AppLovin's Data-Driven Guarantees

A story about how AppLovin, a mobile ad tech company, used smart data analysis and guaranteed minimum payments to rapidly acquire new customers.

"At AppLovin, Adam the CEO really cared about his dashboard for visibility. I watched Adam to see if there was real value in this. I shadowed him at his computer to see what he was looking at and how he used it.

He showed me how he used the dashboard to identify who to go after for deals and figure out how much to offer them. Instead of just pitching features, he wanted to make monetary offers better than their current ad network to get them to switch quickly.

So we built this command center for the CEO. We would go to a developer and say 'You should use our ad network.' They'd say 'I already have an ad network.' We'd respond 'Cool, I'm guessing your ad network pays you $9 CPM.' They'd say 'Yeah, something like that.' Then we'd say 'Cool, we'll pay you $22.'

When they asked how we could do that, we'd say 'Don't worry, our ad network is better. I could convince you our ad network is better, but I'll just sign this paper that says we're going to pay you $20 no matter what. I'm confident it's going to perform. But you have to switch, and we have these two engineers standing here to help you switch today.'

They just rolled through the ad market because they could make no-brainer offers. They knew each app's size, current network, current earnings, and potential earnings. This let them calculate a workable spread and make compelling offers. Most engineers would have just focused on product features, but this approach of building a sales tool proved much more effective."