1. What is your company in 2–5 words?
AffiliateFinder.ai – AI-powered affiliate recruitment software
2. Why is now the time for your company to exist?
Affiliate and influencer programs is one of the MOST profitable revenue channels for SaaS businesses – but everyone complains about how hard it is to find good affiliates and influencers to promote them. It takes a LOT of manual work.
So, we save you 20+ hours per week by finding every affiliate currently promoting your competitors so you can recruit them, as well as all the top influencers and creators in your niche to build partnerships with.
3. What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?
We’re a team of people who all have a LOT of experience in affiliate marketing – either as affiliate marketers ourselves, or as affiliate managers. We get the industry.
We know how time-consuming it is to search for new affiliates all the time – and we literally built AffiliateFinder.ai to solve our own problem while running our affiliate management agency! We know what we want in a software like this, so we feel we know exactly how to build this to solve other people having similar problems.
4. If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?
Probably building a different startup! I really enjoy the game, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
5. At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your metrics?
Product feedback, customer growth, and retention. If we don’t have a good product, people will not complete their 7-day free trial, and we won’t grow customers or revenue. Everything we’re focused on now is around retention, and not just building something they’ll use once to get a list of affiliates, but how to make this incredibly helpful as an ongoing companion for all your partner management work.
6. In a few sentences, what do you offer to whom?
AffiliateFinder.ai helps affiliate, influencer, and partnerships teams 3x their affiliate recruitment by finding all the best-fit potential affiliates for them – and ordering them by priority so they can start with the absolute top partners.
We save you 20+ hours per week of boring, manual research – freeing you up to focus on building those relationships with affiliates so they can send you sales while you sleep.
It works great, no matter what type of business you are: B2B SaaS, AI, DTC/ecom, travel, iGaming, fintech and trading – we have many customers across all types of businesses.
7. What’s most exciting about your traction to date?
We’re used by several of the largest companies in the world. It’s always validating when multi-billion dollar companies use your tool and find it valuable enough to use and pay for!
And, surprisingly, some of our first customers were forward-thinking managers at these huge companies – they saw our product and instantly understood how it could help them scale their affiliate revenue and outcompete their competition.
8. Where do you think your growth will be next year?
We’d like to reach 2,000 paying customers by the end of next year, and we’re building to hit that right now.
If we can help those 2,000 brands reach their goals by recruiting more partners – then we’ll be extremely happy. We have a lot of great products and features we want to build out, and we’re very excited to build these for the world.
9. Tell us about your first paying customer and revenue expectations over the next year.
It took us a while to get our first paying customer – a good few months from launch.
We originally launched with a freemium option where you’d get your first 15 affiliates for free, and then you had to upgrade yourself to get the full version. But nobody was upgrading!
Once we switched to a 7-day free trial, the customers started rolling in.
10. What’s your biggest threat?
We’re an AI-powered tool, and we use AI to filter out bad-fit affiliates – and recommend the good fits. But, naturally, if there is an extremely advanced AI that can eventually do this all, then this is a huge threat to us. But, we’re working on custom data to make us the most useful tool in affiliate marketing. That hopefully keeps our competitive advantage as AI improves.
This startup founder interview template is based on HackerNoon Founder & CEO David Smooke’s ten questions for startup founders.
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Would you like to take a stab at answering some of these questions? The link for the template is HERE.
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