Podcast Summary: Making It with Jon Davids
Episode 214: $200M Founder Shares His "Mess-To-Money" Formula
Release Date: September 23, 2025
Host: Jon Davids
Guest: Alex Zhardanovsky
Overview
This episode features Alex Zhardanovsky, a serial entrepreneur renowned for turning chaotic markets into multi-million-dollar ventures. Alex dives deep into his “mess-to-money” philosophy, recounting how he built and scaled companies from dorm-room experiments to $200 million giants. Jon Davids guides the conversation through Alex’s early affiliate marketing success, a booming pet e-commerce company, a viral media blog, and his latest venture, Prima—a B2B2C app streamlining access to the best restaurants for hotel guests. The episode is a candid look at growth hacking, market inefficiencies, and building defensible, scalable marketplace businesses.
Key Discussion Points and Insights
1. Prima: Revolutionizing High-End Restaurant Reservations
Timestamps: 01:28–07:50, 08:58–13:43
- The Problem: High-end hotel guests frequently struggle to book tables at top restaurants—existing systems are fragmented, inefficient, and highly manual.
- The Solution: Prima bridges hotels and restaurants, allowing guests to easily book curated reservations (often for that day or the next) via QR codes in hotel rooms.
- Value Proposition: “We are paving the highway between hotels and restaurants…without all the friction that currently exists within the reservation space.” (Alex, 01:32)
- Unique Business Model:
- Restaurants pay to be on the platform and a per-cover fee for bookings.
- For ultra-exclusive restaurants, guests can pay a “prime” premium ($200+ for the hottest tables). Prima shares the majority (60%) of this fee with the restaurant itself.
- Growth Hack: Advanced referral revshare links empower concierges and hotel staff to self-onboard and promote Prima, creating viral B2B adoption loops.
- Reduced No-Shows: Focusing on high-intent, in-town hotel guests leads to <2% no-show rates—far lower than standard reservation platforms.
- Not OpenTable: Prima narrows its focus to affluent, last-minute diners and high-value venues: “It’s kind of like OpenTable but for rich dudes...” (Jon Davids, 05:15)
- Data-Driven Model: Prevents long-range bookings (30+ days out) to protect restaurant table inventory and keep value high.
2. Origin Story: Early Affiliate Marketing and Marketplace Building
Timestamps: 13:43–22:38
- Early Days: Alex’s first success came from aggregating affiliate offers (Staples, Amazon) and leveraging network effects among publishers.
- Pain Point: Affiliate marketers struggled with trust and payment fragmentation.
- Azoogle Ads: Solution was a network delivering unified reporting and consolidated payments, taking responsibility for advertiser collections and giving publishers security.
- Growth: The business expanded from $2M to $200M in annual sales within a few years.
- Marketplace Lessons: Built for themselves first, then scaled to others—a pattern repeated in Prima.
“There was not one single place where [publishers] can go to get all these different campaigns and just get one check… So in 2002, we created Azoogle Ads…” (Alex, 14:57)
3. Growth Hacking: Customization, Optimization, and Arbitrage
Timestamps: 18:55–24:54
- Client Customization: Unlike other networks, Azoogle redesigned client flows (for Netflix, Blockbuster, etc.) to maximize conversions.
- Arbitrage Opportunities: Both Azoogle and its affiliates capitalized on media-buying inefficiencies, sometimes making multiples on the same campaign.
- Liquidity Challenge: Alex leveraged existing networks and relationships to quickly create supply/demand liquidity, a concept now mirrored at Prima.
4. Prima’s B2B Viral Loops & Revenue Streams
Timestamps: 28:29–32:39
-
Referral Engine: A two-tier revshare system encourages hotel staff and concierges to invite colleagues, driving exponential adoption.
-
Endless Recurring Revshare: If a hotel introduces a guest to Prima, it earns a share of ALL future bookings that guest makes—globally and indefinitely.
-
Strategic Incentives: This approach, inspired by Netflix’s affiliate strategy, allows for massive, sticky B2B distribution:
“If the hotel introduces a guest to the Prima app, they make money off that guest indefinitely.” (Jon, 30:28)
5. Building Defensible Marketplaces: Avoiding Single-Channel Risk
Timestamps: 39:07–54:47
- PetFlow and LittleThings.com: After Azoogle, Alex built a pet food auto-ship company, then spun out a viral content site (LittleThings), which grossed $60M+.
- Catastrophic Platform Risk: A sudden Facebook algorithm change wiped out 90% of traffic overnight—a defining “scar” for Alex.
- Lesson: Never rely on a single distribution channel; diversify demand sources relentlessly.
- Prima’s Diversification: Onboards hotels, residential buildings, influencers, and more—ensuring broad-based reach.
“The more people we connect to, the more diversified this business is… and we’re not dependent on any one partner.” (Alex, 54:47)
6. Identifying “Messy Markets”—Alex’s Entrepreneurial Philosophy
Timestamps: 55:55–61:00
- Signature Move: Alex repeatedly targets fragmented, inefficient markets—affiliate marketing, pet food, viral content, and now hospitality tech.
- Marketplace Arbitrage: Bridges demand and supply with sophisticated tracking, analytics, and incentive systems.
- Hospitality as Last Frontier: He describes restaurant/concierge systems as “handshake economies” ripe for tech-enabled optimization.
“I find hospitality to be one of the most inefficient [markets]...There’s a lot of handshake deals that happen...that pains me. It shouldn't be like that.” (Alex, 55:56)
Memorable Quotes
-
On Market Inefficiency:
“What we’re doing is not reliant on buying eyeballs, on buying memberships and consumers and running ads and buying Meta traffic... There is no highway that connects [hotels and restaurants].”
(Alex, 10:37) -
On Building Trust and Scale:
“We aggregated all these advertisers onto one platform with real-time reporting... If one of them didn’t pay us, it was our problem. If you’re a publisher with us, you always got paid.”
(Alex, 15:35) -
On Platform Dependency:
“Never depend on someone for all of your traffic. For us, unfortunately, that was Facebook... One day it went down by 90%...”
(Alex, 45:24) -
On Business Models:
“Our system, for example, prevents a guest from booking two reservations on the same day. Other systems don’t do that... We don’t want them to book more than seven days out.”
(Alex, 32:53) -
On Incentives for Adoption:
“If a hotel introduces a guest to the Prima app, they make money off that guest indefinitely…because it’s their hotel guest.”
(Alex, 30:40) -
On Marketplaces:
“Once you have a core group of individuals highly connected within an industry...the relationships drive liquidity.”
(Alex, 24:54)
Notable Moments & Timestamps
- [01:32] Alex introduces Prima’s marketplace between hotels and restaurants.
- [05:15] Jon quips, “You’re OpenTable, but for rich dudes.”
- [09:36] Alex reveals that Prima took 17 years from concept to launch.
- [14:57] Alex on the origins of affiliate marketing and building Azoogle Ads.
- [20:59] How affiliates arbitraged offers for astonishing ROIs.
- [28:59] Explains the viral referral system for hotel staff/concierges.
- [30:40] The “indefinite revenue share” engine for hotels.
- [39:30] Story of building PetFlow and pivoting into viral content.
- [45:24] The catastrophic Facebook algorithm crash wiping out LittleThings’ traffic.
- [54:47] On never relying on one channel/partner ever again.
- [55:56] Alex’s “mess-to-money” philosophy outlined.
- [60:46] Comparing Prima to “Uber for hospitality”.
Overall Tone & Takeaways
- Candid, tactical, and insightful. Alex is direct about failures, scars, and the nuances of growth hacking.
- Practical advice on marketplace liquidity, channel diversification, early-stage growth hacks, and designing defensible business models.
- Big emphasis on identifying real-world friction (i.e., “messy markets”) versus inventing new categories from scratch.
For Listeners Who Haven’t Tuned In
This episode offers a masterclass in practical entrepreneurship, especially for creators and founders eyeing platform businesses or complex multi-sided markets. Alex’s stories reveal both the exhilarating highs (and sudden lows) of rapid scaling, while his approach to building sticky, diversified businesses is relevant well beyond hospitality or tech.
Highly recommended for those looking to understand the “behind-the-scenes mechanics” of why certain startups explode—and others implode—on the road to $100M+.