Killer Growth Strategies to Attract a Surge of New Customers | EP 5.1

Hey everyone, today we have Ayman Ababdulla, who is the president of AppSumo, which I've been using for years and years, and actually almost got me fired from a job in the past. We'll talk about that in a little bit, but Ayman, how's it going?

It's going well, thanks for having me.

Thanks for being here. So why don't you tell us a little bit about your story, kind of who you are and what you do over here at AppSumo?

Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I started my career at Microsoft a few years ago, was there for a few years both on the finance, accounting, and marketing side. And then after a few years there, got connected with Noah. He was looking for somebody to come over, take over for AppSumo. Came in 3 years ago, and since then we've gone on to double and triple the company.

Got it. And so what does AppSumo do exactly? What is the company about?

So AppSumo is a deal site for entrepreneurs. We find the best awesome tools to help you grow your business, go out and negotiate group purchases, and then pass on those savings to our over a million subscribers.

Got it. So let me tell you a story. So a couple years ago, I was leading marketing at a company called Treehouse, where we teach people how to do web design and web development. And I think this is actually one of your best deals, if you ever remember it. I do, I do remember that. So at Treehouse, basically we put together a deal with AppSumo, and what happens is, you know, basically they're gonna— we give them a good price to their audience, and then they blast it out to their email list. And so what happened was, that deal went so well, I didn't tell any of our customer service team. And it exploded their support tickets, and then everyone was just like, you know, it was a complete fire, right? And then I remember the CTO at the time was like, you just ruined everybody's day. And I was like, yep. Anyway, it was a really good deal for both companies at the end of the day. But I think that's the power of AppSumo. That's the amount of preparation that sometimes needs to go into something like this, 'cause you are gonna get an influx of a lot of customers, right? Is that how it works?

Absolutely. I mean, it's crazy. established company like Treehouse, overnight you get a huge influx of customers, brand new customers. And so for a lot of the partners that we work with, this is just a great way to influx 3,000, 4,000, 5,000, 6,000 customers overnight. And that completely changes the trajectory of the roadmap. It helps them launch an affiliate program overnight. It increases their SEO ranking. I mean, overnight you're basically building a huge 6, 7-figure business for them.

Wow, okay. And so you guys, I mean, how did you guys grow initially and how are you guys growing today? 'Cause I think things have shifted and I think, you know, taking a company from We always talk about on this show going from 0 to 1 million, 1 million to 10 million, and then beyond that. You know, what have you guys done in the beginning, and then how are you guys acquiring customers now?

Early on when Noah was running the company, like, there was a few key trajectory points that helped grow the business. One of them was just giveaways. So he gave away 10 lifetime deals to Dropbox, and overnight, like, 200,000 email subscribers. That was the core basis of the business. To this day, giveaways are still, like, one of the key drivers to help us grow our email list. Because the people that are sharing these giveaways on their Facebook and their Twitter, they tend to be friends with people that are similar to the audience that we're looking to attract. That was number one. Number two is just the quality of the products. We did a lot of analysis on what products do our customers want, and we do extreme vetting on the types of software we bring in. So we'll typically test 30 to 40 tools in one category before picking the winner, and then reaching out to the CEO and negotiating that deal. And so our customers don't even just see us as a deal site. They actually see us as a curation engine for the tools that they should be using to run their own business. And so by focusing on those amazing products, people are like, this is amazing. I'm getting a lifetime deal for $40 one time. I never have to pay again for this product that I would gladly pay $100 or more per month.

Hmm.

Of course I'm going to share it with every Facebook group I know, all of my entrepreneur friends, so they too can take advantage of that deal. And then the last key trajectory point that's been working really well for us has been just actually growing our marketing channels. So Facebook ads has been working really well, creating lookalike audiences on our top 1,000 customers, and now we've started to roll out an affiliate program which is clearing 6 figures in monthly revenue.

Wow, okay. I wanna talk more about the business in a little bit, but I wanna go back to your story too. I mean, so you worked at Microsoft, you know, you came from a finance background.

So I actually did my undergrad in accounting. I was gonna go into public accounting, do like the whole Big 4, and I just quickly realized like, wasn't for me. In college, I actually started 2 different companies, and I actually was like super excited about those companies. And that was like— creating those 2 companies is actually like what attract— like what made me attractive as a candidate to Microsoft, because I didn't come from like an Ivy League background or anything like that. But those 2 businesses, they were both successful, allowed me to at least have like one feather in my cap to go against those Ivy League candidates that I was competing against.

Got it.

So that got me into the door.

Yeah, it sounds like, I mean, you had the entrepreneurial bug and then you kind of— so I remember a couple years ago too, I mean, someone tried to hire me full-time. This is a while back. And then I think once you have the entrepreneurial bug, it just doesn't sit well with you to like work full-time under someone else. So the other thing is, I mean, when you think about what Noah was running this thing, for him to let go like that, I mean, what was going on there? Why did you decide that it was time to Bring on a president to just run this thing.

History of the company, you know, he was running AppSumo for a few years and they were building internal tools to help them grow their email list. And so that is now eventually Sumo.com. And so they actually started seeing a lot of growth in Sumo.com and that was like the new exciting thing. And so they decided, hey, like, let's transition the company to focus on Sumo. And so at the time, Anton, the person who's running the business before me, also wanted to move on to start working for Sumo. And so the whole company was moving forward, but they needed AppSumo's revenue to really fund the business in the beginning. So they kind of just wanted someone to come in and just keep the business afloat.

Yeah.

So for the first year, I was just like making sure that the lights still stayed on and, you know, everything was running smoothly and learning from them and learning the way they run the business. But now that Sumo is self-sustaining, now we were able to start implementing some of the growth strategies that have led to us Doubling and tripling the business over the last 2 years.

And what numbers can you reveal around AppSumo today?

So we're just shy of hitting our $10 million goal for this year.

Wow.

In the next— probably gonna hit it this week.

Got it. Okay, great. So it sounds like you guys, you've taken some of the learnings from— you guys, AppSumo funded Sumo, a lot of growth learnings from Sumo, and then you passed them back over to AppSumo, and then you're both growing like that.

Exactly.

Okay, great. So I think there's a lot of lessons there. I do wanna talk about The story. What is the story behind the Sumo? So AppSumo and SumoCon that we're speaking at. Right.

So, you know, I think a lot of early-stage entrepreneurs just spend so much time thinking about a name. They're researching domain names, they're researching, you know, what business should I run? For Noah, it was just like, hey, let's just pick up a name. He actually doesn't even like the name AppSumo, but he's just like, let's just pick the name and stick with it. And since then, like, business is— we've adopted that brand, the business has stuck, and now it's adopted into sumo.com, it's adopted to KingSumo, our giveaway software, and has continued to grow. And like, that's become like a key tenet of our brand.

Got it. And you guys, I mean, we'll take a look at the painting downstairs in a little bit too, but there's a lot of those. I mean, like, Facebook has paintings like that, you guys did the painting. Did you commission that painting, or what's the story behind that?

So Noah commissioned that painting from a local artist, Federico, and so he just ended up paying for a mural downstairs. You can take a look at that, and it just helps solidify the brand, helps everyone just get excited. It's like one of the first things people see when they walk into the office, and yeah, it gets them excited.

Got it, cool. So, you know, for— and this is something I'm trying to do with Single Grain too. I mean, Single Grain is a— the way I look at it is it's an incubator for other projects too. You know, we do great work for clients, things like that. But when it comes to hiring somebody else to, you know, or hiring someone else in to take over like a certain aspect of a business that you've been— he's been running for a couple years now, what are some challenges you ran into when you first kind of took the reins from him?

So I think Noah did a great job in hiring for a role that simply needed to be scaled. I think too many early-stage entrepreneurs and just CEOs in general, they're hiring for people to come in and take over like create an opportunity.

Mm-hmm.

We'll hire an affiliate manager and hope an affiliate program grows up. We'll hire a PPC manager and hope that Facebook ads works for us. Instead, you should be hiring for something that's already working, that if you just invested a few more resources into it, you could double and triple. So AppSumo was already a 7-figure business as is. They already had a system in place, simply just needed to go out, reach out to the tools, close the deals, write the copy, send out the email, and we would make money. So the system was already in place. So I think for Noah, having like a solid assembly line, thinking about the business in one way, it's like, I just need to hire someone that can do sales, close the deals, that can write copy, and we can teach them how to do that and then write up the emails and send them out. That's it. And so having— I think having a solid system, like thinking about your business like an assembly line, like the Ford Model T, you're moving from one end to the end and you have a deliverable. Thinking about your business like an assembly line first, and then saying, all right, let me hire someone for maybe just one component of that, or maybe I can hire someone to manage that whole process. That, I think, is the most critical component to first offloading parts of the business.

Hmm.

So for Single Grain, I think that's something you should be just thinking about. It's like, what area, if we just— if I invested a little bit more time, would double or triple the business? And then maybe you can hire someone to handle one of your lower-hanging fruit. That's huge.

So key takeaway here is you have to nail it before you scale it. And we did an offsite yesterday right before I flew to Austin, and I told everyone, I said the theme for the next quarter, probably for the next year, it's the single-grain way, right? It's all about the process, right? So we always— if we can nail down the process for everything, you mentioned assembly line, I mean, that's what it's all about, right? You get something first, you hit product-market fit, Google what that is, you get product-market fit, and then you scale it up, right? And it sounds like that's what you guys are doing. What are some challenges that you're facing today?

So now that we've, like, we've really expanded the assembly line model, right? So before when it was just me, I was the one closing the deals, writing the copy, sending out the emails, being able to like compartmentalize each one of those departments and start hiring out an amazing team. So a key reason that we've been able to scale up to like now $10 million in revenue just on the AppSumo side has been because of the team. The team has been awesome. The problem is, especially for a smaller company, hiring good people is, as anyone knows, one of the biggest bottlenecks for us.

Mm-hmm.

And so a few months ago, we ended up hiring an in-house recruiter that we thought was one of the critical components to continuing to scale up the business, because I was spending 40 to 50 interviews over the course of 2, 3 months simply hiring for a single position, because one bad hire at a startup can completely derail the trajectory of the business.

Yep. I mean, the numbers are— and I think I just read this last week— but one bad hire is gonna cost you 15x their salary. So you're paying someone $100K, it's gonna cost you $1.5 million. What are some key things that you've learned in the last couple of years too that you can share with the audience about kind of taking the reins from Noah?

So the most critical thing that I think I've learned has been just intense focus on one metric at a time. And I think the problem that, especially in the marketing world, we love to geek out about numbers. You know, open rates, click-through rates, daily average users, monthly average— you could have a dashboard that would make Microsoft blush, right? But in a startup, sometimes, like, just focusing on the most critical component, revenue and profit, and then backing into those leading indicators, I think has been super important. So for this year, our goal has simply been one: we got to hit $10 million in revenue. However we do that, it's irrelevant. We just need to hit $10 million in revenue. And everyone in the company rallies around that goal. And so they are all responsible for an individual part that could end up rolling into that goal. So perfect example, like Chris, he's helped grow the Facebook ads channel from— we were making $100 in revenue to now sometimes up to $10,000 per day in revenue.

Mm-hmm.

And so simply focusing on those core single goals They all roll up into managing singly one metric.

How do you guys track all that? Is there a dashboard? What are you guys looking at every single day? Because the thing is, everyone can look at a company goal of getting to that $10 million, but does everyone have their individual goals? Like, how are you guys going about that?

So every Monday we have a meeting, and so we also have monthly goals that help us lead into the $10 million. So we can quickly know, are we on track for the year? Do we need to start doing more things? There have been multiple times throughout the year where we actually started falling behind on the trajectory on hitting the goal. Once you start recognizing, hey, we're falling behind, that's the week where everyone just needs to buckle down. For us, we know what our key drivers are for revenue. It's better deals. That's simply it. If we can get better deals on the calendar, the business is going to do better. We'll take a look at the calendar and all the deals that are closed. We'll move up the best ones. We'll maybe tweak some of the ones on the back end, and all of a sudden, we're back on trajectory. We're able to hit our goal 3 months before the year is over.

So if you enjoyed this interview with Eamon and Eric, it's going to be continued in the next video right over here. And don't forget to subscribe on your way out and leave a comment. Let us know what you think. Talk to you later. Keep leveling up. Thanks for watching.