Thread by @jspujji

To all the builders struggling out there:

It’s 12 years ago.

6 months earlier, I left my fancy job

Talked to 20+ customers
Built our site
Spent 100 hours a week cranking

We finally launched…

After a week and $10k in ads, we made <$500 in rev

In short, we had failed👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽

1/ 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% matched, our cost would be $20 and the schools would pay $40.

We THOUGHT we'd be printing money, but...

2/ Our conversion rate was closer to 0.1%

We were F****d

Our financial model was totally wrong!

We we're on the cutting edge:
• Keyword scraping tools
• A unique bidding framework
• Super Slick matching engine in JS

But it wasn't working.

I emailed a friend at Google...

3/ 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 flushed...

Why did I leave my job?

4/ We were bootstrapping, @aniketkshah and I lived with my parents.

My dad, himself an entrepreneur + triathlete, took me for a run.

"Why are you doing marketing with no prior experience? You said your boss at GS made millions, what were you thinking!?"

5/ He ran an 8 min mile vs my 10 min so I just kept panting...

Which was ideal, because I didn't have any good answers.

Instead, we went into scramble mode for the next 2 months.

Here's how we saved the company:

6/ First, we called all our clients - 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.

7/ Then 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 those 8 weeks.

8/ Simplified as much as possible - We had over complicated everything.

We had 4 channels, 4k keywords, 8k match types, dynamic bids, 20+ landing pages.

Our "smarts" led us to create an unsolvable problem.

Our new mantra: 1 keyword to 1 landing page that converts profitably

9/ 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 turned out this demo didn't want a slick funnel and that was part of our conversion issues...

10/ Roughly 7 weeks later with less than $10k in our bank account + $50k of credit card debt, it was my 26th birthday.

We "launched" again for the 9th time.

Spent $2k on ads ($25 CPL) and generated $3500 in revenue.

IT WORKED!!

11/ 2 months later, we started advertising on $FB

11 mos later, by August of 2011, Ampush generated $2M in revenue and spent $1.2M on ads every month.

That was around the time we got a call from Facebook...

"You are one of our top 100 advertisers, what's an Ampush?

12/ But that's a story for another day...

My advice:

1. Stay tenacious, don't be afraid to ask for help
2. Iterate quickly.
2. Focus on “rate of learning/improvement” vs absolute position.
3. Nothing ever works the first time.

Share this with an entrepreneur who needs it!

13/ If you enjoyed this thread, follow me!

@jspujji

I've bootstrapped multiple 8 figure businesses, grew Ampush to $400,000,000+ in FB spend, and now run a venture studio launching a profitable company every quarter.