In the last year, Brandzooka, a self-service digital advertising platform for brands and agencies, has promoted a co-founder, Kelly Dotseth, to CEO and added a round of funding to fuel its growth. The Boulder-based company, founded in 2015 by Dotseth and Alex Bogusky, makes it possible for companies and agencies of any size to place targeted ads on prime-time TV and premium digital properties worldwide for as little as $5. Dotseth was promoted to CEO at a busy time for the company, as Brandzooka reported that its monthly recurring revenue had tripled since the beginning of 2020. She recently chatted with Colorado Inno to talk Brandzooka, winner of Inno on Fire's Inno Picks category.
What’s been your biggest 2021 accomplishment? We feel fortunate to be in an exciting, burgeoning digital marketing space, providing what we think is one of the neatest pieces of technology that exists in martech [marketing tech] to businesses and agencies around the world. Our biggest accomplishment this year has been the build of the exciting new version of Brandzooka’s platform that we’re about to release — stay tuned.
Are you in the stage of the life cycle you expected to be at this time? The build/learn/iterate life cycle should be never-ending — it feels like we’re still smack dab in the middle of constant learnings, iterations and growth, which I think means we continue to be right where we need to be.
How would you define your company’s “new normal”? We’ve been lucky to be in a space that has continued to grow rapidly over the past year, so a lot of the “new normal” for us has been continued growth to try to keep up with the pace of a quickly expanding CTV and digital market. I think the forced re-evaluation of what we had settled into as our “norm” regarding work culture and expectations was a healthy exercise to re-examine a lot of our established habits and accepted “necessities.” We’ve learned that we can operate extremely efficiently in a hybrid/remote work model. We even pulled off an incredible remote holiday party via Zoom! This last year and a half has been a good reminder that healthy change can come along with trying uncomfortable things, and that often times, we don’t attempt something new or break our habits unless we’re forced to.
What’s your next big move? We’re about to release a completely revamped, re-envisioned, insanely more powerful version of our technology platform. It adds exciting power and scale capabilities that we haven’t seen before, but has the same premise as our current platform. We continue to strive every day to be the easiest, most powerful way for brands around the world to advertise on premium CTV [connected TV like Roku or SlingTV], web video, display and audio inventory.
What’s your No. 1 piece of advice for aspiring entrepreneurs? This is something that Alex [Bogusky] told me early on. Hire and surround yourself with people who are more passionate than you and smarter than you are. Don’t fall victim to needing to be the smartest person in the room. Always come to the table — whether that be in team meetings or in conversations with users — with an open mind. Sometimes the best thing we can do is be committed to listening, questioning our assumptions, and re-learning.
Brandzooka
Category: Inno Picks
Location: Boulder
Top exec: Kelly Dotseth, co-founder and CEO
