Affiliate Marketing Was a Mess. Here’s the System That’s Fixing It | Ep 230 with Victor Boechat de Carvalho Founder of Glidescale

0:00So, Victor Boysha, founder of GlideScale. Some people might say, and I've heard this, that affiliate marketing is dead. I know you are all in on affiliate marketing, and I've had my own experiences, but I'd love to understand why are you so excited? And what do you say to those that would say that statement right now? I would say that when it comes to traditional affiliate marketing systems, they are absolutely correct. The traditional systems for affiliate marketing are, let's be honest, quite poor. they are limited in the way that they can reach their clientele, their security concerns, and usually they're built around infrastructure that gets in the way of the seamless transition things.

0:44So the question becomes, can we get a system that doesn't have all that bloat? And I think I was able to do that through LightSkill. So in that regard, we're talking about this version of affiliate marketing, I say that it's the future. So when you talk about the future of affiliate marketing and how platform needed to change, it needed to be adapted, what was the problem that you were trying to solve in this marketplace? So when I was in college, I briefly tried my hand at digital marketing agencies, and I had some experience with that and some fun even with that. But what I taught the Galkan clients was just how inefficient everything was.

1:27How you're working through these middlemen who were then hiring middlemen, and that just seemed absurd. I noticed that some people had some success with affiliate marketing, where you almost cut out a bit of the middlemen. But then I saw how limited it was on the use cases as due to security concerns and limitation technology, very limited number of things you can do. There were concerns about some of the list not even getting paid on time. That was a constant concern I heard. And so all I thought was, why can't we make this more efficient? And that's what I began working on two years ago. I liked the idea of when you're in an industry, when you're working in an industry, and you can see where the problems are and then you can start to solve it.

2:16So once you saw this problem, you're in the university, which is amazing. The fact that you're in university and building a company, I think is incredible in itself. How did you start to figure out like, this is how I actually will solve the problem? So I thought first, first issue I wanted to deal with was efficiency, cutting out the middleman. And I saw that affiliate marketing had a way of answering that pretty straightforward. You just get the affiliates directly. They do their expertise. It doesn't matter if it's cold emailing or if it's videos or Google ads or whatever, whatever works for them, that's how they do it.

2:53So that was a good starting point. And then the issue became, all right, but how can I make that universally compatible? As in, any link works. Because as things are, you have to go to a Shopify store or an e-commerce platform. Very limited use cases. And I began to say, okay, well, the issue here is security. Affiliate programs already suffer from fraud constantly. Is there a way of breaking this chain of fraud? And so I looked at the human incentives and how you can disincentivize that. We also did some unique innovations, which I can't fully disclose, which we can then guarantee that this is genuine traffic.

3:36and one of the things like canvas flows is that we have constant human input when someone is clicking on one of our affiliate links we show them a preview of the website not the true website where they then have to effectively confirm is this something we're even interested in or is this just false traffic because say i guess someone my affiliate link they press it they realize this is completely irrelevant to me i'm not the target audience and so our software first confirms, all right, you are interested in this. Therefore, it's a ballot click. Therefore, the affiliate gets paid. So do you find that the affiliates are more excited about this or the brands or is it both?

4:16Who really resonates with the software? And I can relate to the things that you're saying just because we used to do a lot of affiliate stuff and I could see where these problems arise. As we were going through it, barely have been done it before. I was really new to this and I could see how, how this, so, so who are the ones that you're finding are, are saying that they benefit the most? So I've talked mostly active marketers. So we differentiate the users between manager users and marketing users. Manager users are the ones who make campaigns and marketer users are the ones who go in, join light scale and then do the affiliate program, do the affiliate marketing for them.

4:56And I mostly tagged with people who are very interested in the affiliate marketing side of things. And they were particularly interested because they saw if I put honest work in here and actually get those clicks, my payment is automatic, it's instant, and the fees are super low. Comparing that to the other infrastructure where affiliates were usually getting taxed pretty heavily on top of these, like LightScale doesn't have these concerns. We try to transfer as much value as possible to our users. There are no commission fees, for example. If you get a sale, you get a sale. That's that. life.

5:30You generate the traffic, generate the traffic. We take a very small percentage. And the reason we can afford such low rates is because since we don't need all this additional infrastructure to guarantee that our affiliate systems are not susceptible to fraud, because we built Spherty into the affiliate program, therefore we can afford to transfer pretty much all the value to our users. And our goal right now isn't even income. Our goal is maximizing our user count. So we might even experiment with making that low fee even lower. Yeah, Victor, thank you. Thank you for sharing that. Appreciate you answering that question.

6:09I'm curious on the process and the experience of joining it. So if I want to join as an affiliate, what's that process like? Or I have a business I'm really thinking about bringing in affiliates. And I've been thinking for a while, what's the experience like as the brand? He joins Blightstil. He creates his account. It takes two seconds because you can just sign for Google. You have a Google account. Then you have two options you can go down. You can look at the public campaigns. Now, public affiliate programs are quite rare because they're security concerns. But we're quite confident in our security.

6:44So we do offer public campaigns. In fact, that's the default setting. But you can choose Prime. And so you can look at the public campaigns that are currently active. There's a join button. It's a blue join button. You press join. Then you get your link. And from that moment on, it's up to you. Share your link. However you do that, that's up to you. As long as you're getting genuine traffic, you're getting paid immediately. And the moment that money hits your account, you can just withdraw. We use the PayPal API integration. So if you have a PayPal account, that's ideal. If not, PayPal can transfer directly to your bank account.

7:16And that's all you have to do. If you know people who are using LightSkill or are interested in affiliate marketing, you can ask them to create a private campaign. and usually the private campaigns have a more premium rate. So if you look at our normal campaigns that are public, it's about 50 cents per click. A more premium campaign, about 60, 70, 80, sometimes a dollar a click, depending on how specific it is. Now, if you are a company, we're trying to set up your affiliate program, it's also pretty straightforward. You make your account, you get them. There's a button that says new campaign.

7:49You fill out the details. We're going to ask you for what name you want. we're going to ask you for a banner image that we're going to be using in the preview that i've talked about before and a small description things to verify that this is genuine traffic that you want but we asked you for location if it's location sensitive for example because let's say you're a dentistry practice in san paulo you don't want someone in new york hearing about you that's pointless and so you put out that information you then decide these are the amount of funds i'm allocating to this campaign and this is how much I want to pay the marketers for it.

8:27And then you decide if it's going to be a public campaign or if it's going to be a private campaign and if it's private, how you want to do it. We have a system where you allow marketers to apply to join so anyone can apply to join your campaign and they have a profile that they can share. Or it's a pure private system where you have to be the one inviting people in. And that's usually done by LinkedIn, right? Not all this. When you look at how much marketing spend someone should be doing on, let's say, affiliate marketing versus social media ads versus email marketing, what do you feel is a good percentage?

9:00And the reason why I bring this up is people in marketing always complain about like, you know, ad costs go up, you know, ad bidding goes up or people aren't reading their emails. Like there's a lot of reasons why people always complain about different marketing channels, whether it's a brand or even an agency. But I feel like affiliate is always an interesting one because it's, you know, people's community. It's a totally it's somebody, a human going out there and reaching out with other humans, which I find very fascinating. And we've had a massive success in the past working with affiliates in all different angles.

9:37It's something we do right now. So how do you feel in terms of, you know, what percentages are you thinking about leveraging this versus other channels? So if I were to market for traditional means, I would argue, especially if any of my products, at least$1 ,000 bare minimum for you to have anything meaningful happen, assuming no organic. On GlideScale, I think if you want to do bare minimum,$1 is enough. you can get away with$1. And what will happen is because if you choose the public option, anyone can join. They're going to see your campaign and then think, okay, well, I know a friend who is interested in this.

10:19So I must not just join here and then I'm going to share this in my group chat. And there you go. You have warm traffic from people asking no decline. So$1,$2, that's really$2 to be a bit more ambitious. But you can then also then scale that up for as much as you want. You can put$10 ,000, you can put$100 ,000, or you can leave it at a few. I would actually recommend making multiple campaigns where you experiment with different PPC rates. That's how much you pay the parking. So that you can see exactly what works, what doesn't work. If you're enjoying the traffic, that type of thing. So, Victor, if people want to get in touch with you, they want to find out more, how can they do so?

10:59So, in GlideScale, we have an in-built system where you can contact us directly. that's used for customer support, but also really any question right now is available. So anyone who wants to log in and quickly send us a ticket, we'll answer that. We also have a dedicated email on the website, www.glidesfell.me. If you scroll to the bottom, you'll see a contact us page there. And thank you so much for joining us today on FounderStore. I can't wait to dive in as an affiliate, as a brand, and really check this out because I really see affiliate marketing being like an incredible opportunity for a lot of people.

11:36But Victor, thanks again for joining us on Founder's Story. Thank you.