Vungle's Mockup-First Sales
Share
A story about how Jack Smith secured $1M in commitments for his company Vungle by showing mockups to potential customers before building the actual product.
"Basically I got into an accelerator/incubator. I had one idea but it wasn't working out. Then I just mocked up a PowerPoint for a mobile ad network where you would see an ad in between levels of games. I brought it to developers and they said 'Oh yeah, this is way better. If you could actually build this, we're in.'
I did that a bunch of times and got maybe $1M in commitments - developers saying 'Yeah, if you build this we would spend this much money.' I took those commitments and hired a developer, Bryant, who's now the cofounder of Webflow, and we built the business.
It spiraled into this thing where we'd only raised 10 or 15 million, maybe 17 million, and within 7 years when we sold, we were doing a million dollars a day in revenue. We sold it for around $800 million."
Sam Parr
Host of MFM and fitness influencer
Sam Parr is a serial entrepreneur and business media pioneer.
In 2016, he founded The Hustle, a business news media company that started in his kitchen with just $12 and grew to eight figures in revenue.
Sam led the charge in making newsletters popular when few believed in their potential.
After four successful years, he sold The Hustle to HubSpot, a publicly traded company. Now operating as HubSpot Media, The Hustle reaches 3 million readers daily, employs a team of nearly 100, and has been the launchpad for dozens of its staff to found their own media companies and newsletters.
Sam remains the host of the popular business podcast, My First Million, and continues to start and sell companies. He also co-founded Hampton, a highly vetted community for entrepreneurs, founders, and CEOs, and teaches people to write better through his platform, Copy That.