July 10, 2024
I recently sat down with Neville Medhora for a conversation about scaling companies and navigating technological disruption.
As the former CEO of AppSumo, where I helped grow the company from $3M to $80M in revenue, I’ve learned invaluable lessons about what it takes to build successful businesses in today’s rapidly changing landscape.
In this podcast, I share my framework for helping companies reach $100M in revenue, why understanding your core value proposition matters more than chasing trends, and how to think about AI adoption in your business.
We explore everything from the death of SEO to why some companies are still crushing it at trade shows, and what it means to truly know your strengths as a leader.
Video
Watch my guesting here
Transcript
Neville Medhora: Joining us today on the pod, Ayman Al-Abdullah. Welcome, man.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: What’s up, Neville?
Neville Medhora: Thanks for joining. So quick intro about Ayman. Ayman was the CEO of AppSumo and he got it on track from doing 3 million a year to $80 million a year. Great tag lab, by the way. That’s pretty awesome. He became a meme lord for a while and then started Agoge. Consulting is doing great, getting CEOs as clients, killing it with that. And I would love to learn a little bit more about it. So welcome to the pod, man.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Oh man, Neville.
Neville Medhora: Yeah. So let’s talk about this first. You had this pretty sweet gig at AppSumo. You did really, really good with it, but then you moved on to like start your own consulting practice. What was that transition? What was that about?
Ayman Al-Abdullah: So I’d always say there’s three phases of a company’s growth. There’s the startup phase, scale up phase, and the grow up phase. So startup typically gets you to around $5 million in revenue. That’s really around product market fit. Scale up phase is around company creation. So it’s really around taking the team, getting things out of the founder’s hands and then grow up is really around protecting the legacy that you’ve built. I’m terrible at the startup. I hate to grow up and I love the scale up. And I found myself coming in at AppSumo, had already found product market fit was already a really great brand. Noah done an amazing job getting it to that next level. Anton had famously taken it over and it was very easy for me to plug in and immediately have something that I could now inject with the company creation, the stuff that I get excited about. So when I was able to take AppSumo from 3 to 80, I found myself as we’re approaching $100 million in revenue, starting to creep into grow up mode. And I’m starting to realize like, hey Noah, we’re rapidly growing. We’re at that point, we’re doubling year over year and I’m like, it’s probably time for us to look for a CEO because to me, I think a CEO is perfect at each stage of the individual startup. But I found myself being less excited and less really the right fit for the next phase of the company’s growth.
Neville Medhora: So I mean, that takes a lot of it because you had a pretty sweet gig and you weren’t like fired by any means. I think it was like the opposite of like they wanted you to stay on.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Yeah.
Neville Medhora: And you left and a lot of us were like, what the hell’s going on in his life that he would leave this sweet gig? And I actually – and in retrospect, I’ve talked to a lot of CEOs who moved that phase. A couple people we mutually know have left their companies because they got so big, and they’re just like, I’m not the guy for this.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: That’s right.
Neville Medhora: To manage 400 people is a different thing than managing a small, ragtag team.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: That’s right.
Neville Medhora: And so how did you know that? Were you just, like, finding the work less enjoyable and you’re like, I know where this is headed. I can see the future and this is not going to be good. Is that the case, or did you know this from before that, like, I had these three phases and I’m good at this one?
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Yeah. So the analogy that I use is it’s kind of like a sports analogy. In the beginning, the founder is the star player jumping for the ball in every game, playing 42 minutes, the spotlight is on them. Eventually you move into player coach, where you have a small team, but you’re still doing a lot of the work, but you’re coaching up that small team. If you really want to get to beyond 5 million, 10 million, you kind of have to put the ball down and assemble a solid team. So that’s when you become the coach. That’s really where I enjoy is that coach, the sideline, the person that’s not on the court, but rather there with a clipboard and really assembling the best team possible. As we start to approach $50 million in revenue, you now have to move into the owner’s box. And it’s really a much more political game where everything you’re saying is it’s a game of telephones, four or five things removed. And it’s almost like you’re a mini politician of a mini city. And it’s completely different dynamic. And some people are excellent at this. Me personally, I enjoy being a little closer. I like being on the ground floor. And I found myself, if I stayed there, I would essentially be holding the company back.
Neville Medhora: Huh. And so I assume in your own life you were probably like, I’m relatively financially set for a while and I’m just going to go start my own thing, or what were you thinking? Yeah, I remember you ended up starting, like, a consulting company.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Yeah.
Neville Medhora: Did that come out of people just asking you a lot of questions? Is that how that came about?
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Well, no. I mean, the plan was sort of to, like, ride off in the sunset and sip mai tais on the beach. Right? I mean, yeah, at that point, I was like, oh, it’s time to take a sabbatical. Enjoy the fruits of my labor. And, you know, obviously at the time, the market is doing well, crypto is doing well. And so, like, there’s a lot of things that people were buying $400,000 NFTs at that time. So I was just like, look, let me just take some time off. But, you know, guys like us, we get bored quick. And I found myself being bored and going, well, what do I do next? And I open up my email inbox, and I had 400 emails from companies that were looking for their next CEO. And I personally was not ready to jump back into the trenches yet, but a couple of them were friends, so I’m like, I’ll do a fun coffee with you. And so we met up for coffee and they were just asking me questions. And one of them was like, I’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on coaching. This one hour has been more valuable than everything I’ve just spent. Like, whatever your rate is, let me know and I’ll pay it. I’m like, I’ve never done coaching or consulting before. They’re like, okay, well, here’s what – I’m paying other people. I think I can pay you X. And I was like, all right, you know, you’re a friend. Let’s just start it. We started that engagement the very next week. He introduced me to three more people. Those three people introduced me and got to the point where my waiting list just started to grow from there.
Neville Medhora: Are we allowed to ask prices about this kind of stuff?
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Probably not, because it…
Neville Medhora: I hate saying my own prices publicly.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: So the issue is that I’ve raised my prices three times in the last two years. And so, like, the last thing I want to do is, like, communicate the price. And then someone’s like, oh, well, that’s the price. And it’s like, I’ve since doubled it since then. So I will say, yeah, it’s a pretty sizable investment.
Neville Medhora: Okay, interesting. I imagine the 5, 4, 5 figures.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: At least, not… Yeah, probably more so.
Neville Medhora: And then like, how – this is fascinating. I love it when something like this organically happens where you’re like, I wasn’t trying to start this. As so many people were saying, I’m going to give you money. That’s right, that it starts. In fact, all my best products were usually like, hey, can you help me do this? Can you help me do this? And I’m like, what if I just made a product about this and helped a lot of people do it?
Ayman Al-Abdullah: That’s right, yeah. It’s like pretty simple, a hundred percent. I always tell founders, you know, you’ve hit product market fit when it feels like you’re wearing a meat suit in a dog park. So like, if you are literally feeling like I am getting hounded by all these individuals asking me like, do you have this? Do you have this? There’s probably a good signal to noise ratio there where you should probably do something.
Neville Medhora: Did you ever go down the route of I should record a course?
Ayman Al-Abdullah: No, no to me. Like I have, I’ve, I think I’ve bought well over a few dozen courses that just sit unused. And so I did not want to create something that no one was going to use. So founders, CEOs, they’re busy, they just don’t have time to do courses. They will have time to pick up a template. So my wiki famously has got like 2 million views on Twitter or X now free. It’s a one click install and it immediately gives you a wiki for you to install into your business. You’re not having to watch 12 hours of videos. It’s a one click, it’s done in less than 10 seconds. I would much rather have those quick winners than recording a course.
Neville Medhora: Also, it sounds like the problems that you’re dealing with are not lending itself towards a course.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: No, 100%.
Neville Medhora: Like a CEO of a hundred million dollar company asking questions. There’s too many vagaries right to be a course.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Well, every single scenario. The reason I enjoy the one on one coaching, one on one consulting is different because I’ll give you an example. When you’re hiring a designer, a designer at AppSumo needs to ship fast, ship dirty and iterate over time. A designer at Apple needs it to be pixel perfect on day one. So I can’t create a course of like, here’s how to hire a great designer because that’s dependent on the culture of the company. And so I have to first understand, well, is this company on track to IPO or exit? Does this company want to last for 100 years or are they looking to flip it in three years? And so depending on the nuances of the company, it’s kind of like, yes, you could have a generic personal fitness program, but if you really want to take things to the next level, you probably need to get blood work done. You probably need to make sure that things are highly personalized to the individual in order to maximize the results for that particular person.
Neville Medhora: Okay, so what are you doing with these clients? Is this kind of like a weekly type of – I’m always just fascinated by this because here’s the funny thing. You haven’t actually created anything other than just like your knowledge. And you’re selling that for a large amount of money. And for like a software company that sells something for 30 bucks a month, they would have to keep a customer for like 20 plus years to even equate to what like you charge a customer.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: So this, the most common is a monthly check in where we’re doing like almost like a monthly board meeting where it’s like here, what did you say you were going to do in the last month? What are you going to do in the next month? And so we’ll typically have this monthly board check in where we’re reviewing the previous month’s financials, we’re reviewing the previous projects, and we’re seeing are we on track? Do we need to adjust the sales in order to ensure that we’re heading in the right direction? Know oftentimes all it takes is a 3 or 4% shift to get from Boston to Bermuda. And so we’re sort of adjusting those sales in between those. We’re voice noting, we’re checking in, we’re texting, we’re WhatsApping, hey, I’ve got a issue with X, Y and Z. We’ll immediately jump on a quick phone call. And the way I like to think about it is like, I am your concierge medicine doctor for business. And so I become the first point of contact for a lot of these CEOs where it’s like, hey, I’m dealing with X, Y and Z. It’s like, let’s go and address it.
Neville Medhora: Huh, Interesting. Okay, so they just get direct access to you. There’s not like a super formalized product process or anything?
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Well, there is. So I basically walk the CEOs through a framework called the nine steps, the nine figures. Having seen over a thousand companies launch at AppSumo, and now having worked with dozens, close to over 100 CEOs, now I got to see the repeatable plateaus that plague most companies from getting to the next level. And so at each of these nine steps, we want to take the CEOs through this framework in order to ensure that we have these foundations in place. I literally just did a summit with Cody on Tuesday, Monday, Tuesday – Cody Sanchez, for those that are listening, where we walk through the nine steps, the nine figures, and we had individuals in the room that were doing 10, 20, $30 million in revenue going, yeah, I know these basics in the beginning. And by the end of day one, they’re like, holy shit. I have been building this business on rocky foundation. No wonder my marketing is falling apart. My strategy is off. I’m churning and losing employees on a daily basis. It’s because they had not set the foundation. I see this happen all the time where a company will drive to 10, $20 million in revenue on the back of the founder’s hustle and then implode in on itself because the foundations weren’t there.
Neville Medhora: Hmm, interesting. What about some of the technical skills that you’ve picked up since then? I was curious about this because, like, I always like learning new software. Like, I feel like I’m like a freelancer at heart. Like I’m learning how to do Figma and Framer right now and I’m like watching videos and stuff and it just like, I totally, I feel like it’s like a hobby to learn new pieces of software for me.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Yeah.
Neville Medhora: Are there any technical skills that you’ve picked up through this other like, I mean, like WhatsApp is not really a technical skill. Any software that you use to keep track of stuff or anything like that?
Ayman Al-Abdullah: I mean, the core is Notion. You know, I carved out a week to go through Thomas Frank’s Notion course. Highly recommend all CEOs – to me, Notion is excellent because regardless of tool, whether you’re using Loom, Google Drive, Figma, Notion has a really good integration where you can copy paste these links and pop it right in there. The search functionality in Notion is phenomenal. Have you ever tried to search on Google Drive? Like, how does a search company screw up search so badly? So Notion allows you to go like, well, where did I leave that exact comp spreadsheet? Where is the CEO handbook? Where did we leave onboarding? Boom. All of that is in Notion. That’s why we’ve used the wiki. That’s number one. Number two, 100% AI. Whether you’re using ChatGPT, Claude, there’s so many AI tools out there, you 100% need to be leveraging. If you’re not using AI right now, it’s the equivalent of being in the 90s, not using the Internet. So leveraging all these AI tools, in addition to that, there’s a lot of these use case specific tools. So like I use Organimi for org charts. I use Loom videos. By the way, Loom just released AI SOPs. So you literally record a Loom video and then press SOP and it automatically creates an SOP that you can send to your VAs or your assistants. So all you have to do is record yourself doing things once. So 100%, I love leveraging – I mean obviously CEO of AppSumo, I love leveraging software. I think software enables individuals to take things to the next level. It’s the modern toolkit for the CEO.
Neville Medhora: Yeah, it’s like the modern being really strong and being able to dig the deepest ditch. Back in the day, that was valuable. Now you’re just like, who has these skills? Yeah, anytime I meet like a designer or someone like that or a video editor, that’s really good and you just look at the other work and you’re like, whoa. You’re just like, there’s that, that, that, that’s something, that’s something.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Well, like let’s just use video editing as an example. Like everyone can use CapCut, but if you go like one level deeper and we’re going to use Adobe After Effects, that probably requires 2x more effort, but the results are 100x. So like when I see a video that’s using After Effects, it separates so much better than an individual that’s just using CapCut captions. And so like yes, it required 2x more work to make that happen. But you look at the views and the views are 100x of that video. And so the effort was worth it. So I would much rather an individual, a designer, a CEO, your finance team, I love a use a tool called Fathom for finance financial analytics. I would much rather these individuals level up the tool sets, even if it requires a little bit more effort because the results that you get back are exponential.
Neville Medhora: I tell people all the time because we originally before copywriting course, I was teaching people how to freelance and I was always like, you got to become a triple threat. And that’s a concept I first heard from Mark Andreessen, the famous venture capitalist, right? He’s like going out with one skill into the workforce as like going to war with the butter knife and going out to the workforce with three skills that you’re like roughly 70% good at. Like going out there with like full body armor and a gun, 1,000% and so, and so I always tell people. And the concept now has evolved into a certain. There’s a term you’re familiar with, Full stack.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: That’s right.
Neville Medhora: Yeah, I love that concept.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Yeah. I mean, let’s just – let’s just – you’re a trunk fan.
Neville Medhora: Yeah.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Okay. So copywriter, if he was just a copywriter, if he was just going out there and writing funny tweets, probably has a normal following. But he takes that and he stacks that with memes, he stacks that with business knowledge. All of a sudden, he’s one of the most followed accounts on Twitter. Matt Gray was, for the longest time just posting out. Here’s how I grew my social account. Then all of a sudden, he started doing these drawings. Now all of a sudden, his social account started taking things to the next level. And so to your point, social right now is like the equivalent of like the UFC when it first came out, where there’s a lot of these one trick ponies, like, I know karate or I know kendo, and you – it’s like, well, which style is the best? But then when you had someone that could combine styles, all of a sudden they were so dominant. They had a little bit of wrestling, a little bit of jiu jitsu, a little bit of boxing, and they just absolutely dominated the competition. And so you take a look at the world’s best fighters today, it’s these multidisciplinary fighters. The same thing is true in business. I think Elon Musk’s wife famously said this, where it’s like, Elon, if he was just a good business person would probably not be that interesting. But the fact that he’s good at business, he’s good at physics, he’s good at visionary, he combines all additional skills is the reason he’s now one of the richest people of all time.
Neville Medhora: So, so let’s continue on that, that thread. I have a whole thing here about like, content marketing. Maybe we’ll get into that right now. So it’s like multidisciplinary content marketing. You said social media is like the early days of the UFC. Meaning you think it’s just starting?
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Oh, it’s a hundred percent.
Neville Medhora: Because when we were growing up, like, social media was a joke. That’s right, Social media was funny. Like if someone had a Zanga or a MySpace or like posting on Facebook back in the day, you’re like, oh God, dude, do something better with time.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Right?
Neville Medhora: And now you’re like, wait, this is like everyone’s job now. Like CEOs are like required almost to be. They’re like, you have to be like Brian Chesky. You have to be posting on Twitter all the time, posting on xyz. And so, so now you just see that as like a grownup thing. Is social media just part of everything now?
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Something really interesting has happened in the last 10 years where people are no longer following companies, they’re following individuals. And so, like, the Joe Rogan’s are now more valuable than all the media companies combined. The Oprahs of the world are now more valuable than all of the magazines combined. And so people don’t want to follow companies, they want to follow individuals. And so it is impossible for you to be a $100 million CEO if you do not have a social presence. If Elon Musk texts the VP at another company, that VP immediately jumps on a call. If the CEO of Cisco, sorry, if you’re listening to this, texts anybody, nobody’s responding. If you do not have a social presence, you are not going to be able to attract top talent, close incredible deals, and really compete in this new market if you do not have a good social presence.
Neville Medhora: Yeah, I remember when he bought Twitter, people were like, why is he buying Twitter? And of course there’s like the freedom of speech type of thing or whatever, that argument, but at the same time, it’s like he was Tesla’s biggest marketing channel, 1,000%. And Tesla makes hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue. And you’re like, well, 44 billion compared to that. It’s like. And he was going to get kicked off Twitter, by the way. That’s the way it was going because Twitter hated him.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Interesting.
Neville Medhora: And then the thing happened with Donald Trump etc. So he’s just like, he must have been doing this calculation that I need to spend this money. It’s like advertising money. Almost one. Yeah. To make sure I stay on this platform.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: I think Greg Eisenberg mentioned like the ATM framework. Meaning first one is attention, next is trust, then you get the money. And so the most important skill is the attention. If you’re not getting attention, you can never translate that into trust. You can never – I mean even take a look at Liver King doesn’t have, doesn’t have any trust. But because he got the attention, he got the money. Right. And obviously that’s short lived. But if you can combine all three together then 1000%, that’s how you dominate. And so Elon Musk acquiring Twitter. Yes. He makes it seem like it’s altruistic and oh, I’m doing this for free speech. That’s bullshit. He 100% knew that this is a power play. He is literally buying the town square. And now he controls the algorithm, he controls what gets seen, he controls making sure that every tweet that he sends out gets the exposure that’s necessary in order for him to move the markets and move the dynamic and ultimately make him richer.
nt. So I’ve noticed. Do you notice that with a lot of the CEO that you’re seeing just like SEO, kind of like flounder but like social media just like massively go uphill?
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Yes to the first one? No to the second one. So 100% SEO. I believe the latest reports from Gartner is Google searches are down 33% year over year as a result of AI. And so Google results, period, are just cratering. And so if your business was built on top of SEO 100%, you’re already seeing a 20 to 40% reduction in your revenue year over year. That’s number one. Number two, Google just released three major updates this year that drastically changed the way they think about rankings. And so if you didn’t get adjusted by just the pure volume of search, you may have gotten hit by the new algorithm changes. At its core, though, is are you only relying on one or two marketing channels? And so to your point, is social the thing that takes off? Maybe. For others it could be PPC. For others, it could be trade shows. For others it could be billboards. We were joking about that yesterday. So you have to figure out, well, what is the diversified revenue stream that allows me to ensure that if I have a 40% shift in one of my marketing channels, I could easily throw some more gasoline on the fire and ensure another social channel, another marketing channel, another way to acquire customers is able to take up that space?
Neville Medhora: Yeah. And it also, Sam Parr, one of our good buddies, he had a great quote and he said, if you’re building your business on top of a social media channel, it’s like renting an office space and a place where the rent goes up every 18 months.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Oh, I love that.
Neville Medhora: And I was like, oh, that’s pretty good. Also, you could just get banned from one of these things very quickly. I got kicked off Twitter one time for posting a photo, and it thought it was porn. It was like a picture of me and a buddy or something. And for some reason, it triggered a porn thing and we’re like, what the hell happened?
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Wow.
Neville Medhora: And it kicked me off of Twitter for 12 hours.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: That’s ridiculous. Because literally all my comments are filled with porn bots.
Neville Medhora: No, no, this is pre Elon taking over. And I remember thinking, I was just like, wow, all that work just down the drain for. And there’s no one you can contact about this?
Ayman Al-Abdullah: No.
Neville Medhora: Like really nothing you can do? Maybe tell someone else to complain for you or something like that. But you – your stuff really quick. So being in front of all those other audiences, also behind the scenes, I work with a lot of companies and we do a lot of direct mail. So people are like, direct mail is coming back. And, you know, I’m just like, I don’t think it went away.
Neville Medhora: Yeah, I don’t think it ever went away. People aren’t – people are more entranced by something like Instagram rather than like, hey, I got a piece of mail.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: That’s right.
Neville Medhora: Yeah. So I do think there’s a lot. When you said even trade shows, I see companies that they spend, you know, $100,000 on PPC and they spend $100,000 at a trade show and come back with all these, like, clients. Yeah. And you’re just like, oh, this, this – the old school stuff of just getting in front of actual people is still quite powerful. If social media is not the only way to do it.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Well, you have to start with, well, who’s my ideal customer? Who’s the buyer? Right. And if the buyers are going to the trade shows, you need to be at the trade shows, you know, and if your buyers are on social media, you need to be on social media. If you’re marketing to plumbers, they’re not looking at a reel on Instagram to choose their next service provider. Right. You gotta go where – you gotta meet them where they’re at. And so oftentimes people think about the marketing channel first rather than thinking about who do they serve and who’s actually the decision maker first. And then reverse engineer – where does that person live? Where are they making decisions? And how do I build a marketing engine that feeds directly into that customer persona rather than the other way around?
Neville Medhora: What do you think about podcasting? A lot of YouTubers are like, I’m quitting YouTube. And what they mean is, they’re not quitting YouTube. They’re quitting making, like, crazy videos every seven days. And what they’re all saying at the end of the video is like, I think I’ll just start a podcast. So, I mean, essentially what we’re doing right now, you have, like, a conversation. Have you seen results off of these podcasts?
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Once again, it depends on your avatar. Right. For someone like Chris Do 1000%, it becomes one of his greatest feeders, because who are his customers? His customers are designers. And what are designers doing? They’re consuming content on YouTube, on Spotify, and so it directly feeds and builds into his engine. If you are a roofing company, the last thing you need to be doing is starting a podcast, because homeowners are not listening to a podcast to hear about roofing insights. You 100% should be knocking on doors, putting up billboards figuring out how am I getting Google reviews. Your time is way better spent meeting your customers where they’re at rather than trying to do what everyone else is doing.
Neville Medhora: All right, so let’s go back to some of your CEO stuff. I find this fascinating because you’re talking to all these different CEOs. I feel like you’re uniquely positioned to see the future in some way. What industries are killing it? What industries are hurting? Do you see any like, overall trends of like what’s doing well right now? I would assume, like AI stuff like that? Any like interesting insights you’re seeing over there?
Ayman Al-Abdullah: I think first and foremost education’s getting commoditized. I think people are not no longer paying for courses, communities, knowledge the way they used to because the quality of content now on YouTube for free in order to garner attention is significantly higher than it was. And so if you are building an education based business, it’s 100% an uphill climb and a uphill battle. If you can instead take that knowledge and turn it into a template, tool or even piece of software that is 100% taking off. Number two, it is significantly harder to do business now than it was three years ago. For everybody. There’s a lot more headwinds. We were joking around earlier. People were buying $400,000 NFT profile pics three years ago. It’s a lot harder to acquire customers, acquire talent and really just be in business now than it was three years ago. We are 100% in economic winter. And I don’t know if really any industry is spared. I think if anything, some industries may have taken longer to be impacted. You know, like commercial real estate was doing great when everyone else is falling apart. Now it’s in the shitter. Government was doing great. Now things are getting tightened up. And so I think when you take a look back at 2008, almost every industry is getting impacted. It’s just a matter of depending on when so what companies are doing well. The companies that are doing really well are ones that help other individuals make money. And so when you’re thinking about how am I helping my customers acquire customers, how am I helping my customers save money, how am I helping my customers get things to the next level? If you can be directly tied to revenue, you will 100% be a lot more defensible. I think you and I were talking about this yesterday, which is, yeah, maybe email newsletters don’t move the needle, but maybe what you’re doing with the CRO stuff, 100%, we can tie that directly attributable to revenue. That’s a much more defensible business because you can point to the dollars that you’re contributing and it becomes much easier thing to justify on the P and L budget totally.
Neville Medhora: Every year I like to try some sort of little project. And this year I was trying something along those lines. And I used to be, I used to think that you just get this new idea and you try it and you do it. But of course it takes many iterations. And as we know, more and more successful people. I’m just like, wow, everyone has like, I guess what you call a pivot many, many different times before they really found the right thing. And so I was giving myself 6 months to 12 months to figure figure this out. And I started roughly around Q2, trying some things. And one of them was a newsletter agency like we talked about.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Yeah.
Neville Medhora: And everyone’s like, you need to start a newsletter agency. Newsletters are hot right now. Get people to do it. And we’ve had a couple clients that said, hey, can we start a newsletter? The problem is once you get over about 10 grand a month, they could just hire a really good writer to do it. And then the other thing is, we’ve actually gone in and trained some places to make newsletters. And you know what, it was really easy once we got them like the format to make the newsletter, they took over and made a pretty good newsletter every single time. And I’m like, they don’t really need me or my company at all. They just needed the framework to get started. So it’s like, okay, I can make a company starting newsletters, but that’s, that’s about it. And it’s not really tied to revenue. Newsletters are not tied to revenue. Most places maybe AppSumo sends out an email every day, right? That’s tied to revenue. But most places is just like, hey, it’s like a bulletin update. That’s it. Here’s some cool stuff in our industry. Stay top of mind Cool. That’s what a newsletter is. And I was like, oh, these are not tied to revenue. If I’m going to spend the next five years doing this, I think that’s going to be a tough spot to be.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: That’s smart. That’s a smart insight because it’s your point. It’s either not revenue generating, which means it’s not a priority, or it is revenue generating, which means they want to bring it in house. And so like you are always going to be living in that weird middle zone where I’m either not that valued or I’m going to be quickly replaced.
Neville Medhora: Yeah. And then with the AI stuff, you just kind of like, okay, where’s the puck going to be this in five years? Right. ChatGPT is what, 1.6 years old? It’s not even two. It’s not even a toddler yet.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Wow.
Neville Medhora: So, so let’s say when it reaches five years old, is it going to be able to write an 80% good newsletter? I mean, the answer is, yeah, like, there’s no data.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Right.
Neville Medhora: And, and so you have to think like, okay, is that going to be a problem as well? And so I started going towards things that are like, just, can I prove my revenue on day one?
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Right.
Neville Medhora: And that, that’s been like a, that’s been my marker.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: That’s awesome.
Neville Medhora: Speaking of this, whenever you see CEOs that have a business idea, do you ever talk about, like, their early life? Like, how long does it take people to find the right idea that took off? Do you know, do you have insights on that?
Ayman Al-Abdullah: No, I’m terrible at the beginning. So, yeah, I can’t speak to that.
Neville Medhora: You have no idea. You’re good at seeing an idea that’s already taken off and people are clamoring to get in on it, and you’re good at optimizing it.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Well, the founder is a detective. Like, they’re sniffing things out and they’re going, well, where exactly is their revenue? I am – that is not my area of expertise and I do not want to speak on that because, yeah, I mean, quite frankly, I’m just terrible at it. So that’s something that comes naturally to me. Whereas individuals like Noah, like Sam, they love taking things from 0 to 1. I think, like, Noah’s got like a dozen companies that have gone from zero to seven figures because, like, he, like, that’s built into his DNA. He literally launched Million Dollar Weekend, right? So, like, he loves that shit. Whereas myself, I’m like, hey, this has got a lot of potential. We could totally turn this into a hundred million dollars business. That’s where I’m going to come in.
Neville Medhora: Where did you get that insight that you’re – how do you know that about yourself so well?
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Well, there’s an exercise I take my CEOs through, which is, let’s go through the four or five moments in your life that you were most proud of, that even if you could tell no one else, you would still be proud of it. And those things tell me a little bit more about the core of who you are as a person. And so for me, when I look back at my life, the things I’m most proud of, obviously AppSumo, you know, coming in, I remember even jumping on a call with no, I’m like, I think this thing’s got a lot of meat left on the bone. Hiring individuals like Alona that I knew had a ton of potential and seeing her rise from copywriter to now COO of AppSumo, I joined my fraternity when it was one of the worst on campus and when I graduated as one of the best. To me, the core thread amongst all of the moments that I was most proud of was unlocking untapped potential. And so what I love about what I do now is I can see I get to pick and choose who I get to work with. You know, I have – if I were to go sequentially through my waiting list, it would take over three years to reach the bottom. And so I get to pick and choose which companies. I’m like, this one’s got potential. I want to work with this individual to take things to the next level. Because to me, that’s what gets me most excited, is finding something that it’s still rough and loose. It’s got, you know, a little rough around the edges and really polishing and turning into that diamond in the rough.
Neville Medhora: Interesting. So taking stock of what you were most proud of kind of like.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Just tells you about yourself 1,000%.
Neville Medhora: Yeah, well, because there are some transformations you see in public and it’s – I don’t even know this is a good example. But like you see someone like Mark Zuckerberg and this is like a, these are like once in a generation type thing. So to compare yourself to this is like insane. There’s too many things, right? But you see like he became, he was like a just a kid programming and then he turned into a fast growing startup CEO and now he’s, you know, the CEO of one of the largest companies on the planet. And these are totally different skill sets. I think you’ve seen this with like Warren Buffett too, just moving up through these ranks. Those are very, very unique cases where that person has adapted with each step. And you’re saying like, I’m only good at this and I’m really good at this, so I’m not going to even try to get better at that. Yeah, to me that shows a strong amount of like just knowing yourself very, very well. Of like, I’m not good at that.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Yeah.
Neville Medhora: And I do find that impressive.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Well, I appreciate that. You’re right. Like, who has really been able to navigate the multiple phases of taking the company from inception all the way to massive. It’s like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, even Steve Jobs had to like get fired three times before he finally figured it out. Right. Bill Gates, like, look, I am nowhere near any of those guys. And so I have zero illusions to think that I can handle both starting a company, scaling company and taking it to IPO or that level. And so I’d much rather operate in my zone of genius, the things that get me most excited, rather than trying to learn all three phases of the company’s growth.
Neville Medhora: That’s pretty sick to know that about yourself. I don’t know how to transfer this, so I’ll do a Jerry Seinfeld. Like, what’s the deal with AI? Now this is like you mentioned before that like not doing AI is kind of like back in the day of like, you know, the Internet’s coming about and you’re like, that stuff’s stupid.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Yeah.
Neville Medhora: I had a guy who was like a little bit of a mentor and he owned a big company called Golf Smith. I was introduced to him by a friend and he said at the time when I met him, their online retail was doing – their online retail was doing way bigger than their in person retail and had stores across the country. And he’s just like, the way that that started was just someone in the company was just like, we gotta start a website. And this is at the time when like having a website was, it was like a novelty. People weren’t really making a lot of money on the web. And then sure enough, over time that became their primary income source. And, and he was like, I was just so glad someone was doing it inside the company. What are you seeing people do with AI? Like any like interesting applications yet? Because we’re still so early that a lot of the applications that you think are going to be cool are actually not that cool. But then there’s other things that like, like Loom – you do an SOP and just writes it out. I don’t think anyone thought about that in the beginning. No one thought that that was a thing.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Right.
Neville Medhora: People thought like it would write your emails for you. It turns out like just writing your emails for you is not like the best use case of it, but it’s other stuff.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Well, I think we first have to understand AI. I think that oftentimes people are not true – it’s really difficult for founders and CEOs to understand how their business plays into new disruptive technologies. I mean, we both grew up in the era of pre Internet, post Internet and we just saw how many companies were either blindsided by the Internet or leveraged it in order to take things to the next level. And this repeats itself over and over again in any new disruptive technology. And like one of my favorite is back in the 1900s when the Ford Model T came out. It came out, didn’t even call it an automobile or a car. They called it a horseless carriage. They didn’t even understand how to market this thing. And you know, Ford famously said if I asked my customers what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse. And at the time there was over 1800 cars, horseless carriage companies. Today there’s just a handful. And so this disruptive technology that launched over a hundred years ago has completely transformed the way cities are completely transformed. I mean, how many industries are built on the back of automobiles? Additionally, how many industries have gone through recessions as a result of that? Like back in the day, everyone had horses. The horse industry went through a 40 year recession after the horseless carriage automobile industry came out. But what people don’t realize is the horse industry is bigger today than it was in the 1900s. Really huge Kentucky Derby, million dollar horses. It’s a luxury brand now. Think about the companies that were making saddles back then. Most of them were blindsided. Who survived? Those that transitioned to making leather interiors for vehicles. And so understanding how is my company going to evolve with this new disruptive technology? It starts with number one, what are my unique assets? Number two, what is the job that I do? And so when Loom thought about, what is the – why do someone record a Loom? I’m recording a Loom so I can show someone else asynchronously how I do something or share with them information. And so instead of going, how do we leverage AI? You have to first ask, what is the job I do for my customers? And then could AI make this better? And so instead of thinking about the technology, think about the problem that you solve and then ask yourself, could AI make this better?
Neville Medhora: That’s a great framework of looking at it because it just seems like I’ve seen a lot of product launches with AI and you’re just like, well that’s stupid. They’re just trying to shove AI so in their next product update, they can be like, we have AI but they’re not there yet. I feel for them.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Yeah.
Neville Medhora: Because I’m sure at the top there, there’s probably some CEO that’s like, I can’t even follow all this stuff.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Totally.
Neville Medhora: And everyone’s coming like we need AI and they’re just like, just shove some shit out there and see what happens.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Right.
Neville Medhora: But also, you know what’s hopeful about that? For a lot of big companies, we witnessed this with the web. A lot of companies had strong fundamentals. They did a good job by their customers. They weren’t using the web and they were a little late to the web maybe. But at the same time they waited until the web made sense for them. Right. So even a lot of B2B companies now, they don’t sell their products on the web. Like if you’re buying like optical routers and stuff like that for AT&T, for like large scale deployment, you can’t just buy one on the web. You have to talk to a company and there’s a whole process in it to see which one’s the right one.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Right.
Neville Medhora: So like those places saying like they missed out on E-commerce, you’re like, well not really. In fact, they’re still not doing E-commerce the same way. But there are companies like apparel, all that kind of stuff. Like if you’re like Express for men, you’re not selling online. Yeah, you’re going to get screwed. So I do have hope that like even a lot of companies that are late to it, meaning like, you know, the stuff all just came out like two years ago.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Yeah.
Neville Medhora: They’re still not that late, which is kind of interesting.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: I think the companies that have the fundamentals, we were talking about the fundamentals. To me, the very first steps of any 100 million dollar company is three things. Persona, problem, promotion. Persona is who do you sell? Your problem is what problem do you solve for them? And then promotion is how do I get customers and acquire them profitably and scalably. And I’m reminded of a train company in the 1800s who they served was business travelers doing interstate commerce. And they were helping them go from one state to the other and essentially do business in between states. That’s who they served. Business travelers. When they asked them their problem and they were solving it by running this train company, they said it’s really difficult for us to transact from one state to the next because monetary – there wasn’t a Federal Reserve, there wasn’t a centralized way to transfer money. Some people were like, this looks counterfeit. It was a lot of back and forth. There’s a lot of pain using money. And so this company was like, if we help business travelers do interstate commerce, we should probably help them solve this problem. And so what do they do? They roll out something called the traveler’s check. So this train company solved the interstate commerce problem for their customer by rolling out travelers checks. That company, American Express, 1800s to this day, what are they doing? They’re helping business travelers do interstate or international travel. It’s the same customer, same problem, different technology. And so if you want to be a timeless company, company that lasts centuries, you have to think about those core things and ask yourself, how can I evolve regardless of what the technology is? Because products decay. But problems are timeless.
Neville Medhora: Great quote. Nice. I’m seeing a lot of programmers now get really excited about AI and the way they’re going about it is maybe a little bit different. This is like, for you, as a business person approach it almost a different way than the programmer. The programmers is like, I’m going to make 25 companies in 25 days, right? I’m going to apply AI to this problem, AI to that problem. I’m going to copy that company, but put AI in it. And 95% of them just don’t work out at all. Like, they just don’t get traction. Probably because of this. They’re not actually solving any problem.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: That’s right. It’s spaghetti on the wall.
Neville Medhora: Yeah. So someone who’s a programmer, and by the way, I categorize myself as this type of person, I’m like, let’s put a landing page out. That’s my version of it. Let’s put a landing page out. See, we can get customers and see what happens. And you’re like, no one signed up. Okay, figures. Yeah, it’s a bad idea. Kill it, move on to the next one. But they’re doing like a lot of these experiments. And one, a smart program I talked to, he was like, the way I think of it is like, the AI is going to get more and more powerful. So when the next GPT, 5, 6, 7, 12 down the line, whatever comes out, will my product be better? That, that’s the way they’re thinking about it.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: So.
Neville Medhora: But I do like your way of just like, what are the end problems? And could AI help? Maybe not. Yeah, maybe not in certain places.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: I mean, the person who’s most famously using AI right now to make a ton of money is Levels, Right, Peter? Levels. So when you look at him, he’s almost always thinking about what is the problem to be solved, right. For him it’s like, oh, individuals don’t want to drop $30,000 for interior design. So could I use AI to create an interior design app? I don’t want to spend a thousand dollars for headshots. Could I use AI to create more professional looking headshots? And so start with, what problems do my potential customers have? And could I leverage AI in order to solve it rather than, hey, how do I just slam AI into everything, every potential idea and hope one of them sticks?
Neville Medhora: Yeah, I mean, we’ve been seeing – so I run a copywriting company, right? So everyone always ask me is like, did ChatGPT just wipe out your company? And the answer is no, I thought it would. Right? That’s the funny thing. It’s like we teach how to write now there’s this thing that just writes for you. And here’s the funny thing that happened about it. We lost some mid level customers, right? So a customer that’s just trying to write like emails for a doctor’s office to say, can you reschedule appointment? ChatGPT is really good at that. That’s like low level writing. Mid level writing is like a blurb on a newsletter. Then high level writing is Mark Andreessen, Balaji Savasanan talking about their experience in the crypto market, where it’s going to go. That’s difficult to replicate still. But the mid and low level stuff is relatively easy to replicate with ChatGPT in future versions of it. And so what we realized was we’re like, how come it hasn’t gone down? What, like, what happened there? And the reason is office hours. Every time we come to office hours, I talk to people about their problems. Most of them aren’t saying, here’s a long passage, can you update my text? They’re all saying like, I have a page, it’s not converting. Why? And we go, well, what if you put that up there? Like that one headline is just not clear about what you do? And then I’m like, what do you do? And they have a tough time getting it. So I pull it out of them. And then they’re like, oh yeah, that sounds so much clearer.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Wow.
Neville Medhora: Right? So it’s not necessarily just the copywriting part. It’s a – it’s overall like we’re talking about the other day. It’s overall like CRO.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: That’s right.
Neville Medhora: Conversion rate optimization. And what I realized, like, over time is like, people don’t really care about the copywriting aspect of it or the design aspect. They just want that end result.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: That’s right.
Neville Medhora: So I have always had a hard time showcasing our results visually. Because if I show you an email that did well in an email that didn’t do well visually, zoomed out, they both look the same. Like, there’s no – you can’t really tell. And if you zoom in on specific passages, people are like, okay, whatever. Like, it’s not fun to look at.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: No.
Neville Medhora: If you show someone like this logo versus another logo and be like, this one performed 20% better, they don’t care about what it looked like. They just care about that 20%.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: That’s right.
Neville Medhora: And I remember thinking like, oh, they care about the end conversion rate, the method I use to make it better. They don’t give a – wow. They honestly don’t care.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Yeah.
Neville Medhora: The CEO, if they’re like, this performs 20% better. We get 20% more leads, 200% more leads. That’s all. They want to know what you did. Honestly, they don’t care at all.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Wow.
Neville Medhora: And so I was like, oh, that’s my business. It’s not necessarily just copyright.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Totally. Yeah. It could be a color on the button. All they care about is that result.
Neville Medhora: Yeah. Oftentimes it’s a combo of all the above.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Totally.
Neville Medhora: It’s a combo of like, what are you actually offering, who’s the product and are you speaking to them? It’s a combo of all those things. It’s like multidisciplinary. Once again, full stack.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: That’s right.
Neville Medhora: All those different things put together and then – but the other thing is copywriting with the foot in the door.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: That’s right.
Neville Medhora: Because when I say, like, we’ll improve your conversions, you’re like, you know, dime a dozen. When you say copywriting, people go, oh, I wonder if that could help. But what we actually deliver to them is actually better design, better layout, UX, all that kind of stuff.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: That’s right. And you’re a genius of that. Like, you are really good at going, well, what exactly are trying to say here? How do we properly message this in a way that’s effective? How do we ensure that we’re tweaking the – the overall layout of the page in order to drive that conversion? And like, I’ve seen you do this multiple times at AppSumo, where you’re like, hey, let’s update this headline. Let’s move this around. Let’s make this image different. Let’s change things. This feels not clear and like that – just natural and intuitive to you because of how much experience – you’ve been doing this for over a decade. You have such good experience across industries that you’re able to do things where if someone’s working on one business with one product line, they’re so deep in the weeds, it’s really hard for them to know how, like how a stranger would look at it, where you’re able to provide that outside perspective and immediately have an uplift on their conversion.
Neville Medhora: Yeah, you probably experienced this with your CEOs. It’s called familiarity blindness.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: That’s right.
Neville Medhora: Whenever you’re inside something, day after day, week after week after hour, hour, having meeting after meeting about something, honestly, you can’t make any more changes to it.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Right.
Neville Medhora: And so actually, for – for all my consulting, by the way, I tell people I’m like, I am not – I will look at your page before so I can get a gist of it. So you’re not watching me read. But at the same time, I’m going to just do a once, but I can’t look at it continuously or give you feedback beforehand before we get on the call. And the reason is I will get familiarity blindness with it and I’m being paid to look at it. So it’s already coming in a different context. And so one of the best things we do is like, we have other people look at people’s copy and like someone who’s not even a copywriter can be like, I don’t understand what that means. And you’re like, and yeah, there’s a problem with that headline.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Right.
Neville Medhora: It’s pretty cool. So familiar – bonus. Getting out of that. Anyways, man, this is a fantastic interview. Where can people – where can people find you? Follow you?
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Yeah, probably on Twitter, X whatever it’s called today. It’s probably the easiest way. Probably join my newsletter. I actually walk through the nine steps, nine figures in a monthly newsletter. So we’re not throwing too many emails at you. And so each month you can be like, oh, I’m working on Persona, or I’m working on promotion, or I’m working on process. And so every month, sort of like a little nice little reminder of what should I be working on this?
Neville Medhora: I need to sign that up.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Yeah, I have a –
Neville Medhora: Special email address that’s a newsletter reader and I built a tool so I can read newsletters, like an RSS feed.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Nice.
Neville Medhora: I want to see that. What’s the website?
Ayman Al-Abdullah: It’s just my name AymanAlAbdullah.com. Nice. Yeah, thanks so much, man.
Neville Medhora: This is awesome.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Absolutely sweet.