How do you measure a year?
Every New Year is a great time to look back and reflect. 2018 was a tremendous year for AppsFlyer, it was probably our best year yet.
Why?
Well, I’m glad you asked:
- We hired more than 200 amazing people across our 15 offices and hit our 500th employee milestone.
- We continued to cement our position as market leaders globally across all verticals, regions, and enterprise customers.
- We doubled our revenue to $100M ARR with positive cash flow, placing AppsFlyer at the top of the list of fastest growing SaaS companies in the world.
- We doubled our measured ad-spend to $19 Billion annually, and our events measured to 50 Billion daily.
- Our scale and visibility into the market allows us to provide the ultimate ad-fraud protection to our customers and solve the fraud prisoner dilemma paving the way to a fraud-free eco-system.
- We released hundreds of product improvements and features this year alone based on our customer and partner feedback, making AppsFlyer the most feature rich and robust platform in the market.
Security and privacy
Industry security and privacy incidents served as a wakeup call for the market to strengthen its security and data privacy measures, as companies realize that vendors might be their security/privacy weak point. At AppsFlyer, our long-term investments in security and privacy compliance proved worthwhile across the board. We will continue to have our customers in mind in every decision we make and protect their most important asset – their data.
From a startup to an organization
In 2018 we continued our journey, emerging from an early stage startup into a growth stage organization trusted by its customers, partners, and the entire market. We fully acknowledge the responsibility that comes with our increasing market share and are committed to leading by example in every parameter.
As CEO, this change has been both exciting and challenging. Not too long ago, I was involved in almost every decision, from product, to marketing, to IT and operations. Throughout 2018, I kept thinking how I can empower each AppsFlyer team member to make the right decisions, without me being directly involved.
This led us to create two very simple frameworks that all our employees, across all departments and regions, can use:
- AppsFlyer is a Customer-Obsessed company. Meaning, our main goal is to make our customers happy and successful. A great AppsFlyer Experience is our best sales and marketing strategy.
- “How proud are you to be a part of AppsFlyer?” as an internal AppsFlyer’s moral North Star. We uphold the highest business ethics in everything we do. It is a great way to identify where we can improve and to properly prioritize.
I was fortunate to find the time start writing about the AppsFlyer story, our beliefs, and our culture in one of my favorite posts: Organically Building a Customer Obsessed Culture.
Unbiased and independent
One of the things that allow us to truly be a Customer-Obsessed company is our long-term commitment to remain unbiased and independent. As the market consolidates, our commitment received more validations this year. We will continue to stay independent and unbiased while supporting our partners to build the best products to our common customers.
Personal
This year I became a father of three. While all three kids are under the age of 4, I learned so much from these little creatures. They are born curious, constantly exploring, making mistakes and learning, yet over time, these learning instincts seem to fade for some reason. At AppsFlyer we want to create a culture that encourages curiosity, asking questions, not being embarrassed for not knowing, feeling confident to make mistakes, and to always be learning.
In my last blog post, I shared some of my most important professional and personal learnings – ALL-IN, which became a core part of our company culture.
It is easy to get extremely busy at AppsFlyer. My resolution for this year is to do my best to be more available and approachable for the entire team. I’d like to have more ‘free’ time to support the people of AppsFlyer in any way I can, which is also my advice to my managers and the entire team.
Social responsibility
One of the things that excite me about AppsFlyer’s current stage is our position to give back to the community and make a lasting social impact. This is why we created AppsFlyer Cares to support important causes in the various countries we operate in. While there are many things in our world that need fixing, we had to prioritize here as well.
During 2018 we supported holocaust survivors, children fighting cancer, and orphans in need. We also supported several other important causes throughout the year, and look forward to expanding this project further.
I am extremely proud to announce that we will continue to develop AppsFlyer Cares. Starting in 2019, we decided to dedicate 1% of our company resources to increase our social outreach and give back. As we are just 1% done, we believe that AppsFlyer will be able to make a significant impact on the market and our society as a whole.