People Don’t Hate Ads, They Hate Irrelevancy.
The story behind the two Jerusalem founders who are making ad-block obsolete.
The Bromance Begins
Idan: Adam and I always had something special between us. We understand each other in a very deep way, and it’s rare to find that.
Adam: Yup. Just the other day, Idan came into a room full of people with a mouthful of food and just started yelling something at me which came out as gibberish, and I was like ‘OK, got you Idan’, and everyone around us was like, ‘What? How did you understand that?’. So that’s just one example.
Idan: (laughs) I’m sure there are more positive examples!
Ideation, Ideation, Ideation!
Adam: One day, Idan started nagging me (whisper voice) ‘Hey, let’s do something, let’s do something, let’s do something,’ and I kept turning him down. I would tell him, ‘I have a great salary, a great position, a great job. I’m so comfortable, I work from home and wake up at 11’. At the time I was working for TOK Media managing everything on the tech side of the company.
Idan: Eventually, with enough nagging, we decided we wanted to found a startup together. He was resistant in the beginning, but then I began talking his ear off about it all the time.
Adam: We began to meet every evening to brainstorm. One time he came over to my place with a whiteboard, and said, ‘Adam, let’s do some ideation! What bothers you? Let’s do this, let’s do that. Gaming ideation! Look at this lecture. Read this, read that.’ So half a year ago, after 4 years, I decided to take a step back from TOK Media, and finally start something with Idan.
Idan: At the time, we had come up with three good ideas, but we narrowed it down to one and took it to the Siftech Accelerator at the JVP in Jerusalem. The idea was that we fell in love with the new kind of celebrities — the online vloggers.
We knew about a great trend called Fashion Hauls, which is just everyday women in all shapes, sizes and colors — trying on clothing and showing the world how it looks on them. This is the whole point of online influencers today; they have something authentic. They’re bringing something unpolished, something raw. We saw all this content and we said ‘Hey, why is it so difficult to find all those people by specific size and body measurements?’ Our initial idea was to connect people through a platform with vloggers, who had the same body type and measurements as them, so that they could browse relevant TryOns. We called it TryOnHeroes.
As Adam and Idan began working on developing the TryOnHeroes platform, something wasn’t quite clicking. “We felt that there was a gold mine, but we didn’t know where the gold was. It was frustrating,” recalls Adam. “But once we met Guy, everything changed.”
The Team Grows
Idan: Two months after we began at Siftech’s Accelerator program, there was a speed dating event with mentors. Adam had gotten into a car accident two days before and his back was in a lot of pain. The doctor had given him a shot of morphine straight to the back to help him cope and he shows up to this event super high.
Adam: (laughing) I was so high. I couldn’t do anything except smile and every few minutes say an unrelated sentence. That’s all I did there.
Idan: Adam was also really hungry, so at one point, he was just standing at the food table eating everything. It was almost time for us to meet with a mentor named Guy Cohen, who was really important to us because of his experience with UI/UX design, and as one of the founders of Mekusharim.
Adam and I grew up on Mekusharim, which was like the Facebook of Israel, before Facebook was a thing. At the time, it was a huge platform and for us just to meet Guy was so inspiring. When our turn came, Adam had just had a face-full of Doritos and couldn’t shake Guy’s hand because he was covered in cheese and crumbs. So he gives him a fist bump instead, and Guy was like ‘Okay….’
We had great chemistry right away and at the end he told us, ‘Hey I want to keep talking to you guys, let’s meet next week, maybe we can collaborate.” We were super excited. The next week we met with him, and he kept saying over and over, ‘Something is missing here, I don’t know what yet, but I just love you two. You should think about it, but I want in — I want to be a full partner with you.’ So we tried it out and a month later he officially became a full partner of TryOnHeroes.
Adam: Guy was stubborn enough to ask us the right, difficult questions again and again and again. Together with a few other really great mentors from Siftech, we figured out that the idea for TryOnHeroes as is isn’t a great one, and that we’d come up against a lot of barriers and challenges, including raising money.
Pivot, Pivot, Pivot!
Idan: Four months ago, we decided to pivot from TryOnHeroes to ScaleAbout. I think from the first day that we pivoted everything began to work. Meetings went amazingly, people wanted to join us, and the money began to flow. Development started to fly; everything went so fast, and now, less than four months later — we have a product.
The idea behind ScaleAbout was to expand the best qualities of Influencer Marketing beyond social media platforms. This is what we were trying to do with the idea of TryOnHeroes as well. We recognize the value in authentic content. ScaleAbout gives publishers the power to provide top quality advertising using branded content that we know people already enjoy.
Adam: Our vision is to be a company that brings people real, authentic ads. We don’t want to see any more boring, blah, Bar Refaeli ads. That’s it. We don’t want to see it anymore. Nobody wants to see it. People don’t hate ads, they hate irrelevancy. AdBlock doesn’t need to exist if you have good content. The reason people use AdBlock is because the content is crap.
Idan: We want to see real ads, by real people. The end.
What’s Next?
Idan: Until now, we bootstrapped our whole operation. Now we’re closing a funding round for a seed investment. I feel it can’t get any better than this, working on a project that you’re passionate about with people you can 100% trust is the best case scenario.
Adam: It’s also a great combination, because Idan and I are best friends, and you have the secular and the religious working together. If only Guy was Arab, it would be a perfect Jerusalem mix.
Idan: We’re going to use the investment to run a pilot, which is launching in a month with a huge publisher. We’re also working on hitting some solid KPIs, along with more R&D to make ScaleAbout’s algorithms stronger.
Adam and Idan have now successfully raised a seed round of an undisclosed amount and are working to finalize the development of ScaleAbout. Check out their website for more information and to follow the story of these two inspirational founders.
