Thread by @jspujji

This thread is for first time entrepreneurs who are struggling. It is 11 years ago.. 6 mos after leaving Goldman Sachs to bootstrap, work 100+ hour weeks, we launched @ampush. After 3 days and $10k spent in ads, we had generated <$500 in revenue. In short, we had failed...👇

First, what was the biz? We found potential students for online universities by buying search ads that went to our "matching engine." If we paid $1 per click and 5% of clicks matched, our cost would be $20 and the schools would pay $40. We would print $, right? wrong!

Our conversion rate was closer to 0.1%. We were F****d. But how could that be? Our financial model said we'd print $, we built keyword scrapping tools, we had a unique bidding framework from "wall street", our matching engine was built with super slick javascript...

I emailed a friend at Google, her response "Dude, Fail. You picked the absolute worst vertical. It's so competitive, even Google doesn't support/advise in it. I wish you spoke with me before doing this." I wished I had, too. I was numb, my face flush, why did I leave my job?

My dad asked the same Q... given we were bootstrapped, @aniketkshah and I lived with my parents. My dad, himself an entrepreneur + triathlete, took me for a run. "Why are you doing mktg with no prior experience? You said your boss at GS made millions, what were you thinking!?"

To add injury to insult, he ran an 8 min mile vs my 10 min so I just kept panting unable to answer his questions. Which is good, because I didn't really have good answers. Instead, we went into scramble mode for the next 2 mos. Here's what we did:

1) We called all our clients - we apologized we weren't delivering the volume we promised and assured them we were committed to success. None left and all were impressed by our candor/proactivity.

2) We sent out pings to any/everyone we knew who could help. We asked for introductions to competitors, ad experts, friends, cousins, anyone who could teach us anything about digital marketing. We learned a tremendous amount in <8 weeks.

3) Simplified - 1 thing we learned was we had over complicated. We had 4 channels, 4k keywords, 8k match types, dynamic bids, 20+ landing pages. Our "smarts" led us to create an unsolvable problem. The mantra: get ONE keyword to ONE landing page that converts profitably

4) We hustled - my then girlfriend, now wife @tweepika started cold calling publishers who would send us traffic. We looked at competitor websites and borrowed liberally (it turns out this demo didn't want a slick funnel and that was part of our conversion issues.)

And we got lucky... roughly 7 weeks later with less than $10k in our bank account + $50k of cc debt, on the week of my 26th Birthday no less (may 23rd), we "launched" again for the 9th time. Spent $2k on ads ($25 CPL) and generated $3500 in revenue, IT WORKED!!

2 months later, we started advertising on @Facebook and in August of 2011 (13 mos later), Ampush generated $2M in revenue and spent $1.2M (per month) on ads. That was around the time we got a call from Facebook... "You are one of our top 100 advertisers, what's an Ampush?

But that is a story for another day... If you liked this, please follow me @jspujji share it with any entrepreneur you know going through ups/downs and struggling. My advice: stay tenacious, don't be afraid to ask for help and iterate quickly.

Also focus on “rate of learning/improvement” vs absolute position.