I get excited when I see that people are really excited. So please don't hesitate to reach out and I'll do my best to help you.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Great. Well, um Martins, thanks so much for joining here. Um we interact with 100,000 uh engineers a year. So if you are interested at some level and Monetizr seems interesting to you, feel free to reach out to, to Martins. Um thank you so much time uh for your time Martins, for joining us today. And for all our listeners for listening, means the world to, to me and to our company. And until we catch up in the future Martins, we'll see you uh down the road hopefully soon and hear your progress. And to our listen-, all of our listeners, we'll see you on the next episode. Thank you so much, have a great day.
Martins Bratuskins: Thank you so much Jake, it was a pleasure to be here.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Alright, thank you.
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. We 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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