244: Emmet Gibney — Referred Into the Role of CEO

interim CEO at Rewardful. We discuss about this transition and the expansion of the company on the new private equity ownership, how Emmet stepped into the void that was left by the original founders and just how incredibly impactful referral and affiliate programs can be for us indie hackers. From setting up the perfect referral program to identifying the ideal affiliate profile for your business, we just unpack it

all the tools and tactics you need. It's all in there. And then we dive into the role of building and contributing to communities for maximum impact as well. A big shout out at this point to acquire.com, the sponsor of this episode. More on that later. Now, here's Emmet. Emmet, thanks so much for being on the show. Tell us a little bit about your journey with Rewardful. What's your job there? How did you get it? And what does a day in the life look like?

working for a travel company here in Dublin. And I've been working there for a few years and then the pandemic hits and like the absolute worst industry to be in when the pandemic hit. And so the company went from, like, 120 people to 10 in a, you know, in a couple of weeks kind of thing, right? And I was one of the people who got laid off. And so, you know, trying to figure out, like, oh, like, what am I going to do? And hiring

just like, you know, ground to a halt. And I kind of, in a way, I was thinking you know, I'm just gonna take it easy, do a little bit of like, coding and you know, brush up my Ruby on Rails skills. And it was actually, like, I know this wasn't the case for a lot of people. And maybe people don't want to hear this, but that first sort of part of the pandemic was actually a very nice time for me. Because, you know, it was kind of stress free, you know, no work and we were having a kid

coming, you know, a few months later. And so sort of a last hurrah of freedom before parenthood began. Anyways, I had known the guys who founded Rewardful for a number of years, maybe close to 10 years at that point in time. And reached out to Colin Brady, who were the co-founders with Brady Cassidy. They're the founders of Rewardful. And just said, like, hey, like, do you need to help with anything? You know, I'm unemployed and have some spare time. And they're like, yeah,

like, we're just drowning on support. Can you come and help us with support? And so I just typed into intercom and help them out with support and you know, helping people figure out how to get the affiliate tracking installed and did that with them for a few months. And then our kid arrived and I said, okay, you know, I'm just going to focus on helping out at home for the next little bit when now that the kid arrived and then I got a job shortly thereafter because, you know, you need to

have an income if you've got a kid. And so I worked a real sort of classic corporate job for another kind of year in a bit and did not enjoy my time there. But it was like, you know, for personal reasons, we need to like get a mortgage and needed to have, you know, kind of a stable job. And once that was settled, then I reached back out to Colin Brady and said, hey, like, you know, I'd love to work with you guys on a permanent

basis. And my background professionally was in sort of product management and bit of like content marketing and things like that. Anyways, reached out to the guys. And they said, yeah, sure, like, you know, we've got, you know, we've got a spot for you and went and joined them in March of 2022. And for the first call it eight or nine months that I was there was primarily working in kind of a marketing capacity and some background context. Rewardful had been acquired by private

equity company or group called saas. group, which is currently the owner of Rewardful. You can go to saas.group if you want to learn more about saas. group and if you're interested in selling your SaaS company, you can go check them out. And so they had acquired the company a few months before I had joined the company full time. And so, come November 2022, Colin Brady had finished their, I think or no period is sort of the technical

term. And they decided that they wanted to move on. They've been working on Rewardful for, you know, five years, mostly, like, on the side of their full time jobs. And so they were pretty tired and decided they wanted to, you know, take a bit of a breather. I think Kyle had a just had a kid and decided, like, you know, he wanted to take a bit of a step back. And so November, at that point in time, there was, I think, five or six of us calibrated then left. And so our team went from

six to four and the company was growing quite rapidly. And so within the group, not just within Rewardful but within the group, trying to figure out like, okay, you know, what do we do now? We've lost the CTO and effectively CEO of the company. And one of our, I guess, lead developers, I don't know what his title was actually at the time, but Chris Kottom. He stepped up to be the CTO and then we started effectively, like, external CEO search. And then I moved up to being head of

product, which is sort of a portion of Brady's role. And but in the intervening months, I basically started taking over a lot of sort of the CEO type functions, you know, like handling all this stuff in terms of finance and reporting up to the board. And, like, all the sort of, you know, firefighting that you do in that type of role. And once a quarter, we basically have a presentation that we give to the guys that run saas. group in terms of how we're performing and what we're

doing and initiatives and things like that. And I basically said to them, like, listen, I've been basically, you know, running the business for the last few months. I know we've got this external CEO search. Would you mind if we pause that? Let me continue to operate in this role for the next several months. The place hasn't burned down yet. If it doesn't burn down, you know, within the year kind of thing, can I do this, you know, on a

permanent basis? And they said, yeah, we'll let you do that. And that's where we are now in sort of an interim CEO of the business. My title is technically head of product. But in terms of, you know, your question around on a day to day basis, you know, what does my day look like? You know probably 5% or 10% of my job is actually product related. There's so many other aspects of the business. So like, you know, today I was

reviewing a new template for our data processing agreement. Every now and then we get requests from people who are in Europe who want a data processing agreement. That's sort of a requirement under GDPR when you're working with what we would be technically classed for a lot of our customers is a sub processor. So diving into marketing, we're starting to do a lot more content marketing. I used to run a video production company and sort of a past life. So content and particularly like

video content is something that I'm pretty comfortable. And we're looking to hire new people. So you know, putting together job specs, occasionally, you know, jumping into product team meetings with the developers and our CTO, you know, figuring out, like, which features should we be doing next? What should we be building? How should we be building it? A lot of customer calls, demos and sales calls. You know, I think it was last Monday or something like that, I

had eight customer demos in one day. So that was a very busy day. So there's a lot of that almost every day there's at least one sort of customer demo that'll be doing. And, you know, a lot of sort of firefighting little things that come up, you know, you need to address and so it's a very varied role. And it's kind of the way I like it. I am more of a generalist generalist. I like breadth as opposed to depth. And then, you know, the guys that run saas. group, they run like 14 or 15

other companies. And as result, they've kind of leave us at it as long as things are going well. They give us enough rope to hang ourselves with. And so far we haven't. So yeah, that's a little bit of sort of my journey and what I'm doing it at Rewardful. And yeah, what my sort of day to day looks like.

a void that needs to be filled. That has a very indie hacker like touch to it, you know, like, it's just you do the things that need to be done because that's the way forward. That's really cool to hear. And the fact that it's a very varied job well, yeah, that's just the role of a CEO in a small SaaS business like this, right? You have to do everything. I really appreciate that you mentioned saas. group here because you said they're running like 15-18 other companies. They almost

bought mine. Like we were actually in conversations with them selling Feedback Panda. We went for it with a different PE group at that point. But we actually had negotiations about that, too, when we sold back in 2019, right? That was the time that we talked about selling our Productivity Online Teacher business. So I have a relationship with saas. group. And it's interesting to see how far they have come since then as

well. Like the last couple of years, they've been busy if that's the current portfolio that they're operating

to buy the company. And we're going to protect that investment by, you know, getting a steady hand who's done this kind of stuff before. Who are you? Right? And I mean, technically still, they could do that, right? Like they might decide that, you know, they want to find someone with more experience and so forth. But I've been very lucky, maybe some additional context too is prior to Rewardful, Kyle Fox and I were actually co founders on another startup, which was

healthcare software startup. And I don't know if you've had any experience or know anyone who's had experience in the healthcare industry, whether in software or otherwise. But it is a brutal industry for startups. And anyone who's ever, you know, subsequently come to me and asked about, like, advice in terms of healthcare software and startups and stuff I've said, basically just run, like, just don't because it's just such

like a enterprise sales cycle. But the point of bringing this up is just that Kyle and I had had worked together previously, so you know, wasn't coming in just like totally cold and having no kind of working relationship, that kind of thing. But I've been super lucky. And the guys at saas. group have been super like, supportive and not micromanaging everything we're trying to do and which I totally could have. And I've heard of cases of, you know, PE groups that that's how

they kind of operate. And so we've been really lucky that they've been awesome.

terms of different stage to be working at. And the types of things you have to do are very different, like that very early stage when you're building like from zero, you know, what's that period sale book, zero to one, like, that's the hardest kind of phase. And I think there's a certain kind of skill set and like comfortability with chaos and this kind of thing. And I think like, you know, Colin Brady are really good in that stage and I can see, like, they've already gone and started

new projects. They've got a new project they're working on called Review Rocket, which is basically like helping SaaS companies get reviews on, you know, all the different set of software review platforms. And so, you know, in terms of that, like next stage that, you know, we certainly haven't done anything where it was like, oh, we wouldn't have done that or like the team has grown a bit like, you know, we've added

three people, which is not a huge amount of people. But when you go from four to three, you're, you know, you've almost doubled the size of your team. And, you know, you're doing a lot more hiring. That's a big one, like things really change in terms of the dynamic when you add more people. And then there's other stuff that's it's the comes in that it's not so much about the stage that Rewardful is and this stage of Rewardful is going to put a lot of it's actually about the stage

that saas. group is in and the stage they're going into. You know, we've gone from four people to three people, which is, you know, whatever. But saas. group in September, we had like, a all portfolio get together in Lisbon and there was 100 ish people in that came, maybe 120 we're in the total group. And now I think we're at like 220 or 30 or maybe 50, I don't know, right? And so we're meeting again in September, this time in Barcelona. And, you know, they're bringing 200

people from all around the world. But the point I'm getting to, though, is that the types of processes that you need to have in place, one to manage all these different portfolio companies, but then also as sort of like a central body, right? So like centralized HR processes, centralized finance processes, recruiting and hiring kind of processes. And I think they've done a pretty good job of kind of having the best of

both worlds where I only speak for our company. I don't know to what extent it's like this for other portfolio companies, pardon me. We certainly feel like we have the autonomy and room to run and to, you know, feel like a startup whilst

living within this broader thing, right? And so we have the benefit of sort of structures and there's, you know, HR processes and you know, finance handles payroll and so there's all that kind of stuff that normally, you just don't expect in a startup like, you know, onboarding and helping onboarding like, you know, what are you talking about if you're

in like a five person product? Yeah, I don't know exactly. And so we have to the benefit of some of that structure and then also have the benefit of like, they kind of let us operate and do what we want to do. And we'd let them know what we're up to. And you know, so far, I haven't felt over pressure to do something that we weren't thinking we were going to do anyway. And the other benefit too is like, these guys have a fountain of knowledge and experience in software and SaaS

businesses. And across the portfolio, we've got access to huge amounts of help, like, both on an internal team basis. So like there's a marketing team and a product team. We need to get like a designer to help with product work or we need you know, we got a lot of help from the internal marketing team on

optimizing pay per click and content and SEO. But then across the different portfolio companies, you know, just reaching out to one or the other, it could be a founder or there's a CEO one of the other companies or it might just be like a head of some, you know, team. Like I reached out to the head of sales at Pipeline. It's one of the other portfolio

companies. They're a CRM company, just asking them about sales and setting up you know, we're thinking about we don't have any outbound sales, but just trying to understand how are they doing that? Or you know, support talking to someone like, you know, how can you, you know, manage support and all these different things. So it's just been a huge learning

experience working with them. And it hasn't felt like, you know, you need to suddenly there's this kind of, you know, the board coming in and simulating into some sort of like process. You know, that's ultimately like enterprise-y bureaucratic in nature. So we haven't felt that at all, which is awesome.

interesting. And it's something that I was kind of afraid of that, as a founder of a business. I didn't want other people to interact with me. I wanted to build my own thing, right? Which is why we never hired. It was so bizarre. We was just Danielle, my co founder and girlfriend and I, together running this business, never really hiring anybody having 1000s of customers trying desperately to keep them under control, then we sold the business and we transitioned it

over. And all of a sudden, there was this interconnected group of also hundreds of people just doing the work together much better than we would do it alone. It was a humbling experience for me as an indie hacker to see that this was an

option. And as you said, the cofounders of Rewardful, they probably might also feel like this and they're probably right to feel like in their state of how they want to build a business, just in my perspective and opened my eyes to that there is a way past the isolated indie hacker experience into a much more collaborative, bigger system. But that still allows you to act individually. That's really cool to see how well that worked for you. I guess it depends on the private equity

company you work with, right? Not every company will give you that much leeway.

with my baby kind of thing, right? And yeah, so I think like, you'd want to be careful and do your due diligence if you're, you know, an indie hacker looking to sell your SaaS product or whatever, to make sure that they're not going to just, you know, ruin what you've created or just like make that process, you know, stressful. And, yeah, like, I think it's

definitely something that people should consider. As I've been in the machine now myself, I've been thinking like, oh, if I was ever to do this, I'd want to stick around kind of as long as I'm learning stuff because I've just learned a huge amount, you know, just kind of seeing the way these other companies are

run. And I have access to a lot of sort of metric type information and a lot of these different companies and seeing the things they're doing and benchmarking and seeing like, okay, like, you know, this is how much revenue they're making per employee. And, okay, this is how much they're spending on their PPC. And, okay, like, the CRM industry is very different from like, our industry. The customers are different, their go to market and kind of benchmarking these different

things. And it's just been, you know, I think education, you know, I'm sure getting, you know, bought out is probably the primary driver. But like, just learning and personal growth as an entrepreneur, I think, is a huge reason to join one of these types of groups. And, yeah, definitely, I think it's a worthwhile option to look out for people.

But the learning along the way and keeping learning beyond, that is more important for just to have a continued life of achievement or just to feel fulfilled, have passion of purpose, that still needs to happen. Because if you just stop working on the product, somebody buys it from you. Now you have millions. What are you going to do? You're not going to sit on the beach, right? That is the illusion of entrepreneurship is that you're going to retract completely from life and just

sip daiquiris every day. That's not going to happen. You still need to, you have this passion, you can actually mobilize this passion, you want to keep mobilizing that passion. So it's really cool to see that you're getting this without the existential risk of having somebody destroy your baby,

that's really cool. For you, this is a great situation. And one thing that you said earlier that I find almost hilariously fitting is that you're kind of you got referred into your spots for a company that does referral or helps other people with referral systems for you to be constantly referred into a job.

It's really, really fitting. I would like to talk about referrals a little bit because from what I understand your target market is indie hackers, people like us, people like me, people who are building businesses and I guess many people don't really understand the value of a referral system or an affiliate system. And I would like to, I guess, give you the opportunity to convince me that my next SaaS business should definitely have either affiliates or a referral system or both. So try that.

paying people a commission. Typically, it means like, you're paying them like a credit or something like that, right? So imagine Feedback Panda, if you had a customer referral program and you know, customer A refers customer B to join. You'll give them like, maybe a free month or something like that. And you would credit them, you know, so that, like, there's no exchange

of cash. There's no commission. Customers, you know, they obviously, it varies depending on the industry, but they oftentimes can't be bothered with like signing up to your affiliate program and you know, getting paid out and Pay Pal and all this kind of stuff, right? So that's customer referral program. Affiliate Program is I'm an affiliate and I want to make money and I'm, you know, maybe I've got like a blog or I'm an influencer or something like that. I'm trying to

monetize my audience. I'll go looking for affiliate programs to join, where basically, I can refer customers to these businesses and they're going to pay me in commissions cold, hard cash, right? Rewardful enables both situations. Customer referral programs is a little bit more complex in terms of the installation and sort of building of it. Because there's more interaction in terms of, you know, doing a credit within

Stripes, API and this kind of stuff, right? Affiliate Programs is much easier to set up within Rewardful and whoever you're going with. And so in terms of why you want to use either of these, word of mouth marketing is a very effective way, maybe the most effective way of getting customers. Anecdotally, even beside our affiliate program, a huge amount of customers that Rewardful gets, as people just talking about us on Twitter. Someone asks like, I want to set up a, you know,

affiliate program. Who should I use? And someone chimes in and says, you know, checkout Rewardful. And so just word of mouth is very powerful. And so if you can incentivize people to refer customers to you, that's a great model, right? You're rewarding your existing customers for bringing in new customers. The new customers know that if this person is an existing customer, well, they're not going to refer me to something that they don't want to use and so that social proof

you know that speaks volumes, right? And then in terms of affiliate programs, they work a little bit differently. The principles are the same in terms of word of mouth is valuable. But you know, probably people might be a little bit more guarded when an affiliate says you know, check out this product. Everyone knows you know, influencers now like you know, hashtag ad or whatever they've, you know, if they're

doing an Instagram post or tweet or whatever. But it might not be as impactful in terms of, you know, people might be a little more skeptical if an influencer is recommending something. But you understand this. You know, the Twitter audience guy and building relationship that an influencer or anyone with an audience, they have social capital with that audience. And they can drive commercial behavior, right? You know, recommend some sort of product if it's a fit in terms of

whatever their you know, expertise is, right? Like, if you were to become an affiliate for Typefully, that's a customer of ours. They've got an affiliate program. And you were to recommend this is a Twitter tool, it's a perfect fit in terms of your audience. That would probably perform quite well. And you'd probably make some decent money off of it and Typefully gets customers that are, you know, that are within their ideal customer profile and so forth, right? So it's a good

fit in that perspective. In terms of some numbers, that might be interesting. It varies greatly, obviously, from business to business, industry to industry. But typically what we'll see is for a business that is up and running and generating revenues already, typically, you'll see anywhere from 5 to 15% added to your MRR. In some cases can be higher. And then obviously, in some cases, it doesn't work for some businesses or they don't make it work because you don't put in the

effort to run the program. And so if you're already up and running, it's just a great channel to add to your marketing mix. And it's just like leaving money on the table by not, you know, operating an affiliate program. Obviously, there's a bit of work to do. We can talk about that in a bit in terms of best practice and how to make it worth your while. But it really is just like a great channel to add. There's also another factor to take into consideration is launching a SaaS or any kind of

launching any kind of business, right? You've operated in the course world and info product world. And that's an industry where we have a lot of customers in that space as well. That's a space where a launch really works quite well, right? Like building a hype to something and then releasing it at launch. And then, you know, either you remove whatever the sort of promotion is or you remove it from the market, that's a common

thing. And so if you can launch with a group of affiliates behind you, you can expand your reach and get much more people into that sales process. And we've seen some ridiculous stories of people launching SaaS products. The case study that's actually on our website. And it's something we've got, if people might see our ads on LinkedIn and YouTube for this particular case study. A customer of ours called Commonly and they launched, I can't remember exactly when it was

2020 or 2019. But they launched and within their first week, they hit $54,000 in MRR and that was with one or two affiliates that were kind of perfectly placed within their market. Caveat like you know, disclaimer etc like, results will vary and don't expect you know, not everyone should expect that. It really comes down to the quality of the affiliates. We had another case. I can't say who they are because we haven't like they haven't agreed to give us a case study and that kind of

thing. But we had one customer back in March. And they launched their business in I think it was like the first or second week of March and by the end of the month, they had hit $800,000 in sales, from zero to 800,000 in like two or three weeks and then it like it drastically kind of tapered off from that. You know it's a real kind of classic launch where it's like peak and then it kind of trickles off to you know some kind of more

normal level. But like this, we've seen some insane stories and sort of in terms of people launching both SaaS and info product type businesses using their affiliate programs and so yeah that's kind of the pitch to like why you should set up an affiliate program. It's not easy to have those type of results or even just to run an affiliate program but it's not

complicated. Like there's some pretty simple principles to adhere to and but yeah like any SaaS business that is in a product led you know self serve SaaS type of model should be considering adding it to their marketing mix for sure. Yeah

the platform. So that's going to, you know, I think three people, you get a free month because we wanted to have a multiplier in there. And then each of these people that came on also got their first month for free as a double sided incentive. And we can talk about the specifics in a second. I just want to get back to what you were saying about SaaS businesses, launching with an affiliate system, which is the

other side of what you offer. I've seen this done extremely successfully in several products over the last couple of weeks and months. In fact, over the last couple of weeks, I talked to two indie hackers on this podcast. One of them was Tony Dinh, who had launched Black Magic, which is also a Twitter tool with an affiliate system. And it was quite successful. And I think just last week, you know, on this show, I talked to Louis Pereira, who launched Audio Pen, which is a ChatGPT

based audio to summary conversion tool. That's a very basic way of describing it. It's really cool, got to product of the day, second product of the week and fourth product of the month on Product Hunt, got a lot of initial success, also launched with an affiliate system and made significant cash just from that by having people be affiliates that are really aligned with his audience. And that's something I wanted to talk to you about because I have a horror story here. Maybe

that's a bit strong of a term. But earlier today, I got an email by a company that I have never heard of before. And they just told me how they would love for me to be an affiliate for their product, just click here and you become part of my affiliate system. That was kind of their pitch in that email. And I was looking at that email. And I was thinking, like, I would have probably been interested in this company if they hadn't just tried to push me into the role of an

affiliate. So I think there are ways to do it really well. I'm looking at Louis and I'm looking at Tony and how they started their journey with the affiliate system and ways to do it not well at all, which seems to be a cold email sent to a massive amount of people asking them to join the affiliate system. So how do you find the right people? As a SaaS entrepreneur who wants to have affiliates to send this to without breaking trust? Like, that's what happened to me today in that

email. I don't trust this company. They just want to make money off me and my reach. That's how I felt. So I'm not going to get it. Again, I'm not going to go for that. On the other side as a founder, how do I get the right people? And how do I build trust with people so that they becomereliable and trustworthy affiliates?

your results, right? So the good news with this is it means you don't need a lot of affiliates to see actual results, if you can find the right affiliates. So it's following this kind of classic power law, right? Like where you've got a huge amount of results from small number of people and then it kind of this long tail, the long tail is valuable. Like there's value to be had there. And I would say though, like it's probably more worth investing in, like these more kind of power or higher

influence type of affiliates. That's where the value really is. And it really is just about trying to build relationships with these people, right? So the advice I commonly give to people is, first step is to identify your ideal affiliate profile. So in marketing and sales, you talk about like your ideal customer profile, right? Like who's the ideal customer you want to go after? For us indie hacker is one of our two sort of main ICPs

ideal customer profiles. And so for an ideal affiliate profile, you got to figure out okay, for my product, the market that I'm in, who are the people that my customers are engaging with, right? And so that example I gave earlier of Typefully and that's probably like a pretty pretty good fit in terms of audience, right? And so like if I was Typefully, what I would do is first step is identify that ideal profile. Second step is start doing research to put together a list of people that

fit in within this profile. What I've done in the past is I've gone to places like Upwork or Fiverr. And get them to do the research because it's kind of it's time intensive. And if you've got the budget for it, you can find virtual assistants that are quite affordable. And you know, put together a spreadsheet with all the different sort of data points

you're trying to find from about the people. So like, you know, name, website, email address, twitter handle, number of followers, etc, etc, etc. And do like 10 of them and then go to Upwork and say, okay, I want you to find me as many more of these people as possible. Here's kind of the profile I'm looking for.

Go research for two hours and then come back to me and show me what you've got, look at what they've got, you know, give your feedback to kind of refine their search and then send them back at it. And, you know, get them to research as many as they can find or as many as you can, you know afford within your budget. And now you've got your list of people that you're going to reach out to. Then the next step is the outbound outreach

process. And this is where you want to be really careful, like you don't want, even if you are doing cold email, there's a way to do cold email that feels better and less greasy than other ways, right? And the way I would and I'm no cold email expert, but the way I would categorize it is like, there's certain elements of the outreach you're going to do that are somewhat formulaic and then other elements of it that are going to be personalized. And so you got to kind of figure out,

like, what those are, right? And actually do a little bit of research on all of these different people that you're planning to reach out to. And the bigger the audience is for these people you're reaching out, the more time you're going to want to spend to try and win them over. And so if I was trying to sell some, if I was Typefully and I was trying to recruit you as an affiliate, I'd be like, okay, like, this guy is like, perfect in terms of audience, match and relevance.

So like maybe we just take it off to the cold email and we try to build that relationship in a different way, right? And actually start going to try and engage with them, you know, follow them on Twitter and start like, you know, your courses talk about like how to build these relationships with with people, right? You know, try not to be quite so, don't be quite so transparent in your transactionalness, right? Like, actually try and build relationships with partners. So

that's what you're doing. You're trying to build partnerships. And it's worth the time to do that with people that can drive those results, you know, that 99/1 rule I talked about. Like, okay, those people that are in that 1%, like, take the time to build those relationships. Look at it as more of like a partnership as opposed to just this very transactional affiliate type relationship. One of the things, one of the questions that we get from a lot of prospective customers is do

you guys have a network? And so there's a lot of affiliate networks out there where they do both the affiliate tracking and management as well as they've got a network of affiliates. So you think back in the day, like Clickbank and commission junction and these different places where it's more of this marketplace of products and affiliates. So we have a lot of prospective customers who come to us and say like, oh, do you

have a network? Oh, how am I going to find affiliates? And in that there's this misconception, there's this false assumption that the value and value is in like these transactional relationships. Oh, people will find me on the network and they'll come and promote my product. That is true, like people will find you and maybe they'll sign up for your program. But they might not be the people that you want to be promoting your product. They might be promoting your product

in a way that you don't like. You don't know them. They're totally faceless. And there's all sorts of kind of gaming that people can kind of do that you don't want them to do. And so the quality of affiliates you get from these networks is not like you're not going to find Arvid one of these networks, right? Like the way you're gonna find Arvid as a partner is through trying to actually build a relationship with them, right? Like, you know, any like market that you're in, you're in a

community right? I come back to this kind of analogy in my head over and over and over again. When it comes to business, it's like in sports. And for people who've played competitive sports we'll get this, where, you know, if you're in a sport you're competing. And even though all your opponents there that are in this community, you're all part of the same community. You go to

the same tournaments or the same leagues or whatever. And you see each other day in day out and you become friends with these people, even though they're your competitors. And a market is quite similar. All the people that are operating in this market, it's the same sort of thing, it's a community. And the people who are very transactional aren't just coming

into a market because they want to make money. The people who've been in that community forever and are kind of the mainstays and the sort of stayed members of the community, they'll sniff these people out in just like, in a heartbeat. And they'll just be like, okay, like, I'm gonna stay away from those people because like, like, they're not good actors within the space. And so this email you got, it gave you that feeling of like, oh, here's an interloper. This person is a blow and they're not

part of my community. Otherwise, like, they wouldn't have engaged with me in this way. And you can kind of sniff that out. And so if you're just going to be really transactional and just like sent a spam to a bunch of people and not put any research into who they are and your outreach, they're going to smell that out, right? And so at least make the effort to try and make them feel like, you know, you're worth my time. That's the way

that I would go and try and the way I would think about it. You know position it in your mind that I'm trying to build relationships with people. For those really kind of, you know, more high influence type of partners. And then there's other kind of more passive ways that you can get just sort of the, you know, the generic people coming in trying your program.

the least possible transactional to get there. It's just an interesting observation. And the community centric approach is also something that I've personally felt in the Twitter course space, for example, like you mentioned the course that I have. I compete with a lot of people who talk about building audiences on Twitter, but we all know each other. And there was a moment when Daniel Vassallo, the guy who has one of the biggest Twitter courses out there. I was talking to him a lot after

recording mine and I was saying, hey, Daniel. I'm gonna compete with you a little bit on this. I hope you don't mind. And I said that in a Twitter DM because we are connected and we talk all the time. And he said, hey, I said what I want to say. Now you say what you want to say. And now we are both affiliates off each other on Gumroad. Like he recommends mine. I recommend his. In my course materials, I list like three or four different Twitter courses by other people because I know they

list mine. Because we all know that in this space, the more we can combine our knowledge, the better it will be for the person taking it in. It's a very community centric approach and just trying to transact in there, that would not fly. So perfect description of that space.

district. And there's some markets where it's like a nightclub district where you don't want to go to the bar that has no other bars around it. You want to go to the nightclub district and you go to a bar there and it's been an hour and then you go to the next bar and you know, people bar hop. Info products are very much like that, right? Where, like, you know, you said one thing and then Danny said another thing

and Justin Jackson says another thing or whatever, right? And just because you take one course doesn't mean it doesn't preclude you from taking another course because they have different perspectives on things and different things that you can learn. So you see a lot of people in the info product space that promote each other's you know, at face value looks like directly competing products, but they'll promote each other.

alternative product to your customers. As you have a lot of indie hackers as a customer, does that raise any special challenges around that particular kind of behavior as well?

lot of word of mouth. And that's hugely beneficial for us. I would say it's probably, it's a difficult one to actually do attribution to but I'm fairly confident is probably, you know, our largest if or at least one of our largest sources of customers. The other side of that sword is when things go wrong or people are frustrated and they take to Twitter, then you deal with the wrath of that on the other side, where we had

a thing recently about affiliate fraud. And basically what people were doing was using affiliate programs to bid on brand terms on Google. And this is one of those things. So this idea of like, you know, getting, you know, high quality affiliates versus kind of transactional affiliates. And this is something a transactional affiliate is going to do. They don't care about you. They just want to make money. And the way

to do that is to bid on their brand terms, right? And so let's say like Feedback Panda, you would imagine if you Google Feedback Panda, that's the first result. In Google, you're gonna have the number one result for your brand term. And so why would you bet on your own brand term? You're already at the top of Google. And so an affiliate will come in and they'll join your affiliate program and then bid on your brand term and they rank above your organic result. And people will sign up through

that. And so they're then getting a cut, they're getting like 20-30% depending on what your commission rate is, of all those sales. And the math tends to work because it's cheap to bid on the brand terms because nobody else is putting on those brand terms. Anyways, there was kind of a rash of this happening across our customer base and people took to Twitter to complain about this and got a lot of attention because there's some sort of big named indie hackers that were tweeting about

this. The upshot of that is, you know, we get ideas for new features for fraud, protection, and things like that that we're working on and sort of hacks that people can do to protect themselves against this kind of stuff. That's the only thing I've seen that, you know, it's kind of that double edged sword of dealing in the indie hacker space.

professionally used any tools. And like I said, I built all of this myself. I'm really happy that you shared all of these insights into particularly affiliate marketing because I am both a SaaS founder and a info product owner and to see the slight differences between what a recurring revenue business needs and what a info product business needs, that is really, really helpful. Thank you so much for coming on the show here today and sharing all of these insights with me and my

viewers/listeners. Where do you want people to go and find out more about you and Rewardful?

think on Twitter, we're @getRewardful. And then yeah, come and consume our content. And we'll do our best to educate you on how to set up an affiliate program.

this situation. You're a founder who's built a really solid SaaS product, you acquire customers, and the whole thing is generating consistent monthly revenue. The problem is that you're not growing for whatever reason, maybe lack of focus or lack of skill or just plain lack of interest and you feel stuck. What should you do? Well, the story that I would like to hear is that you buckled down and somehow reignited that fire within. You got past yourself and the cliches and you started

working on rather than just in the business. You start building this audience you always wanted to build and you move out of your comfort zone and start sales and marketing, the scary stuff. And six months down the road, you've tripled your revenue. Reality, unfortunately, isn't that simple. Situations may be different for every founder who's facing this crossroad. And too many times, the story ends up being one of inaction and stagnation until the business becomes less

valuable, which is bad or worse, worthless. And that is really bad. So if you find yourself here, where your story is likely headed down a similar road, I offer you a third option. Consider selling your business on acquire.com. Capitalizing on the value of your time is a pretty smart move and acquire.com is free to list. They've helped hundreds of founders already. Go to try.acquire.com/arvid and see for yourself if this is the right option for you at this time. It doesn't hurt to check.

Thank you for listening to The Bootstrapped Founder today. You can find me on Twitter @arvidkahl. And you'll find my books and my Twitter course there as well. If Twitter is still around, then you know find me on Twitter. If you want to support me outside of that, please subscribe to my YouTube channel, get the podcast in your podcast player of choice and leave a rating and a review by going to (http://ratethispodcast.com/founder). It really makes a massive

difference to show this show to more people. Any of the things that I just mentioned will help me, so thanks for listening. Thanks for taking action. Have a wonderful day. Bye bye