Thread by @jspujji

We were on fire.

Barely 1 year into starting Ampush we were already doing >100K a month in profit.

I woke up one day and checked our dashboard.

Revenues had plummeted 80%

Something was wrong.

The crazy part?

2 years later this disaster led to our largest partnership👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽

1/ It was the summer of 2010. We had hired two interns from Wharton.

One of them was this super smart go getter, and she helped us figure out Facebook and went on to become a McKinsey EM.

She figured out tons of creative ways to target back in the early days of FB ads...

2/ This is back when Facebook was desktop only.

No newsfeed. No algorithm. Just a bare bones CPC platform.

So she had compiled all of our tactics at the time into a deck, and developed some really crafty ones too...

3/ We were generating leads for online universities. They all offered masters and PhDs in nonprofit management.

She had this brilliant idea to target people who mentioned a specific non profit in their FB profile.

Then used the logo in her ads...

4/ She would micro target the 30,000 people who said that they're fans of the Red Cross or Habitat for Humanity in their Facebook profiles.

Our Head of FB at the time, Brian, said "I don't think this is a good idea."

I, the swashbuckling entrepreneur, overruled him...

5/ So she launches these ads and their performance was off the charts!

Super high click through, crazy high conversion. It was over three times more profitable than any other media we ran. Below is the original report!

Things were going great, until the first letter came...

6/ We woke up one morning to this email, and it was from one of these non profits and said "You are illegally using our logo in your ad."

And then we got another one, and another...

Then we start getting physical mail of the same type

By week 3, I had paused all the ads.

7/ The following Monday we come and we see this huge red bar across the screen.

Completely banned from Facebook...

Do not appeal, do not try anything, you're done.

We lost 80% of revenue in one day. FB was our #1 channel by far!

We scrambled, this was life or death.

8/ We tried to escalate with FB. Calls, emails. No response.

We tried emailing a college friend who went to high school with Zuck to message him for us. No luck.

We kept talking to people, but no one could help...

9/ We expanded our search and went after anyone high up within the FB Policy team.

We asked everyone we knew.

Eventually it was @richardprice100, who I’d bonded with talking education monetization at happy hour, that delivered the introduction.

That's when we met Paul.

10/ At the time, Paul led all platform policy at Facebook. He was the top of the pyramid for us.

I explained the situation, and it worked through the system...

We considered just starting a fresh account or just hacking in, but wanted to take the high road.

11/ We ended up having to get a deep legal audit and review of all our internal policies.

Had to hire a compliance officer.

We even got placed on a 0 strikes policy.

This could never happen again if we wanted to work with Facebook again.

12/ A few weeks later, we were allowed back on the platform.

The company was saved.

We learned an important lesson about not skimping on legal, but deepened our relationships with Facebook - our largest platform.

13/ If this hadn't happened we may never have become one of FBs early marketing partners.

That led to us becoming one of their largest advertisers - spending over $1 BILLION with them for companies like Hulu, Peloton, Blue Apron, Uber, and Clash of Clans.

14/ This was our second near death experience with @ampush. Check out the first time here:

https://twitter.com/jspujji/status/1380010635854016517?s=21

15/ If you enjoyed this thread, follow me @JSPujji

I tweet stories and learnings about bootstrapping and growth every week.