Sabri Suby built King Kong into a digital marketing agency by solving a specific problem: companies needed ROI-focused marketing, not vanity metrics. Most startups fail because they sell products nobody urgently needs or chase the wrong numbers. You can start a business from anywhere, but you need hunger and a purpose bigger than quick money.
Founder Sabri Subhi joins me now in the studio. I really look at business as an incredible vehicle to really make good and make change in the world.
Do you think say, entrepreneurship or starting someone's business is possible for anybody? Or do you think you have to be a certain type of person?
You can be anybody, but you need to have an innate hunger, your stomach to go out there and to go and get it. Because anybody can start a business. Everybody's got an idea. Not everybody can basically make that idea come into a reality, right? Because the idea of start, like every single person that you speak to has an idea about starting a business. I don't think I've ever met somebody that doesn't have an idea about starting a business. And it's like a short lived moment of inspiration. But what really counts is the years of perspiration to actually execute on that idea and make it a reality. And if you're doing it just to make money, there will come a time where you make some money and that itch is been scratched and then your business will collapse because like, you know, you can start, you can say like, I, like, I'm in this really big predicament and I need to make this money or there's like you want to help out a family member or your children or your wife or whoever that might be. And then once you actually get that amount of money, unless there's something else driving you, then it's done, right? Because business is so hard and there's so much that goes into it that if you're optimizing just for that kind of short lived sugar rush, that flood of like dopamine or you want to go out and buy some Yeezys or buy a Lambo or something, then that happens and then you're screwed, dude. Like it's all over because your business is going to fail, right? And I believe that's one of the reasons that business has such a high mortality rate and failure rate is just because, you know, people don't really know what they're getting into.
You said you ran couple of businesses into the ground. Was there any particular reason why they failed? And like, did you learn from it or.
Yeah, the number one sin that I committed is I wasn't selling something that the market was absolutely starving for. So I learned that the hard way, like sending little, like selling gizmos or gadgets or things that I thought were cool or that I enjoyed rather than going out and finding out what is the market absolutely starving for. What would they crawl across crushed glass to get where a compelling offer is 10 times more effective than a convincing argument. And in all of those businesses I was trying to make a convincing argument around selling those things. I used those battle scars to never make that a sin ever again and to make sure that I was selling something that people were up at night at 3am googling, not telling their partners about tossing and turning, unable to sleep at night because they had such a pressing problem that they absolutely 100% unequivocally had to solve. And then position my product to solve that bullseye of the market.
I would like to touch on King Kong. What made you start it? Like the actual company and is it officially a digital marketing agency or like. And what made you start King Kong?
Yeah, look, we started off as a digital marketing agency. I saw a niche in the market that like no one like in all the businesses that I had and in some of those businesses we'd look to hire agencies and hire internal employees, all of that kind of stuff. And everyone was just talking nonsense like all vanity metrics. This is how many impressions you're getting like this. Look at all the engagement. It's like, dude, I can't pay for my employees salaries on that. I can't take those likes to the bank account and pay my children. I need to be talking about the real shit that matters, which is the return on investment. And no one was willing to have those conversations. Everyone wanted to hide behind vanity metrics and it's still the case today. And so I saw a nation the market and that's basically what led me to kind of start King Kong. Since then we've transitioned from being a digital marketing agency to now being a platform that businesses can come and plug into regardless of where they are on their journey. We've got something for every step of the way to help them solve that problem of getting more customers.
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There and get that answered.
