00:00:13:09 - 00:00:30:21
Unknown
So today you have myself. Who's going to be hosting? My name is Olly. I work for a win and we have Matt would hear from. Hello partner founder as well. Hello. Thank you for coming. And if it isn't obvious, lessons from losing was essentially born out of the idea that a win really does get a kick out of it when our customers win.

00:00:31:01 - 00:00:58:10
Unknown
And we love to celebrate that. But far too often do we find that people really do just focus in on that winning moment, and they kind of tend to ignore all those lessons that come from the stumbling blocks, the failures from that idea of losing. So we had this idea that we would approach people, that we saw a successful founders, business owners, people in the affiliate industry and beyond that have really stood out to us and zone in on those moments in the hope that we would learn something from it.

00:00:58:12 - 00:01:28:01
Unknown
And today we have Matt. When we sat down to do our briefing call, we got pretty excited. Matt has probably one of the most eclectic career histories that I've ever seen at uni. Affiliate marketing consultant graduation. There was Tescos and Abattoir, English teacher and Digital Nomad. But then things really got going. So you set up a system limited where you went solo and you co-founded existing affiliate management, you co-founded Voucher Cloud and Gift Cloud with an exit to Vodafone.

00:01:28:02 - 00:01:55:00
Unknown
You founded a for you. You found a creator. First you found a hello partner. I mean, if we don't learn something from today pressures on. So I mean talk to me about that over that eclectic career. What do you think the biggest lesson you've learned is? Oh, gosh. I mean, I think what I quite like to do is start with my origin, actually, because I think, like you said, I've been in this industry longer than some of you in this room being alive.

00:01:55:00 - 00:02:15:11
Unknown
And that's quite scary. Thought, you know, I was at university and you kind of put into that room where you kind of put in the attributes, what you like doing your skills, and it spews out a career for you. And I remember mine was a country estate manager, and it probably would have been a lot healthier, right, than the affiliate marketing.

00:02:15:11 - 00:02:37:12
Unknown
But affiliate marketing just wasn't a career, right? It wasn't a career choice. You know, when I was at university, Affiliate Window didn't exist. I believe it was founded in the year 2000 by Kevin Brown. So I searched on the web and I kind of thought, how do I make money online? You know, I had some friends that had bought domain names and were very early adopters.

00:02:37:13 - 00:03:05:04
Unknown
And I came across an ad and it was from a network and it said, earn money whilst you sleep. And I thought, oh, that's compelling, isn't it? I mean, if you can earn money while you sleep and this was 25 plus years ago, so I thought, this is cool. So I found Affiliate Window. Eventually I think I had a two digit affiliate ID number somewhere still, and I found my offers, which was a CPA program and it was £0.60.

00:03:05:05 - 00:03:26:18
Unknown
Right. Get £0.60 for a lead Jen. I thought, this is good. So I've just got to convince my mate at uni, my mates. I don't even have more than one right to sign up to this deal, give their data a way to win a year's worth of pizza or holiday. So I kind of plastered it on the boards at the university, on the forums, emailed, probably broke every rule in the book.

00:03:26:20 - 00:03:46:12
Unknown
Not that we had many rules, and I think in a field of marketing 25 years ago, and then the sales started coming in, you log into your dashboard, you affiliate dashboard, and 60 came in, and that happened to be the pint of Pretty Diabolical Foster's in the student union bar. So I set myself that target. Right. I'm going to pay from around for my affiliate marketing activity.

00:03:46:12 - 00:04:07:03
Unknown
And that's kind of when I got hooked and I was at my final year at Union, I thought, what hell do I do? Do I want to be a state manager? I got an offer to be a graduate at Tesco. Com thankfully I didn't accept that because they went pretty bad. So I went traveling and that's what I did.

00:04:07:03 - 00:04:29:19
Unknown
But I had four months to prove to myself that I could do this affiliate stuff. And my parents were like, get a job, you know, don't do this. What are you doing in your room on your computer building these websites? And the first website I built was something called It's Just for fun UK. I mean, don't look at it now because it probably doesn't exist, but it's very literal.

00:04:29:20 - 00:04:53:19
Unknown
I thought, let's do this. How do I how do I optimize? How do I get this design going? Put some affiliate links in, get it ranked in Google. So I did that and then I thought, okay, there's got to be other people doing this as well. So then I started contacting Kevin at an and I kind of helped Kevin in a way with the community we built, which was affiliates for you.

00:04:53:21 - 00:05:27:06
Unknown
Affiliates for you was like the Mumsnet of the affiliate industry 20 years ago when forums were big. And I genuinely, I think the community as a whole can be applauded for the fact that they really helped the early adopter networks to evolve in the first instances, because it was an instant feedback mechanism for them. You know, there were CEOs of networks that would have their executive assistants with a report landing on Monday morning and what happened on the forum over the weekend because the affiliates were so powerful back then.

00:05:27:08 - 00:05:48:10
Unknown
So anyway, I had four months to prove it. I like I said, I worked in Tesco, I did night shifts in an abattoir. And I'll tell you what, if you're packing pork chops, six pork chops into a tray for eight hours, that gives you real time to focus on what you're doing and kind of like what you want to do in life as well.

00:05:48:12 - 00:06:05:16
Unknown
So I did that and I did some consultancy. Someone found me through a philosophy and said, look, we want to start a mobile phone affiliate program. And I thought, okay, I can do this, right? Why not? So I had my affiliate consultant hat on. I'd never done it before for what do I do? And I said, how much do you charge?

00:06:05:18 - 00:06:34:14
Unknown
And I was like, God, hasn't they £200, £200 a day after going. Right. So yeah, that's fine. But then actually what I'm going to say is I'd like also 20 pounds for every sale, any affiliate I enjoy juicy and that I'll tell you what that little negotiation play that one sentence 100 x my revenue because I was able to introduce this mobile phone client that I built their affiliate program up from an affiliate first focus.

00:06:34:16 - 00:06:52:24
Unknown
The first thing I did was to ensure all our affiliates had their own 800 numbers back then, right? This was a long time ago, but at least they were tracking. They weren't leaking into someone else's thing. And and BT at the time, all the broadband sales or the mobile phone contracts would go to the call center and they would lose the commission.

00:06:53:04 - 00:07:19:10
Unknown
So the affiliate program launched. It was applauded. We became a top two mobile phone supplier up against stylus phone back in the day in Carphone Warehouse. I think both of those are gone, but they won the network, so I did that. And at that time I also met a developer called David, and David was he was lived in Aberdare in Wales, and he was an Agra phobic.

00:07:19:11 - 00:07:47:15
Unknown
I never left the house, the perfect PHP developer for me because we got on really well. I couldn't code at all, right? I could execute, but I couldn't code. And we somehow got together a keyword list from one of the paid search engines. I think it was e spotting a long time ago. Or we're going. I'm not sure if anyone remembers those, but I got a keyword list of a million keywords, and what we did together is we spewed out 30 million pages into Google.

00:07:47:17 - 00:08:11:04
Unknown
We thought, you know, let's try and get them ranked. And nothing happens for weeks and weeks. And I thought, oh, this is this is a failure. But I left it. I learned some money from my consulting business, I went traveling, I did a bit of teaching in Thailand. And for anyone that's taught in somewhere like Thailand, you don't really teach.

00:08:11:05 - 00:08:37:15
Unknown
You play hangman and sing Bryan Adams I think it was. And I met these guys in Kotel when I did my paddy, and they convinced me to go to Sydney and we got a flat in Randwick, which is near Shiva or Bondi Beach, and the guys there went out selling American Express door to door. They were kind of doing manual labor.

00:08:37:16 - 00:08:58:21
Unknown
You know, I'm definitely not suitable or suited to manual labor. So I did what came naturally to me, which was to gauge the department store and pick up a laptop. And I sat there in the flat watching the Australian equivalent of Lorraine Kelly in the morning, and just optimized these websites, and I could see the revenue was starting to come in.

00:08:58:21 - 00:09:22:16
Unknown
Now it's a few hundred pounds a day, something like that. Pretty decent enough for me to be traveling around, you know, Thailand and Vietnam and Australia. And then I got to Fiji, and I remember it very well, because we only had a generator that was on for an hour a day and a satellite connection. That was the slowest thing you could ever have again 20 years ago.

00:09:22:20 - 00:09:42:02
Unknown
And I logged in and something had happened a couple of weeks prior that we were sort of top three position for thousands and thousands of keywords in the search engines, and it was like, wow, this is the moment. But I couldn't do anything about it, right? I was I'd seen the chief of the islands, we were buying stuff.

00:09:42:02 - 00:10:07:24
Unknown
We were drinking mud shots as we really did you. But long story short, I came back home and I thought, yes, this could be a career, right? That my parents. I'd had to prove them wrong, that I could do it, that I didn't need to go to a graduate position and have the confidence to then start my first proper affiliate business.

00:10:08:01 - 00:10:26:04
Unknown
Did you manage to make money while she slept? I did, yeah, come on. I mean, I stayed in some fancier hotels than maybe I would have done prior, but. Yeah. And do you think that was maybe the start of, like, I looked for your career? It's all founding, your co-founding or your founding. Do you think that's where it all started?

00:10:26:06 - 00:10:46:02
Unknown
I think so I knew that, you know, I've never actually worked for anybody else apart from the the stint at Voucher Cloud which which if we've got time go on to I've always wanted to work for myself I think having the freedom to do so. And I think there's some consultants in the room here, you know, you can set how you work, what you do.

00:10:46:04 - 00:11:10:05
Unknown
The work life balance is super important as well. I think as I get older I find that much more important. You know, I'm 47 now, so I see my generation. That makes me sound incredibly old, but we didn't have the work life balance, I think, as we do now and know the importance of it. But I remember coming back and I started existing limited, and the first thing I did thought, what the hell do we do?

00:11:10:06 - 00:11:28:03
Unknown
Right? And I looked at the US market and they were doing cashback and coupon. So I thought, well, let's do it. And I didn't just do one, I did both, right. And that's part of my, my, my something in me I do too much. And that's, that's one of the lessons that I've certainly learned that you have to focus.

00:11:28:06 - 00:11:54:10
Unknown
And I absolutely didn't. So we built a product called Three Fivers. Again, very literal name. It was a cashback sites. I built it with David Everyone, Aberdare, but on a retainer. We weren't co-founders and I think that was probably one of my biggest regrets is is probably going it alone at that time. You know, it's fresh out of uni, 19 years old, something like that.

00:11:54:11 - 00:12:16:13
Unknown
And I didn't have the support mechanism that I think I needed at the time. You know, free fivers became a product that had well over a million members. This was before Top Cashback existed. It took top cash back five years to get to a million members. We did it in under 12 months. At the time, I didn't know what I had, right?

00:12:16:14 - 00:12:39:06
Unknown
I was fleeting from one thing to another. You know, when you look at honey was purchased by PayPal and they paid about $230 for an active user. If you think what we have, then either a quid for a user, that's 1 million pound product. But I was fleeting from one thing to another, doing some voucher code sites, doing some stuff without the support.

00:12:39:06 - 00:12:59:15
Unknown
And I think if I had at the time, someone would say, Matt, just stop. Pause. You know, just think what you're doing here rather than kind of being too reactive. I would probably be in a very different position because I know that there's certain generation of kind of founders back in the early affiliate days that certainly sold their businesses.

00:12:59:17 - 00:13:27:13
Unknown
And I'm thinking like Duncan Jennings from Voucher Codes UK. So it has no for a 3040 million. You've got other founders as well that have exited successfully as well. And I think they were all co-founders. They had that support. And I think at the time I didn't I mean, from the affiliate industry from when you started to now, what do you think the biggest change that you've seen over the years has been?

00:13:27:15 - 00:14:00:10
Unknown
Yeah, well, weirdly, there hasn't been an awful amount and that sounds awful. But we were chatting just before we got on the stage. And I think right now we're at definitely at a reset moment. We have an opportunity to change the way affiliate marketing exists, and I'm quite critical of our industry sometimes because we've always opted to make it easy for entrepreneurs to build models around the last clip.

00:14:00:12 - 00:14:33:14
Unknown
So every single cashback site, every single voucher site, you know, they are generating 6,070% of network revenues. And I think possibly that's going down. It depends on which network and which country, but that's too significant. And I think we've been greedy as an industry to not enable new entrepreneurs to embrace affiliate marketing on a fair attribution, because why would you come and build a business in affiliate marketing when you know someone else is going to take the click at the end of the day, potentially?

00:14:33:15 - 00:15:02:14
Unknown
I mean, obviously there's a lot at play here and there's soft cookies in all these things, but I think having a fairer way of attributing sales, especially with the collision of the creator economy, I mean, we started Creator Fest two years ago. We had a two and a half day show at Magazine London a couple of months ago with 2000 people, you know, 600 creators in the room, incredibly bright young people who just know their craft so well.

00:15:02:15 - 00:15:37:16
Unknown
I was so impressed with their ability to kind of execute, to understand their value as well, and to build their community. You know, there's there's a lot of talk about trust as the new economy. And if we look at the creative economy is all about that trust and building that community. Whereas affiliates in the early days were very much get the customer in, make a click and they'll they go, you know, it was only until things started like thinking about CRMs and and databases and capturing the user that we kind of changed that methodology.

00:15:37:16 - 00:15:59:15
Unknown
And, you know, there's obviously very different styles of affiliate. You know, you've got your white hat, your black hat, your gray hat, all slightly different strategies. So for a company that needs to stay alive as things do change, what do you think they should focus on? I think just look at the way users are shopping nowadays, right? I mean, in affiliate you mean or in terms of I mean anything, right?

00:15:59:17 - 00:16:19:12
Unknown
You know, we were talking about the introduction of AI, the last clicks going. It's about influence, you know, even maybe if the funnel disappears, you know, where should companies focus in if they if they want to keep doing that, of building that trust. Well, look at your partnership base. I mean, that's got to be the thing. I mean, we live as in a couple of we in seven weeks time.

00:16:19:12 - 00:16:37:13
Unknown
And the main theme for that is very much not necessarily the funnel is dead, is that there is now a new ecosystem that you need to cherry pick your partners from and do it carefully, because each of them add value and each of them think, and I'm not saying that people that, you know, cash back doesn't have a place.

00:16:37:14 - 00:17:01:24
Unknown
It absolutely does in some programs as long as you monitor it. But I'm also kind of quite critical about some of the innovations coming out of those, those incentives. You know, when I looked at Voucher Cloud, which we founded, we kind of played hard. We took risks. You know, I was able to own the product and build a product with 30, 40 people in a way that I knew would work.

00:17:01:24 - 00:17:31:08
Unknown
And it did work. We had a bit of luck along the way, but we launched in 20 countries. We built a team from 20 to over 100. We had investment from Vodafone, which changed the game, of course, but alongside that became challenges. And when you're an entrepreneur and you kind of like used to working for your yourself, suddenly having board meetings with Vodafone, which is very political.

00:17:31:10 - 00:17:56:22
Unknown
Any big corporate company like that, that's political. Right? It was a game changer and it just didn't suit myself. And it was it was at a time where probably one of the biggest lessons I learned is kind of I was there for four years and whilst I enjoyed it immensely and it was a really good opportunity, I also really struggled at that time because it was kind of I'd left my business in the hands of somebody else to build.

00:17:57:02 - 00:18:25:05
Unknown
Although I co-founded it, it was kind of a different beast altogether, and it just affected me immensely. My mental health was was poor, and I ultimately had to make a choice. Right. Do I continue at Voucher Cloud, which was, you know, really booming? We'd exited, we wanted out. It was far too long, by the way, and I thought, you know, my happiness is more important than the paycheck at the end of the day.

00:18:25:11 - 00:18:55:16
Unknown
So at the same time I'd left my business, which was a few expo back then, without innovating, without changing. Right. Affiliate marketing does evolve. The way that the partners come in changes immensely too. And we had the business and I came back into and I thought, shit, we're we're not in a good position. I hadn't been close enough to the figures and close enough to the detail, and also close enough to the industry to some extent to understand where we were.

00:18:55:17 - 00:19:14:13
Unknown
And it got so bad that I had to meet my accountants and think, what do we do about this? You know, do we have to liquidate the company? And it was only because I was able to inject some money in from the voucher cloud exit. That was to save the event business idea. But you know, the event business I'd never intended to build, right?

00:19:14:19 - 00:19:38:07
Unknown
I hadn't organized event in my life. I was an affiliate, but I built a community. We had the forum and we had a the vent in London. We had 30 grand behind the bar from the network. So remember the biggest but I'd ever. Right. And we had the pitch and piano and Bishopsgate and 700 people turned up. And it was the first event of its kind for the affiliate community in the UK, and it was just clicked.

00:19:38:11 - 00:20:08:08
Unknown
Everybody knew what they were doing, everybody got affiliate marketing, and that's when we realized we needed to do something different. And, you know, I learned from my previous mistakes and hired a proper consultant called Brian, who came down to Bristol, and I was just like a sponge for three days. And I remember taking him into Excel because we did our first event there and they were kind of rubbing their hands, you know, kind of thinking, oh, we're going to we're going to take this guy for a lot of money.

00:20:08:08 - 00:20:30:20
Unknown
And Brian came in and their faces just dropped. And he, you know, he saved me easily six figures in that one meeting alone. So getting advice from from someone that's been there and done it before was absolutely invaluable. Do you think that's the biggest bit advice you would give to someone looking to start a business? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, don't it can be a lonely thing.

00:20:30:21 - 00:20:55:05
Unknown
You know, I found it quite lonely as a solo business owner. It's only recently, over the past couple of years, that I've kind of had non exits, which I think have been incredibly valuable. But I would absolutely go out to you and say if you you've got your family and your friends, but they're very different kind of support mechanism to people in a business or in an industry that kind of been there and done that before.

00:20:55:05 - 00:21:19:08
Unknown
And I think, you know, I'm happy to offer some advice if it's valuable at all to anyone here, you know, over a coffee. But having someone just as a weekly check in is so invaluable and definitely worth your time. We we always try and aim to end this podcast on a positive note, because sometimes it can obviously get into like some of the darker moments of business and all the rest of it.

00:21:19:08 - 00:22:01:13
Unknown
But I guess the final question is what is winning mean for you now? I think as I've got older, winning is, you know, I've got two young kids, five and seven. We relocated to Cornwall from Bristol 4 or 5 years ago. For me, it's building a team that can take on what I started and having that proper work life balance again, because sometimes you don't get that as as a solo founder, you work hard, you work late, and happiness and winning to me is knowing that I'm I'm there as a father for my kids.

00:22:01:15 - 00:22:20:10
Unknown
And they remember finally after them. Oh good answer Matt. Thank you so much. We are at time. Thank you everyone for joining. If you would like to listen to any of the other episodes or watch them on YouTube, you can scan this QR code. But from me to you and Matt, once again, thank you so much. Thank you.

00:22:20:12 - 00:22:23:09
Unknown
That's all for this special live edition of lessons from losing,

00:22:23:10 - 00:22:54:10
Unknown
Recorded at a win Stink Tank UK in London. For our final episode, we're staying at Think Tank, but moving away from the stage and into the recording studio we set up at the venue. My colleague Jessica Smith, a regional agency lead, sits down with Jamie Bruce and Gary Winter, co-founders of Rev Wise, who decided to start a business together after knowing each other for barely a month, they'll explore what made them take that chance, what they've learned about making a co-founder relationship work, and the mistakes and growing pains that followed.

00:22:54:10 - 00:23:14:15
Unknown
As Rev Wise went from two people to a team of around 50. If you've enjoyed listening, make sure you're subscribe so you don't miss the final episode. And if you'd like to watch the full video interviews from across the series, just head over to a wins YouTube channel. Until next time, thanks for listening and join us again for one final lesson from losing.