What I learned from Christian Limon, growth executive at Wish.
He spent over $2 billion on marketing at Wish with a small team, and bought the Mayweather fight sponsorship for $1M. These are my notes from our conversation.
Christian has been the growth executive at five exits totaling $28 billion: Wish, Tubi, Gemini and others. At Wish he made it the third most downloaded app in the world, ahead of Facebook and Instagram on Android.
I sat down with him for episode one. It was equal parts performance ad nerdery and sponsorship deal big game hunting. Below are the parts I think you'll steal.
Wish was built to be the perfect ad client.
The CEO and the first engineers came out of ad recommendation systems at Google and Yahoo, so they knew how the prediction algorithms worked from the inside.
They also knew most of the value from ads goes to the advertiser. So instead of building another ad tool, they built the company that would get the most out of Facebook: mobile first, over a million SKUs, low prices, and enough range to match almost any interest.
It's a liquidity game. With ten customers in the auction you have to win every one. With ten million, the math works in your favor.
The frontier has no map.
Facebook told them they were the most sophisticated advertiser on the platform. Christian saw that as a problem, because it meant there was nobody left to learn from.
So he kept asking who had won for different reasons, even companies with different constraints. Often the answer was nobody. That still helped, because it stopped them copying people who knew less than they did. His advice: expect to hit a ceiling every few years, and keep asking.