What did Magfi do in 2022? How much did it grow? What did it develop?

Before starting with Magfi's development in 2022, I would like to quickly and briefly explain what Magfi is for those who might not know.

Magfi is a community engine that lists messaging communities/groups such as WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, Snapchat and analyzes these communities end-to-end with artificial intelligence technology to place appropriate ads within the groups. At the same time, community owners/admins (we call them Magfiluencers 🙂) also earn regular income through these ads thanks to Magfi.

Now we can start. Here are the topics waiting for you to read in the coming minutes.

1. Company Establishment and Before
2. Our First Revenue and First Customers
3. Pivot in the Idea
4. AI Integrations
5. Our Statistics
6. Community Owner and Customer Relations (CR)
7. Our Team and Company Culture
8. Investment Round
9. What Awaits Us in 2023?

Company Establishment and Before

Actually, Magfi was an entrepreneurial idea that had been in our minds for a long time. I would like to tell you the unofficial establishment of Magfi with a beautiful story. After going to university, we noticed that WhatsApp and Telegram groups were being created for each course. Since we and those like us are entrepreneurs, school usually comes second because we put our dreams among the priorities of our lives. However, those of us who lived and grew up in Anatolia also need to somehow stop the pressure from our environment and finish school. So we started thinking about something to pass the university exams. Then we realized that all kinds of information are shared in these course groups I just mentioned. To access this information, we first need to reach these groups, but there is no way to find messaging groups. That day we decided to make an application that finds WhatsApp groups.

Subsequently, realizing that not only WhatsApp groups but also groups on other messaging platforms could not be found, we added platforms such as Telegram, Discord, Snapchat, Facebook Groups... in order. We made various updates and developments in the application for about 8 months. We reached 80,000 users but realized that we were having difficulty monetizing this platform. We saw the diversity of these groups and the millions of people in them as a potential advertising platform and produced Magfi ADS. Now the adventure begins.

We produced an artificial intelligence bot for Magfi ADS. Our users include this bot in their groups and we analyze the groups end-to-end through the bot. After this analysis, we measure the group's audience and create a digital community identity. Brands can advertise by selecting the target audience and keywords they want from us. We match these ads with the groups we analyze and share them within the groups. The group owner becomes a revenue partner from each ad. Of course, all these processes happen automatically.

Since we can start receiving ads and invoicing as our users add our bot to their groups, we officially established Magfi in London/United Kingdom as of January 21, 2022.

With this establishment, we were very excited to include our first customers in Magfi ADS and invoice.

Our First Revenue and First Customers

Magfi ADS achieved great success at the beginning of 2022. Nearly 400 users registered their groups with Magfi ADS. There were 2,400,000 unique users in these 400 groups.

We were very happy and thought that thousands of customers would line up to advertise, but we were inexperienced in the agency and advertising sector and hit a big wall. In January and February, we made revenues that did not exceed $500 in total and our number of advertisers was two or three. We had issued our first invoices, but this was not satisfying us and was not ensuring the sustainability of our business. We thought of doing a new marketing campaign and announced the feature of communities being able to advertise themselves in other communities.

With this, we gained dozens of new customers. At the same time, agencies and big brands that saw our advertising statistics and efficiency became our regular customers in the following months. Among these are brands such as Huawei, Zubizu, Akbank, Bitlo, CoinDesk, Aksigorta and many more, and we now provide regular service to hundreds of national and international customers.

Pivot in the Idea

During this process, we saw that 96% of our revenues came from Magfi Ads and decided to pivot by converting our community finding application idea into a messaging groups digital marketing platform. We think that development and change are very important in entrepreneurship and we never insist on fixed ideas. With this pivot, we channeled all our energy into Magfi Ads and decided to focus on artificial intelligence to make better micro-targeting.

Our AI Developments

Magfi is a technology company. That's why the most important thing for us is how advanced our technology is. Random ads shared in groups neither give us an advantage over our competitors nor do the ads work efficiently. That's why we decided to focus on what we can analyze from the data on us to increase the efficiency of ads.

So how do we extract the Digital Identity of communities? We have multiple parameters for this.

• Community's; name, description and metadata
• Users'; age, gender and interests
• Analysis of community's anonymous data (surveys, etc.)

First of all, I would like to point out that all analyses are carried out in accordance with KVKK and GDPR rules with the consent of users and all data is analyzed anonymously on a group basis, not on a personal basis.

By analyzing the above parameters, we extract tags for groups. We also use sentiment analysis such as emotion analysis that predicts the tendencies of our users. Thus, we can show more clear content in front of them.

We don't stop there either. We use special machine learning technologies that analyze the authenticity and uniqueness of clicks and views in groups. Below I will explain one of these, the Anomaly Detection algorithm.

Deniz Duran, one of the important members of the Magfi team, leads the Anomaly Detection algorithm, and he shared the article and statistics below with me. This year he will also write a thesis about this algorithm.

According to Dörnyei's research, it is estimated that approximately 10% of all advertising expenditures in the digital marketing sector are spent on fake viewing and clicking activities (Dörnyei, 2020). Digital marketing expenditures worldwide are expected to reach $602.25 billion in 2022. This means that the money spent on online advertising fraud in one year will be close to $60 billion. At Magfi, we use anomaly detection methods to detect, prevent and prevent these fake views and clicks from victimizing our advertisers. First, we need to know what the outlier values called "Outlier" are. To answer this question, we can take a closer look at the figure below. This graph shows the increase in views of a Magfi ADS ad every 30 minutes for 24 hours.

There is clearly an increase at x=40 and it can be easily distinguished from the rest of the data. This is called an outlier. We can understand that the reason for the outlier here is fake views used by 3rd party software, but this is also the point to be careful about in anomaly detection in time series, it is necessary to know that not every point that is visually separated from the data set is an anomaly. For example, the increase in the middle of the graph is due to sudden activity in the morning hours. That's why it is necessary to detect contextual outliers, which are outliers obtained by comparing graphs of multiple times belonging to the same source.

We detect these outliers in Magfi ADS systems with advanced machine learning, and every day, our artificial intelligence learns with each new ad and continues to work more consistently.

Our Statistics

Magfi grew exactly 205% monthly compound in the 9-month revenue generation process.

Our revenues reached 5-digit $ MRR from $500 monthly. A total of 3000 communities regularly receive ads from Magfi Ads. There are a total of 6,500,000 users in these 3000 communities. Approximately 900,000 of these users are active every day. To date, over 2,000 of our community owners earned over half a million ₺ with Magfi Ads and these revenues were deposited into bank accounts. Our revenue increases by 24% every month. We are also actively operating in Azerbaijan outside of Turkey.

To give a brief summary about our advertising statistics, Magfi Ads performs better than other similar digital marketing platforms. Our CTR (Click Through Rate) rate exceeded 2% on average. We can complete a campaign within 24 hours and provide hundreds of thousands of unique views in 24 hours.

Community owner and customer relations (CR)

During this process, we developed a Magfi Management Panel where we can see all statistics and control ads. With this panel, we respond to all kinds of problems of our Magfiluencers instantly and make adjustments. We are in one-on-one communication with more than 50 Magfiluencers every day.

At the same time, even though our customers can advertise completely through the panel, we stay in communication with them and support them in the advertising process. We call the team members who manage this process Community Leaders and we have a Community Department in our team.

Our team and company culture

As a team, since the day we were established, we have always prioritized happiness and creativity. Our motto is

Don't work with someone you wouldn't want to chat with when you meet them in the bathroom at 3 AM.

Our team is progressing in a more qualified and beautiful plan day by day. In 2022, we lived together in Magfi Home as always. Almost all team members work in the same house and live in the same house. Startups are not organizations that succeed by working 5 hours a day. For this reason, we work day and night and we all share the same roof.

We also kept our team quite lean this year. Without forgetting that WhatsApp is still 50 people, we only grow our technology team when necessary. (Atakan Kocaayan (CTO) reminds me of this word in every meeting 🙂)

Investment Round

Magfi is actually more like a living organism than a classic company for us. Because as Magfi grows, we as team members also experience things we have never experienced before, and we encounter difficulties we have never encountered before.

As a team, we thought we were ready for investment when we first presented Magfi ADS, but we weren't. Subsequently, we thought we were ready when we got our first revenue and invoiced, but we weren't. Currently, we are a start-up that can reach millions of users, earn monthly 5-digit $ revenue, has hundreds of corporate and international customers, and has taken its first steps in international expansion, and we are now ready for investment. We achieved these successes without any investment until today, and in the upcoming process, with investment, we will achieve many times more than what we have achieved with much bigger visions.

What awaits us in 2023?

As a result of the work we have done in Turkey for 1 year, we have proven the quality and efficiency of our product. Now it's time to serve not only people who speak the same language, live in the same geography, share the same culture, but also people we have never set foot in our lives, whose languages we don't know, and whom we may never witness in our lives. Our goals for 2023 with investment;

1. More than 50% dominance of the Telegram advertising ecosystem in the Eurasia market, especially in Russia,
2. Entry into the European market with WhatsApp and Discord
3. Reaching more than 50 million users
4. Training our artificial intelligence in Russian and English
5. Doubling our team
6. Raising our MRR to 6 digits in dollar terms

and with many more new developments, we aim to be one of the leading businesses both in our own sector and in entrepreneurship in the coming years.

We are still at the beginning of the road, but we are more excited about the road itself than the end of the road!