Alex Bachmann – an inspiring story of a self-taught entrepreneur

Alex moved to Germany with his parents when he was 11 after being born in Kazakhstan to a German father and a Ukrainian mother.

Aged 15 and just discovering the Internet and online forums, Alex quickly became an active member,  where he met Maxim Volokhov (now head of the startup incubator at Mitgo). Having moderated quite a few forums, Alex Bachmann discovered the power of social traffic and online advertising.

Alex then launched his first website on free hosting and then borrowed $27 from Max Volokhov to buy dedicated hosting and a domain.

His first company – Binlayer – resulted in a significant revenue of 2 Mln Euros in 2009.

The development of Bachmann’s main project – Admitad – began in August 2009 and the network has been launched in 2010.

Already in 2010, the first major clients appeared, and a year later, top retailers Quelle, Lamoda, and Sapato joined. This marks the beginning of the e-commerce era for Admitad.

While there are numerous business and reward models sprawled across the retail marketing and advertising space, what makes Admitad unique is its continuous development and adoption of the CPA-based model. The model allows advertisers and publishers to pay only for their orders and not clicks or traffic, making Admitad a transparent and fair business partner.

As early as 2015, Admitad created an additional service, the second after launching an affiliate platform, for managing and optimizing budgets in advertising networks. Together with the affiliate network, this provided a foothold for the future structure.  “When I was working as a publisher, I realized that no company had client services capable of satisfying my publishing needs, and this is what inspired me to jumpstart Admitad,” – says Bachman.

Today and tomorrow

Today, Admitad has outgrown itself to become one of the fast-growing IT companies worldwide. The firm is functional across nine countries, including its HQ in Germany, the UAE, the U.S., Brazil, Ukraine, and India. Admitad reported a total GMV of $11.6  billion for advertisers in 2021,  and proudly counts $700 million in payments to publishers in the last ten years; a remarkable growth within a short span.

In 2023, after years of growing the company and acquiring a few more businesses, Alexander Bachmann took a decision to build a new parent company Mitgo unifying all Admitad entities and taking ownership of all solutions and services in the MarTech, FinTech, Smart Shopping, and IT-driven Startup Incubation sectors.

Mitgo is represented in 10 offices worldwide; the company continues expanding its portfolio of products and services beyond performance marketing and aims to become a global IT player with a focus on partnership development and digital services.

Bachmann invests in buying companies, setting up representative offices in various countries, and launching and scaling new businesses with a startup studio. Over 300 business ideas were screened up today so far, four of which have grown to round A series. The list is likely to extend in the next three years, with over a 100 million US-Dollar budget planned for global expansion.   The vision of Bachmann is to become a global IT enterprise with flexibility, adaptive practice, and a seamlessly run structure that can handle every uncertainty on the market.

Alexander Bachmann has been listed among the top 50 online marketing players in Germany according to OMR, and interviewed by leading media such as FORBES magazine.