The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Unlocking Growth: Multi-Channel Strategies for Business Success with Avishai Sam Bitton

Episode Date: February 4, 2025

Unlocking Growth: Multi-Channel Strategies for Business Success with Avishai Sam Bitton Linkedin.com/in/avishaib Intro.co/AvishaiSamBitton About the Guest(s): Avishai Sam Bitton is a three-time founder and a prolific angel investor with a wealth of experience in tech entrepreneurship. He co-founded Orbi, which was acquired by LinkedIn, and Brainy, a company with a nine-figure revenue. With over $475 million spent on performance marketing channels over 12 years and angel investments in 146 startups with five notable exits, Aviche Bitten is recognized for his expertise in building scalable systems and assembling growth-oriented teams. Episode Summary: In this enlightening episode of The Chris Voss Show, host Chris Voss welcomes Avishai Sam Bitton, a seasoned entrepreneur and investor known for his strategic insights into performance marketing and scalable business growth. This episode delves into Avishai Sam Bitton’s professional journey, highlighting his entrepreneurial beginnings, major career milestones, and his innovative approach to ensuring long-term business success. In an ever-evolving market landscape, Avishai Sam Bitton discusses the importance of businesses diversifying their revenue streams to mitigate risks and embrace innovation. He shares his extensive experience with digital marketing and how his company, The Demand Box, supports organizations in creating multiple growth channels. Emphasizing a holistic approach to omnichannel marketing, Aviche offers valuable insights on leveraging unique talents and expanding business opportunities. With his hands-on experience in tech entrepreneurship, he provides a roadmap for building sustainable businesses prepared for future challenges. Key Takeaways: The need for businesses to establish multiple revenue streams to safeguard against market volatility and single-point failures. The role of omnichannel strategies in attracting diverse, talented professionals and creating cohesive teams. Avishai Sam Bitton's transition from an early entrepreneurial start to a founder of high-growth tech companies. The unique business model of The Demand Box, offering equity-based partnerships that align interests with client's success. Importance of creating a business built to last, focusing on continuity and resilience in an uncertain market. Notable Quotes: "Scale is what usually is the differentiator between what makes you a big successful entrepreneur." "Tech is a great place to put your time and to see scale happen in a very short amount of time." "My goal is to always try to be at the lowest margin of the cash component while pushing to increase the valuation of the company." "Business is never static, it's constantly changing and very dynamic." "Nothing gets a higher valuation and appetite of a potential buyer than a company that's being built to last."

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education rollercoaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hey, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. Well, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the big show. We certainly appreciate it. As always,

the Chris Voss Show is a family that loves you but doesn't judge you, at least not as harshly as your mother-in-law because she wanted Becky to marry Bob and she married you. But, you know, you can still work on it. Invite her to the show. She'll be much happier. Go to Goodreads.com. I can't guarantee that, actually. The lawyer says go to Goodreads.com. Fortes, Christmas, LinkedIn.com. Fortes, Christmas. Christmas won the TikTokity.

And ChristmasFacebook.com. YouesCrispFoss, LinkedIn.com, FortesCrispFoss, CrispFoss1, the TikTokany, and CrispFossFacebook.com. You can see us over there as well. Today we have Avi Shai, Sam Bitton on the show with us today. We're going to be talking about his insights and some of the amazing things he's done in his startup and founder life. He's a 3X founder. He co-founded Oribi, acquired by LinkedIn, and founded Brainy, a nine-figure revenue company he spent over 475

million plus in various performance marketing channels in the last 12 years my wife spent that on amazon yesterday i don't see why that's a big deal anyway he angel invested in over 146 startups with five exits and positive irr so far i don't have a wife. He built companies, created scalable systems built to last, and assembling growth teams that thrive under pressure. Why is Chris Voss messing with people's bios? Welcome to the show, Mr. Bitton. How are you? I'm doing fantastic, Chris.

Fantastic. It's good to have you, and it's going to get some great startup insights and investing insights. Give us your dot coms or wherever you want people to find you on the interwebs. I get to know you better. Yeah. So on intro.co, you can just type in my name, Avishai Sametan, and you can find me there. And on LinkedIn, just Avishai and the letter B in the end.

And I'm happy to connect with whoever thinks that I can give them any value. We'll have links on the Chris Voss show for everyone to go there. So give us a 30,000 overview of what you're up to these days. Right now, I'm kind of working on something new. I'm helping us create more demand, and I'm doing it in a way that they never thought possible. A lot of companies have kind of like a motion of sales, a motion of creating revenue that they kind of become very familiar with, even a bit addicted to. One of the biggest dangers that is kind of looming above their head is that they're with like a revenue generation mode of one kind of way that they are really good at and they're

familiar with, but it's a single point of failure for that company if, God forbid, something happened to that. So what I kind of do is I open many more channels, and it could be these very big and established companies. It could be these kind of up-and-coming companies, and I try to create for them at least a second successful channel of bringing in clients. So I'm already working with really good companies, but I try to help them to not just be good, but also stay good in face of whatever uncertainties might lie in the future.

Yeah, because this is never static, right? It's constantly changing and very dynamic. And, you know, you can have a great business model for a year, two years, 10 years, 20 years. You can have a great business model. All of a sudden, innovation comes along and goes, yeah, nope. We kind of saw that this week. Was it deep? was it deep is it deep six it's the d6 a bunch of stocks that's for sure the alibaba alibaba chat gpt i call it

yeah yeah yeah it's or timu chat gpt is that deep seek for those of you wondering what chris voss is uh meandering about uh they just it's January of 2025. They just blew up $600 billion worth of market share of companies. I mean, you just never know, right? I mean, one day you're cooking along, you own the world, and next thing you know, the China's here. So that's probably a reason why they need you to create multiple streams for them. Because if you just have one stream of income from one source sometimes you know you're not seeing the big picture maybe is that right it's also that you know you're probably not going to get the best of all types of talent if you're

only going through one stream of revenue right so example, if you're really good at doing Google ads, search and intent, you're going to find very, I would say, Turo talent that knows how to find the long tail keywords and knows how to do the research. But if you don't try to expand into a Facebook or LinkedIn ads or TikTok ads,

then you're not going to have the creative types joining you. And if you want to win big, I think you have to have a bit of every type of talent. And that's one of the biggest, I think, benefits of being an omni-channel company. You can bring these different types of talents, and they can work in sync in a holistic way with each other. And it becomes, instead of one saxophone player or one guitar player becomes a symphony yeah yeah the so tell us a little bit about your journey through life how did you get into entrepreneurism investing you know being you know running your own thing tell us about some of these things my first steps in entrepreneurship was around the age of seven. I came to a visit in Israel and I found out that there were no Snickers bars

and Twix bars and Kit Kat bars here. And yeah, and if somebody ever saw them, they saw them when they were on trip to the U.S. as kids. And just like a visit to Hershey Park, I thought about it.

I said, you know, there's all these mini bags. Why don't you just bring a ton of these mini bags of all these different chocolates back from the U.S. to Israel? I'll just create these, like, what I called bundles at the time. I didn't even know that bundle was actually a real thing, and people sell bundles all the time.

I went, and when I eventually moved to Israel around the second grade, I just started selling these bundles to kids of these foreign magical candy bars. They would have Mars and Snickers and they were completely over the moon and they were willing to pay a premium out of whatever at the time the allowance their parents gave them. And that was the first step in entrepreneurship. You're a candy bar drug dealer. At the time, I didn't know that business could not scale because there were only so many uncles coming back to Israel. We had the kind of Silk Road of candy bar supply chain.

That was the first time I ever sold something. From there, it was hard to stop. At the age of 13, I started DJing and I did parties and I had my own bar mitzvah. I was doing other people's bar mitzvahs. Wow. And by the time I was 23, I think I started my first tech company. It kind of started very, very young. What led you into the tech company? How did you get the start, from that from djing so one of the things that i kind of learned through settling

canning bars and being a dj is that scale is what usually is the differentiator between what makes you a big successful entrepreneur than a versus like a nice successful business person. And I think that in every industry, even industries that are as old as time, scale is an important thing. So if you think about the consulting industry, you have McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group that are basically doing consulting at scale. And there are huge law firms in the US

who employ thousands of people and they're doing law at scale. And if you don't have 200 year mindset like me, which I want to get everything really fast now, tech is a great place to put your time and to see scale happen in a very short amount of time. And most internet businesses, the majority of them, can see the type of scale that usually would come in my mom or my dad when they built a business in the 70s or 80s. What would take them 10 years could take you 10 months on the internet.

And from the minute I understood that, I knew that I wanted to build businesses online constantly. Wow. You got hooked at the entrepreneur blog, as we call it. So your first company, how did things go? So the first company we started was supposed to be a black box media buying company. It eventually pivoted to be an analytics company. And like many good companies, sometimes our co-founders have differences. And me and my co-founder split our different ways.

She continued to run the company all the way to an exit and that was great. Got acquired by LinkedIn. I went to start a second business, which was a big passion of mine in the publishing space. And I created one of the first performance publishers in the world. It was basically a media company publishing business that had owned and operated magazines where we would do content distribution at scale through data-driven decisions around the editorial process. So we would basically understand every day what people wanted to read and we would cater to what they wanted to read. So instead of making the news, we created evergreen stories that people were in the mood to read. That eventually reached around 1.1 billion unique visitors

around the third year. And we bootstrapped that to tens of millions of dollars and it was really great. And we had seven figure EBITDA years. And I managed to grow the company to 80 people at peak bootstrap with offices around the world. That was a great experience. And I couldn't get to that type of scale without really understanding that the Internet is also not just English. It's Spanish. It's Portuguese. It's French.

It's German. And our content reached people in multiple different languages on multiple different topics. And I think that was key to get to that volume and size. And so now you're kind of, would you call what you're doing freelancing? Of course, you're working on a stealth right now. So that too. Yeah.

My third company is actually very special and dear to my heart because it takes everything I learned throughout the last 14 years in the tech industry. And I kind of am taking the people I connected with along the way and combining what I learned with the people to create the solution for, it sounds funny, I'm trying to solve problems for very good companies who barely have problems. So I find companies who have product market fit, who have a great go-to-market motion, and I try to basically help them improve the angle of the hockey stick of their growth. As I look at them, I see what they are doing right now and what they're not doing. And I know that focus is always a challenge, even for the best of companies. And I try to help them build out through like an in-source motion, what is missing. For example,

one of the very successful B2B companies has a great outbound sales motion and does really great Google search ads. And they do events very well. What they're missing is CEO. And what they're missing is LinkedIn and Facebook ads. And what they're missing is maybe partnerships. So what I would do is I take the things that they're missing. I'd find what is feasible to probably do very well in the next year or two. And I create these two to three year engagements where for a deep cash discount, me and my company, Demandbox, we will take equity and we'll have an alignment of interest to see

the company succeed and reach its next successful round or see its share price increase. And that is the unique model. And I will bring individual contributors who are best in class on hireable people to work on specific things. So if we were talking about now doing SEO, I will bring the top 0.1 percentile of SEO person to work on that company. I'd bring the top YouTube ads creator to do YouTube ads. And that will possibly

go one by one in each of those fields. And my goal is to always try to be at the lowest margin of the cash component while pushing to increase the valuation of the company through hitting the KPIs and hitting successful milestones. And that makes it so companies are outlaying a bunch of money to hire you. And you're vested, as it were, in the results that you're trying to get for the company. So that's a great place to be. It is. And it's great to be part of the journey really from the inside. Many vendors or the word agencies, which I don't really connect to when I'm thinking about what we're doing in the man box, but many different types of let's call it external help.

They're looking for the cash component and they're looking to be inside the company for as long as possible. in order to create the infrastructure and the motion needed so I could be what I can only call in the best way kicked out and not needed anymore. Kicked out and not needed anymore. Something like my first 10 marriages. That's a callback joke we do on the show. So kicked out and not needed anymore. I mean, that's a good place to be if you kick ass, take names, all that good stuff. Now, for clients out there listening, LinkedIn is a big thing for us. What's the minimum that they need to be at maybe in company valuation,

size, spend, revenue? Is there a minimum that you have? Yeah. So if it's around A or B company, they should have raised significant capital. Our smallest company has raised a $35 million round A. And in terms of kind of like our average client, they're either round C or above. They're usually doing 50 to 100 million AR. And we have some publicly traded companies who are doing a few hundred million. And we're really looking to just work with companies who have great product market fit and a lot of room to grow. So we're not really picky on valuation or revenue. It's really about having great operators inside, a great product or service, and a true belief that we can help scale those companies. Anything more to cover as we go

out? I think that there's a real need in today's go-to-market world to have multiple ways of selling, especially when every year we see more doors close. If it is email marketing that's becoming extremely hard in the past few years. Before that, there was iOS 14 that made it impossible to do performance marketing for a while and it took time for platforms to find a way to kind of bridge that gap. There was always something in the works that will try to basically create a challenge for every person who does go to market. And by creating as much channels as possible

and always trying to be one step ahead of the curve and creating these the curve and creating these fallbacks and creating these opportunities of growth. Companies can create one of the most important things, which is business continuity, right? And on top of business continuity, when you're thinking like this, you're not thinking about building a company for a quick exit. You're building a company built to last and nothing gets a more higher valuation and appetite of a potential buyer or M&A opportunity

than a company that's being built to last. You want to build them to last, folks, because I tried building them to last a week and it didn't go well. It was fun for a week. Thank you very much for coming on the show, Mr. Benton. We certainly appreciate it. Thanks for having me, Chris.

Thank you, and thanks to your audience for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, 4chatschristmas, linkedin.com, 4chatschristmas, chrismas1, the TikTokity, and all those crazy places on the internet. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you next time.