Forget the AI Buzz: building value, not features with Mustafa Mussa @adtron.io

saas.unbound is a podcast for and about founders who are working on scaling inspiring products that people love, brought to you by saas.group, a serial acquirer of B2B SaaS companies.

In episode #28 of season 5, Anna Nadeina talks with Mustafa, CEO & founder at adtron.io, a digital advertising platform and software solution that helps brands, agencies, and publishers create, manage, and optimize mobile ads.

Mustafa’s path began in media informatics and creative work, then moved into project management for mobile services (think premium SMS and mobile downloads before the iPhone era). He founded BAM Interactive to help agencies bring mobile into campaigns — building apps, mobile landing pages, QR campaigns and HTML5 creatives.

By 2017 a turning point arrived: a partner agency needed to run thousands of mobile ad campaigns and could not scale with manual development. Rather than hire rapidly (and risk quality), Mustafa and his team modularized their work. Reusable HTML5 modules, a shared frontend base and automated processes made it possible to reuse creative building blocks and scale efficiently. That modular approach became the foundation for adtron.io.

Productization: how the agency work shaped the platform

Rather than starting with a theoretical roadmap, adtron grew from real agency projects. Early customers — experienced mobile advertisers who had been running mobile campaigns for years — co-designed the product: prototyping, testing UI and calling out competitor gaps. That collaboration defined adtron’s direction and helped the team ship a tool that matched actual workflows, not imagined ones.

What adtron offers

• No-code / drag-and-drop creative building for mobile ads
• Reusable modules and templates for faster production
• Hosted ad scripts that integrate into DSPs and SSPs
• Analytics and anonymous engagement tracking
• Optional consultancy and agency support for peak times

Customer profiles and onboarding

Mustafa describes three main customer archetypes:

• Experienced mobile teams — agencies or teams who already use similar tools. These are the easiest to win and typically onboard in 4–6 weeks.
• In-housing brands — marketing teams moving from social platforms into the open web; they often need training and take up to three months to get internal approval because of multiple stakeholders.
• Feature-driven power users — long-time programmatic specialists who request advanced capabilities and push the roadmap.

Onboarding varies: experienced teams move quickly; larger brands require more stakeholder alignment and negotiation (pricing, compliance, internal processes). Even so, once customers are live they tend to be sticky — running high impression volumes every month.

Sales: network first, automation later

Adtron is bootstrapped, so sales focus on efficiency. Mustafa prioritizes introductions from his LinkedIn network and referrals from current customers. Cold outreach is used, but warm introductions win more quickly and with less friction.

Long-term growth plans (paid marketing, sales automation) exist, but the current approach is pragmatic: hit near-term revenue targets first, then reinvest into scalable marketing.

Working with big brands vs agencies

Most brand relationships come via agencies. Big brands often delegate programmatic strategy to agencies, while adtron provides the creative building layer. When a brand signs directly, the platform’s drag-and-drop UX helps the in-house designers and media teams adopt the tool without heavy technical overhead.

Balancing custom requests and product roadmap

Mustafa admits to a large backlog: prioritization hinges on value. The rules are practical:

• Prioritise clean architecture and stable base code over one-off hacks.
• If a single custom feature unlocks a large deal, accept paid development in exchange for multi-year contracts.
• Never let the product be built around a single customer — keep things modular and maintainable.

Regional expansion: DACH roots, Asia growth

Adtron’s strongest market is the DACH region — a natural consequence of BAM’s agency network. Growth to countries like Poland and markets in Asia (Singapore, Vietnam) began through existing clients operating across regions. International deployment required operational tweaks — notably ensuring low-latency, regionally hosted delivery for fast banner loads in app and mobile web environments. Once solved, onboarding designers and teams remotely proved straightforward.

Mustafa’s stance on global expansion is pragmatic: if customers and revenue come from new regions, the team will support them. There’s no aggressive “conquer the world” plan — focus remains on product quality and customer success.

AI: a vehicle, not a headline

Rather than chasing AI buzz, Mustafa treats AI as a tool that must deliver measurable value. His principles:

• Don’t add AI for the brand badge — add it when it creates real customer value.
• Prefer integrating APIs from reliable providers over building large ML stacks internally.
• Focus on predictive/ML-based improvements (e.g., predicting creative performance, surfacing learnings from past campaigns) rather than generative features that don’t move the needle.

“AI is a vehicle. If it gives my customers value, that’s fine. If it’s just a badge, it’s not interesting.”

On the creative side, generative image tools (e.g., using AI to create assets) are useful, but they’re often part of the designer’s workflow (Photoshop, external image generation) rather than something that needs to be rebuilt into the platform. The higher value is in learning from campaign data to improve predictions and efficiency.

Privacy, analytics and integrations

Because adtron focuses on creative and anonymous engagement tracking, GDPR compliance is simpler than for identity-driven platforms. The platform tracks engagement with anonymized identifiers; it does not attempt to link ad interactions to named individuals.

Customers can edit the ad script produced by adtron and add their own tracking pixels or analytics code. That flexibility means adtron provides the creative serving layer while leaving compliance and advanced tracking choices to the client and their DSP/SSP ecosystem.

Team, wins and lessons

Team composition and hiring are central to adtron’s success.

• Team size is small and distributed: roughly 5–6 developers across Poland, Ukraine and Germany, plus a product owner and a QA engineer.
• Core win: finding the right people and mixing skills (frontend, backend, full-stack) to stay lean and productive.
• Big learning: the original platform required a rebuild — a reminder to balance vision with execution and not underestimate the product work needed to scale.

“Know your weaknesses and your strengths. Hire people that cover what’s missing. With the right people, a small team can beat much larger competitors.”

Founder hack: self-awareness first

Mustafa’s key piece of advice for founders is introspective:

1. Understand your personal strengths and weaknesses honestly.
2. Build a team that complements you — hire for the skills you lack rather than duplicating strengths.
3. Prioritise product quality, documentation and onboarding so a small team can support large customers effectively.