Verified Expert Growth Marketing Agency: Ampush

Customers have described Ampush as the “McKinsey of growth marketing,” and in many ways, it’s apt. Ampush has a relentlessly quantitative, full-funnel approach to growth marketing, and they’ve built proprietary software to back it up. Co-founder and CEO Jesse Pujji explains why Ampush exclusively works with direct to consumer companies, and why they went from serving 100 companies in 2015 to forming deeper partnerships with less than 20 companies today.

On Ampush’s evolution

“From 2011 to 2015, we were one of a handful of companies that could do Facebook really well, although that’s all we did.  As a result, we ended up working with a ton of growth brands and Fortune 1000 brands, like Dollar Shave Club, Uber, Stitch Fix, and all of these direct to consumer brands and businesses.

By 2015, we realized, “what got us here won’t get us there,” and so we started to question how we would evolve our offering and our company. Just doing Facebook would be okay, it would be good, but it wouldn’t be great, and we always said, “We want to be really great.”

Advice to early-stage founders

“Amazing at testing, measuring and iterating. Very quality and long term focused.” Katia Beauchamp, NYC, Co-founder & CEO, Birchbox

“It’s important for a founder to understand the right metrics and what levers can be pulled because they’re going to need to understand it to keep growing their business. I typically recommend that one of the founders spend 50% of their time for 90 to 180 days with one or two contractors who really know the technicalities of Facebook and Google you don’t have to learn those if you’re a founder, but you do want to understand which copy is resonating, which creative, which audience, etc.  It takes a founders’ level of depth to crack the nut, and then Ampush can come in.”

Below, you’ll find the rest of the founder reviews, the full interview, and more details like pricing and fee structures. This profile is part of our ongoing series covering startup growth marketing agencies with whom founders love to work, based on this survey and our own research. The survey is open indefinitely, so please fill it out if you haven’t already.


Interview with Ampush CEO & Co-Founder Jesse Pujji

Yvonne Leow: Tell us about your journey. How did you find yourself working in growth?

Jesse Pujji: I was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. My dad was an immigrant so I learned early on how to also be a small business entrepreneur. I was always running a snow-shoveling business, a lemonade stand business, a DJ-ing company. We cornered the Indian DJ-ing market in St. Louis. It turns out there weren’t a lot of Indian DJs in Missouri!

I went to Penn for college, and fortuitously, Nick, Chris, and I [Ampush’s co-founders] were actually freshman college roommates. The name Ampush is the first two letters of our last names: Chris Amos, Jesse Pujji, Nick Shah. If you know anything about Penn, it’s a pretty standard path to consulting or investment banking, so we all pursued those traditional paths after college.

After we’d been at it for a while, this was like in 2010, we said, “Let’s build a company together.” We always wanted to build a long-term business that we would run and do a bunch of interesting things with. We also wanted to be profitable early on so we didn’t raise venture money.

What we did do was ask ourselves and everyone else, “What’s a cool space, either analytical or quantitative, that would touch a lot of companies in the internet world?” The most compelling answer we heard over and over was “Do customer acquisition and you’ll figure it out.”

So, we started doing it. We figured out Facebook marketing in 2010. In early 2011, Facebook called us and said, “Who are you guys? You’re one of our top 100 global advertisers and we’ve never heard of you.” That was how we became one of the first companies to get access to their API, and gained the most favored nation status within Facebook advertising. Back then it was called API, now it’s called “Facebook Marketing Partner.”

So a lot of our initial success was being in the right place at the right time. From 2011 to 2015, we were one of a handful of companies that could do Facebook really well, although that’s all we did. As a result, we ended up working with a ton of growth brands and Fortune 1000 brands, like Dollar Shave Club, Uber, Stitch Fix, and all of these direct to consumer brands and businesses.

By 2015, we realized, “what got us here won’t get us there,” and so we started to question how we would evolve our offering and our company. Just doing Facebook would be okay, it would be good, but it wouldn’t be great, and we always said, “We want to be really great.” The other thing we realized was that we were trying to be everything to everyone and it wasn’t working. We decided to go deeper with fewer companies and get much more involved in their businesses.
We had 100 partners in 2015, today we have under 20.

It was tough to walk away from revenue and clients, but we said “We want to add really unique value, and in order to do that, we need to get very focused.” The other important catalyst is that we sold an equity stake to a strategic company called Red Ventures. They had taken a similar strategic approach very similar in Telco home services and financial services for bigger brands, so they taught us a ton about going deeper with fewer partners.

Yvonne Leow: How else is Ampush differentiated from other growth marketing agencies?

Jesse Pujji: Specifically, we made 3 big shifts in 2015 that continue to differentiate us: first, we decided to only work with companies that are doing direct to consumer (D2C); second, we aim to own “the whole problem” by taking a full funnel approach starting with the ad impression and going all the way through to conversion; and third, we align our compensation with our partners’ to focus on win-win.

After we shifted our strategy to go deeper with fewer, it means that now we only work with companies that are doing D2C. We view D2C as being the next big decade-long trend. Historically, you’d have to pay 30% to a retailer like Walgreens or Comcast, but now you can just go direct to the consumer and cut that cost. Whether you’re a big company or a growth company, there’s a huge opportunity in learning how to go direct to consumer. The four D2C sub-verticals we focus on are e-commerce, healthcare, financial services, and media.

The second thing we decided is to own “the whole problem.” Typically an organization has a marketing team, product/engineering team, an analytics team, and finance team, and they’re all trying to coordinate across each other, which is very challenging. Due to this complexity, when an agency comes through, it’ll take a month to change even just a pixel on a website, because the product team is prioritizing something else.

In contrast, Ampush creates a horizontal growth organization across the board with the business, and we own everything from impressions, like buying ad and media, to Google, Facebook, and digital, to the whole conversion funnel. We do this full-funnel approach so we can control and personalize the actual web experience, and we do that with a subdomain.

We’ll own the analytics and will essentially exist within this horizontal layer that’s responsible for the whole thing. We’ll have anywhere from six to twelve people on our side working dedicated to the partnership.

The third thing, which is maybe the most unique thing, is that in every one of our partnerships, we align our compensation with our partners’. Virtually all of our partnerships are cut as deals that are tied to either revenue growth, or customer growth, or something that’s not about how much money you spend, but about how much results you generate.

So those are the three big shifts we made in 2015: direct to consumer, a full funnel model where we own everything, and then this aligned compensation model. We also have proprietary software to help solve the full funnel challenge, but we don’t license it out.

Yvonne Leow: Fascinating. What’s the decision-making process for which companies you decide to partner with?

Jesse Pujji: The funny thing about Ampush is that we don’t have sales people so no one is out there pitching Ampush services to anyone. What’s helpful is that we’ve been around for a long time. We get a lot of referrals from Facebook, VCs, and private equity firms. We then talk to C-suite executives and see if there’s a big problem we can solve. There are several questions we consider:

  • Is it a business we’re excited about and believe in?
  • What’s the industry market and unit economics?
  • Are we aligned from a relationship perspective? Are we talking to the right people?
  • Do we have the right amount of buy-in?
  • Can we actually solve the problem? When you’re being compensated based on results, you really want to make sure that you can add value to the problem. And so it keeps us very honest around not taking on things that we don’t think we can actually move the needle on.

Yvonne Leow: What’s the likelihood of working with an early-stage startup? It sounds like some of these companies have already found their product market fit and have established funding channels.

Jesse Pujji: It depends on the stage. We’ve started experimenting with a couple of models like accepting equity, which has been pretty interesting. The truth is what I tell most founders who are in the early, early stages, is that part of building a D2C company is marketing innovation. For example, if you’re selling vitamins online via a subscription, and you’re the first person to have ever sold it in that way, then part of what you’re building is the equity of learning how to do that, and doing it really well.

Often an early stage founder will ask me, “I’m spending $50,000 a month on Facebook. Should we pay an agency for that?” And my response is: ‘Even if we would partner with you, would you outsource someone coming up with your vitamin or your product? Would you give that to a third party? Of course not.’

Sure, Ampush can scale your product and have better analytics, capabilities, and resources, but that’s not the 0 to 100 part of the process. So I advise most founders, and I’ve invested in a bunch of companies, by saying: ‘No third party can help you solve the actual first principles marketing problem of what do people want and what do they react to.

Once you’ve gotten the base figured out, then yes, Ampush can help you can pour kerosene on the fire, but you don’t want a third party to light the fire.’ At the same time, what founders need to zoom out and see is that there is no single silver ‘growth bullet’ which will fix everything.

Instead, it’s a curated mix of people, technology, analytics, design and culture all coming together to drive results; to create a sustainable growth cycle. Because we’re out there seeing what works and what doesn’t across many companies (including our own), we have a unique perspective on how to fit all these puzzle pieces together.

It’s important for a founder to understand the right metrics and what levers can be pulled because they’re going to need to understand it to keep growing their business. What I typically recommend is one of the founders spends 50% of their time for 90 to 180 days with one or two contractors who really know the technicalities of Facebook and Google, because you don’t have to learn those if you’re a founder, but you do want to understand which copy is resonating, which creative, which audience, etc.

It does take a founders’ level of depth to crack the nut, and then Ampush can come in. If your LTV (customer lifetime value) is 300, and your CAC (customer acquisition cost) is 100, then Ampush can maintain that ratio and double or triple the volume. We’ll even be willing to put our money where our mouth is.

Yvonne Leow: When Ampush does take on a new client, is there still a sense of experimentation to figure out what works or are you executing a game plan?

Jesse Pujji: We don’t have some magic solution – what we do is figure out the process to building a growth machine for your specific customer, company and product. The only way to do that is by experimenting constantly and keep trying to find better results. Some of what we bring is tactics because we already know how to deploy certain strategies, but it’s also the experience of actually building a system.

Yvonne Leow: Awesome. What’s Ampush’s pricing structure?

Jesse Pujji: Every single one of our partnerships has a custom pricing plan. We look at their business economics, how much value we think we can add, and we try to come up with a fair way to share in the value we’re generating. It’s usually happening between me and the founder. The truth is there are some companies that are just looking to get more customers, there are some that are looking to improve the CAC to LTV ratio, there are some that are launching a new business line – we start with the problem the companies want to solve and then determine how to align compensation together.


Founder Recommendations

“Amazing at testing, measuring and iterating. Very quality and long term focused.” – Katia Beauchamp, NYC, Co-founder & CEO, Birchbox

“Ampush helped us successfully outsource our Facebook marketing competency to leverage Facebook’s most current platform capabilities alongside out-of-the-box creative strategies to drive growth.” – Jared Cluff, NYC, former CMO at Blue Apron

“At my first company, they were huge in building Social partnerships with companies like Samsung. In my second company, they were great partners in experimentation and Facebook marketing.” – Chief Product Officer in SF