AppLovin's Pivot Success

A story about how AppLovin started as a social app for discovering what apps your friends use, but pivoted to become a massive ad network.

"We made this product called AppLovin that was an app where you could see what apps your friends were using. It was like a social network where if you're playing Candy Crush, it says 'hey Sam is playing Candy Crush and you should play too.'

We realized people really converted with this - this should just be an ad product. We sat down, built that for a couple months, and then it skyrocketed. The first month we jumped up to $10,000+ in revenue a day and kept skyrocketing up from there. As an engineer, it was crazy because our servers were being hammered. We were pulling all-nighters just because money was flowing and we had to keep it up.

The company started with $4 million in self-funding, then raised a small strategic round for about $5 million total funding. A few years later, we had a big liquidity event over $1.4 billion when we sold a portion to a Chinese company. It was really fast - only 3 years after we started, and we were doing $600-700 million in revenue.

It was magical to see what product-market fit really looks like. I always thought other things were working, but they weren't. This is what working looked like, and it was probably one of the best versions of it."