April 17, 2025
When I was CEO of AppSumo, I discovered something that transformed our business: the power of truly understanding our target audience.
Recently, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Chris Do on the Futur Podcast to reveal the strategies that helped us dramatically increase customer lifetime value and skyrocket our revenue.
In our conversation, Chris and I debunked this common myth and explained why a laser-focused approach to serving specific customers will outperform trying to reach everyone, every time.
I shared real-world examples from my AppSumo journey, pulling back the curtain on how data-driven decisions and absolute clarity about who we were serving transformed our business.
We also explored why companies like Apple deliberately focus on creatives rather than trying to appeal to everyone, and how this principle can apply to businesses of any size.
Video
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Full Transcript
Ayman Al-Abdullah: If I go to your website and you’re like, I’m a designer, it’s like, okay, maybe. Maybe I like some of your designs. Whereas if I go to your website and you’re like, I only design homepages for SaaS platforms doing north of seven figures, all of your examples, your portfolio, everything related to that is deeply aligned to the one thing that you’re best at. Now, all of a sudden, when I go to your website, I’m like, this is exactly who I need to hire.
Chris Do: Let me just clarify a couple of things. Person, problem, promotion person. Is that you?
Ayman Al-Abdullah: No, that’s your ideal client.
Chris Do: Oh, okay.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Yeah.
Chris Do: All right. Tell me more then, I think.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: You have to start with: Who am I? Who am I serving?
Chris Do: Okay.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: I think the best entrepreneurs, the best creatives, they deeply understand their audience. They deeply understand who they serve. I think that a lot of times, if you don’t have this foundation, it will crumble as you scale your business. Because building a business without an ideal client in mind is like writing a love letter and addressing it to whom it may concern. Imagine that you wrote a love letter to your wife, and at the top it said, to whom it may concern; she would throw it out, and you’d never get married, versus writing a love letter to that individual. Everything you do, every piece of marketing that you roll out, every piece of product, every strategy is directly tied to that individual. And I’ll give you an example, Chris, at AppSumo, we were serving everybody when I joined. We were doing Udemy courses, we were doing SaaS tools, we were doing fonts and icons. So, we’re serving designers, we’re serving solopreneurs. And so I took a step back and I analyzed the data. I’m like, look, who is actually… Who loves us the most? Who do we love to serve? Who’s our most profitable customer? And that’s the key phrase: Who’s the most profitable customer? And most profitable is the person who sings our praises, isn’t a pain in the ass to work with, and continues to buy from us. And what we realized is there was one individual, marketing agency Matt Alliteration. I’m a huge fan. Marketing agency Matt was buying from us at almost a 10x rate of everyone else. And it’s because marketing agency Matt was buying licenses on behalf of his clients, versus the solopreneur, who was buying one license. So when we doubled down on marketing agency Matt, our marketing changed, our strategy changed, our product, everything changed. So now, instead of you can only buy one license of this tool, you’re buying 10. Instead of having no marketing agency focus for Easter, now we’re rolling out white labeling, we’re rolling out the ability to have multiple seats. So we’re doing all of these things with marketing agency Matt in mind. That one decision alone, changing who we’re serving, directly led to us tripling our customer lifetime value, which then allowed us to triple our revenue as a result. So it has to start with who do I serve? Because from who you serve, which is the most profitable customer, your customer lifetime value increases, which makes your customer acquisition costs so much easier. It makes the ability to think about strategy and marketing easier. So, person, then the problem, then promotion.
Chris Do: Okay, some things to get through here. Do you credit your analytical accounting mind to comb through data and try to look for the needle in the haystack to find your most profitable customer? Did it become apparent that somebody looks at them like, dude, what are we doing?
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Yeah, I mean, I definitely have that data-driven mind. But at that time, I had a great team. You know, they’re the ones that are asking questions on my behalf. They’re able to go deeper and ask, who should we be going after? How do we get better at marketing? And so the ability to have a team that has higher standards than yourself, I think, is really critical. At that stage, when we were doing around $10 million in revenue, in order to figure out, hey, let’s dig into the data, let’s be a little bit more data-driven, but not too much. I see a lot of people get hamstrung, and they almost paralyze themselves with data. They get analysis paralysis. But I think that if you can get 70% accurate, you can make a decision and move forward in a way that has a lot more clarity and gives clarity to the team. I say all the time, a CEO can be uncertain, but they can’t be unclear. And so, make a decision and move forward, and you’re going to have much better clarity for your entire company in order to say, hey, this is who we serve. How does this serve marketing agency Matt? They’re using the lens of that with product decisions, marketing decisions. Everything goes through the lens of how does this serve marketing agency Matt? I think Amazon famously leaves a seat open at every meeting for their customer. How does this serve our customer? And I think the best companies in the world deeply understand that. And the worst companies in the world, the Kodaks, the ones that fell from their graces, it’s because they ignored and forgot who they actually served.
Chris Do: Okay. The problem with the person is it’s not easy to see. It’s not easy to commit to.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Yeah.
Chris Do: And it’s one of the biggest challenges that people have, because the logic goes, if I narrow who I target, then aren’t I leaving a lot of opportunity on the table?
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Yeah.
Chris Do: To which you respond with, we were…
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Very worried about that, but what we realized is when we cut our target audience, we tripled our revenue.
Chris Do: Yeah.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: And the reason that that happens is it’s not that you’re ignoring solopreneur Sally, but by having that focus, you’re able to then deeply serve one individual, which allows you to increase your revenue. And as a subsequent side effect, solopreneur Sally is still served because now she’s getting better deals because we’re selling more, so we’re able to have better negotiating terms with our partners. And so the entire ecosystem benefits as a result. Apple, I mean, from the very beginning, Here’s to the Crazy Ones, right? The ones that are pushing the envelope, everything they do, every piece of equipment they roll out is to help creatives. And that doesn’t mean that I can’t do my accounting on a Mac. That doesn’t mean I can’t use my Mac for Chrome. But by them focusing on the creatives, those that are pushing the envelope, they end up serving everyone else. Now, they’re a $2 trillion company, and with all their marketing, they’re basically just serving one type of customer.
Chris Do: Right. There’s something that I’m reminded of that Blair Enns says, which is the market is bigger than the target, and we worry that if we just go for the target, we lose out on all this. But in fact, when you’re super clear, you know how to write your love letter, and everything becomes clear. The messaging, the tactics, the strategy, the product mix, all that kind of stuff becomes super clear. You serve them really well. And then there’s actually… You hit all these other people around, which you said, like, solopreneur Sally.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Yeah.
Chris Do: Still served and sold.
Ayman Al-Abdullah: Yeah. Well, let’s just use your designer example. If I go to your website and you’re like, I’m a designer, it’s like, okay, maybe. Maybe I like some of your designs. Whereas if I go to your website and you’re like, I only design homepages for SaaS platforms doing north of seven figures, now I’m like, this is exactly who I need to hire. All of your examples, your portfolio, everything related to that is deeply aligned to the one thing that you’re best at. Now, all of a sudden, when I go to your website, I’m like, this is exactly who I need to hire. And a lot of times people go, well, I want to serve everyone. I want to show my entire portfolio. I want to do, I do logos, and I do this, and I do that. And now people don’t want to hire mediocre. They want to hire the best, the best for what they can afford. And if you dilute yourself and say, I can do a little bit of everything, I’m going to go for the person that specializes. I’m going to go, who’s the best logo creator in the world? Who’s the best branding specialist in the world? Who’s the best YouTube thumbnail creator in the world? And the market is big enough that you can run a seven-figure business being hyper-targeted on one thing that you focus on. I mean, I think that Mr. Beast spends $20,000 per thumbnail. It’s like, there’s an opportunity regardless of what you want to focus on. And I think the key is just figuring out how do I get hyper-targeted on who I serve in a way that is going to serve them and allows me to grow my business by being hyper-targeted on the one person I serve.