- Everyone, today we have Ayman Al-Abdullah.
Who is the president of AppSumo,
which I've been using for years and years.
Actually it almost got me fired from a job in the past.
We'll talk about that in a little bit.
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
kinda 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 in the finance, accounting, and marketing side
and then after a few years there,
I got connected with Noah.
He was looking for somebody to come over,
take over for Appsumo.
Came in three years ago
and since then, we've gone on to
top, 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, negotiate group purchases
and then pass on that savings to
over our 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.
- Yeah, so
(laughing)
- At Treehouse, basically we put together
a deal with Appsumo and what happens is,
you know, basically, we came up with a
good price to their audience
and then they blasted 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 like their support tickets
and then everyone was just like, you know,
it was a complete like fire, right?
And then, I remember the CTO at the time was like,
you just ruined everybody's day.
And I was like, yup.
Anyway, it was a really good deal for both companies,
you know at the end of the day.
But I think that's the power of Appsumo,
like that's the amount of preparation that
sometimes needs to go into 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, like even like
an established company like Treehouse,
overnight you get a huge influx of customers,
brand new customers.
So for a lot of the partners that we work with
this is just a great way to influx
three, four, five, six thousand customers overnight
and that completely changes the trajectory
of the roadmap,
it helps them launch an affiliate program overnight,
it increases their SCO ranking.
I mean, overnight you're basically building
like a huge six, seven 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?
Because I think things have shifted
and I think, you know, taking a company from--
I mean, we always talk about the show
going from zero to one,
one million to ten million and beyond that.
You know, what have you guys done in the beginning
and 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's, 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 on 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 deal 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.
So our customers don't even just see us as a deal site,
they 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.
Of course I'm gonna share it with
every Facebook group I know,
all of my entrepreneur friends
so they too can take advantage of the 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 1000 customers
and now we've started to roll out an affiliate program
which is clearing six figures in monthly revenue.
- Wow, okay.
I wanna talk a little more about
the business in a little bit,
but I wanna go back to your story.
So you worked at Microsoft, you know,
you came from the finance background?
- I actually did my undergrad in accounting,
I was gonna go into public accounting
and do like the whole big four
and I just quickly realized that wasn't for me.
In college, I actually started two different companies
and I actually was like super excited
about those companies.
And creating those two companies is actually like
what attracted--like what made me attractive
as a candidate to Microsoft.
Cause I didn't come from like an Ivy League background
or anything like that,
but those two 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...
- Yeah.
- So I remember a few years ago too,
someone tried to hire me full time,
this was 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 Noah was running this thing,
for him to let go like that, I mean,
what was going on there?
Why did he decide that it was time
to bring on a president
to just run this thing?
- The 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 was eventually Sumo.com.
And so they actually started seeing a lot of growth
on Sumo.com and that was like the new exciting thing
and so they decided like
hey, let's transition the company
to focus on Sumo.
So at the time Anton,
the person who was running the business before me,
also wanted to move onto start working for Sumo.
And so the whole company was moving forward,
they needed Appsumo's revenue to really fund the business
in the beginning.
- Mhmm.
- 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 making sure that the lights still stayed on
and that you know, everything was running smoothly,
and learning from them
and learning how 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 two years.
- Got it.
And what numbers can you reveal on Appsumo today?
- So we're just shy of hitting our 10 million dollar goal
for this year.
- Wow.
- And we're probably gonna hit it this week.
- Got it.
Great.
So it sounds like you guys,
you've taken some of the learnings from...
So you guys, Appsumo funded Sumo,
lot of growth learnings from Sumo
and then you passed them over,
back over to Appsumo
and now you're both growing like that.
- Exactly.
- 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?
- The Appsumo and Sumo or Sumocon that was being...yeah.
- So you know, I think a lot of like
early stage entrepreneurs spend so much time
thinking about a name,
like they're researching domain names,
they're researching, you know, what business should I run?
For Noah, it was like,
hey, let's just pick up a name.
You know, she doesn't even like the name Appsumo,
but let's just pick the name stick with it.
And since then, like business is,
we've adopted that brand, the business is stuck,
and now it's adopted into Sumo.com,
it's adopted into KingSumo, our giveaway software.
And it's continued to grow
and that's become a key tenant of our brand.
- Got it.
And so 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 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, Frederico.
And so just ended up painting for a mural downstairs,
you can take a look at that.
And it just helps, you know,
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 it gets them excited.
- Got it, cool.
So you know, for--
and this is something I'm trying to deal with Single Grain.
Single Grain is, the way I look at it,
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 that you ran into
when you kind of first took the reigns 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.
We'll hire an affiliate manager
and hope an affiliate program grows up.
We'll hire a PBC 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 seven figure business as is,
they already had a system in place,
they simply just needed to go out,
reach out to the tools,
close the deals, write the copy,
send out the email,
and then 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,
I just need to hire someone that can do sales,
close the deals, they can write copy,
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,
moving from one end to the end,
and you have a deliverable.
Thinking about your business like an assembly line first
and then saying, alright lemme hire someone
for maybe just one component of that
or maybe I can hire someone to manage the whole process.
That, I think is the most critical component
to first, offloading parts of the business.
So for Single Grain,
I think that's something you should
just be thinking about.
It's like, what area, if you just--
if I invested a little more time,
would double or triple the business
and then maybe you can hire someone
to handle one of your lower hanging fruit tasks.
- That's huge.
So the key takeaway here is you have
to nail it before you scale it.
And we did offset 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.
It's all about the process, right?
So if we can nail down the process for everything,
you mentioned an 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.
So what are some challenges that you're facing today?
- So now that we've nailed,
like we've really expanded some of
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 of those departments
and start hiring out an amazing team.
So the key reason that we've been able to
like scale up to like ten million revenue
just in 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.
And so a few months ago, we ended up hiring
an in house from Kreuger
that we thought was like one of the critical components
to continuing to scale up the business.
Cause I was spending 40 to 50 interviews,
over the course of two, three months,
simply hiring for a single position.
Because one bad hire at a startup
can completely derail the trajectory of the business.
- Yup.
I mean, the numbers are,
I think I just read this last week,
but one bad hire is gonna cost you
15x they're salary,
so you're paying someone 100k,
it's gonna cost you like 1.5 million dollars.
What are some key things that you learned
in the last couple years, too,
that you can share with the audience
about taking the reigns 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 view rates,
daily average users, monthly average--
You could have a dashboard
that would make Microsoft blush, right?
But in the startup, sometimes just like
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 gotta hit ten million dollars in revenue.
However we do that is irrelevant,
we just gotta hit ten million dollars in revenue.
And everyone in the company rallies around that goal.
So they are all responsible for an individual part
that could end up rolling into that goal.
So a 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.
And so simply focusing on those core single goals,
they all roll up to managing singly one metric.
- How do you guys track all this?
Is there a dashboard?
What do you guys look at every single day?
Cause the thing is to,
everyone can look at a company goal
of getting to that ten 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 ten million.
So we can quickly know,
are we on track for the year,
do we need to start doing more things?
And there have been multiple times
throughout the year, where we actually
start falling behind on the trajectory
in hitting the goal.
And so once you start recognizing,
hey, we're falling behind,
that's the week where everyone just
needs to buckle down.
So for us, we know what our key drivers are for revenue.
It's better deals.
That's simply it.
So if we can get better deals on the calendar,
the business is gonna do better.
And so we'll take a look at the calendar
on 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 the trajectory
and we're able to hit our goal
three months before the year is over.
- There you go, goals,
we talked about processes earlier,
but so we got process, goals,
and now I wanna talk about culture, too.
And I think there's a big story around
the culture of Appsumo, I mean,
you guys, there's tacos, there's a Sumo,
there's all this kind of stuff.
So what do you guys do from a cultural perspective?
What are some stories you can share
that are, you know, pretty amazing?