Welcome to ProfitLed. A podcast by and for Bootstrapped Founders Brave or Crazy Enough to grow a business to profitability with very few resources. ProfitLed is brought to you by EWebinar, the leading automated webinar platform built to save you from doing the same webinar over and over again, from sales demos to customer onboarding to training. This season, ProfitLed's host Melissa Kwan, who is also co-founder and CEO of EWebinar, will walk you step-by-step
through the company's journey to a million. Melissa is a three-time bootstrapper who has spent 13 years building startups. Together with co-host and EWebinar COO Todd Parmley, they will dive into one major topic per episode, sharing war stories, mistakes, and lessons learned as they grew the company to a million in annual recurring revenue 36 months after product launch. So buckle up fellow bootstrappers, it's going to be one heck of a ride.
Welcome to ProfitLed season two, our journey to a million episode 16. My name is Melissa Kwan, co-founder and CEO of EWebinar and your host. I'm here with my co-host Todd Parmley, EWebinar's COO. Hey Todd, how's it going? It's good, 16. I don't know if we're going to hit the same number, but I think we have like 28 episodes per plan. Wow. Might be longer, it won't be shorter, but it's pretty crazy. It's like a year long because we release it every two weeks, so it's a year
long. It's wild. It is wild. And we've gotten so good at it. It feels way more natural as a conversation now than when we first started. That is true. I do not claim to be a master podcaster, but it is more definitely better at it now than when we started. Well, in the last episode we talked about how we decided on our roadmap, how we chose what was important, mostly by listening to our customers, instead of using quantitative data because we never had
any. We're still working on that. Today we're going to talk about my favorite topic, our, mostly my, $130,000 mistake in experimenting with affiliate marketing and why we think startup should stay away from that, especially in the early days. This one is quite painful for me because I would consider this the biggest financial mistake I've made in my career, not just with eWebinar,
but you know, you live and you learn and now I get to tell people to not do it. And I'm actually glad we're making this episode because a lot of people ask me about affiliate marketing and I'm like, don't do it. And I just send them my LinkedIn post, but now I can send them this episode. Wanted to kind of just rewind to the kind of the backstory of why we even decided to invest in
affiliate marketing. Why did we do that, Melissa? That's so crazy. I mean, I mean, at that point, I think it was like within the first year of launch and we were just around 25K MRR. That's how long it took us. I think it took us like maybe just a year to get to 25K. At that point, it felt like we were pretty mature in hindsight. We weren't. It took us so long to get there that I thought, oh, it's it's time to kind of pour fuel in the fire, not realizing how immature we still were
as a company. But just to even rewind a bit more is what is affiliate marketing. Just wanted to find that. So we're all the same page is where we leverage affiliate sometimes or influencers. Sometimes there blogs with a lot of traffic. Sometimes there, you know, people that sell products kind of in your industry that refer your product to their audience for a commission. So sometimes it's a one time fee. Sometimes it's an ongoing percentage. But that's what affiliate and sometimes called
partnership marketing is. And I guess I just decided to invest in it because at the time, we were trying so many things and we kind of touched on this right on episode 14. The go-to-market strategies that didn't work. We were trying so many things. We're throwing everything against a wall to see what would work. And I remember back then our strategy was never to get everybody. It was always to get a very loyal group of customers. And we had a lot of customers that were referring us
to other people. And, you know, saying really good things about us. We had raving fans. And we thought that we could leverage more people like them to sell our product because we just had so many good reviews at the time, even though it wasn't a huge audience. Yeah, I mean, word of mouth was a huge channel for us at that time. I think it was our biggest, you know. And we never invested in ads. So everybody that came in either saw our product somewhere, read a blog or saw someone else
using a webinar and looked us up. A huge bar in me felt like we were ready for it. I didn't know anything about affiliate marketing. I thought it was as easy as getting someone to refer you, like getting someone to review your product, buying a space on the first three blogs, you know, of Google, getting a YouTube reviewer to do a video, getting an influencer by paying them a little bit, you know, to market our products. And I also was talking to, I belong to this Slack group
that only had affiliate marketers. I can't remember what the name of it was, but it had like thousands of people in it. And there were a lot of companies and products within that group that had a lot of success with affiliate marketing. Through that, I also met some people that I was talking to,
that which is like raving about it obviously because they're in the industry. And I actually took a lot of time recruiting somebody that had a lot of experience in that industry, like affiliate marketing and partnerships, that I thought could help us out because this person just had so much
success doing that for other companies that were, you know, much larger. But at the time, this person would have been an, and was the most expensive hire on our team, even though they were taking like a 50% pay cut that when I say like that was a hundred and thirty thousand dollar mistake, we didn't spend that on on marketing. A lot of that was paying this person's salary or retainer
because everyone's a contractor. And at the time, I wasn't paying myself. I think David was getting something like seven thousand a month from us and then five thousand from a contracting job. You are still with us. This person was going to be our most expensive hire. Yeah, kind of by a mile. Yeah, by a mile. And we took a leap of faith because we thought this was a revenue position. And of course it was a revenue position. But we didn't realize how difficult it would be to get the
revenue and how long it would take, you know, as as this channel. So it felt like we were ready to tackle it. I didn't have any idea what this role entailed and how difficult it was. I thought it was going to be somewhat easy because this person had a built-in audience by selling other SaaS products as well. And I really thought that it was going to take a maximum of three months to ramp up before we could start seeing revenue. In hindsight, that was the biggest mistake. It was
underestimating what it was and how long it would take to get to revenue. Yeah, I mean, I think it's also like jogging my memory to we had raving fans of our product, right? Our customers were like, they really were genuinely spreading the word advocating for us. If they we know, we would joke that we hoped people would get fired and moved to other companies because they would always take us with them, right? They would go to a new company and they would start using us there. And we thought
that would translate into this sort of like referral market. Yeah, like we have a great product, why wouldn't everyone want to use it? Like that was actually my mindset. And people who are not getting paid to refer it are referring it and we're getting customers. And I think it just sounds like easy money. It just sounds like free money. Like if you have a good product, you know, to set to an audience that would use you, why wouldn't they use you? The only reason they're not
using you is because they don't know about you. And I think those are the two core like kind of false assumptions we made. We thought those things were true. And it's really easy to see why we would think that even in hindsight, you know, even though it's like so obvious now, it was wrong, but back then we had no idea. And there's one thing that I keep talking about is what not to do is to pay someone to take away your pain that you know nothing about. I am not from marketing. Nobody
from our team is marketing. And I was just learning about it from talking other people and reading about it. And I couldn't create enough demand. Like I did not know how to sell this product. We weren't investing in ads. I wasn't writing on LinkedIn. I didn't know anything about building an audience. And affiliate marketing was a channel that was referred to me as something that I should explore. And it just sounded super good. And I wanted someone to take away my pain of not
being able to generate enough demand. So if I could pay someone to find me more customers, why would I not do that? So another mistake was not understanding the role and what was required to sell a product through someone else and then paying someone to do it, hoping they would figure it out is something I would not recommend anybody do. I mean, it just proves itself over and over again. Like if you don't understand how to do it yourself, like just a basic level and you've proved it
out as a workable strategy, you should not outsource a period. Yeah. And it's probably important to mention that I never even reach out to an affiliate to talk to them. Part of that, I guess, is not have any, but part of it is just I trust my people. Like I cannot do so many things. I was scrambling just trying to do my own thing that when you hire someone, you have to trust them. If this person has success elsewhere, why would I question that? But I didn't think about looking
at where they came from. You know, this person had only worked in large companies or medium-sized companies before. Like a medium-sized company compared to a zero-to-one startup is massive. Right. I'm talking to two to three hundred person startups, right? Quote, quote, startup. So not realizing, not understanding that, oh, you actually can't hire someone who's only worked for corporate to figure out your product because they have all the resources and mailing lists and
people at their disposal where at your company, it's a person of one. It should be like a litmus test for any hire at a small startup. It's like it's almost like a disqualifier. If they have no startup experience of any kind, if they've had a long-term career in corporate, like it's probably not going to work. And it doesn't matter how much they want to be in a startup,
how creative they are within that company. It doesn't translate. Like very rarely, I don't want to say like such absolute, but like it normally doesn't translate because the things that you care about in corporate, you don't find in a startup. Yeah, and you don't have support. You're it. Like, figure it out. Do it. Every aspect of it. Like you are the only one. So, you know, you got to be scrappy. I mean, I have a list of kind of as opposed to part of why this strategy was a
colossal failure. And the thing is like fundamentally, right, while it seemed like it was easy to get people excited about our product, which it was, it was virtually impossible to get anyone to execute on a campaign. So what's a campaign, right? Like an influencer agreeing to market you, you know, on their platform for a month or an influencer agreeing to use your product to sell their own product and then never actually doing it. Like that could be a campaign, right? So we tried
this. We gave it a really good shot as we give everything a really good shot. We spent 10 months investing in the strategy spent 130,000. And we could only attribute at the end of it around $500 a month worth of revenue. The money, most of it went to salary, but some of it went to paying people up front, trying certain ad campaigns, but it wasn't ads. It was more like co-marketing. I've I've a list of eight reasons that we could go through of why I think this is I thought this was
a failure. And maybe people listening can can take something from it. So the first one is our subscription prices were too low to create a financial motivation. So in the beginning, we were price that starting point of 49 over time, we increased it to 99, but you can imagine when your product is so cheap, if you're paying someone 10%, that's five to 10 bucks or 10 to 20 bucks a month, whereas they could be selling a product for a thousand dollars and getting paid 200 per month.
So why would they sell yours over something else? Because these affiliates, they don't just sell your product. They're selling a few other ones as well. So our subscription prices were way too low for it to be interesting. And we did not have an annual plan. So if we had an annual plan that for a thousand dollars, we could pay you five hundred bucks up front. So even that is way more interesting than five dollars. And that was never brought to me as a problem, but it was only a problem
later on. I think that's why I'm trying to think of the products that succeed in this. And I think like VPNs are one of them. You see how these like people marketing VPNs? Because I think it's just like this high up front price. Think about it. If they have three products that they're selling or if you know, referring and only two of them are really making the money, they're going to ignore that third child, you know, immediately and just ignore them completely. But on the flip side,
there wasn't enough margin to give away to make an interesting for ourselves. Like we were struggling so much. We were at 25,000 a month. We were burning at least double that. I can't remember what the burn was. At least double that at the time. So when somebody comes to me and says, I'll sell this, you'll have to give me 20%. But then we end up making like 35 bucks or whatever. While we know that, you know, 15 is going to this person. It's not interesting for me because now
all you did to make me money was to post on a blog. And then I have to support that person. So now I don't feel like you did enough work to make that money perpetually. It's not like you make it for five months. You're making it perpetually for the life of our company. That's how a lot of these plans work. And that's how they say motivated. Then it just felt ridiculous to me that you could just post something and you make, you know, a couple hundred bucks from us every
year while doing nothing and having posted this two years ago. Yeah. And I believe that like if you're still making a dollar more than you had, it's like that just doesn't translate at an early stage like that. Like if they were bringing people in in massive volumes, but that wasn't happening. I think I still pay some people 10, 50 dollars a month because of some campaigns that we
ran two years ago. Every time I go to that PayPal, I hate myself a little bit because we were spending so much effort building the product, supporting it, making sure people say like, I'm making sure this person stays, but you are getting paid for that person. Having never met them, never talked to them, never actually saw them. They just clicked on your link. Right. And not only did we have to sort of exceed just the value of supporting there, the cost of supporting that
customer, but the cost of having someone on salary. So, you know, it just the math was not working. I mean, some people in that Slack group was telling me, oh, you can limit the commission to a year or six months, whatever. But now I'm making it less interesting for them because now you're already not making a lot. And I'm cutting it down. Whereas other companies that are profitable are paying you perpetually or are paying you a big long song upfront. So there was just a no win situation
because of the price point that we were at. And the third thing I have on my list is like, we didn't have a high ticket package, right. So I kind of already touched on this. So there was no chance of a meaningful commission. And a lot of that also had to ask to do with like where we were in our company. Like we were just super early. We didn't even know how to price our product. We were like, testing pricing. Yeah, we didn't have an annual plan. We didn't have any add-ons. I
don't think at the time. So there was nothing to bundle, right. There was literally no way to increase the overall price of the package. So that was another limiting factor in terms of what we could offer in terms of value for them. So yeah. And the fourth thing is we didn't have a huge mailing list or an audience to offer like reciprocal exposure. So that's a really big thing. Is like if somebody sells for you, they also want you to sell for them because a lot of these
affiliates and influencers are building their own audience. So when you're working with a huge company like Thinkific for example, there were one of our earliest partners. We mentioned them in the last episode. They have a mailing list of like 300,000 people or plus, right. Something like that. We had a mailing list of like 400. So we want you to blast us out to 100,000 people. Like now you think about it. It's ridiculous, right. So they're like, okay, I'll give you two
newsletters, but what do you do for me? And you're like, well, I'll give you 20% of my 50 bucks. And they're like, well, no, I would rather you blast me out so I can build my mailing list so that I can sell other people's product and yours in a better way. Because all these guys are trying to cross sell. We didn't have anything to offer in return except for like our friendship, which this person we hired was trying to pitch. But it's not enough because it doesn't translate
to money. No affiliate market is always about immediate return. If you can't find a way to make that happen for affiliates, don't even bother. Yeah. And the fifth thing that I think a lot of people would agree with it's like the 80 20 rule. But for affiliates is like 95 five rule. Whereas 95% of the affiliates are super small. They will contribute very little. They'll do very little. You can get them to send out one email, add a link in an article, write a paid review.
But that's it. Like they're running their own business. The other five who are like the Neil Patels of the world, like they require a significant financial investment up front. And you'd be at risk of not seeing return, which we didn't have. These guys like the Neil Patels of the world don't move if you don't give them like 50k out front. Why do they have to? But once you have that
relationship with them, you know, maybe they'll do, you know, more things for you. But I think like Tim Ferris, I looked on his podcasting like as a guest, you could pay like you could pay to be a guest and it's something ridiculous like 45 grand or something. So you can do those things if you have money or you can engage with a bunch of small people and hope that one day you'll find someone that actually does something for you. We also looked at a lot of the top affiliate blogs. There was one
guy, I can't remember his name, but he had one of the most popular SaaS product review blogs. And this guy knew person we hired. The person we hired started to invest in this person before they were like anything. And then over time, this person became like the number one SaaS marketing blog out there. But he wouldn't even return his email. He wouldn't even return his text messages. Like it's, it's crazy how hard it is to engage someone who actually have an audience because they
just don't, they don't need you. They don't need a small company. And then when we wanted to get a a price, you know, to be like the first webinar software, it would be like five grand a month minimum. So for a bigger company, like that's part of the ad budget. But we also looked at like how much traffic they would get. So they'd be like, Oh, okay, if you're on this spot, the person last month
got 200 clicks. I'm like 200 clicks. So then, you know, it doesn't make sense for a $50 product, but maybe another product, it makes a lot of sense because maybe through that link, they're selling a $2,000 product. So there were all these things that like, by the way, if you see a one of those top blogs online, like whatever webinar reviews, your M review, like you can only trust it with a grain of salt because a lot of those spots are purchased.
This probably goes without saying, but should be pointed out, I think, is that this is a bootstrapping focused podcast. So everything that requires that level of upfront investment is immediately off the table. It's a complete non-starter. So, and we didn't really understand that until we got
into it. And we were like, wait, it just didn't make sense. Hey, I like to take a second here to talk about my own company, you webinar, and our mission to rescue people from what I call webinar hell, to give them back their time and save them literally hundreds of hours every month through webinar automation. If your CLCM is tired of doing the same demo over and over for unqualified leads or worse, prospects who don't even show up, an on-demand demo powered by eWebinar can help them get their
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system, let's get back to the episode. Yeah, and so the sixth thing, which was a strategy that that we tried to go after was like giving bigger affiliates that have something to sell free accounts so they could use our product to sell to their audience, but here's the problem. We talked about if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys, you give someone a free account, they don't care
about your account, they're not going to use it. If they never use it, they never see value, their audience never sees it, and you're giving them an unlimited timeline to not use the product. So it actually hurts both sides because now they have a product that they're not motivated to star because they're not paying for it and then they're not using it to sell their product, but then now you're just sitting there waiting for this person to use your product. So we've tried that with a
few people based on friendships, right? Like this guy had worked with other affiliates in the past, they have a huge audience, they're like, okay, have you given me your product? Then I'll use it, but they never actually use it. It was so frustrating. I think for the most part affiliates have to come
to you. I don't know if that's, you know, they have some desire or connection with your product in some way, at least it seems that way if they don't, like yes, ultimately if there's a big financial, you know, incentive for them to do it, but at least at our price point, they had to love the product. And these affiliates, like they don't actually care about whether your product's good, because if I went to a competitor and like I know who their affiliates are, if I went to my
competitor and say, can you sell my product instead? Because it's better than this. They're not going to do it. They don't actually care about promoting a good product. They care about money. And my competitor has a relationship with them and has offered them lots of money in the past and also gives them exposure because they're much bigger companies than us. And that's something
to think about when you buy a product often affiliate. And this was actually one of the more frustrating things is they're like, well, we work with your competitor, but if you give me more, then I'll sell yours. But I'm like, but they suck. So why would you sell them? Like they have no conscience. So that was a, I think that was a hard, hard realization is like, oh, people only
care about money. That's interesting. So the seventh thing is that again, something that had to be learned later on is that we were in the early adoption phase, like 25,000 a month, right revenue. So it wasn't an easy sell. Like we had a hard time selling the product because I couldn't sell a product is why I wanted affiliates to sell a product. So we didn't actually have an established brand to help with the sale. Like we're not a hub spot. We're not on a Monday. We're we're not a
mailchimp. Those things are easy sales. What I learned is when someone sells your product, you can't expect them to figure out how to sell it. Just like when you hire a salesperson, like imagine the affiliate and the influencer is your salesperson, they're not going to figure out the valley propositions for their audience. They expect to sell your product and for people to get it right
away. So if you are in the early adoption phase and you don't have a brand and a mailing list and an easy to understand valley proposition that people just get at the time they see it, it's going to be a hard sell. If it's a hard sell, they can't sell it. If they can't sell it, they don't make money. So now we have the perfect formula of low price product, nothing in return, not an easy sell and no big audience as an exchange. I think there's like two things going on with like
not having an established brand. First of all, we are still I think in an immature product category. Not everybody's going to be like, oh, I know exactly what that is. So that was one issue. But also, it kind of like actually links back to the mailing list problem is, you know, there's a certain amount of marketing touch points typically that a potential customer needs to have before they're going to really check you out and give you any sort of like real attention. And so if the one
and only time they hear the word ewebinar is in a mailing list once in an ink and a word. If you don't have some other presence out there that at least your target audience is aware of, then it's going to be really hard to reach them, especially if they don't immediately understand the value of your product category. I mean, the most naive thing was we thought having a good product was enough for people to want to sell it or having a good product was enough for people to buy it.
So the eighth thing and the last item, which we kind of touched on in different ways, is most importantly, we thought we had product market fit, but we didn't. We thought that because we had a group of rating fans, we had nailed product market fit, but people didn't understand what we were selling. And to a large part, they still don't. I still don't feel like we have product market fit because people don't come here and want to buy it. It still requires a demo. It still
requires a conversation and still requires them trying things out. Like they're not coming here and say, I want this. It still hasn't happened yet. I agree with you. I mean, there's one specific group, which is not even the most desirable customer, which is the course creator kind of like coach customer that often comes here knowing what it is. But in terms of our ICP, we now at least, this was before a million of like reaching companies that use us for onboarding
and training. I don't know what we are. Yeah, I mean, I think it's a summarize. We were way too early for this strategy. And we used affiliates and partnerships as a go-to market strategy, which is the wrong way to see this. Affiliates is a growth strategy after everything is established. After your product market fit, after you have an audience, when you have resource, when you have time, you hire someone to manage that whole strategy. But you do not go to market for the strategy.
If you don't know what you're going to be when you grow up, you're not going to have the resource and all those things to back it up. That was like something that I had to learn kind of the hard way. Which is why it's not a good zero to one, but a good one to two strategy. It's like it just isn't. So obviously affiliate marketing works in the world. Otherwise, people would not be doing it. What do you think the circumstances? I mean, I think it's sort of a lot of it we've talked about.
Like it's the opposite of what our circumstances were. But when do you think it would work for a company? Well, there are a few elements that have to be in place. First, you have to be able to compensate affiliates enough to motivate them. But not so much that it takes away your own motivation to engage them. So there's got to be the sweet spot where they're going to sell you above anyone else, but you're not going to be like, I'm paying you too much that I don't want you to sell me now.
I think that the product has to be mature enough that it sells itself or that selling can't be hard. So that's why people have managers to manage affiliates because they have also press kits and, you know, sales packages or methodologies for different industries or different audiences. Like all of that is already done. When you sign up as an affiliate, you download a package that you just take to sell for you. And sometimes you can brand it yourself and you have a landing
page that's branded to you and then the link goes to the sign up for for your product. Like all that has to be in place. And I think also part of that is that you have to be a recognizable brand. Right. So, you know, that's part of what the package is that they're signing on for. It's something that's already kind of a known entity. And it's not just having product market fit. It's having product messaging fit. Right. Your message has to resonate with their audience right
away. Sometimes you can have product market fit, but you don't have messaging fits. Right. So people come to you and they don't get it. And a lot of these affiliates, if they're in different industries, different lines of business, they need different messaging. And so otherwise they won't market for you. Like you have to do all the work for them. Right. Because all these big affiliates with big
audiences, they can go anywhere and sell anything. So why you? Like that's the way to think about it is like what are you giving them? Is it easy to sell? Does it make a lot of money? Do people get it right away? Are they going to see quick return? If they see quick return from a campaign, they're going to do it for you again and again and again. But if they have to do any work and get
paid almost nothing, then why don't they just spend their time elsewhere? Yeah. So I think you have to have all these things in place and you have to be prepared to invest a lot of time and money to build relationships with them before you see any result. Right. And what does that mean? Right. You need to have enough runway to retain an affiliate manager in order to see positive ROI.
Because you're not going to do it yourself. This is a full-time job. Engaging affiliates, getting them to do things for you, making sure that they sell, making sure their campaign is going to be pushed out. Like sometimes a campaign is a joint webinar. So you need to have someone to do it with them and then there's going to be follow up and then there's going to be an offer.
And then maybe there's a newsletter and the next thing. You have to have all these in place, you have to have a person managing them and enough runway to see positive ROI if there is going to. So in many ways, it's it cannot be your primary strategy. It has to be something that supplements what you are already doing. And I think that's what most people don't understand. Because they're kind of in my position like, oh, I don't know how to sell. Maybe someone else can sell for me.
I heard about affiliates. I should just go and engage them. And that's why it only works as a growth strategy. It means your primary marketing strategies are firing on all cylinders. They're working. And so you can have something that's supplemental. I think it's probably a good place to stop. Yeah. I think that was enough ranting. Is that what this was today? It was just like your cathartic releasing. So what are we talking about today? We talked about the how we got into this
mess in the first place and why we decided to pursue affiliate marketing. Why it was such a big mistake for us to do. That's a hard word even to say, but there's no other way to frame it. And then when it might work, right? Because this is just our experience and our circumstances. So with that in mind, what is your hot take for today? Before I go into my hot take though, I want to mention one other thing is I mentioned it took 10 months and people listening might be like,
oh, that's so stupid. It took you 10 months to realize what was going on. And maybe something to touch on is why we spent so much time on it. Right. So one is we always give everything a good shot. You bring someone on board. It's like hiring any marketing agency, right? We talked about this. We're not going to fire them in month two because we want to give people enough time and effort to try a thing and exhaust every channel and every strategy before we say, okay, this is not working.
Another big part of it was because we didn't understand what was going on and every campaign and every success seemed to be around the corner. We thought maybe we just had to give it a bit longer, a bit more time because every affiliate, every campaign starts very high. Right. The energy is always very high. And I think the person we hired was all in good intention and really, really wanted it to work and was overly optimistic. And maybe he also didn't know how to recognize the signs
because we were a zero to one startup and not a one to two or two to three startups. So nobody really recognized the signs, the eight signs that we talked about. Like nobody really knew that. Right. Not even the person that we hired because it was just a different environment. And the fourth thing was there was because I spent so much time recruiting this person, there was a personal emotional investment in really, really wanting this to work. And yes, we need to, as a bootstraft,
startup be very cautious about where we spend money. But it doesn't mean we're ruthless. And not emotionally invested. I think a big part of being a bootstraft startup is you are more emotionally invested in your team because people take massive pay cuts to join your team. Yeah. And everybody wants this to work so so badly. So yes and hindsight, it was not a good financial decision, but it was not something easy to give up once we were fully invested in that process.
Does there were people involved? I think that was an important thing to add because in hindsight, it was like, why did it take us so long to realize it wasn't working in change course. But when we were in it, all of those factors that you mentioned were a play and time goes by super fast. It's not like,
oh, you know, we're counting the months. And you know, I will say one of the reasons why this lesson, I think, was particularly painful is because a lot of times when you do something that doesn't work, you still come out of it with something that you can kind of like parlay into something else. And this was just a straight up lesson. It was just like, oh, that didn't work. So it was it was a tough one. Yeah. And like bringing into one of our earlier points as I wasn't
paying myself, like this person was getting paid like double David at the time. Like it was just insane. All of it was crazy. But we learned many things that we're not going to repeat, not just affiliate marketing. But we also learned about listening to our gut when it comes to strategies and people, how to have hard conversations earlier and how to be more aware when things just
aren't going anywhere. So coming around to my hot take, my hot take as it relates to this particular topic of affiliate marketing is just remember that your product needs to be mature enough so that selling is not hard. Like affiliates can accelerate you, but it cannot test the market for you. And we were certainly too early for it. So just remember that it's a growth strategy, not a not a go-to market strategy. What's your hot take? Just that affiliate marketing really projects this
air of free money. Like it really just like, you know, like everybody who talks about it talks about it is sort of like this. You just got to do it because you're going to make so much money. And I mean, I guess we don't have direct experience with this, but I would venture a guess that even if all of the circumstances were right for us, it still would have been really hard. You still need to hire someone. You still need to have money to invest in attracting certain
affiliate marketers. And so that's kind of why as a bootstrap startup in particular, it's like a lot of those things are immediate disqualifiers. So it's not free money. It's my hot take and it's hard. It's harder than it looks. And I think people always follow, okay, yes, it's not free money. And you know, most affiliates don't work out but some do. You don't realize how much time you need
to find the some do. And the whole affiliate marketing landscape is also changing. So if you are thinking about investing in the strategy, talk to people in the industry that's been in it for a really long time. And just to give people a benchmark, an amazing affiliate marketer with lots of experience that have a big network, which is what you're paying for is a minimum of 250k in the US at least because you're buying their network. So let's say you want to hire the affiliate
marketer right now for active campaign. Like what do you think that person's going to be worth? This person has been selling old affiliates and partners of active campaign for the last five or 10 years. So what are you going to pay for that? And the smaller affiliate marketers, they don't know that nitty gritty and the tips and tricks and the relationships and they can't get people to do
things for them, right? So something to think about is even if you can, you have all the elements and you're ready to hire someone, the really good person is going to be very expensive. If you've been enjoying this podcast, I've got a small favor to ask. The only way profit-led grows is my word of mouth. So if you'll do us a favor and hit the subscribe or follow button or ever you're listening or watching this podcast right now, it means the world to us and help us
continue to spend time making these episodes for you. Pigmailing DIN if there are particular topics you want us to get into this season. Send me any feedback you have on this podcast because I love hearing from you. My name is Melissa Kwan, last name is spelled K-W-A-N. To get notified of new episodes, join our mailing list by going to profitled.fm. I promise to only share things you'll actually care about. Thanks for listening. Bye-bye.