Russ: This is the BusinessMakers Show heard here and online at theBusinessMakers.com. It's guest time once again on the show, and I'm very pleased to have with me Dave Lineman, the founder and CEO of Click True. Dave, welcome to the BusinessMakers Show.

Dave: Thanks Russ, great to be here.

Russ: You bet. Well, let's start by you telling us about Click True.

Dave: Click True is a business that we founded to enable online advertisers to audit their paid advertising for online click fraud. And fraud really comes in two categories, and it's something that's really important for the business. One is that competitors can actually click on your ad. We call that a competitor attack and another happens more on syndication networks where third parties can just click on your ad to drive money into their own pockets.

Russ: Okay. Well, I've always been suspicious any time I've participated on advertising on the web, but that first example - what you mean is let's say I have a company that I decide well, I'm gonna do some search engine marketing. We're talking about that type of click through.

Dave: Correct.

Russ: And so I buy sort of the ability to show up higher in the paid search results, and you're saying I might have a competitor that's gonna just sit out there and pound away on it, and I'm paying a buck or two bucks or ten bucks every time they click on it, right?

Dave: Yeah, absolutely. One of our customers the other day notified me he's paying $100.00 per click.

Russ: My goodness! (Laughter)

Dave: So, for him, one or two clicks a day from his competitor makes a big darn difference.

Russ: Okay. Now, the other kind you mentioned, the third party type, now why would that happen?

Dave: Yeah, this is the nuance that's difficult for some people to get, and that is that Google's - I think 25 percent of their revenue comes from what they call the AdSense Program.

Russ: Okay.

Dave: And this was really a big innovation. That was allow other people to make money by putting Google ads on their site, and what they do is they split the revenue with the site.

Russ: Right.

Dave: And so it works fine, but you can imagine that there's a temptation for somebody who owns a site to find some way to get more clicks on their site since they're basically sharing the revenue with Google.

Russ: Not caring who is there, just as long as somebody is hitting it, then they can mind it. Wow, wow, wow.

Dave: Yeah, exactly and Google is making money too.

Russ: Right.

Dave: So it puts them in a very unique situation as far as how much policing do we really want to do?

Russ: Right. Well, I find this real interesting, but I'm curious what was the idea trigger? What was it, Dave, that said, "Wait a minute. I think there's a business here,"?

Dave: Well, it was pretty straightforward. It was money coming out of the pocket. That's a great business idea. We were doing another business that I have. We do a lot of online marketing. We spend a lot on Google every month, and all of the sudden, our budget was just being used up every single day. Thousands of dollars going out the door. Being basically a security person with a security background, I went through, digging through the log saying, "Hey, what is going on?" So what we found out was really at the time there was no - the information was there, but there was no software to make it easy to use to get at the information.

Russ: And what information? You mean the information about who was clicking on?

Dave: Yeah, yeah.

Russ: Yeah, Okay.

Dave: Yeah, it gets the site that funnels the click, if you will. The click farm or the fraudulent site, it's in there, but its buried way down in the information. So, to be able to bring the data up, and then also to be able to do it across multiple places such as Facebook and Yahoo and Google, it just didn't exist. So we wrote our own.

Russ: Okay, wow. So, what you can do is if I was paying for advertising out there and I said, "Wow, all of the sudden there's a lot more people hitting my ad and I don't see any benefit; I'm suspicious," and I hire Click True, you could tell me who is clicking on the ad. Is that right?

Dave: Yeah basically, and also we have basically a crawler that analyzes sites for patterns. Some of the most blatant click fraud sites actually have patterns that are detectable. So what we do is we go and we crawl the site that you're getting clicks from and we give you a fraud rating.

Russ: Okay.

Dave: And we also have a system - you could call it crowd sourcing. That's the buzz word, but if another advertiser has elected to block that site, it also gets flagged. So, in other words, if you sign up for Click True you're gonna be not only getting the benefit of our crawler, but all the other advertisers voting. So what we do is not only show you where the clicks come from, but we actually make an assessment, "This looks like fraud." So, to help you focus on the areas that you - you know.

Russ: So on this crawler example, now, does that sort of really only apply in that AdSense model?

Dave: Correct, yeah, yeah.

Russ: Okay, all right.

Dave: In the direct competitor one it's fairly simple. We look at the IP addresses and we figure out the location of them and then we look at the timing.

Russ: So are there actual sites that invite Google AdSense on that are there primarily just for the purpose of ringing the cash register and, therefore, committing fraud?

Dave: Absolutely! It's a touchy subject because obviously places like Google will probably try to minimize what the impact of these sites are, but anyone who advertises - our judgment based on doing this for a while now is that people realize there's fraud and they just accept it as part of doing business.

Russ: Wow.

Dave: And its fuzzy. It goes from questionable to outright fraud. Sometimes the outright fraud sites do get shut down by Google.

Russ: Okay, wow. So, I'm curious I guess Google knows about businesses like yours that are really out there validating and looking and searching for fraud?

Dave: Yes, they do. Their stance is that we've got it all. We've got you covered, and that might be true, but our sense is that we talk to a lot of people who just kind of don't trust that maybe Google is looking out for them.

Russ: Right.

Dave: They've got a lot to do. They're making billions of dollars.

Russ: Right. They've got a lot to do and millions and millions of people that are advertising, wow.

Dave: Yeah, yeah. People that spend $5,000.00 to $10,000.00 a month on Google. That's a lot of money for people like me. It's just noise to them because they've got people spending over a million dollars on pay-per-click ads on Google every month.

Russ: My goodness. Okay, well, let's go back to the sample. Let's say that I hired Click True, and you showed me a competitor that was just beating the door down, and you also showed a crawling site. What should I do about it?

Dave: You can actually go in and block them, which is a very gratifying thing to do because we've done it. (Laughter) We did it with our other business. Google enables you to actually stop certain IP addresses, and they also enable you to block up to 500 different sites. That's really what our software does is it enables you to quickly identify these sites and then go block them.

Russ: Okay, so if I blocked a competitor and the competitor then went back out and did a Google search that caused my ad to show up in the SEM category and they clicked on it, would just nothing happen?

Dave: No. It just wouldn't even show up.

Russ: It wouldn't show up? Oh cool.

Dave: Yeah, so you become invisible.

Russ: Okay, real cool. All right. Talking with Dave Lineman, the founder and CEO of Click True, and we'll be back with more with Dave after this. You're listening to the BusinessMakers Show heard here and seen online at theBusinessMakers.com.

[Commercial]

Russ: This is the BusinessMakers Show heard here and seen online at theBusinessMakers.com, and continuing on with Dave Lineman, the founder and CEO of Click True. I like the business, man. It's kind of keeping the world straight. How long have you been doing it?

Dave: It's been going on four years now.

Russ: Oh wow.

Dave: Yup.

Russ: You must have had this idea very early on sort of in the idea of trying to stop fraud on clicks?

Dave: Yeah. We did, and probably one of the interesting business lessons from it was the difference between a good idea and one that can become a business is a long stretch.

Russ: Right. (Laughter)

Dave: So we wrote the software actually very quickly, the initial draft of software, but getting to the point of creating a business plan, deciding, forming the corporate entity, trying to judge the size of the market takes a little bit of time.

Russ: Right. So, how are you capturing and winning customers?

Dave: Well, right now we've been doing it strictly through online advertising ironically. (Laughter)

Russ: Okay, right, right.

Dave: People pick up the phone and call us, and that's where I get a lot of information. People pick up the phone and they're upset.

Russ: They're hacked because they figured out something was wrong here.

Dave: Exactly, and we're getting a lot more phone calls from ad agencies and people that manage multiple campaigns because they're starting to get the sense that this really is a problem and is there something that they can do about it at a reasonable price point?

Russ: Okay, well speaking of reasonable price, once again, let's imagine that I was suspicious, called you up. What might I have to pay for your services?

Dave: Yeah, we try to make it simple. It scales based on the number of clicks. So, for 2,000 clicks it's only $49.95 a month, so basically 50 bucks a month. So, if you're the guy losing $100.00 a day, that's kind of a no-brainer.

Russ: Right.

Dave: That's probably an extreme example. It can scale to several thousand a month if you're up to the 500,00 or 1 million clicks, and there are certainly people who buy a million clicks.

Russ: Right, wow, wow. That's interesting.

Dave: So we try to make it so it's accessible to anybody because there's really a lot of people. I think the real target market are people that such as we were that managed their own stuff, but still spent a lot of money.

Russ: Right, right. So, by selling and marketing online, are you pleased with that result or you're gonna try something else in addition?

Dave: Well, I think we're ready to jump on the direct sales model. We've been kind of using this time to refine the product, and it's such as changing environment that our customers will give up new reports to create. So, the online marketing is fine, but this is a business where people don't know what's happening to them.

Russ: Sure.

Dave: So, we're just gonna now explore going to these sites and finding the people that are being defrauded and showing them a screenshot and showing them a screenshot and saying, "Hey, you're being defrauded." So that will be interesting to see how many deals you can close doing that.

Russ: Wow, so you'll go to a site and set up just with mainly AdSense ads, and you know its committing fraud because you've seen other customers that went there. Wow, that could be interesting.

Dave: Yeah. So I mean that's about as targeted market as you're gonna get, but we'll see.

Russ: Right, yeah. Now, you've done this long enough. Do you have some real success stories with customers that just thank you profusely and love what you're doing for them?

Dave: Yeah, absolutely. There's a guy and I think he'd be okay if I mentioned him that does custom romance novels.

Russ: Oh my goodness.

Dave: It's a great business, and he was just able to get his - he saved something like $3,000.00 or $4,000.00 a month on his Yahoo expenses right off the bat, and he was able to get a refund.

Russ: Wow.

Dave: The refund business is a little challenging and here that's why we went for blocking.

Russ: Right.

Dave: But he was certainly a happy camper and I said the folks who are testing it now at $100.00 a click I think are real happy.

Russ: Wow. That's so cool. Now, you mentioned a while ago there's sometimes a long gap between a good idea and a real business. That's kind of a lesson that we see pop up every once in a while here on the BusinessMakers Show. Sometimes you can't turn a good idea into a good business. Did you ever feel that on this one perhaps?

Dave: Absolutely. This one literally seemed like it was gonna die three or four different times.

Russ: Wow.

Dave: Different obstacles. Our first really technical guru kind of left us, and so I had to search for another. (Laughter) But it was one of those things that I felt like that's a lesson I had learned doing this stuff for 20-something years is that good ideas are cheap. Doing it and making the commitment financially and emotionally to do the business - so I just was not wiling to give up on this thing. That's about all I can tell you about it.

Russ: That's great. That's great. So, in fact, that's a perfect segue. Let's imagine that we have a young aspiring entrepreneur right now tuned in and listening to this story. What general advice would you give him or her?

Dave: I would say trust, but validate. So, in other words, if you have a great idea, trust that it's a good idea. Do a little bit of market validation, but just go for it, and just don't give up. For me, looking back, that was probably the - most entrepreneurs, they don't just have one idea. They've got 100 ideas.

Russ: Right.

Dave: And it's just a matter of picking one that looks reasonable that has a good business model and sticking with that and staying the course.

Russ: Cool. Well, Dave, I really appreciate you sharing your story with us.

Dave: It was great being here. I appreciate the opportunity.

Russ: All right. You bet. That's Dave Lineman, the founder and CEO of Click True, and you're listening to the BusinessMakers Show heard here and seen online at the BusinessMakers.com.