Find Your Hustle | Vungle co-founder Jack Smith

So please give it up, amazing story. Cool, all right, yeah, I'm excited to come back here. I've talked maybe like 7 or 8 times or so at DraperU because always meet like interesting people and exciting to see what you guys go on to do next. Basically about 8 years ago, I was exactly where you are now. You'll see with my story, but I was basically sitting in an environment like this, and I had a terrible idea. And what I'm going to tell you is how it got from there to today. It's kind of an interesting story to see how you can get from that terrible idea to something a lot bigger. So, as I said, like, 2011, I was just me and my co-founder. And we had about 3 interns. And we were sitting in our tiny office in London. It was pretty much just like the back— the size of the back room there. And we basically had no money. We were barely making enough to pay the rent each month. Each month we'd have to tell the landlord, oh, the check must have got lost in the mail. I don't know why that didn't get paid. And basically, we were doing our normal business. and I was procrastinating and just reading TechCrunch when I should have been working. But anyway, I came across an article with this headline. So it basically said there's this new incubator, so pretty much similar to this setup, in Silicon Valley, and each company that joins is getting $100,000. And so me and my co-founder, we were in London, And we had not been able to raise any money at all, but we had this terrible idea, and London has a different investment scene. And this article, it said at the bottom, there's one spot left for— they've reserved one spot for TechCrunch readers or something, like, click here to apply. And so I told my co-founder, hey, man, look what we're doing with no money. We should try and apply for this. And he's like, dude, that's a complete waste of time. We've got other things to be working on. What's the point in— applying for this. Like, we'll just get lost in the noise. We checked their Twitter account and they said, like, oh, we just had, like, 2,000 applications in the last 24 hours. So he's like, dude, we'll just, like, never stand out. It's a waste of time. And I was like, come on, it'll take, like, 5 minutes to apply. Like, let's just give it a shot. And so basically what I did is I looked who was the guy running this incubator. So pretty much like Tim here, if you imagine. And so I had this objective, like, how do we stand out from the noise then? Like, there's these 2,000 applications for this one spot. How can we get his attention? And so what I want to do is I'm going to take you through my exact thought process in that moment. As I said, like, we didn't really expect to get anything, but it's like, how can we give it our best shot? This seems like a great opportunity. And so basically, I, at that time, I'd found this kind of hack. I hadn't used it for anything till this date, but I had just found this hack by basically playing around with LinkedIn. So, with this, like, LinkedIn had just launched an ad system, a bit like Google AdWords. So, Google AdWords had been around, like, 10 years or whatever, but LinkedIn just launched their ad system. And I was just like playing around with it just to check it out, because often when you have like a new platform, like something that's really new, there'll maybe be like bugs or loopholes in it. Like Google AdWords, there's people like certified in Google AdWords, and you know, they've been doing it for 10 years. Like, there's not bugs in Google AdWords. Like, loads of people use it. But if someone else launches some platform, like Reddit just launched some ads, there might be bugs. And so I was just like playing around on this thing, like, hey, LinkedIn Ads just launched, let me play around with it. And so basically this is what LinkedIn Ads looks like. Like, you're browsing on LinkedIn, right? And then you've got these ads on the side. And so it's got like a picture, a title, and then this description. And so I just played around like trying to create some ads. And so I looked like, what is the rules of LinkedIn ads. You have, yeah, a title. And so these are the rules that it told you. The title has to be less than 25 characters, the description can be up to 75 characters, and the image can be like this many pixels. Now I didn't do anything with this, but with this particular hack, but actually I found that one loophole they had is you could set the ad to make it look like it was from any company, even not your own. So, Lyft could create an ad saying it was from Uber. I didn't use that hack on this bit, but that was pretty interesting to see. And then, so that was the rules for the ad unit, and then I was just playing around with creating an ad. So, if any of you guys have ever used Facebook ads or Google ads, you have these targeting options, right? Target like women this age group or something. LinkedIn has like pretty cool targeting. You can target people by company, job title, like specifics because it's a work platform, right? And basically what happens is like when you set your criteria on LinkedIn, like so for example, here's one I've set up like targeting Apple employees in California by whatever job title. Basically you get this this number on the right, it tells you how many people your ad is, is going to reach. Like, normally, like Facebook or Google Ads, it's normally telling you like really broad range, like, you know, this will reach like 100,000 to 200,000 people. But for LinkedIn, it was like super specific. It said like 1,260, and I was like, okay, that's pretty specific, you know. So my thought process, I was basically like, all right, well, What happens if I make the criteria so specific that that number could only be one person? So, like, criteria is job title CEO, company Vungle. So that number said, like, 1. And then, basically, I tried to create an ad that was, like, that specific. And, basically, as you would expect, it's basically saying, like, dude, you can't run an ad targeting one person. Like— You're not targeting enough people, so, like, please expand your audience. And then, so, me being me, my thought process was like, okay, well, what if I add one more person? So, job title CEO, but the company Vungle or AOL. So, now that number said 2. And then, again, it was like, this is not big enough. And so I kept on expanding it by adding 1 each time. So, like, all right, what if it's the CEO of Google? And it's still saying, like, not big enough. Like, CEO of Microsoft. All right, so I'm just going to keep going because, like, I want to show you exactly what I did. So I just kept on adding 1 more. And it's just numbers keep going up and it's just, like, not doing it. But I'm just like, all right, what the hell, just keep going. So, Tim, you're saying that the And until one point, I got it so I'm targeting 7 people, and then it let me submit it. So, again, for whatever reason, probably just some engineer just doing a bug or something, is just like, how many should the minimum be? Like 7? It's like, what the hell? Now, many years later, now they've fixed it. Now you need to target like 1,000 people or something, but at that time, the number was 7. And so what does that mean? Well, that means that now I'm armed with the knowledge that I can create an ad targeting any individual person that I want, because I can create an ad targeting the CEO of Google, and then I can just add in 6 randoms who I don't care if they see the ad anyway, like maybe like cleaner in some other country, but they're not even going to speak English. It doesn't matter if they see it. So, but I know that my one person is in there. And then the last part of LinkedIn ads is like how you bid on the ads. So the same with Google AdWords or Facebook, you have 2 options. You can— this is called CPM, so cost per 1,000 people that see an impression of your ad. Or the bottom one— oh no, sorry, that's the bottom one. The top one is CPC, so you pay like per per person that clicks on it. So LinkedIn suggested bidding on a cost-per-click basis, and so they suggested bidding $8 or something. And then this bottom one is like you could pay $2 for every 1,000 people that see it, even if no one clicks it. And then lastly was the review process. So when you— Which one did you choose? CPC? You'll find out in a second. But just if you remember that bit. And then so the last part is like when you submitted an ad, like if you've ever used like Google AdWords or Facebook or something, you submit it and then it just like goes live instantly, right? But then with this, I saw that when I submitted it, if you see the text, it's like, we'll review the ads and like we'll approve it or deny it in the next 24 hours. So what that showed me is because it's like new, because especially because it was new, that they were reviewing all the ads manually. I wasn't a computer saint. So what that meant is that basically if I wanted to do anything that maybe didn't exactly fit their rules, like with the URL, et cetera, I basically submitted one ad, and the URL I used like a URL shortener. I waited for them to approve it, and then I just changed where that URL pointed to. So, like, after they manually reviewed it, then I just changed it to stuff that they probably wouldn't have approved if it, if it was automated.