Rafael Vivas

@AxonAdsManager @applovin

[Rafael Vivas @rfvivas]

A group of underdogs. Ex-affiliates with a chip on our shoulder and a $8 domain. No one believed in us. Not investors, our family or friends.

What they didn't realize is there was a hook lodged in us that they could not see. Success was not a choice, it was the only damn option we had. We would've died before we gave up.

We built @AxonAdsManager over fourteen years, so we could help the underdogs. Those who are crazy enough to take on the impossible.

[David Senra @davidsenra]

This is the best founder you've never heard of. Adam Foroughi's company prints $5 billion in cash a year with just 400 people. When his stock price dropped by 92%, he borrowed money to buy back $6 billion in stock. That bet made the company more than $60 billion. The entire C-suite is just 4 people. To this day, Adam approves every hire. This episode has the highest insight-to-minute ratio of any conversation I've had so far.

Here’s our full conversation:

0:00 The $6B Buyback That Made $60B
2:15 Borrowing Money To Buy Back Stock At A Discount
5:02 Why VCs Passed On AppLovin In 2012
9:00 From App Discovery To Ad Platform
14:45 Beating Google's AdMob With Performance Marketing
19:30 No Board For Six Years
30:12 The China Deal That Almost Blew Up
37:45 The Convertible Note Pivot And KKR
46:30 Buying Gaming Studios To Get Data
51:45 Losing Trust With Game Developers
58:20 The 2022 Crash And How He Kept His Team
1:02:00 Building An Hyper Competent & Efficient Company
1:07:25 Why Every New Hire Needs His Approval
1:19:06 The Axon 2 Inflection Point
1:21:15 One Great Engineer Now Beats A Hundred

Includes paid partnerships.

[Rafael Vivas @rfvivas]

@aryehMaxx @trueclassictees @EricAlanDyck @DTCNewsletter "How me much of your ad spend at True Classic is going through Agentic media buyers at this point?"

"100%."

"I mean actually I should correct that 100% of meta is going through it but we are in the process of enabling the rest."

[Rafael Vivas @rfvivas]

@shaneparrish @markpinc Still can’t get over how he started Zynga at 40 and ran it like a war general.

[Rafael Vivas @rfvivas]

@AxonAdsManager Some people may have noticed the "2026 TW Case Study" in the image. Lorenzo came to us through our partnership with @triplewhale.

If you're a Triple Whale merchant, you can activate @AxonAdsManager in one click and start for free:

https://t.co/NyuKWGGbWG

[Rafael Vivas @rfvivas]

My favorite part of this job isn't helping the biggest brands. It's helping founders like Lorenzo.

Self-funded. Zero employees. An Italian founder with nothing but grit and conviction.

He started on @AxonAdsManager 5 weeks ago.

Stories like this remind me why I do what I do.

[Rafael Vivas @rfvivas]

@EcomUnfiltered @AxonAdsManager Here’s two tip to get you started:

- Upload at least 10 video ads.
- =>30 second videos are typically the most performant.

[Rafael Vivas @rfvivas]

I still can't believe that less than 0.01% of advertisers in the world use @AxonAdsManager.

[Rafael Vivas @rfvivas]

@KodyNordquist @AxonAdsManager Sounds like a plan.

[Rafael Vivas @rfvivas]

@ChrisLangSocial @AxonAdsManager Amazing! Reach out if you need anything.

[Rafael Vivas @rfvivas]

@_boraturan @AxonAdsManager eCommerce.

[Rafael Vivas @rfvivas]

The median purchaser on @AxonAdsManager sees 8 distinct ads before making their first DTC purchase.

If you're running fewer than 8 creatives, you're putting yourself at a massive disadvantage.

The really crazy part? That's nowhere near how many the top advertisers run.

[Rafael Vivas @rfvivas]

How to create 12 creative sets with 330 creatives on @AxonAdsManager in minutes.

https://t.co/dZxUHT95Yj

[Rafael Vivas @rfvivas]

81% of spend on @AxonAdsManager goes toward videos longer than 30 seconds

Why?: Because Axon gives advertisers something rare: guaranteed attention.

Savvy advertisers use that attention to tell a more complete story, educate audiences about their products, and ultimately drive more sales.

[Rafael Vivas @rfvivas]

BREAKING NEWS: Mobile gaming traffic is incremental.

[Common Thread Collective @CommnThreadCo]

We just ran four months of AppLovin incrementality tests across multiple brands.

Discovery campaigns are averaging 284% incrementality. Even excluding the outlier, it's sitting at 190%.

For context, prospecting campaigns on the same platform benchmark around 120%.

If you're running an 8-figure brand and looking for truly incremental customer acquisition, AppLovin Discovery is the channel to test right now.

New episode breaks down exactly how we're running it.

https://t.co/zZlg4xhAyQ

[Rafael Vivas @rfvivas]

Opportunity lies where you least expect it.

[Bar Bruhis @Bbruhis]

This is WHOLESOME AF

1 - great proof point that Boostcous customers do live on mobile games

2 - that we need to double down on the GLP1 angles. More to come there!

[Rafael Vivas @rfvivas]

Are you really sure your ideal customer is not a mobile gamer?

[Rafael Vivas @rfvivas]

@AxonAdsManager @claudeai @ChatGPTapp https://t.co/dZxUHT95Yj

[Rafael Vivas @rfvivas]

Should I tell the engineers to release @AxonAdsManager MCP so you can auto-upload ads and manage campaigns from @claudeai and @ChatGPTapp… or nah?

[Rafael Vivas @rfvivas]

Do you really know that your customers aren’t mobile gamers?

[Axon by AppLovin @AxonAdsManager]

Boarderie deals with massive seasonal spikes, so being able to scale quickly really matters.

Lexi Grossman, Director of Growth at Boarderie, shares how Axon by AppLovin helped them ramp campaigns from $2K/day to $50K/day in under a week, while continuing to see strong new customer CPAs relative to their top-performing channels.

When asked what she’d say to brands that assume their customers aren’t mobile gamers, her response was simple:

“Do you REALLY know that your customers aren’t mobile gamers?”

[Rafael Vivas @rfvivas]

🤠

[Ecomm Cowboy @ecommcowboy]

“The channel just ripped.” - @Seanfrank

“We ended up spending more money on @AxonAdsManager in Q4 2024 than Meta, and it was a brand new channel.”

“It’s never happened before.”

“We’ll probably spend $5-6 million on it this year. …It should be part of your mix.”

[Rafael Vivas @rfvivas]

@davidsenra @danawhite @ufc Incredible episode!