AppLovin: Monetizing & Marketing Mobile Apps

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
This episode is sponsored by Tegus. Tegus is the new digital hub for market intelligence. The Tegus platform empowers investors and corporate development teams to invest smarter by pairing best-in-class technology with the highest quality user-generated content and data. Tegus content is powered by many of the world's leading institutional investors, where their expert calls are recorded, transcribed, and uploaded to the shared platform, leading to the highest quality content and datasets.
Tegus also recently acquired BAMSEC, which will allow users to seamlessly toggle between financial data, management commentary, and expert interviews as they get up to speed on a company.
Any customer who signs up for Tegus before May 31st will receive a free BAMSEC license as part of their subscription. Find out why a majority of top firms are using Tegus on a daily basis. Head to tegus.com/patrick for your free trial. This episode is sponsored by DeLupa. DeLupa streamlines a major pain point for investors. By capturing all of a company's KPIs and adjusting financials into their database, DeLupa makes it easy to quickly update your models for what matters.
So many investors I speak to complain about juggling multiple company earnings or rushing to ramp on a new investment. DeLupa uses AI to find every KPI disclosed, from charts to text, and even from footnotes of investor presentations. DeLupa updates these KPIs and data points in your existing Excel models in one click, regardless of your source or format. Try DeLupa for free at delupa.com/patrick.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:31)
This is Business Breakdowns.
Business Breakdowns is a series of conversations with investors and operators diving deep into a single business. For each business, we explore its history, its business model, its competitive advantages, and what makes it tick.
We believe every business has lessons and secrets that investors and operators can learn from, and we are here to bring them to you. To find more episodes of Breakdowns, check out joincolossus.com. All opinions expressed by hosts and podcast guests are solely their own opinions. Hosts and podcast guests may maintain positions with securities discussed in this podcast. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:15)
Today, we're breaking down AppLovin. It's a business you may not recognize, but have likely interacted with.
Founded in 2012, AppLovin provides a platform for developers to market and monetize their mobile apps. The business also owns some of the most popular mobile games in the world, which they use to feed richer data into their software platform. To help break down the business, I'm joined by its CEO and co-founder, Adam Foroughi. Please enjoy this breakdown of AppLovin.
So Adam, for this business, I think a bit of a history lesson is probably the right place to begin. I'm fascinated by the path that this business has taken over time, and so I'd love to rewind all the way back to what you think is the most appropriate seedling, the first idea, first risk taken by you and the founding team. How did this whole thing begin?

**Adam Foroughi** (3:00)
We started the business in really 2010, and prior to that, I had a couple of successful advertising platforms on desktop. We actually built an advertising platform for web app developers in 2008, 2009, early days of the Facebook app ecosystem. So when I came to Palo Alto to start AppLovin, I didn't want to get into advertising, actually. We wanted to build apps, and we started building a couple of mobile apps. Back then, when we wanted to grow them, there was only one path. You had to go beg the app stores to go get a feature, and there was no marketing platform built really for the app developer. So even though I didn't want to get back into advertising, knew how to do it and saw a really big opportunity, and we did have a guess, at least back then our hypothesis was this app store was going to become really big, you started seeing just massive amounts of consumption, even though the quality of content was pretty weak. So we felt like building a marketing platform for that app developer could be a really big business.
We ended up pivoting off the apps, and in 2012, in Q1, we launched the first version of our marketing platform on Android, and really just started having app developers flock to us, and started seeing month over month growth that was pretty phenomenal.
With that, we knew we were on the right track, and we were going to run this business and see how far it could take us. From there, we never really have wavered at all. Over the last decade, we've been hyper-focused on expanding out the toolset to help app developers grow their business. In late 2012, I went out to raise funding and bring on VCs. I felt like bringing on VCs would give us credibility and help us hire more folks to the team. We had a good core group. It was about 10 to 12, mostly all engineering at the start.