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January 22, 2020

Interview with Juergen Thellmann of venedash

Who we are

Juergen is the product owner of vene dash. He has been in the mobile industry for almost 10 years working for advertisers, adnetworks and a few startups. Over time he has gathered a lot of experience in ad tech and tracking technologies.

vene dash is powered by freenet digital that promotes a diverse portfolio of digital products. Their digital entertainment platform approach offers highly integrated services ranging from user acquisition, payments, customer management and premium consumer content and services. With sureyield they operate an exclusive affiliate marketing network, built for premium affiliates and advertisers, focuses on in-house and performance marketing, across multiple verticals and geos.

1) Please tell me the background of vene dash. The idea, your journey, and how it came to be.

Before vene dash was born, we being one of the biggest mobile entertainment providers in Germany, were looking for a tool that could help us track our internal campaign performance. After spending hours scouting the market, we came to the conclusion that solutions available at that time could not cover all our needs. Therefore, being a part of a large corporation and having the knowledge, the experience and the qualified resources, we decided to design our own software to support our business in the best possible way. This is how vene dash was born.

Fast-forward a few years and a successful multimillion-dollar business run through our platform, we determined to make our software available to other companies seeking a stable and a reliable tracking solution designed and engineered in Germany. Given that vene dash was created as an internal tool, its functionality and features are based on the real needs of performance marketeers. We know exactly what the market needs!

2) There are so many tools out there, why did you choose software as a performance marketing service?

You are right – there are many choices out there and the competition is tough. This is why we included an array of unique features that differentiate us from the competition. We also have the luxury to belong to a large German corporation, meaning we can listen to our customers’ needs and develop our tool in a way that makes most sense for our customers instead of being driven by financial targets like other smaller companies are.

3) How do you find customers for your software? What is your customer acquisition strategy?

Here at vene dash we believe that to get good results we need to have a multi-layer approach to acquiring customers. This is why we go about it from multiple directions – be it email and content marketing, website optimization, SEO, social media marketing or personal outreach, both online and offline. We run campaigns on all major channels, work hard on optimizing our assets and our Sales team goes far and beyond in contacting people who could be interested in our platform. Our next step is setting up our own incentive-driven referral program.

4) What scaling challenges have you faced in your company in terms of revenue, customers, industry?

The performance marketing world is a very high-paced and competitive environment, meaning things change fast and one should react quickly. We receive new feature requests regularly from our customers who want to stay on top of the game. Satisfying the specific needs of all customer is a challenge but also extremely valuable for us as we can make our product even better. We at vene dash have organized our work and our teams in a way that we can react and adapt fast and it has been working quite good so far. That said, we still find ourselves playing catch with others on a more or less regular basis, which can be challenging at times but is also what drives us forward.

5) How do you measure your success? Is there any metric to keep track of when it comes to your business?

Absolutely. Being a German company, we love data and knowing where we stand at any given moment is key when important decisions need to be made. We track all our campaigns, every euro spent, every click and every conversion. We run reports on a weekly basis and look at the whole acquisition funnel to make sure we are where we want to be and if we’re not, we make changes to our strategy and do things differently the week after.

Another angle to this is the feedback we receive from our customers and industry colleagues. Getting positive feedback shows us we’re on the right track, which is very rewarding. We are a young and dedicated team striving to make sure vene dash reaches its full potential and we take pride in adapting quickly to anything that awaits us around the corner.

6) What is your customer retention strategy?

We love doing things the right way. That goes for every aspect of our offering – on the product side as well as on the customer success side. We believe that only happy customers bring other customers and therefore do our best to keep our existing users very happy.

Our dedicated customer success managers are very knowledgeable and take time to make sure every customer gets the support they need – from product demos to migrations to any other question about specific product features. We take pride in ensuring quick and qualified responses so that our customers can be productive on the platform from day one.

We also pamper our clients by running exclusive campaigns that only vene dash customers have access to. This combined with qualified and responsive staff makes our users feel valued and well-treated.

In addition, we are currently working on providing a library full of insightful, current and relevant articles, blog posts, white papers, how-tos, etc. to keep our users well informed on what is going on in the industry and how to navigate the complex waters of performance marketing.

7) What is it about your platform that sets it apart from the competition?

vene dash is a solution that empowers you to have full control over your campaigns without having to cut any corners. As mentioned before, our platform was designed by us, a service provider company, and not by marketeers. We know exactly how the market operates, what the regulations in each geo are, the requirements and obstacles that a network or an advertiser needs to consider in order to protect its revenues and keep its services live. We have invested many hours in developing sophisticated tools such as URL checker, Traffic blacklisting, Fraud protection and our recent billing feature that allows you to pay your customers with cryptocurrency.

In addition, we pride ourselves in designing and engineering our product in the heart of Berlin, which means we follow strictest data protection policies, making our platform one of the most trusted and secure ones on the market.

8) What are your expansion plans for 2020 and beyond?

We have big things planned on the product side as well as on the marketing side for 2020. We will be introducing many new features and improvements within the first quarter next year. One of the most exciting one that we are about to roll out is the possibility to let publishers request payments via cryptocurrency. Apart from that we plan to introduce several features around automation in 2020. The aim is to automate processes and minimize manual work as much as possible so that our customers can focus on increasing their business instead of keying in the data.

We will also be sponsoring a very big networking garden located right before the entrance to Hall 8.1 at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona end of February. We are very excited about 2020 and look forward to welcoming new customers to our platform and see them benefit from vene dash.