What's Working For Influencer Marketing in 2026, and How Shopify Brands Are Using "The Influencer Pyramid".

25:52Yash Chavan:But in the next three months, like there is going to be a lot of agentic workflows around this because a lot of this work is just like, I mean, we are using AI in the fraud engine. Like it uses a lot of models to like detect fraud. And anticipate the percentages that I said, like, hey, this person has$400, that person has$40 ,000. That's like an LLM doing that, thinking we're going to do a lot of agentic flows. So like, hey, delete this, inform them, or recommend that you should probably move to leak-proof codes if you're seeing a lot of fraud, things like that. So yeah, it's all automated and then very soon going to be agentic also.

26:31I was buying something the other day and you know usually you go to a site and there's always a pop-up to get 10 % off if you enter your email or something um and this particular site like the purchase was it was fairly expensive and I never got a a pop-up but when I landed on the site I just quickly added it to cart because I knew what I wanted added to cart went to checkout and then I was checking out and I was like oh hmm a 10 % off coupon saves me like 100 bucks here I'll I but I never got one I never so so then I was like oh I wonder if I just missed it because I quickly added it to cart so I went into chat GPT and I just said are there any known coupons for this site yeah and chat GPT did its thing scanned a bunch of stuff and it it you know when it uh when it's doing its work it says what it's doing and it's like looking through looking through common influencers on social media yeah scanning, doing these things.

27:26And then it came back with a result and it said, I found a common code from a popular influencer with this is the, this is the code. And so at the beginning of the show, I told you why everyone's serious about their Shopify business should have their store backed up and protected with rewind. There is no excuse not to, there literally is no undo button for Shopify. Shopify's own terms actually say that your data is 100 % your responsibility. Your products, your theme, your customizations, your settings, everything. They don't back up any of it. And no, a CSV export does not cover it. With CSV exports, there's no images, no meta fields, no themes, settings, et cetera, nothing.

28:10I was talking to the people at Rewind about a brand where one team member actually ran a bulk update and accidentally overwrote 11 ,000 products. Orders, customers, contacts, all of it gone in a single action. Luckily though with Rewind it was a simple one click rollback. It could be anything a bad CSV import a random app you just installed that messes everything up or all of these AI tools that everyone's using to manage their store now. I have heard so many horror stories. Rewind just gives you peace of mind no matter what. If you don't have Rewind installed you absolutely should have it. Go now and get it.

28:48Shopify1 %.com slash Rewind. You'll get an exclusive 30 days free on me.

28:53Yash Chavan:The link is also in the show notes. It might not have even been leaked even. It might have just been that they had it on a blog or somewhere and ChatGPT scraped it. So that's a whole nother thing that wasn't even an issue a couple of years ago. Yes. So one of the things that we do flag but don't highlight as fraud and leave it up to the brand is if somebody's link is not being used but just the code is being used so in your case if more people did that the brand would because you can't have an affiliate without a link so they're gonna share their link somewhere the link is gonna have some activity so what the ratio of clicks on links to coupon codes there's probably a healthy ratio correct and it learns this by because it's by affiliate.

29:41It's so smart.

29:42Yash Chavan:There's like actual number, like, okay, it has to be like 10 times or whatever. It's by affiliate. Some people share their link. So we have like an average over time. And if there's any anomaly, like, okay, now chat has detected this or Claude has detected this, started to suggest it to people, in a month, you're going to see like a discrepancy. And then we'll flag that. So smart. And you can probably notice over time too, that like certain influencers have, you know, maybe 70 % of their sales are coming through links because they're, whatever type of content they're creating is very link heavy.

30:14And then you might have other influencers who are just making YouTube videos and whatever. And their traffic is very coupon heavy. And if those get out of an acceptable range, that would actually be fairly easy to detect with AI and just flag it. That's a smart, super smart fix. Yeah.

30:33Yash Chavan:Yeah. Yeah. Like I said, like we've spent quite a lot of time thinking about this because we really wanted to give something that's super robust. Yeah. Both on the fraud side and like we can talk about the attribution side also. It's like actually give like what we've spoken about so far is like don't give credit to the people who don't deserve credit. Like fraudulent, code leaks, suspicious order traffic, blah, blah, blah, paid ads. But also like the flip side to this is, which I also want brands to take away is often they're actually not giving credit intentionally to the people who are driving the actual sale.

31:09Yash Chavan:So for instance, there was this brand that was started working with us at Serral and then started working with a Google ads agency because they were just ramping up their acquisition. Okay, we have PMF, we've raised money, let's go. We started getting influencers posting about them and they were getting like 30, 40 people posting in like month four, 30, 40 people on average per week posting about them. Insane levels of awareness in their market, right? Right. On the other end of Google ads, but they're not getting any affiliate sales here or very minimal. But the Google ads, that agency is crushing it, according to the founder, because like the cost per clicks are lower than ever.

31:49Yash Chavan:Like the CAC is just next to nothing. Like she's like, OK, I want to stop doing this influencer stuff. I'll just focus on the Google ads. And then, you know what happened? Like in three months, the ads just shot up because there was not enough awareness that was driving all the sales. Yeah, the cost shot up because there was nobody was Googling it as much because when 30 people post about you on a weekly basis, all people see you and then they Google you on the weekend when they want to buy the product and they click on the Google ad and they buy. So Google takes the last click attribution, but the influencers who did all of this work go unnoticed.

32:25Yash Chavan:And then you think your affiliate program's not working. so you're not only is there fraud and there's like this over-crediting fraudulent affiliates there's also under-crediting the people who are actually doing the work so it's like a double whammy so we're also addressing some of this so yeah it's a very interesting space and time to be in yeah this was actually my exact next question was this like last click being a faulty metric but it feels like every affiliate platform on Shopify uses last click attribution So is the, is the platform, is the affiliate platform broken or is like the metric broken?

33:05Do we need to be tracking something different? And like, how can merchants think about that when they're like, I agree with what you're saying that you're right. Because this is why celebrity brands have the lowest cost on Google ads. Because a celebrity is like, you know, if a celebrity launches a product and you search for a product and you see a celebrity's name, like, you know, there's trust already built. And affiliates, when you go on Instagram and you see everyone talking about a product and now you search for it and you see a Google ad for it, it's going to be, you're going to have a higher click through rate.

33:42And so, but how can you connect that as a merchant to know that it's because of that?

33:47Yash Chavan:Correct. Good question. So I'll answer the last click question. Is it like platforms, merchants? Yeah. I think it's one of those things that I said earlier, which frustrates me about a lot of technology, especially in our space, is like nobody challenges like fundamental assumptions. Like why is affiliate last click? Affiliate as last click only originated because affiliates traditionally used to be bloggers, publishers, coupon sites, these sorts of people, right? So it's like, hey, if I have an email list and I'm sending an affiliate offer to my email list of 50 ,000 people, then yeah, like it better be last click because that's the dynamic.

34:26Yash Chavan:I want the person who's promoting me to get like the last person who promoted me to get all the credit. And the affiliates were also far and few in between. Now, 20 years later, the world has changed. Brands on average have hundreds of influencers as affiliates, right? Dozens are posting every single day, every single week. In that case, last click breaks because they're not far and few in between. They are many and all of them are posting at the same time. So how do you attribute when five influencers post about you? Somebody sees all five pieces of content, which means everyone had something to do with the sale, with influencing the person to buy.

35:03Yash Chavan:But then it's a weekend. I remember my favorite influencers code and then I just use that at checkout and buy. Last click attribution, aka your current affiliate platform, will tell you that, hey, this last person that you saw, whose code is used, they are like 100 % credit for the sale. But it's not true. Like the other four get zero. Like their commission dashboard says zero. So they stop posting eventually and then your affiliate program dies, right? So you're, because you're not giving them credit despite them doing the work. So how do you solve for this? So we've come up with two things, cookie less and multi-touch attribution.

35:39Yash Chavan:Another assumption is affiliate tracking only works on cookies. But as we all know, Cookies don't work on Safari. Cookies don't work on Brave. People have ad blockers enabled even on Chrome. So cookies don't work there. If you generally have ad blockers enabled anywhere, cookies are blocked. Google Chrome might sunset cookies anytime, right? And anything iOS 14 and later too. Yeah. Yeah. So like cookies are just a bad way to track. Yet everyone's using cookies to track. So it's like, even for the last click affiliate, half of their stuff is not tracked because it's like, it's cookies. and it's like half the browsers don't have cookies anymore.

36:17Yash Chavan:So ours is cookie less, which means it's fair even for the last clickers. Like, hey, if you drive, if you're a genuine person, you drive a last click, you're going to get attribution for that. On the second hand, to counter for the case that I mentioned, it is multi-touch. Meaning if somebody has clicked on multiple affiliate links, brands will see that. So hey, if today I see you post about something and I click on your link and I maybe just browse the website, tomorrow Eric posts about something and then I maybe add to cart but I don't buy and then on a Sunday I use the code Jordan25 at checkout and I finally check out I have went through three touches you Eric and Jordan and then the brand in this case has the ability to do a last click if they want to stick to that or to do a first click if they're like let's say they're a new brand and they want to incentivize people who introduce someone to the brand yeah and not the people who close.

37:13Yash Chavan:You could do a first click attribution. You could do linear attribution, which is equal 30 % credit to everyone. You can do that. You could do decaying attribution. So last person gets like 70 % and then like say 20 % and 10 % or the opposite decay, like first person gets 70 % and so on. So you can choose from what model you want based on what your product is and what sort of marketing philosophy you ascribe to. So that's awesome. Giving them the flexibility. And then now in an old world, only Jordan would be getting the credit for the sale. In the new world, you and Eric and Jordan will get some credit for the sale depending on what the brand decides.

37:57Yash Chavan:And now you're happy that you at least introduce somebody. Maybe you get 25 % commission, which is still 25 % of the total commission, which is still better than getting zero. So yeah. So like, that's like another, nobody talks about this, but it's like, we're living in a new world. It's cookie less, it's multi-touch. It's a journey is no longer a funnel. Like let's drop all of the old methods of tracking and move to this new world. So yeah, that, those are some of the things we're working on. I love that. That is so smart. Is it the first affiliate tool to do that? Yeah, I haven't heard of it.

38:34Yash Chavan:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I haven't either. Yeah. And it makes so much sense because A, it will keep your more affiliates engaged. Right. And so if you want is like as an affiliate, if I'm an affiliate for a brand, I only can promote so many products. Like I can't promote five different types of daily green supplements. I have to pick one. Otherwise, I come across as like not authentic. Right. And I have to be true to my fans. And so if I am seeing no traction from this one brand, I might dump that brand and start promoting another one. And so I think brands are probably losing affiliates like and affiliates have a choice who they promote.

39:22Like they don't have to promote you. They can I mean, they can look like, oh, you give 20 percent, you give 10 percent. They can pick by that way. But they can also pick by which one am I actually going to make sales on? And if you tell me with your platform, I make sales or I make revenue through a multi-touch.

39:39Yash Chavan:At the top of the show, I mentioned OmniSend can now talk to ChatGPT and Claude. And I want to tell you why that's even bigger than it sounds. So if you missed it, quick catch up. OmniSend is what I use for email and SMS on every Shopify store I work with, plus for this show as well. And you can now connect your AI, Claude, ChatGPT straight to your OmniSend account. Your data, your campaigns, your flows, everything. You open a chat and you ask, what should I focus on this week to make more money? And it will come back with real answers about your store, which flow is underperforming, which automation needs improvement, which customers are going quiet, what's missing, everything.

40:18My favorite part though is AI segments. I used to build these by hand, clicking through filters forever. Now I just type something like customers who bought twice but ignored my last campaign and it just builds it. And anything it writes already sounds exactly like your brand because it pulls from all your previous emails, from your website, your logo, your color, your voice, everything. I've been doing this for 15 years and this is the closest I've ever felt to having a full-time marketer sitting right beside me. I have a link for you in the show notes that will give you 30 % off for your first three months or you can just use code J30 when you sign up, J-A-Y-3-0.

40:54If you're ready to migrate from Klaviyo to Omnisend like thousands of others, they will do everything for you. You just show up and all your campaigns and automations from Klaviyo will be set up and running in OmniSend, ready to go. And usually at 35 % less what you were paying Klaviyo. System, that might be the tipping point for me. Like I, you know, and it also makes your affiliates kind of feel like a team. Like they're not just competing against each other.

41:22Yash Chavan:Like that's, I love that. Correct. Because like, it's also like the type of affiliate that would work for a last click sale is actually not the type of affiliate that would introduce somebody to your brand, right? Like, there's content creators on say Instagram or TikTok that do content like here's my Amazon haul or here's my Walmart haul for the weekend. That's a bottom of funnel content. That's like buy now content, right? Yeah. If somebody is doing like my daily routine, that's not, and there's a greens powder in there. That's like so top to middle of funnel education content. Like that's not going to get as many clicks, but that drives a lot of influence.

42:02Yash Chavan:And that needs to and deserves to be credited. So we saw that with Saral because we were like, we saw all these influencer programs and all these influencers promote, but brands relied on last click and coupon codes. It was only part of them ever got the credit. And typically these tended to be these sorts of last click people who make this type of content. Everyone's necessary in the funnel. I'm not saying one is good or bad because you do need top of funnel, mid funnel and bottom funnel content. But if you never incentivize the mid and top of funnel, you're never going to have those people. And if you don't have those people, the bottom funnel people are not going to, like they're not going to be able to sell anything because there's no education and nurturing happening.

42:40Yash Chavan:So you need to incentivize everyone. And that's what we want to enable. Do you have any data yet or is it too early? But on which model works best, like the linear, the decreasing, the like, is there any one that you recommend? I would, one, we don't have the data yet. Super new, like testing this with brands. Two, on just like a theory perspective, I won't even call one model better than the other. it really depends on where you are, what type of stage of awareness your product is in. That's a good point. Because if you're a brand new product that needs a lot of education and like, for instance, we work with this company that's like a, it's called Brick.

43:22Yash Chavan:It's literally like a brick that would brick your phone when you're working. Oh yeah, I'm aware of it. I know them, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So like such a new category, like you can't, you gotta, like I just had to explain. You have to educate people on it. Yeah. So like they might want to do like incentivize the first touch more So for them, like an exponential decay model is better because like the first few people who tell somebody about you are way more important than like the last few. Versus you're a supplement brand. You're competing against hundreds of supplements and you just want somebody to close that sale for you.

43:53Yeah.

43:53Yash Chavan:Then maybe a last click model or a reverse decay model would be beneficial. Or maybe you're somewhere in the middle and then you want to do a linear. It's like, hey, just be fair to everyone. So it's almost like a internal philosophy that you have. and then obviously a little bit of awareness of who you are as a company, which should determine your model. And the good thing is we have, like the way the system is built is you can choose a model to attribute, but you will still see how the program looks under other models. So you can still see that how the attribution shifts if you were to ever switch to like the linear model, for instance, is your affiliate revenue more or less that way.

44:35Yash Chavan:So you can always run these like tests parallelly with like obviously simulated data. So you pick a model to incentivize and then you still have the other models running in the background. If you ever want to see like a data visualization of how it looks like under different models. Yeah, yeah. So cool. I didn't ask, but how with Saral is being an influencer management platform. Now, does Sati work with it? So prior to this, anyone using Saral to manage influencers was just using any tool for affiliate payments. Correct. But now that can be integrated and I can kind of have this in one view. Correct.

45:19Correct. Absolutely. So previously. Tell me about that. Yeah. Yeah.

45:23Yash Chavan:Good question. So previously, so these products kind of like play into each other. Previously, brands had to use another affiliate platform to run their affiliate side of things. Red and Serol integrated with some of them. So which means you could still see the data on Serol, but it was still hosted on another platform. With Saathi, it is just now built into Serol. So it'll integrate. Everything can be done on Serol. The same things you can do on Saathi can be done on Serol. So because we own the technology for both platforms. So it's much more seamless for brands running influencer affiliate programs also.

45:55Yash Chavan:and like the whole seeding, gifting, like that sort of spiel. And also simpler now for brands who are just doing affiliate, for instance. And often brands maybe like want to use the discovery, the seeding. Once they build a community of like 300, 500 people, some brands are happy with that. Like they don't want a large affiliate program. So then the other parts of Saral, such as the discovery, the CRM, the management may not be as useful as just the tracking, management, creator retention, fraud prevention functionality. So then that is the part that SASE does really well. Where do you see the biggest challenge brands facing when it comes to affiliate marketing?

46:36Is it finding affiliates, working with them, being competitive with other brands, like convincing them to come on? Or like if someone, I guarantee there's a lot of listeners, probably based on the surveys I've done, I bet you over 60 or 70 % of our listeners listening to this episode are not working with affiliates. Yeah. And I, you probably know the exact data on what it is,

47:00Yash Chavan:Rob, but I'm, I'm just going from our user base, but they are, they're not sure where to start. They know they probably need to do some product seeding, like sending their products out. They don't know how to manage it. It feels overwhelming. And like, where do you see the breakdown of, should every brand be using like working with affiliates or where where's that that point where like a brand has struggles the most i think it's a it's not about every brand i think it's about at what stage do you want to start leveraging influence in your marketing and i say influence and not influencer very particularly if you're in your like the first growth stage of your brand like going from zero to one, zero to three million, like figuring out PMF, figuring out your first marketing channel, which is typically some form of paid media, mostly meta ads, right?

47:53Yash Chavan:For e-com, just do that. Like don't distract yourself with influencers or affiliate. Maybe like have a passive. One of the things you could do on Sati is like turn your customers into affiliates so you can set up rules like, hey, if anybody buys over$500 or turn them into an affiliate, like you could have something passive like that if you need to and just have something running, but that shouldn't have to be a focus, right? Once you get to the first milestone where your ads now start plateauing because you've run out of everybody who's in market and at any given time, like one to 3 % of the market is in market, like looking to buy.

48:27Yash Chavan:And ads are great at targeting though that sliver of the market. But what about the other 97 %? That's not in market. That you want to influence to be in market so the ads can target them. Then you work with your influencers. then you start seeding, then you grow awareness. And once the awareness is high enough, and those people then Google you and click on the Google ad and buy. Those are that, those brands. So I think like once you're at that stage when you want your, what we've seen with Saral so far, influencers, affiliates, there are exceptions, but influencers, affiliates tend to be a really good second growth lever that take them from like three to 10 or like one to five, as opposed to like zero to one, zero to three, if that makes sense.

49:08Yash Chavan:If you're in these stages where you're looking for your second growth lever, then work with influencers affiliates. Is my recommendation. And Saral will help identify influencers and engage with them and sign them up? Correct. So searching, so discovery, hey, show me fitness influencers in Austin, Texas, who are men between ages 20 to 50, right? Like Saral does that. Contact all these, you know, 500 people with my offer. Saral does that automatically. It has a CRM to manage everyone. So like, hey, where are they in my process? Have they signed? Have they posted? Are they an affiliate? Are they a paid Black Influencer?

49:48Yash Chavan:Like all of that management CRM are done by Saral. And so all of that is in Saral? Like through Instagram or through TikTok or through the platforms? Yes, or email. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Or yeah, email's big, by the way. Email is like the very under - So how do you get the emails of the accounts? That's our, so we built a search engine. That's the secret sauce? Yeah, so we integrate directly with like the platform APIs. And if their email is publicly available anywhere on the platform, we have access to it. Which most influencers who want to work with brands have their emails available. Yes, if they're, yeah.

50:21But what about finding people who are not maybe like an influencer, but they are like, they're putting out good content and they've got a good following. And maybe you kind of discover them. Yeah. Like, is that something that like Sarl would help with? And is that like a good way to approach it? So like, rather than just going to like the people who are clearly an influencer, but like if you're posting about exercise, cause you're on a diet and you're, you're posting your personal journey, you've never been paid by anyone, but you're just doing your journey and you have 7 ,000 followers, nothing crazy, but a decent amount.

50:56Yash Chavan:Yeah. Um, I might want to reach out to you to say like, Hey, yeah, like, do you want to post about our stuff? I'd love to send you our supplements or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. So it's actually like built for that particular use case more than finding the large ones. Because the large ones you're going to find in like top hundred influencers in X list. They're easy to find on Google, right? They're easy to find. What's really hard to find is like the gems where you want to find like, hey, show me the soccer mom who talks about productivity. Right. Like, where's that person? You know? Yeah. That's like, so Saral does that.

51:31Yash Chavan:And you can like do a multi-keyword search. You can search for if you really have an example. So here's like a hack for everyone listening, right? Find like a big influencer in your space that you cannot afford. Let's say like, let's use like Hexclad as an example, right? Like, hey, Hexclad has Gordon Ramsay, right? If you're a cooking brand or like you're in that space, you're not probably going to afford Gordon Ramsay. But what you can do is go to Surrell, plugin at Gordon Ramsey and we'll find you influencers who are similar to him in lower follower ranges. So basically if Gordon Ramsey has whatever, 5 million probably has more, but let's just say 5 million followers there, those people, those 5 million people individually, also like maybe 50 ,000 of those people follow this like other girl who's also like a chef, right so you can hit Ramsey's audience by working with somebody with 50k followers Seral can detect that and show you these hidden gems like hey this person has like 40 ,000 people who also follow Ramsey and they have 50k total followers so like 90 % of their audience or 80 % of their audience is basically like Ramsey followers so you can work with Ramsey without working with Ramsey if you get like 10 of these affiliates so like there's different hacks like these that you can do and find these hidden gems basically like you said of of people that you wouldn't that are not classic like influencer influencers yeah that's so smart yeah rather than just paying the big the top dog get the smaller ones but they have the same audience the same audience yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah because like the people who follow like kim kardashian also follow like the makeup influencer with 10 000 followers where everybody wants kim kardashian and ignores the 10k follower person.

53:19Yash Chavan:So just go work with like a hundred of those. They're probably cheaper, easier to work with. I will stick with you for longer. And I sometimes think they might even convert better because like when I see celebrities posting stuff, I kind of know it's a it's a paid post. It's paid. You know, like, and if I see someone who's not quite as big, but there's someone I respect and someone I follow and there may be something like, I won't always assume they're getting paid for it. And so I might think it's just more authentic and genuine. So it might even convert better. Correct. Correct. It's trust. Any sale, as we know, like if we've been in sales for long enough, it's like any sale is a transfer of trust.

53:57Yash Chavan:That's what it is. I don't trust like a bit, the rock with a supplement, like, you know, but I trust like, you know, that, that dude with 15K followers, who's gone from like fat to fit. and like guy man like he's like i trust him right i don't trust the rock um so like you know it's just trust and it's like who has a higher people that feel like you that look like you yeah that you identify with that are in your social class and then exactly you want to hear what they have to say correct yeah okay can you walk me through imagine you you run a brand uh let's say it's some kind of supplement, let's just say anything, but you're doing, you found product market fit, you're doing maybe a couple million a year, nothing huge, but you're, it's like, okay, you're, you're, you've established, you're not currently doing anything with influencers.

54:51You're not currently doing any affiliate marketing. And now you sit down, you're listening to this episode and you're like, okay, I gotta, I gotta, I gotta get on the affiliates and I gotta get on my thing. How are you implementing this? Like, tell me exactly step-by-step the structure that you would do to build out your influencer and affiliate program and you're you know given that

55:11Yash Chavan:you're at the right stage perfect you need to build your influencer illuminati okay so what i mean by that is you know there's this conspiracy of how illuminati is like the secret society that's controlling and influencing the world maybe that's true maybe that's not that's a separate podcast But you can build your own influencer Illuminati, which means a small group of people, 100 to 200, that are influencing your customers or your future customers to buy from you. That should be your North Star. How do you build your Illuminati? What's the symbol of an Illuminati? It's the pyramid, right? It's this.

55:52Yash Chavan:So now you've got to think about it like a pyramid in three layers. base, you start seeding. Like you said, everybody wants to seed. Easiest way to start. Hey, dear influencer, I'm this new brand. I'm up and coming. Here are my USPs. I'd love to send you a free supplement for like a month's worth of supplements. If you try it, if you like it, if you see results, please post about it. If not, that's okay. Very easy offer for an influencer to say yes to because they don't lose anything. If they don't like it, they don't post. If they like they post and then there's like a future maybe like a deal or a partnership here start seeding some of those people are going to post posting is positive behavior for you as a brand incentivize more positive behavior by turning the people who post for free into affiliates don't start by like turning everyone into an affiliate now you just have like a bunch of random affiliates let's seed first see who posts you likes your product enough to post about it for free then make them an affiliate.

56:55Yash Chavan:Now they're an affiliate. Now you keep running your affiliate. Now we're in the second layer of the pyramid. Now you're running your affiliate program for three months, six months. You're going to see that it's pretty much always an 80-20 where 20 % of your affiliates are going to drive 80 % of the sales, 80 % of the views. Take that top 10, top 20 % every month and turn them into long-term partners. Retainer deals, equity deals, higher percentage affiliate commission, whitelisted ads or partnership ads, spark ads, anything. Do custom deals with them. That's the tip of your pyramid. Northstar, I'm a supplement brand.

57:34Yash Chavan:I need to build an influencer Illuminati to go to the next level. I start with seeding. I send hundreds of product every month. Some people post. I turn them into affiliates. They start performing. once I have enough performance data, only then I'm going to start paying them and make sure that the performance data is correct by the right attribution methods with the right fraud handling. So you sati in the second layer and then you graduate them into like a paid tier or a custom tier where they get a higher affiliate commission or some sort of a custom deal. And that's how I would approach it is this sort of three layer Illuminati pyramid framework.

58:11Yash Chavan:So yeah. This is awesome. I mean, this is like, I could clip this right here and send this to listeners, but this is awesome breakdown. I feel, tell me if I'm wrong, but my guess is most brands, like that top of the pyramid one where you take your best ones and you break them out into some type of a separate program is probably what most brands don't do and they're missing out on a huge opportunity of like 10xing down on the really good ones. Ooh, most brands don't even do the middle. They just want to seed. So they're like, yeah, we're just going to start seeding and then get some content and that's it.

58:43Yash Chavan:But there's no retention built into that model because they post about you once, maybe twice, and then they're gone. You never hear from them again, right? So like so many brands focus on this like recruitment treadmill of just like getting more and more influencers to post about them. But don't think about like metrics like posts per creator. We call it PPC internally, right? Like what's your PPC? If your like PPC is one or two, like you're in trouble. Make sure you like incentivize them to keep posting again and again. because eventually you're going to run out of a top of funnel. There's only so many creators that your audience trusts, right?

59:19Yash Chavan:It seems like there's unlimited, but it's very easy over a year to reach out to like 50 ,000, 100 ,000 people. Like you will run out of people. So you better build a program where like people are incentivized to post again and again. So like, yeah, to answer your question, most people don't like just do the bottom. Do the middle, like build an affiliate program. And yes, like the people who build an affiliate program, oh man, please turn the accurate high. why is everyone on a 15 % commission? Give them more, give them 30%. Gamify your program. Again, something you can do in Sati, like set up a reward.

59:51Yash Chavan:Hey, once you cross$10 ,000 in sales, you get a 3K bonus. It's a great thing to do. Incentivizes them like anything. Or once you cross 3K in sales, you get an email saying, hey, let's do a paid deal where we'll pay you 3K over the next six months if you guarantee that you are going to post about us a certain number of times. Because you now have data to say that, hey, this person posted about us 15 times and made 20K in sales. Yeah. Just pay him 20K for the next three months and get a guarantee of 15 posts. It's like pretty much guaranteed sales because you have that equation. What people do is like worse.

1:00:29Yash Chavan:They flip the pyramid. So they start paying influencers up front and then they're like, well, influencer marketing doesn't work because there's no proof that like there was any resonance that they even liked your product or their audience liked your product or they could even like sell. So like first get the validation that they like your product to the base of the pyramid. Does their audience like your product and can they sell to the middle of the pyramid? That's the affiliate. And at the top is like your creme de la creme, highest performing creators. So yeah. And then are you always recommending to then ask influencers or these creators to white label their content as like paid promotions that you put ad spend behind?

1:01:09Yash Chavan:Yeah, pretty much that's been working really well for brands now. Because again, trust is with the creators. It's no longer with like institutions or brands. Yeah. So obviously like the ads that you run through a creator's account, partnership ads, whitelisted ads, whatever you want to call them, tend to perform better than like typical ads. But we've seen some evidence to the contrary. Really depends on the brand and really depends on the influencer. So make sure you're like testing this with creators. For well-known people, this works better. So like this is something to do with like larger creators who get recognized.

1:01:42Yash Chavan:Like you said, like if it's a celebrity and you see like a celebrity's name on the ad, they're more likely to click. But if you like don't know who this person is, then it's just more like a UGC ad, which is still maybe better than like a brand focused ad, but may not be as better as most people see on like LinkedIn and Twitter. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I always wonder, like I know they work. I know brands are crushing it with those white, with white labeling ads. Yeah. But I wonder sometimes if you want to balance because when you see paid promotion on an ad and if it's like if it's someone I follow and I've been seeing them post about it and then I see the paid promotion.

1:02:21There's a little bit of less trust, but like I think it's still there. Like I, to me, it doesn't affect it that much. But I wonder if like a balance is healthy. So it's not just every post you see, you see the little paid promotion up in the corner. Yeah.

1:02:38Yash Chavan:Yeah, totally. I think like that's like up to the affiliates, right? But then if they do that, their natural ability to drive sales for brands is going to go down because you're then essentially selling out your audience by partnering with whoever or just keeping on promoting things. And most influencers like who are smart and who want to treat it as it's, because it's a media business. You know this, you run a podcast. Like you don't want to promote everyone and anyone. Right. So like, cause there's a trust, there's always that little bit jab, jab, jab, right hook. Right. So like, if you just keep right hooking, then your audience is going to leave you.

1:03:12Yash Chavan:So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Where does AI play in this? I know you're a big, you, you built, it's called Sia, right? Your AI product within Sarl. Yes. So I know you're a big proponent of AI and very forward thinking on it. Is there any big shifts you see with influencer and affiliate that AI can help with? I think there is a lot of operational work that affiliate managers do right now that quite literally like in the next three months, 80 % of that we will just eliminate. Like all the basic things like, yeah, like even things like collecting U9 information from affiliates for taxes or making invoices or following up with your inactive affiliates or pulling up reports about or looking at dashboards and like filtering and figuring out who's not performing, who's performing, who do I need to reach out to to make sure that they drive sales next month.

1:04:12Yash Chavan:all of that stuff can be AI. I think like a lot of reporting, AI can drive insights. Like AI can look at data at a depth and scale that no human will ever look at, right? So like it can look at things like that and surface insights that humans cannot. So stuff like very, very basic example of that is things like the coupon code used. Like, hey, the coupon, like the code usage is much higher than the traffic users. Like if you just look at data, data, like you can't see that as a human. But like an LLM can spot that very easily. Like that, but like much higher order. I think there's so much just grunt that AI can automate.

1:04:50Yash Chavan:I think that's like level one. And we'll be there at Sati in like three, four months. Level two is like, which is what I'm the most excited about, is what can it do that humans cannot do? Is it able to like figure out like this weird, like, hey, if you just change your attribution model from this to this, your affiliate program is going to drive 20 % higher sales. It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Like if you just increase your commission model from 15 % to 17%, these affiliates who haven't posted for a while, I predict with 90 % confidence that they're going to start posting, which means the X percent revenue increase in the next three months.

1:05:26Yash Chavan:Like that's like my pipe dream. So I want to, I want to build that. I'm very excited for that person. They're running some internal POCs. So I don't want to speak, speak too soon or very confidently about this, but I feel very pumped about some of the stuff we're doing around the things that humans, a lot of AI companies, a lot of AI tools are like trying to replace humans. Okay, fair enough. I think level one thinking, I think level one, level two, level three thinking is like, what can it do that the human physically cannot do due to human constraints? So like, yeah, that's like, that's where, that's what excites me the most.

1:06:00Amazing. Yeah. I have a few lightning round questions, but before I get into those, is there any question you wished I asked you today?

1:06:08Yash Chavan:man i would just based on our pre-interview i would just love to talk to you about like operating companies and business in general like i think i feel like i have a lot of questions to ask you you've run like a 400 people company at some point like there's a lot that i need to learn but yeah no no i think i think we're good i think we covered a lot of ground yeah yeah you you've built an amazing company. I know for those listening, you know, Sarl was launched in 2022. And before the show, I was just telling Yash how much I admired what he's built because at Bold, you know, transparently in 2022, we were going through layoffs because that was a really hard year for almost every tech company.

1:06:54I remember Shopify laid off 20 % of their team. It was like Like every single company you in 22, it was like the pandemic. There was this peak of everyone thought, oh, the whole world is only going to be online commerce. And it's all going online. And tons of money was thrown at any company that was doing online commerce. And then in 2022, the world started opening up again. And all that money was like, oh, no. OK, everything went back. No more money. And you launched right in the hardest time. And sometimes they say that the best companies are started at the hardest time. Like, you know, like Google started in 2001 at the dot boom collapse and Facebook 2008 and the housing market collapse.

1:07:34And like, yeah. So do you think there's some truth to that? Like you started at a time where you had to build something that worked. You couldn't just fund it.

1:07:43Yash Chavan:Yeah. Yeah. I think. And we're bootstrapped so far. Plan to be that way. So I think it builds a certain level of discipline. and it's like, what's it called? Like hard seas make strong sailors, right? It's just that. I think when the sea is rough is when you become a very good sailor. And I think if it's like peace and quiet, then there's no, when it's wartime, then it's like, who's the general then? Who's in the battlefield then? I think that makes really good people in general. So yeah, I think 100%, I think there's some truth to that. Okay, I want to end with a couple of quick lightning round questions.

1:08:20and just for those listening, I didn't send these to Yash ahead of time. So he has no clue. So I'm going to throw these out real quick. One answer. Last click attribution tool. What's one tool that has outlived its usefulness? Oh, man. Okay. Okay. You know what's funny? I actually, well, I use that because Shopify uses it and I find it archaic. It is archaic. Like I agree 100%, but they must have really good salespeople that get in with these enterprise brands because I agree. I agree with that. What is the most overrated affiliate tactic in 2026?

1:09:02Yash Chavan:Most overrated affiliate tactic is no strings attached. Oh man, like it's not, it's like the seeding tactic, but it's like to get them to be an affiliate. It's like, hey, I just want to reach out to you and send you a product. No strings attached. Like just writing that is just icky to me because it's like, yeah, there are strings attached, bro. like there are, you're gonna, when you send them a product, you know, just say it. Just say it like, hey, if you like it, you post about it. If not, it's fine. Yeah, be open. In that sense, there's no strings attached. But when you say that there's no strings attached and then you like follow up, it's like, hey, do you want to post about it?

1:09:31Yash Chavan:It's like, maybe not. So yeah, I think that's like overrated. I think it's done for. So yeah. What's the most underrated affiliate tactic in 2026? Ooh, turning your affiliates into long-term partners. Nobody thinks of the top of the pyramid. They all want to like be affiliates and play that game. But you want to eventually build predictability into your engine. And the way affiliates are going to leave, there's going to be natural churn. The way you make them stick is you make like sign contracts, make them long term partners. Think like, yeah, stop making them affiliates, like do something else.

1:10:05Yash Chavan:Yeah. What's one number every Shopify merchant should be tracking on their affiliate program, but they aren't? Good one. Bunch of metrics we have about RPA, revenue per affiliate. Nobody looks at this pretty much. Quality of the program. You may be driving 100K in sales, but maybe it's only coming and you have a thousand people affiliate group, but only like 150 of them are actually like driving any traffic. So why are the other like 850 there? Borgam, you're just unnecessary ops headache. So I think looking at revenue per affiliate is a good one. So yeah, earnings per click is another one. EPC, nobody looks at that.

1:10:45Yash Chavan:Earnings per click shows you the quality of the traffic that you're getting. So yeah. You asked for one, I give too. Over delivering, Jay. Last question. I heard a monkey got into your house last week. Tell me, how the heck does a monkey get into your house? I live in an apartment complex and then they're like repainting the building. So they're, they have this like scaffolding around some, like a group of monkeys came from somewhere. Scaffolding, easy to climb compared to like a triple. They just climbed in. They found my kitchen window. They hopped in and they were quite literally bananas because I use bananas as pre-workout.

1:11:27Yash Chavan:They ate my bananas. So how did you get them out? You shoo them out the window or? No, I couldn't. Like they were just there. I, thankfully I, we found them and then we just closed the door to the kitchen. so they were just trapped in the kitchen. And the only way they could get out is they ate everything and they left. Oh my gosh. So yeah, they quite literally ate every single fruit that was there. They opened every single like utensil. It was quite a scene. So yeah, it was fun. It's a fun story to tell on a podcast. Yeah, yeah. Oh, I thought a fun spot to end. I actually had a pet monkey as a kid.

1:12:06You would not, I grew up in Africa in Sudan. And I had a pet monkey and it was the worst pet ever because you couldn't catch it. It was like a dog if it's bad or something, you could be like, sit. Or you could train it. A monkey you couldn't catch. It would jump around and it would get a cup on the lights. It was just the worst idea for a pet. But we had a pet monkey. His name was Coco. And anyways, so I have a related...

1:12:32Yash Chavan:Coco's such a good monkey name. Yeah. Yash, thank you so much for coming on. This was a ton of fun. Where Where can people go to try? Like, I guarantee there's people listening right now that want to take advantage of both of these tools. Where can you send them? Anything else you want to say to point them in that direction and end this off? Yeah, if you're looking to start an affiliate program, there's no better time. By the way, Instagram also recently enabled link clicks on Reels. So I think affiliate is just going to blow up because of that new mechanism. So you want to take advantage of that.

1:13:09Yash Chavan:mysathi.io is the right place to go. There is a trial, get a trial, see if you like it. If you want to be prioritized, we're getting the trial a little bit because we're early. If you want to be prioritized for the trial, just use code J, J-A-Y, when you fill the form and we'll bump you up the list. Awesome. And I will make sure to put all these links in the show notes and the email that goes out and everything as well too. So this has been a ton of fun. I learned a lot. But thank you, Yash, for coming on. And I wish you all the best with your launch, which when people are listening to this was probably five or six days ago.

1:13:43But I hope it goes well. And we'll definitely be in touch.

1:13:47Yash Chavan:Thank you so much. Thank you, Jay. Appreciate you having me on. Bye-bye.