AngelPad

How Vungle was born from an ad accidentally auto-playing in a meeting

Jack Smith recounts pivoting at AngelPad: after a recorder app blasted a Coke video during an investor meeting, the team realized they could show 15-second video ads for apps inside other apps. Prospective customers immediately offered $5K-$10K ad spend.

“Opened this like sound recorder app and it started like auto-playing on full volume like some video for Coke. Like we're trying to close it, like what the fuck? But then we actually just thought like, hey, wait a minute, what if we had videos like this but like advertising other games and other apps instead of like Coke stuff?”

The bait-and-switch ad: approve a clean ad, then swap the creative

Because new LinkedIn ads were manually reviewed but editable after approval, Jack submitted an innocent ad, then swapped it for one showing the AngelPad founder's face urging connections to pass along an 'urgent message' linking to his pitch video.

“So basically I would create like an innocent looking ad, um, just targeting whatever, and then I'd change it after they approved it, um, because otherwise they wouldn't have approved it. So basically the and it said, it had a picture of the founder of AngelPad's face and it said, "Do you know Tomasz? We've got an urgent message we need to get to him. Click here."”

Pitch yourself as the 'wild card' when you don't fit

Surrounded by AngelPad teams of ex-Google engineers and PhDs, Jack and his co-founder turned their lack of technical pedigree into the pitch: take all safe bets plus one wild card that could be an epic failure or a massive success.

“And we were like, "Why don't you just choose us as just like a wild card. Like, it could be an epic failure or it could be a massive success. Uh, so that was our pitch, is like, we know we don't fit in, but at least we can be a wild card.”

Steal thisWhen you can't out-credential the field, pitch yourself as the high-variance wild card a portfolio needs.

Cure the cancer, not the itch

At AngelPad, Jack tested 6 landing pages in 6 days; ideas got praise but zero sales. An investor's framing crystallized why: don't build something that cures a customer's itch (nice-to-have) — build what cures their cancer (must-have).

“He said, Don't create a business where you're curing your customer's itch. Like, if you don't exist, they're like, oh, well, it's just an itch, it doesn't matter. Like, your antidote for my itch is nice, but, you know, whatever. He's like, create something where it cures your customer's cancer.”

Steal thisValidate by trying to actually sell each idea in a day — praise is worthless, only a sale or a pre-payment counts.

The LinkedIn ad targeted at a single person

Unable to get into AngelPad among 2,000 applicants for one spot, Jack discovered a loophole in LinkedIn's new ad system letting him target an ad down to essentially one specific person to reach the accelerator's founder.

“I'd found this kind of loophole hack on LinkedIn where I was able to create an advertisement and target it down to a specific person. So LinkedIn has its kind of own ad system like Google AdWords, but they— I think it was a software engineer, like, I think some software engineer had done this as a bug that I found I could set the targeting so specifically, say, like, job title AngelPad, job title CEO, that there's kind of only one person who that ad would show it to, you know.”

Pitch yourself as the wild card

Knowing they were the only non-engineer team against 11 software-heavy companies, Jack pitched AngelPad's founder to take them as the deliberate wild card—an epic failure or massive success—turning their obvious weakness into the reason to bet on them.

“But what we told Tomas is we said, "Hey, look, you've got 11 other companies, all heavy software engineering backgrounds, and you've got one last spot." And we were like, "Why don't you just choose us as just a wild card? It could be an epic failure, or it could be a massive success." So, that was our pitch. We know we don't fit in, but at least we can be a wild card.”

Steal thisWhen you don't fit the standard profile, pitch yourself as the deliberate high-variance wild card bet.