Challenge
San Diego, CA-based Adcrush Media is a performance marketing agency that works with top brands like HBO, Uber, and eHarmony to: -Drive targeted traffic through social, programmatic, and mobile marketing. -Continually measure and optimize campaigns to deliver qualified leads. Adcrush Media needed to automate their media buying process and scale their company faster without relying on external capital. Adcrush experienced early success by driving targeted traffic and leads for their clients. However, their manual process for media buying limited their ability to take on additional clients. To scale, Adcrush knew they needed to automate their process. Building automation functionality would require hiring developers. Adcrush co-founders David Sanghera and Tony Wang challenged themselves to accomplish their goal without resorting to raising any outside capital. By flexibly engaging with Toptal, Adcrush achieved triple-digit growth while continuing to bootstrap the company.
Solution
Using Toptal’s flexible, on-demand hiring model, Adcrush worked with ten developers to automate their ad-buying process and rapidly release critical features. Over the course of a year and a half, Adcrush engaged a total of ten Toptal developers to build and transform their product. Using agile methodology, David Sanghera worked with the engineers to roll out a minimally viable product after only three weeks and release additional critical features into production every week after that. Adcrush also utilized Toptal experts specializing in machine learning, blockchain, web scraping, and the Facebook API to enhance product functionality. Toptal Director of Engineering Martin Chikilian worked closely with David to facilitate the hiring flexibility he sought. Adcrush was able to efficiently scale up or down the quantity or specialty of the engineers as the project evolved.
Results
Without raising external capital or hiring a full-time engineering team, Adcrush expanded their client base by 500% and tripled revenue year over year. By productizing their ad-buying process, Adcrush tripled revenue year over year, significantly expanded their client base, and has seen a 50x return on investment through their ongoing partnership with Toptal. As a result, Adcrush has not had to take on outside funding and remains independent. They only require one full-time developer on staff, in addition to continuing to work with five Toptal engineers on a flexible and ongoing basis.
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