His influencer marketplace hit $150M in revenue—& just exited for $500M. It all started with a party at Coachella. | Piotr Tomasik, Co-Founder of Influential

Piotr met his co-founders at a party in Coachella. He built them an app for influencers to post online. That simple idea evolved into one of the world's first influencer marketplaces.

While so many other tried and failed, Piotr and his team targeted marketing agencies with big budgets. They grew to $150M in revenue over a 10 year period. This summer, they were acquired by Publicis Groupe for $500M.

This is the story of how it all started, where the idea came from and how partnering with IBM of all companies drastically changed Influential's trajectory. Piotr also goes through in depth what it feels like to actually sell your company, and to go from living like a salaried employee to having tens of millions of dollars.

Why you should listen: 

• Why the right go-to-market channel is the difference between failure and a $500M exit.
• How to shift from a manual process to a tech-enabled marketplace
• How to know which partnerships are key— and which are totally useless.
• What it feels like to go from a regular person to having $10s of millions in the bank. 

Keywords

Influencer marketing, startup journey, product-market fit, technology, partnerships, exit strategy, ad agencies, growth strategies, entrepreneurship, venture capital

Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:01:27) The Start of Influential
(00:11:49) Raising the Seed Round
(00:14:41) How to leverage a partnership with a large incumbent
(00:21:26) Series A and Superbowl Campaign
(00:30:02) Winning because of go-to-market
(00:35:43) The Acquisition
(00:38:56) One Piece of Advice

Chapters

• 1:27 The Start of Influential
• 11:49 Raising the Seed Round
• 14:41 How to leverage a partnership with a large incumbent
• 21:26 Series A and Superbowl Campaign
• 30:02 Winning because of go-to-market
• 35:43 The Acquisition
• 38:56 One Piece of Advice

Transcript

Pablo Srugo (00:00)

I just finished talking with Piotr, the co -founder and CTO of Influential, which is one of the earliest and most successful influencer marketplaces. They ultimately grew to $150 million in revenue and this summer they got acquired for $500 million. We go through the origin story of Influential, why Piotr thinks they won when so many other influencer marketplaces went nowhere and what it felt like to go from a founder with almost no liquidity living on a normal salary having so many zeros in the bank you can't even count. Welcome to the Product Market Fit Show brought to you by Mistral, a sixth stage firm based in Canada. I'm Pablo. I'm a founder turned VC. My goal is to help early stage founders like you find product market fit.

Piotr, welcome to the show. 

Piotr Tomasik (0:48) 

Thanks for having me Pablo. 

Pablo Srugo (0:50)

It's been a 10 year or a little bit more journey at Influential and now you had the company acquired for reported $500 million, which is absolutely massive. You guys raised about $40 -50 million, so pretty solid dilution, all that good stuff. It must have been an amazing day. We'll get to that. But here we always focus as you know kind of on the early days. Let's start at the beginning I mean take us back to whatever it was 2012 2013 when you were just starting influential and kind how that all came together 

Piotr Tomasik (1:28)

Yeah, sure. So, the way that I came into the story was Dan and Ryan the other two co -founders they were throwing a party at Coachella in 2014. 

Pablo Srugo (1:46) 

That's always a good way to start a start-up.

Piotr Tomasik (1:49) 

Yeah. And they brought me in to build an app in preparation for that party. It was two pronged. One, to help them with the fledgling platform that they had. And I'll describe that in a second. But more importantly, to keep people on the same frame of mind at the party, meaning posting with the same hashtags so that we could trend worldwide while running the party. you know, back then no one knew what an influencer was, you know. They were just people with large followings or celebrities with social media accounts. And there was just a bunch of Viners at this party and people on Twitter. And basically throughout the day we had them, you know, post to the app to their Twitter Vine followings. And we ended up being the number one trend in the United States and worldwide at different times during this party. And we kept on repeating this later. We got out of the party business pretty early in the company, but we didn't...

Pablo Srugo (2:55) 

What happened to Vine, by the way? I have to ask. I got the thought on my head because it was a thing.

Piotr Tomasik (2:59)

It was a great platform. don't know. I mean, Twitter acquired it and then shut it down for some reason. think Elon has, you know, teased that he might bring it back. But we'll see. But yeah, so built the app for them, got to know them as a consultant, you know, building an app really quickly. It was a different sort of interview process. You know, when you find co -founders, it's like getting married in a way, but it was nice. I got to know them by building something for them. They liked my speed and the way that I did things and they invited me on as a technical co -founder to go after this opportunity together. 

Pablo Srugo (3:41)

And they had an idea of what, because they’re just doing parties with influencers, not labeled influencers. That was kind of the business they were at the time. 

Piotr Tomasik (3:48)

No. So, the first business was, primarily run by Google AdSense on web pages. They had a couple of celebrities signed on. They're under NDA still, I think. So I won't name the names, but we were driving traffic to websites with ads all around them, probably doing about 1.5.million in rev off of Google AdSense on these web pages.

Pablo Srugo (4:15)

 How did it work? Like really simply, like, let's say, you know, X is a celebrity. What, what, what did you do to get X to drive traffic or where would the traffic go?

Piotr Tomasik (4:23) 

So X would either drive traffic to pre -populated slideshow websites, meaning, you know, I'm sure most people have run into these things where, it's just a simple story or like slide by slide. Each slide is a webpage and it's just populated massively with ads all around it from AdSense, right? 

Pablo Srugo (4:43)

That was like super popular, no? Those slides, you say that and I'm like, I haven't seen that in a long time, but I also remember seeing like a lot of those in like 10 years ago or whatever.

Piotr Tomasik (4:52) 

I mean, the name of the show is product market fit. There was some PMF in those early days with that product. The issue was this was the early days of the mobile web. And so, you know, we were driving a lot of traffic off of these influencers’ web pages or not web pages, but Twitter profiles, what have you. And the bounce rate was incredible because the ads were leading to non -mobile optimized pages. so Google flagged that as being, you know, either spam traffic or invalid traffic and kept on clawing back our revenue. And you can't really run a business where, you know, you're handing out 70 % of your top line to the people that are driving the traffic and then get your revenue clawed back. you're in the negative, right? we made a shift to going after ad agencies and representing influencers at large. and in that first year in 2014, we were able to close around a million dollars in ad agency revenue.

Pablo Srugo (5:56)

 Where did you sit between the ad agencies and the influencers? 

Piotr Tomasik (5:58)

In the early days, go direct to representation of these influencers. A lot of them didn't have representatives yet. Maybe it was their parents. or you know, it was pretty, a really fledgling thing. So either go direct or through representation, bundle them up. Like we were aware of, I don't know, let's say a hundred or 200 influencers at the time because Ryan himself was what's called a niche influencer. What I mean is

Pablo Srugo (6:27)

- And Ryan's one of the founders, I assume?

Piotr Tomasik (6:28)

 Yes, yes, Ryan Dietart. He had a number of accounts like add-on emotive at USA at travel on Twitter. And he would sell space on those and also drive traffic to our same websites using those. 

Pablo Srugo (6:42) 

He was like an OG, he got the domain, what you would call the domain handle, I the handles, like the key handles. then same like getting cars.com or something like that in the early  .com. 

Piotr Tomasik (6:51)

Yeah, exactly. But on, well now X, but Twitter, right? And so we would sit in front of those influencers, go after different ad agencies and explain the benefits of, you know, doing ads on these accounts. Agencies understand, you know, impression based advertising. That's how we did it in the beginning. Just trying to sell based on impressions. So we would take the amount of members of an audience, right? So maybe a hundred thousand people on a Twitter account and say, we'd post three times. We would, we would claim that we'd be getting, you know, 300 ,000 potential impressions, right? and they would pay off of that. 

Pablo Srugo (7:33) 

And this was not like really a tech play, like you literally, you just have the influencers through representation or whatever. You're almost brokering space between agencies who have brands and influencers who have views. 

Piotr Tomasik (7:43)

That's right. And so this was the early days. The first campaign was, our first big campaign, like a hundred thousand dollar campaign was for Rock in Rio in Las Vegas, which was a concert. Okay. And we were driving traffic to a landing page where people could buy tickets. We were already being held to, you know, real world results like you do in, you know, Facebook ads or Google ads, right? You can actually do CTAs, cost per acquisition, cost per. Yeah, that was exciting. Cause that was our first like a hundred thousand dollar deal in one, right? Rock and Rio. But we quickly, you know, figured out that this model wasn't really going to scale. Like you said, it wasn't really a tech play yet.

Pablo Srugo (8:27) 

And when was this?, what year are we talking about?

Piotr Tomasik (8:29)

So now we're talking like early 15. So we closed out 14 with about two and a half million in Rev, one and a half from Google AdSense and a million from this ad agency business. 

Pablo Srugo (8:43) 

But the Google AdSense was all like in risk, right? was at risk.

Piotr Tomasik (8:46)

Super risky. So, we closed it down. We hired a seller from Ron Howard's agency in LA. And he had a lot of experience selling billboards and radio ads because he had been at, I think, iHeart radio before. What we needed to do was prove out, and I give Ryan a lot of credit for this, he wanted us to really lean into anything that we could provide data -wise on these influencers and trying to track results through the campaigns. So I set out and I built the first version of the platform. which started aggregating all of the influencers that we were aware of in one place, looking through their accounts, downloading all the different posts that they were making, running them through different data partners to determine basically their attributes and their audience's attributes. And so what I mean by that, or sorry, affinities, what I meant by affinities is like, let's say you have influencer X, right? and they have an audience that's filled with equestrian lovers or something like that. We would be able to find that different people had, or audiences had bigger affinities for different topics and try to target those people for certain brands. This was the first like tech play and in an automated fashion, try to search through the database and find the people that were right for a given brand. 

Pablo Srugo (10:23) 

This is obviously really early. my question is like, obviously today you can target anything on Facebook, but just so I understand back then when you were doing this for influencers, was Facebook already doing this within its own kind of platform or was this like a totally new way of kind of segmenting audiences that you're bringing to the table?

Piotr Tomasik (10:44)

 So Facebook was allowing you to segment audiences for their paid advertisements. But thank you for asking about how things worked back then because I sometimes forget. Let me give you some context. Back then we were still dealing with timelines that were recency based and algorithm based. And so the real power of the influencer back then was that, you know, you're looking through your feed and you're being interrupted by ads, right? In your chronological feed that you didn't opt into, you didn't ask for. Obviously they work really well, but when you were following someone, you were guaranteed to see their posts in the chronological order. And so there was a lot more power to it in the early days because 

Pablo Srugo (11:35) 

Yeah, it's almost like peak follower power. Cause today it's all algos. it doesn't make a difference, I mean, it matters if you have more followers, cause it's a signal, but it was a time where like, if you had a hundred thousand followers, they would all see like just about every post you make. And I guess that was, that was right about when you guys were –

Piotr Tomasik (11:51)

That's when we were starting out. And so we were able to actually justify charging based on impressions, right? Because we could say, a certain amount of these people are really going to see it because they're online. They are following this person really deeply and they've opted into hearing from this person. It's not like some random ad, right? That appears on your feed. And so there was a lot of, a lot of power and people just weren't used to seeing, you know, their neighbor next door advertising to them. Right. And so It was pretty good. So we raised the seed round in 2015. We raised it from Europlay Capital Advisors. 

Pablo Srugo (12:34)

And that was to do what? That was to build this kind of platform or it was already built out? 

Piotr Tomasik (12:37) 

Build a platform. No, it wasn't built out, but we shared our vision and they were famous for being angel investors in Skype and then buying it back and selling it again. It was a pretty interesting play that happened over there.

Pablo Srugo (12:54) 

And do you remember how big that round was?

Piotr Tomasik (12:55) 

 I remember that we set out to try to raise 750k and we ended up raising like 3 million because it took it took us a really long time to get it closed. We even tried out a early version of crowdfunding. It was a platform called Flash Funders. Yeah, basically we had like an open round for like 11 months that started at 750k and ended at 3 million. Something like that.

Pablo Srugo (13:22)

Because 3 million is actually like today's median seed round. But 10 years ago was probably like 4x the median seed round. Like it's a big seed round. 

Piotr Tomasik (13:30)

That's right. But it took a long time. We were fairly inexperienced, I'd say, at raising money. Like the three of us, none of us went to Stanford, right? Or anything like that. It was our first foray into, you know, venture capital and raising in that fashion. But the reason why I wanted to rewind to 2015 is, you know, we got this money to build out this platform. We closed out the seed round finally. And because of the press of the seed round, I got an inbound cold reach out on LinkedIn from a guy that was running IBM Watson's ecosystem development program. And they were looking for use cases for the IBM Watson API. for context, IBM Watson was a foray into AI technology, you know, the first wave of AI. recommendation engines, natural language processing, knowledge graphs, things like this. Nothing like today's transformers and LLMs.

Pablo Srugo (14:31)

They wanted to become the GPT. They're like 10 years too early. it was a huge push by IBM to almost like, at least the way I remember it, was to still be relevant. know what mean? Because it was already on this decay. It was like, hey, we're in your forefront of AI. 

Piotr Tomasik (14:47)

They spent all this money to, you know, play Jeopardy with Watson, right? They needed to parlay that into some sort of commercial opportunity. And so they reached out. I looked through all the APIs and the one that struck a chord with me was one called Personality Insights. it basically, given a corpus of text, it would return the different Jungian archetypes of that corpus of text, right? So was like 52 different traits and I, posited that if you ran a corpus of texts from an influencer and a corpus of texts from a brand, and if enough of those things intersected in a Venn diagram that the influencers audience would be, you know, open to hearing from the same sort of things that the brand wanted to talk about, right?

Pablo Srugo (15:42)

 It's a matching algorithm for brands and influencers.

Piotr Tomasik (15:44) 

 So I submitted this to IBM along with a little white paper that we wrote with one of my engineers that had a physics degree. And lo and behold, they loved it. We became IBM Watson Partners. And the reason why I'm diving into that so deeply is, you know, people don't get fired for picking IBM. And in the ad agency world, all of a sudden we were able to, you know, put in our pitch decks that we were IBM Watson Partners. And it gave us a real level of credibility almost. Credibility. Thank you.

Pablo Srugo (16:18)

 It's interesting you say that, right? Because I just had, I was just talking to founder yesterday asking me about partnerships in the really early days. And honestly, my canned advice, obviously these things like every startup is different. My canned advice is generally speaking, partnerships are like a little overhyped in the early days. It can be a huge accelerant, but most of the time, but like once you have real prior market fit in your selling, partnerships can be massive kind of way to continue to go to market and get new channels and all this stuff. But A lot of times founders will be like, if only I get this partnership, they would just sell my product. And then like, you know, everything will be taken care of. in your case, actually the partnership, I mean, they didn't go sell for you, but it really was like a huge lubricant credibility proof of stamp. That's kind of how the partnership did work for, for you. So it's interesting to see like given the right situation, it can, can work.

Piotr Tomasik (17:05)

 it, certainly helps lend us credibility and it led to what I believe to be the moment of PMF. But really quickly, without going off on a tangent too much, IBM also let us astray on the partnership angle because to your point, you know, we were enthralled by the idea of 300 ,000 IBM sellers selling our product, right? And so we spent a lot of resources and time creating materials for their sales team to sell our product. And even though they have one of the greatest sales machines in history, especially tech, we didn't see a single dollar out of their sales team. So, you know,

Pablo Srugo (17:48)

why do think that is?

Piotr Tomasik (17:49)

It's the Jekyll and Hyde. I think sellers are sort of coin operated, right? And so if they don't understand your product and it is in top of mind to sell into their given client and if I t doesn't make sense within the context of a conversation they're having with their end client, they're not going to bring it up unless you have some sort of incredible comp package and you can keep yourself top of mind, but that takes a lot of time to stay top of mind of like 300 ,000 people, right?

Pablo Srugo (18:18)

That's right. I mean, you know what my, my simple kind of viewpoint on this is the natural progression of things is first you have to learn to sell your own thing and then you have to teach your own staff, like salespeople in your company to sell your thing, which that's a transition. lot of companies will fail. And only then can you tell external sales staff that you don't control how to sell your thing. that should normally be, there's going to be exceptions, but that's the normal progression. And then the other thing to your point around top of mind is if nobody knows of your product in the market and these external salespeople could sell a bunch of different things, their product plus a bunch of other channel partnerships they have, why are they going to choose yours? What you want is at the point at which the market knows about it and potentially even asking these salespeople, enable them to sell your product and you have a playbook and all these sort of things, then that's a true accelerant.But the idea that, you know, 300 ,000 people are just going to go sell your thing because it's a cool product is tough.

Piotr Tomasik (19:18)

Anyways, but so we got, we secured that partnership and that led to us signing Kia North America for their Super Bowl campaign in 2016. So we're amplifying what was happening on TV with a number of influencers.

Pablo Srugo (19:39)

Did you guys do just the matching or did you do anything with the content too? Or did the influencers just decide? 

Piotr Tomasik (19:45)

Not only did we do the matching, but we helped with the creative strategy and then the platform itself assisted in launching the campaigns. What I mean is we were able to schedule posts to go out at different times of day at exactly the right time. We figured out what time on the East coast on, you know, central time zone, the Pacific time zone would be best to send out campaigns. And we were able to automate it because, you know, the influencers would OAuth into our platform and grant us the ability to post on their behalf, things like this.

Pablo Srugo (20:23)

 I see. So I was going to ask like did the Kia and potentially influential create the posts and all that you needed was the influencers to let you push it on theirs or did the influencers become part of that because now it's evolved, right? Where now like you are an influencer, they'll make their own video, like whatever. But back then, how did you guys set it up? 

Piotr Tomasik (20:43) 

So the way that it generally worked was we would send out basically like a creative brief that was already agreed upon between the brand and us. So in this case, Kia and influential to the influencer, maybe imply that they could post this string, right? But the influencer themselves had the opportunity to come back with copy that was in their own voice, inside the platform, which would then be sent back to the agency personnel that was acting on behalf of Kia or Kia themselves to approve or deny the content, right? 

Pablo Srugo (21:25)

And was it multi -channel like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook?

Piotr Tomasik (21:28)

 Yeah, we could go omni -channel. I don't remember the particulars of the campaign now, it's been a number of years, but I'm sure we had Twitter and probably some Facebook posts involved. Anyway, so we closed that deal, we signed it in 15. Because of that, we were able to get our lead for our Series A. We got the term sheet for our Series A in Thanksgiving of 15, but we didn't end up closing it until right around when the Super Bowl campaign happened, right? which was in 16, like February of 16 when the Super Bowl happens.

Pablo Srugo (22:05)

And how big was that? Was that series A?

Piotr Tomasik (22:06)

10 million? No, 5 million bucks. 5 to 10. And the campaign went really, really well. We got featured in the Wall Street Journal, you know, as this new form of advertising, right, alongside IBM and Kia North America. And we got invited to meet Ginni Rometty in Armank in New York where IBM's headquartered. And that was, that was a really special experience. One of the, one of the best CEO meetings I've ever had. I mentioned all this because, once we were featured in the Wall Street Journal, it seemed like we had, you know, we had PMF, we had a platform that was using AI and ML, using knowledge graphs, using word clouds to match influencers. We even started adding image recognition to the platform. we're using a lot of early AI products. the way we used image recognition was if you take all the influences are a little vain, right? So if you take all the photos from an influencer's account and you look for the person that appears the most, guess what? It's the influencer themselves, right? And so we're able to map out their faces. And let's say a customer really, really wanted a, I don't know, a celebrity- Elon, they wanted someone that looks like Elon, right? But there's no way we were going to be able to book Elon. So we would go and upload a photo of Elon and look for influencers that were similar in stature, look and feel. So we could look whether they looked the same, whether they talked in similar fashions and whether their audiences had similar affinities. And so this worked in multiple ways. So one was, I already covered whether they looked the same, but the other was: let's say we did have a celebrity like this happened with the rock. Okay. So we had the rock signed up for a campaign for one of his movies. And what we wanted to do was amplify his message with people with similar audience types and similar, you know, things that they talked about. We're very easily able to do this with the platform that we built out.

Pablo Srugo (24:20)

Huh? Interesting. And so how, how, what about like, you see, I remember you're sharing some notes in the early days, you had the one million and half from that Google AdSense. mean, that kind of fell in fall apart. got, let's say, taken away. And then you had your kind of non -tech play that was driving like a million in revenue. So obviously there was a need there. It just wasn't scalable. Then you build this platform, raise the seed round. And as you go and raise the series A, like what kind of numbers are you doing? Kia campaign. Like I assume, you know, those were all six figure plus deals. 

Piotr Tomasik (24:50)

Yes, yes. So 16, we closed out with around six million in rev.

Pablo Srugo (24:54)

Okay. So it was a pretty crazy ramp because in 2015 you closed what, like two or so? 

Piotr Tomasik (24:58)

2015, we were right there on the cusp of three. And then in 17, we hit eight figures. So we were in the $10 million range. And the rest of the way really was optimizing union economics and heading into it with this idea that we were going to bring as much information and transparent data to the advertisers as we could, index as many influencer accounts as we could, you know, people opted in to be indexed by us because they wanted to get –

Pablo Srugo (25:31) 

brand deals. Yeah. And how did you shift as the algorithms got smarter and it became less about, you know, follower account and more about quality of posts more than anything, like how, much the post resonates and that keeps driving it. How did you adapt to still be able to deliver ROI? Cause now it becomes more like on a post by post. I mean, obviously there's some predictability, But I assume like there's now more variants. Like if the post the influencer makes is a dud, you know, they might be famous, but you'll get half of what you expect it to get or whatever.

Piotr Tomasik (26:02)

That's right. That's right. So there are a number of ways that we adapted. First, you know, in the early days, let's say the first three years before this algorithmic time period, we were able to drive some of those crazy viral successes that you heard about where, you know, there was a company called Live LoKai that we represented. In the early days, they sold these like wristbands with like ice from the Himalayas and water from the Dead Sea or something. Anyways, we were able to drive like crazy sales numbers because you know, you can guarantee that people would see these posts, right? And those things started to deteriorate over time because of the algorithmic changes. And the first adaptation of that that we conducted was something called Optimized Paid Media. So what we would do, and this is very popular now. But I think we might've also been the first ones to do that, where you would take the influencer's posts in their own voice, talking about a given product or brand, and you would actually run paid against it to their own audience to ensure that it was actually being served to the people you wanted to. And you could run paid against people that were similar to their audience. was the first real thing that we had to do. In response to the algorithmic changes, right? So obviously our margins took a little bit of a hit because we had to run paid instead of just organic views. Over time, it really just went into more and more depending on the creators getting better at how they were delivering their messaging. Like really people matured in that passion or the industry matured, right? Now they're called creators, right? I keep on using influencers and our company was called influential, right? They really, they really did mature and adapt. 

Pablo Srugo (27:56)

And you know, the other question that really is in my mind is there's been an, at least from my vantage point as, a VC, like a lot of these influencer marketplace concepts, creator marketplace concepts, they all make a lot of sense, but I don't know any that exited or for the scale that you did or got to the level that you did. hashtag pays another one that comes to mind, but there must be dozens and dozens of these influencer marketplaces go in as a brand, find the right influencer launch campaign. Is it true that you were kind of like the number one in this space? And even then, like, what did you guys do to get the success you got where so many others ultimately fell flat? Maybe got some traction, but kind of plateaued.

Piotr Tomasik (28:38) 

I think we were just laser focused on getting into ad agencies and brands direct. And even the way that we sold into that agencies. wanted to make sure that, you know, they had all these antiquated ways of measuring campaigns because all they were used to is like, you know, radio billboards, impression based advertising, right? Going back to something that we talked about earlier on, we made it so it was very easy for them to buy space with us, meaning, you know, they were buying a certain amount of impressions. Okay. And try to make it as easy for them to make the play as possible. And then we would go and fill in all the details around the edges and make sure that we were delivering what we said that we were selling, right? On the impression based count. It started becoming easier with the OPM stuff, optimized paid media, because we could get reporting coming out of those campaigns and feeding it back into the ad agencies. And they were very pleased with our data first approach, basically, The reason why I think we succeeded is that we were just the sheer willpower of trying to sell into the ad agencies instead of, you know, on a brand by brand basis or like campaign by campaign basis, because that's where the real dollars are in advertising, in impression based and awareness advertising. 

Pablo Srugo (30:09)

Are you one of the few that had that kind of go to market focus on ad agencies?

Piotr Tomasik (30:13)

I think so. I think a lot of people were more focused on self -serve marketplaces, which, yeah, they scale more if they work. You know, marketing and ad agencies is a relationship business at the end of the day. And you have to be in front of these people that are making the, you know, $10 million decisions, not, you know, the brands that are, I don't know, buying a campaign here or there. 

Pablo Srugo (30:38)

Yeah, it's true. mean, the ad agencies are the ones that have like the consistent budget and almost the decision making around how to do this and understand how it fits into everything else. A lot of the self -serve stuff is going to be people testing something out, like, let's drop $5 ,000 on the influencers, see what happens, and then they don't come back.

Piotr Tomasik (30:55) 

So in the end, really, we ended up building a tech -enabled business, right? So there was a large sales force that went out and closed the deals, and it was enabled by the platform that we built. We did end up selling some SaaS subscriptions to our platform within ad agencies that have large enough teams that they created for influencers or, you know, creator teams now, as they're called.

Pablo Srugo (31:25)

 But you didn't just sell pure software, like there was a service element to each sale. 

Piotr Tomasik (31:28)

Yeah, because we helped, we helped with the creative, we helped launch the campaigns. 

Pablo Srugo (31:34)

What kind of margins did you get .. gross margins, we're talking more like 50 % gross margins instead of like the 80 % SaaS type gross? 

Piotr Tomasik (31:40)

That's right.

Pablo Srugo (31:41)

 Yeah, it's funny. It's funny how I find it like, at least in the venture world, like, it's almost look, it's like frowned upon. you know, ad services to these like pure SaaS, like don't touch that margin. But I mean, if you can scale revenues and get to these, you know, half a billion dollar plus exits by just making, doing whatever it takes to like make your customers get to success, right? Like if they need some handholding, they need some handholding, why wouldn't you do it? And by the way, 50 % gross margin, if you just zoom out of tech for a second, it's actually an amazing gross margin. so yeah, other question, like the other thing I want to touch on obviously is, and we were talking about this earlier, kind of in the pre -call, like just the exit, right? actually, and I love to hear the story of just where that came from and how that all happened. But you know, we were talking about was like this, you know, being a tech founder that's having success, right? Like series B plus is this really unique and almost awkward place because, know, kind of the discussion we're having is like, if you've got in a company to be a successful, like in terms of revenue or valuation as a series B company is outside of tech, like in real estate or traditional business or whatever, you personally have a lot of wealth.

Like you'll either be like very profitable or you'll be able to just like actually spend commensurately with what your company's worth. But many tech founders will have on paper value, like a value they'll own 10, 20, 30 % of a hundred million dollar plus business. So they're worth tens of millions of dollars, but they're living on a salary of 250K or whatever. Right? So it's this like really weird disconnect where like you almost have this cognitive dissonance. You're like, what am I? Like, am I really wealthy or am I just like, you know, a 90th percentile employee sort of thing. In your case, obviously, you got it to the other side where you had that liquidity event and it all materialized. So anyways, my biggest question is if you could just take us through that story and the feeling of what happens when, because again, a lot of listeners here are in those early stages hoping one day to get to that kind of end outcome. What does that really feel like?

Piotr Tomasik (33:37)

 It feels really great. It's very validating to finally be on the other end of it. And having psychological security, right? I'm still a founder. I have another business, well, maybe we'll talk about later- 

Pablo Srugo (33:53) 

Well, we're investors in the tensor wave, which is crushing it, and he speaks a different type of story, but yeah.

Piotr Tomasik (33:59)

I think the world has changed since, you know, when we started Influential. What I mean is, you know, I built up a big group and cohort of other founders that were also, you know, paper wealthy, as you described. We would all like commiserate over how, you know, we had all this paper wealth and it's sort of a really strange, strange world, right? Because people assume that you are rich if you're a part of like something big to your point, but you're not, right? You're still living the same way you were almost day one at the come, maybe not eating ramen, but you know, you're just a salaried employee, just like everyone else. And it starts to eat away at you, right? Cause you... you don't know when it's going to happen or if it's going to happen because companies go to zero. And so what I mean by the world's changed is there's more pathways to liquidity than there were, you know, 10 years ago. It's more common for secondaries to occur in the later rounds to get the founders some liquidity. There's some unique platforms that have popped up. Like I think Vested is an example. EquityBee, some other things like this. They tend to lean into the very well -known startups, but if you have something that is working really well, they're willing to get you some liquidity as well. So I know some people that took advantage of that and it really helps, you know, de -risk your life. My wife and I really believe in taking money off the table when you can because there's a lot more psychological safety in that than putting it all in black, right, and waiting for the end. 

Pablo Srugo (35:48)

That's right. But mean, in your case, how did it happen? Like, where did the acquire come from? Was it just a pre -financial, like, you know, based on revenue years and multiple, or is it kind of strategic angle to it?

Piotr Tomasik (35:57)

 It's very strategic. I mean, Publicis is a multinational group of ad agencies, essentially. And so it's going to be able to drive a lot more business into influentials’ bottom line, top line, bottom line, all of it. but the way that it happened, we had a couple of near misses over the years. We ran a process. I'd say this was the third time we ran a process. This company, there were some other factors that happened that made the other deals not happen. Economic factors basically had nothing to do with, influential, like the end buyer, ended up not being able to do it because of you know, external factors to us. But yeah, we ran a process with the bank and they, you know, identified Publicis as the leader. And we went through a couple rounds of negotiations and it worked out finally.

Pablo Srugo (36:56)

 You're describing it very like logically or rationally. I can tell you like if I was if I was on the other side of that, you know, I almost imagine there's this like, closed off door trap door, you know, there's like 10s of millions of dollars. Like if you sign this thing, it'll open. It just falls into your bank account, you know what mean? And especially if you'd gone through a few of these to know that, you know, where you, I'm sure assumed like, shit, it's actually the day's coming sort of thing. And then it didn't. That when it did, it would have just been that much more like, I don't know if you celebrate, I don't know what you do, but it must have been like, I don't know, almost like these, you know, a few times in life, like you have these surreal moments where you're like, is this like actually? You open up a bank account, is that a mistake? 

Piotr Tomasik (37:38)

No, yeah. My co -founder at Tensorwave, he caught a photo of me when I opened the email with the first ACH payment, you know, I was like grinning from ear to ear, right? And he was joking with me that I was going to leave, that I didn't need to do this company anymore. But no, I'm in 100%. I love doing this. 

Pablo Srugo (38:05)

What keeps you going actually? Why do you do it?

Piotr Tomasik (38:08)

I love building products and watching people use them. I really enjoy wearing tons of different hats, learning about how to, you know, my career has spanned a lot of different fields from fintech to social media marketing, to gaming in the sense of offering credit to gamblers and now AI infrastructure. Right? So I love learning about all sorts of different things and, you know, achieving PMF. 

Pablo Srugo (38:45)

Perfect. Well, we'll stop it there. mean, you talked earlier about kind of the point at which you felt, you know, true product market fit. So I won't ask that question, but I'll ask the other one that we usually end with, which is, you know, if you could give one piece of advice, you can either think about it like to yourself 10 years ago when you were just starting off influential or One piece of advice that you find yourself giving out commonly these days to like early stage founders, what would it be? 

Piotr Tomasik (39:09)

Getting your product out to your customer as early and often as possible is the most important thing. Getting real feedback in the moment rather than trying to query people their opinion ahead of time. Because very often people do not give you true feedback. What I mean is like, You know, people try to do surveys or something like, would you buy this if you had this, you know, placed in front of you? People will tell you, yeah, sure. And then you build it and guess what? They're not going to buy it. They don't care because they were being nice to you. So the concept of building in public or like getting stuff out as quickly as possible, iterating is super powerful. And it helps you not veer too far off the path and not building for yourself, but building for your customer. Yeah, I think, I think that's the most important thing to keep in mind. And then also when you do close the funding round, don't over hire. Don't try to solve problems with people. Try to solve your problems, you know, with process and tech, hopefully. And if you can't, if your eyes are bleeding, then hire the next person. Because the worst thing in the world is overspending, over hiring, and then having to having to cut people from your team.

Pablo Srugo (40:27)

100%. Well, Piotr, we'll stop it there. Thanks so much for jumping on the show.

Piotr Tomasik (40:31)

Thank you.

Pablo Srugo (40:32)

 I just gave you content that you liked so much. You actually listened to the end and guess what? You didn't pay a single dollar. Not only that, I didn't even put any ads in your face. So you just got a bunch of content for free. And now that I've delivered that value, I'm asking for something in return. Open your app, open Apple podcasts, open Spotify, open whatever app you use to listen to this. and hit that follow button. It's actually going to help you because it's going to help you make sure you don't miss out on the next episode, which you like so much that you listen to the whole thing.