Hike helps attract Customers with low CAC & is already Worth BRL 80 Million
Hike a startup that helps companies like Bradesco, Nubank and Claro acquire low CAC customers – has just raised a funding round that values the company, which was founded just four months ago, at 80 million of reais (after money). The financing was financed by Coruja Capital, former director of the Consumer Banking District in Itaú, Marcio Schettini, and by 39a, by Gustavo Roxo, former director of BTG.
Hayek was born with a simple suggestion. 70% of the digital sales market is in the hands of big tech companies (Google and Facebook). We want to go through the remaining 30%, Renato Dolce, the company’s founder, told Brazil Journal. Basically, Hike helps its clients advertise in alternative media – such as little-known but highly rated sites and mobile games – which significantly lowers their customer acquisition cost (CAC) without compromising conversion.
“This advertisement that appears in the middle of a mobile game is 7 times cheaper than Google and Facebook, for example,” Renato said. “The problem with this medium is that if you don’t do it right, you won’t be able to convert.”
Hike also buys media from sites like Plusdin – which compares financial products like credit cards and has more than 4 million unique hits per month – and Passageiro de Primeira, which teaches how to better earn and use airline miles and has 1 million hits. / month, mostly Class A.
Hike only earns success: if it converts sales to its customers at less than the company’s average CAC, it gets value on top of that. Hike is not Renato’s first venture in this field. Until recently, the entrepreneur was the CEO of Decode, a company he founded and sold to BTG Pactual in 2019.
Decode did the same as Hike, but only for BTG Digital, helping the retail bank win new customers for its brokerage and banking services. Before founding Decode, Renato had an atypical career in the world of startups.
A political scientist and Master in Econometrics from the Sorbonne, he worked from 2013 to 2017 at the Federal Secretariat for Government Communication (Secom), where he created models to understand the behavior of the population in relation to government agendas. After that, he went to work in the digital field for the Bank of Brazil.
There was little time. He left to set up his own digital transformation consulting company, BTB, which was eventually acquired by BTG, giving birth to Decode. Renato founded Hike with Eduardo Galvao, his partner at BTB, and Fabiano Melo, who was COO of Decode.
With the trick, Hike intends to build a platform to connect partners (websites and game developers, for example) with smaller advertisers, similar to Google Adsense and Taboola. Today, Hike only serves large customers. With the new platform, he also intends to penetrate small and medium-sized enterprises.
But why does a customer leave AdSense? “We have a more competitive cost-competitiveness than theirs and we were able to follow the conversion, show that it came from us,” Renato said. “For a website owner, I can pay more because I’m paying per conversion, not per view. To get money from Google, you have to have millions of views.”
