Jeremy Weisz 16:17
You could have gone to radiology, though, something, but you still have to go through the training is that ultimately, right now, maybe someone’s listening, and they’re not sure what path and maybe that’s one of the paths what made you decide ultimately, this isn’t where I wanted to spend the rest of my life, this is not what I want to be doing.
Manick Bhan 16:36
Well, I just felt called in a different direction. To me, when I did my soul searching. What I really discovered is that my passions lied elsewhere, I was really interested in markets I was really interested in business. And that interest of mine took me in a very different direction. And I ended up going to Wall Street, where I feel like I was able to really sink my teeth into that working at Goldman, I learned a ton. And through the process of being there for four or five years, I found my next passion, which was actually in technology at the time, seeing companies like Groupon IPO eBay IPO, it was so fascinating. To see the energy that was in the room that we had never seen anything like that, since the first tech boom. So that really pulled me in into this new direction. At the time, I didn’t realize that I would end up becoming a CTO and building my own tech companies. But I was interested in technology and had no idea where the problem lead. So I think it was just staying curious and pursuing my interests. And also noting that that can change as you go through the course of your life.
Jeremy Weisz 17:51
So talk about Rukkus and what was the first step into starting Rukkus?
Manick Bhan 17:58
The first step was, so I actually had some tickets to a concert. I’m not going to say what’s causing it is because I’m embarrassed. And here’s with just me too much.
Jeremy Weisz 18:12
Maybe you’ll share it at the end is curiosity-based. But now I want to know, obviously,
Manick Bhan 18:18
Maybe we’ll put in the show notes. Just to get people to enter there if they really want to know, but I’m not going to get into it right now. It was my girlfriend’s idea she wanted to go, we ended up getting like really, really good seats like front row seats. And then of course, like the day came and we just couldn’t go to the concert and I ended up selling them online. And I ended up actually making money like doubled my money. There were like $1,000 seats each and I sold them for about 2000 something on StubHub and I was fascinated by that. And I’ve always been very into music. I was a professional violinist and guitarist and grew up a classically trained and always like loved spending my time going to shows and events. So that curiosity led me into this crazy industry of ticketing, Rukkus was a secondary market for concert sports theater tickets. And it was incredibly humbling to try to build a marketplace as my first technology company. So I got kicked in the teeth many, many, many times trying to build that company almost failed and gave up three, four times, but I just kept going. I have been known to be kind of a stubborn person. And refusing to give up is definitely like a key part of my personality. So it kept going and eventually launched the platform as a mobile ticketing app with virtual reality experiences where you could actually see your seat in the app in 3d, which is really you’re ahead of your time there with the VR stuff. Yeah, we were actually we before people started really Getting into it we built we call back the power glove and it was three cameras attached to like this glove. And he would take two shots from the seat and it would stitch together a full 360-degree pan out of what it’s like to sit in that seat. And we were sending drones, we actually said drones into Yankee Stadium in New York into the Red Bull Arena. And we were trying to basically get all this footage of the arena, we actually almost got arrested for that.
Jeremy Weisz 20:25
I’m like, you have to get approved ahead of time. Are you just oh, we’re just gonna try this.
Manick Bhan 20:29
Yeah, this is like the startup mentality. It’s like, ask for forgiveness, not enough for permission. And so that’s what we did. Unfortunately, the cop was like, this is pretty cool. This drone thing is awesome. Had a lot of questions about the drone. And just like let us go.
Jeremy Weisz 20:45
Did it someone inside the stadium spotted or what? Or would they see you standing outside the stadium with a remote control? And they thought you were bombing something?
Manick Bhan 20:55
Well, yeah, so fortunately, fortunately, it wasn’t me flying the drone. It was someone else on the team, who looks a lot less suspicious.
Jeremy Weisz 21:07
They were really racially profiling you.
Manick Bhan 21:11
Yeah, they saw the drone inside the arena. And I think one of the groundskeepers saw it and notified the police that there was a drone inside the arena, which is totally understandable for safety purposes. And in short order found us outside, sitting on the hood of a car with like, a goggle on, to see the view with like controller in the hand. I think it was about three squad cars that
Jeremy Weisz 21:38
Wow, you tell the staff member? Yeah, we’ll be fine. You go do it, I’ll wait back, just call me when it’s done.
Manick Bhan 21:46
I was at home when I got the call. So fortunately, we had a really an incredible team of people who was super passionate about what we were building and the vision. And so it didn’t take a lot of convincing.
Jeremy Weisz 21:59
That’s awesome. So what was one of the challenges you remember, again, like in startup world, there’s many times where there’s bumps in the road, and people want to quit, what was one of the big the big challenges with Rukkus.
Manick Bhan 22:17
It was a very much a David V, Goliath. Kind of experience from day one, our total fundraising was the lunch money of our competitors, they would spend millions and millions of dollars on marketing for branding purposes. And meanwhile, our entire budget for the entire company, including r&d, for years was like what they would spend in like a couple of weeks in a $5 million. So we had to be very judicious and really careful with all of our bets. And we didn’t have a lot of room to make a lot of mistakes. So we had to try to be really thoughtful and as much as we could stay profitable and lean. So with execution, that was always challenging. It was always a little bit nerve-wracking, not knowing if this bet was the right bet, and if it would work out. So obviously, not everything we did worked, but we did have a lot of things that we invested in work. And I think the best thing for us was investing in our brand investing in a product experience that was memorable, and differentiated and brought the team together in a way where we were all really proud of what we created and eventually led to us being acquired by some open tech pick for the technology and the audience.
Jeremy Weisz 23:37
I want to hear how the acquisition came about. But were you using the SEO? What were you doing with the SEO to build a Rukkus at the time?
Manick Bhan 23:50
So SEO was an important part of our strategy. What a lot of people don’t realize is that the biggest ticketing company in the world is Google. Everyone thinks Ticketmaster, and some people think StubHub, but it’s actually Google. If you think about how much those platforms spend on paid media to Google, Google owns a sizable share of the total economic value in that industry. So understanding how to win on Google organically, for every company in that space is a key part of their business strategy. For us, because we were newcomers to the space we had to build notoriety for ourselves through our product through our software. So what we really tried to do was build something special and different and be really cutting edge on the technology side, and give people something that they’d never seen before. And that allowed us to get a lot of great press, a lot of access. We were in every New York City taxi cab for see 360 which was a big product that we launched and that was really great for our awareness. And then that eventually led us to getting a partnership which is in where we were powering exams, ticketing experiences in their app, and got SEO backlinks from them on their website, which helped us in search. So investing in the product again, and the brand, doing something very different than what everyone else was doing, allowed us to step apart from the herd of other companies that were in the space, fighting for recognition. And that eventually helped us get acquired.
Jeremy Weisz 25:30
Manick, one of the things I’ve seen is, when companies have grown, some of the fastest growing has occurred because of partnerships. What can you talk about forming partnerships like, Shazam? How did those come about?
Manick Bhan 25:51
Yeah. So for big partnerships like that, the one of the things that I’ve learned is they’re really based on relationships. It’s building trust with the key players on the other side, and really, really listening very intently to what their needs are, especially in a dynamic where we were a much smaller company than they were. So we didn’t really have as much leverage in the negotiations, it was always us trying to understand how do we really drive a revenue opportunity forward for them? How do we understand what they’re looking to do here and give them something that they can only get from us. So what that was, was we, we realized Shazam was really into their brand. And for good reason, they have an incredible brand. So we actually redesigned our venue maps to include their logo. And it was something that we could do it, it took some work, but it showed them how committed we were to the partnership. And we were going that extra level, that they realized that there were really no other companies in the space that had the integrity as well as the technology capabilities that we did. And it allowed us to eventually inked the deal after over a year of working through it, and it did take a long time.
Jeremy Weisz 27:09
I love it, you know, thanks for that. That’s great. Um, how did the acquisition eventually come about?
Manick Bhan 27:14
Well, at the time in which we were looking to exit, we had a few companies that were in orbit that were interested in us. And what we really needed to do was figure out how do we organize those conversations in a way where we can get the best outcome for the company. And so it was just about getting everyone that saw value, and what we had created to the table at the same time, and encouraging them to put their bids forward. And us trying to really maximize the value we’re able to create. So we had to be a little bit creative with how we structured it to get the best value out of it. But we did. And fortunately, we’re working with some really great partners at the time that helped us manage the process, and successfully close and execute the deal.
Jeremy Weisz 28:08
I’m sure, like you were thinking of a bunch of interesting ideas, right. So you exit, and like, what’s next. Right? What I guess was on the chopping block, you know, obviously, LinkGraph, SearchAtlas was one of the ideas, what else were you thinking about that maybe got cut, before you kind of move forward that path?
Manick Bhan 28:38
Well, once the exit happened, I knew I needed to take some time off and just recharge my batteries. And so I did spend some time with family with friends did some traveling. And the one thing that I kept coming back to was what I felt was like an unclosed chapter or an unanswered question. And it was really around Google. And I knew and everyone knows how important Google is as a technology platform. I mean, it’s essential, I think, to the way that humanity that we find and discover information, it’s like the library of information on the internet. And it’s fast, and it’s free. And I realized how critical apart from that it would always be now and forever in the future. And I really felt like there was more there. So there were some other ventures that I was involved in. I was helping my friends, with their companies helping them figure out their approach to go to market and growth. And I realized all of them have the same similar set of problems with Google, which is, how do I get Google to love me? How do I get found on the first page of Google? What are they looking for? And why don’t they understand that I’m the best company in the space. I’ve got the coolest product. I got the best experience of doing something really different, right? Why don’t they get that I don’t understand. And it’s a common problem that I see with startups, like they’re doing something interesting and innovative. But they don’t have that reputation, the authority in the eyes of Google. So everyone was struggling with authority, building up authority, creating domain authority in the eyes of Google. And that was a common problem that I knew needed to be solved. So after reading some of the literature that Google had about how they evaluate that, I started figuring out how to solve that problem and do it at scale. And it was initially, just a research project, we were crawling the internet, one of the reasons we call it LinkGraph is because I was building a LinkGraph of the internet, how the internet sites connect to one another through different pages, what are some websites that are linking to other sites a lot, and passing do follow links? And I was doing that to figure out what types of websites can you get links from? And how do they link? And then trying to like, deconstruct that. And that ended up sort of forming the path that led to creating LinkGraph and SearchAtlass. So just kind of happened, like organically?
Jeremy Weisz 31:14
What were your thoughts at that time of bootstrapping versus raising money?
Manick Bhan 31:22
So as someone who has raised money for startups before, one of the things that I never enjoyed about that process was feeling like it was a treadmill that you’re always on. And really, I’m a product guy, I’m a I’m a tech guy, I like digging into like the business problem, more so than I like being on the road and glad hitting investors and convincing them and getting them excited about what we’re building. So me being more interested in actually applying myself to solve the problems, more so than raising capital, made it really obvious to me that raising capital is not something that I wanted to do, especially in the early days, and was fortunate that I had some capital that I could use to start the company and see how it would go. Unfortunately, for this company in particular, we began doing a lot of work, consulting and servicing other brands. So it did have the ability to be profitable, very quickly, it didn’t need a lot of upfront capital investment. The software did. But we slowly like lagged into that, as we built the agency and the firm up, we had more capital to invest into the software. And that then helped us build the agency and the firm even more.
Jeremy Weisz 32:41
You worked with the Olympics? What kind of stuff to do with the Olympics.
Manick Bhan 32:48
So the Olympics is so interesting, when we think about the Olympics, we think about like watching your Olympic Games. And looking at the Olympics as a digital marketing event. And unpacking what that really represents. We’ve got hundreds of languages, right globally, all these audiences tuning in to their local Olympic team, their local Olympic website that’s written in a different language, right? Whatever their language is, those websites all have their own technical challenges and their own issues, servicing their official content on Google and to their audiences. And with the Olympics, what was so interesting is even though you have these official Olympic websites out there, representing the team, whether it’s a team of Serbia, or the team of Croatia, or the team of, of Spain, there were other competing sites that were taking traffic away from them, just because those sites weren’t optimized properly from an SEO standpoint, or Google can crawl them. So a lot of the work was just setting standards across all of these hundreds of Olympic websites in different languages for different audiences, and helping them establish like good technical fundamentals, website fundamentals, giving them all audits that their teams could then use to repair and fix the websites. And in some cases, we help them do that as well, to solve some of the bigger, more challenging issues and hurdles so that their sites can be optimized discoverable by Google, and engaging their audience at this very, very critical time of the Olympic event. So it was great fun, and very exciting. A lot of moving pieces there. Tons moving pieces. Oh, yeah.
Jeremy Weisz 34:44
I want to talk about a b2b example, also. And you there was a data visualization company.
Manick Bhan 34:52
Yes, yes. So yeah, so one of our clients there. We have a NDA in place. So I can’t share too much about who they are. But they’re a public data visualization company. And one of the interesting challenges that they have is that their product, it is a global b2b product. And that means if they want to reach audiences in China, and in Japan, and in Germany, they have to create content in all these different languages. And making sure that content is factually accurate and fact-checked and readable. And really conforming to a very high standard was a challenge for them. And they wanted us to help them figure it out. So we helped them build a pipeline where we were actually using AI and machine learning to help them translate those pieces from English into each language, and then confirm that those articles were all written correctly. And then once the content was created, also, building authority in Google’s eyes, and each of those countries, they’re a US company that’s like where their headquarters is. So they’ve got tons and tons of recognition as a brand here in the United States, but not abroad. And so one of the biggest challenges that we have to do is figure out how do we actually do outreach to journalists and publications abroad in different languages, and respond in different languages, so that we can actually secure them digital PR. Far, far away from our home turf. And that was a great and fun challenge for us to solve.
Jeremy Weisz 36:38
Manick, first of all, thank you. I have one last question. Before I ask it, I want to point people, they can check out linkgraph.com and searchatlas.com to learn more. My last question Manick is your favorite tools and software outside of the SEO space. You know, obviously I’m sure SearchAtlas is your favorite. But outside of that, what are some of your favorite tools and software that you use as an organization or personally?
Manick Bhan 37:08
Well, or personally, I think I’m absolutely fascinated by my journey. The ability to take text and generate images that are so beautiful, and creative and stunning. It is still something I’m wrapping my mind around. So I’ve been really following with great intent the innovations happening on the AI content generation space, I’m really interested in AI-generated music and generated images, engine generated video now as well. So there’s a lot of really fascinating things happening in that space.
Jeremy Weisz 37:44
Which, specifically in AI, so here’s the mid-journey, this is what you’re referring to. Yeah, I feel like I’m in the matrix. Okay.
Manick Bhan 37:56
You are more than you know. And it’s a it’s an incredible platform, you do have to use discord to leverage it. So you sign up with discord. And through discord, you can actually generate AI-generated images within their chat experience, and they’re stunning, the quality of the images is just absolutely mind blowing. I actually use that to generate a children’s book for my wife for her birthday about our daughter. And it was it was a lot of fun. And it was also, I think a great testament to the power that this technology has. So this was just a fun one for both pretty wild.
Jeremy Weisz 38:40
Yeah, any other AI tools that you like, you’re experimenting with?
Manick Bhan 38:45
Ooh. Probably like there’s some really experimental ones. And they’re not yet all the way there. This is the one that I would feel most confident recommending.
Jeremy Weisz 38:59
What other tools and software do you like?
Manick Bhan 39:06
It’s gonna sound kind of lengthy. I think everyone appreciates them now. But slack. Big fan of slack, a big fan of loom. For teams, what we really try to do is really minimize our in-person meetings. And so what we do is we send a lot of asynchronous video communication with each other. We use loom extensively to do that within our team. And I’m a huge, huge proponent of that technology. Really, really likes that.
Jeremy Weisz 39:34
Awesome. Manick, want to be the first one to thank you. Thank you so much for sharing your journey. And everyone check out more episodes of the podcast and LinkGraph and SearchAtlas. Thanks, Manick.
Manick Bhan 39:47
Thanks Jeremy, appreciate it.
