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.
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.
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