Vongol

Jack Smith was in an accelerator with an initial business idea that wasn't working. Around 2009-2010, he read a Gartner report predicting that iPhone apps would explode. He noticed an opportunity: if desktop applications could be monetized through instructional videos (his previous business), why not do the same for mobile apps? But there was a problem—no one could easily record iPhone screens at the time.

With his co-founder skeptical and only $1,000 in the bank, Jack took a creative approach. He sent an intern to the Apple Store with a credit card to buy iPhones and iPads, knowing they could return anything within 14 days. The intern's first task: jailbreak the devices and figure out how to record the screen. Within 48 hours, they had hacked together a solution using a camcorder cable and jailbreaking techniques—something no competitor could do.

When they started building Vongol, they initially made money charging $500 per video to create app advertisements. But this revealed the real opportunity: app developers didn't care how many people watched ads. They only cared about app installs and user spending.

Jack took the most unconventional sales approach: he created a PowerPoint mockup of the video ad network concept showing how it would work. He went directly to mobile app developers and pitched the idea. The response was immediate—developers committed to spending roughly $1M if he could actually build it. He hired Bryant (who later co-founded Webflow) as the first developer, and they began building the platform.

The breakthrough was rethinking the business model entirely. Traditional ad networks charged per impression (CPM), but Vongol flipped this: they charged only when an app was installed (CPI). This aligned incentives perfectly—developers paid for results, not views.

Vongol's proprietary ability to record iPhone screens became a lasting competitive advantage. Later, they packaged this into a free video production service for advertisers spending over $25,000, but with one condition: the videos were exclusive to Vongol's network. They produced the best-quality videos in the space, making their ads convert better than competitors like AppLovin.

Jack also hired a 10-person team in Pakistan to build a database of mobile game ads by having them play games all day and manually log what ads they saw and which networks served them—a low-cost but effective way to understand the competitive landscape.

Within seven years, Vongol scaled to approximately $1M in daily revenue (roughly $365M in ARR). The company raised only $10-17M in venture funding, an exceptionally lean path to scale. Jack sold Vongol for approximately $800M when he was around 29 years old. Unlike many founders who immediately restart, Jack deliberately chose not to launch another venture-backed company, instead pursuing impact-focused projects like a digital detox retreat in Portugal and connecting inmates with books through pen pal programs.