Question 1

Is there any concern from print publications about cannibalizing their future revenue? Once the small businesses get hooked on to online sources, there will be very little reason for them to go back to print newspapers.

Accepted Answer

SMBs are already transitioning to digital ads. OwnLocal helps publishers make this transition. I don't think any publisher in the US thinks that print is going to be around forever and they are all looking for something like this. Thanks!

Question 2

I understand that you've cut back your growth rate for the time being to profitability. What is your growth plan after this round is complete. How much runway do you have before you contemplate your next big funding round or are you seeking to reach a certain milestone (critic...

Accepted Answer

Burn rate: we are currently cash-flow positive and do not have a burn. Next fund raise: we are already working on an institutional round and should close something in the next 6-12 months, but plan to hit $10mm ARR before closing this next investment. International: We currently have 165 newspapers in Australia, 200+ in Canada, and working on closing 300+ in the UK.

Question 3

Since you are expanding from small local papers to include larger national names (LA Times, Chicago Tribune, Daily Mail, etc.), do you see OwnLocal growing to include the large businesses that advertise in these outlets? or will you only focus on small businesses?

Accepted Answer

We already work with some of these larger businesses and even multi-state or multi-national businesses. As we grow we have been adapting our technology to work with these groups as well as the SMBs. That said, If you look at the complete spectrum of our business customers, well over 90% are small businesses.

Question 4

OwnLocal seems to be growing very quickly on its own cash flow, how will investor funds accelerate growth?

Accepted Answer

Product and Sales. As we scale the platform more opportunities have come up to add features that will drive revenue growth outside of acquiring new newspaper customers; this boils down to needing to expand the engineering team to drive the product's growth--more than half of this investment will go toward building the product team. The balance of this round is earmarked for sales to accelerate our pipeline: last year we had one sales person, and we are looking to build that team as expand int...

Question 5

Thinking about scalability, I have two questions. 1. How do Ownlocal gets each client info and graphic ad from the newspaper? I imagine most newspapers use different softwares for managing clients/ads. 2. How do you train the newspaper salesforce to be effective selling digita...

Accepted Answer

A huge part of OwnLocal is our integration tech. We deeply integrate into publisher's backend ad systems and platforms to pull in data from different sources--even if that doesn't work, we can just take the e-edition of a newspaper and pull all of the data we need from that. Training is the biggest part of our onboarding process. There are over 30,000 ad reps at newspapers in the united states and we've trained over 10% of them on our platform. Both of these things actually add to our stickin...

OwnLocal

Automated digital ad agency for local media

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OwnLocal

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$157,701

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