Dustin Howes: 0:25

Hey folks, welcome to Affiliate Nerd Out. I am your Nurturator, dustin Howe. Spread that good word about Affiliate. You're going to find me here every Tuesday and Thursday at 1215 Pacific Doing a live show with whoever I'm interviewing, and today my guest is Noah Tucker, ceo over at Social Snowball. Welcome to the Nurtutorium, noah. Thank you for having me Awesome we don't want to be too much of a nerd.

Dustin Howes: 0:55

We don't go way back. This is our first time meeting, but I know your team and I know your product. I've heard good things and I found your guys's platform very interesting, so I'm glad you could be a part of this today.

Noah Tucker: 1:07

I'm glad to hear that. Yeah, I'm glad you've heard good things.

Dustin Howes: 1:10

All right, If you'd like to be in Noah's seat, come be my guest. Go to DustinHowes. ecom slash, nerd and drop a idea about Affiliate that you want to nerd out about our question of the day, the quid, if you will. What is the latest trend you're seeing out there in Influencerville? I want to hear you got any good tidbits here. What are you seeing? What's a good trend you're seeing right now, Noah?

Noah Tucker: 1:37

I think a lot of brands are starting to realize that Influencer could be more of like a performance channel than maybe they were considering before. I think Influencer has historically been like more of like a top of funnel awareness channel and brands now are partnering with influencers as affiliates more and optimizing their influencer programs and partnerships for attributable revenue, which is obviously great because brands are trying to find new customer acquisition channels and this could be that and I think more and more brands are starting to realize that and it's really awesome to see.

Dustin Howes: 2:11

That's a great point. I think the influencer, the creator realm, is definitely moving down the conversion funnel these days, and social platforms are making it easier for them to make a living and influencers to make a living. That's a really great point. That question of the day again what is the latest trend that you are seeing out there in Influencerville? But without further ado, noah, who are you?

Noah Tucker: 2:42

So I am the founder of a company called Social Snowball, which is an affiliate and referral marketing platform for e-commerce brands. So if you wanted to partner with influencers as affiliates, or even turn your own customers into affiliates, we provide the software to automate the onboarding of affiliates track their sales, give them codes and links, give them a dashboard to track their sales, send commission payouts, make sure codes aren't leaking to coupon sites, integrate with your emails and gifts and reward tiers and all the management really that goes into maintaining these partnerships and making it a real acquisition channel for your brand.

Dustin Howes: 3:14

Beautiful, I love everything you said there. I really want to make a note and come back to that leaking of coupons. That sounds really interesting. I want to get into that a little bit deeper later on. So good, good, getting to know you a little bit. Tell us about your career path, essentially in affiliate. How did you get started?

Noah Tucker: 3:37

Sure, well, I started on the brand side of the e-commerce world so I was like very much in the marketing world of e-commerce brands. So I was mostly consulting, built some of my own stores, did a lot in media buying as well as building ambassador and affiliate programs. So really how I got started was kind of on the user end of other affiliate softwares. At the time I just kind of was frustrated with the clunkiness and lack of automation and a lot of affiliate softwares I was using. I think at the time I just didn't really understand why they felt outdated and disconnected.

Noah Tucker: 4:10

I think now, looking back, I think they were built for a different type of affiliate than a lot of brands are partnering with today. So when I'm talking about affiliate, I'm usually picturing influencers, creators, ambassadors, and the time where a lot of these legacy affiliate platforms came out, the type of affiliates brands were partnering with was exclusively like publishers and list of goals, reviews, bloggers, media buyers, and so when I was trying to onboard influencers and creators and even my own customers into these legacy softwares built for publishers, it was just a nightmare of a user experience and after a lot of frustration with those tools, that's kind of what led to the idea that there should probably be an affiliate platform for this newer, modern type of affiliate that brands are excited to partner with, and that's sort of how the idea started.

Dustin Howes: 4:55

Oh, that is awesome. You're out there fixing the need. Let's talk about social snowball and what you've built out here. First off, name origin story. What's going on here?

Noah Tucker: 5:05

Yeah, so I mean honestly, when I was deciding a name, I just wanted to think of a word that could explain that it can grow on autopilot, because it's like you know your customers and your own audience is becoming affiliates, so then they're referring more customers and then those customers become affiliates and it just like creates this sort of snowball effect. So I was toying around with like snowball. Also like domino virus was a contender. This is pre COVID, so I'm thankful I didn't choose that name. Wildfire also probably wouldn't have been a great name, but that was one of the ones on the Google doc.

Noah Tucker: 5:38

Eventually, you know, it came to a domain availability challenge and everything that was just like one word dot com, dot co or dot IO was taken. But so I had to kind of expand it. But I liked snowball and I wanted to think like, okay, what, how is the snowball growing? What is causing the snowball to snowball? And it's social sharing, whether it's social media, sharing with friends, that is what is creating this snowball. So there came the name social snowball and the dot com was also taken. So we took the dot IO and here we are today.

Dustin Howes: 6:08

Oh, that's, that's a great story. I love it. You accidentally chose like the least dangerous, like super event that could possibly be a tragedy Right, like you don't hear too many stories of like an avalanche that murdered thousands of people, a few might die but like social snowball, and I love the concept of it, it is growing as you, as you build more partnerships. All right, so Great story. Tell us what you guys do and who you're serving. Yeah.

Noah Tucker: 6:49

So I mean our customers are all Ecommerce brands, so our functionality is very focused around enabling these partnerships for Ecommerce brands. Um, as far as the platform itself, I mean we help with everything from sourcing influencers, whether those are, you know, finding new influencers on Instagram and TikTok, or even, like I was saying before, turning your customers into influencers and partnering with them as affiliates, everywhere through attribution and tracking. Um, like I said, ensuring codes are in the coupon sites, creating commission payouts, actually sending payments to the affiliates directly. Uh, gifting product and seeding, creating reward tiers and bonuses. Integrating with email for communication. Um, basically, just the end to end management that you would need so that you aren't using spreadsheets and PayPal and a bunch of other manual kind of duct tape together processes to facilitate a program like this. Maybe if you have one or two influencers, you could manage that, but at scale, obviously, that's like a full time job. Having to make codes manually and create spreadsheets and send, you know, payouts through PayPal. It's just a nightmare of an experience. So that's that's actually what we do.

Dustin Howes: 7:51

Okay, and uh, tell me more about like the, the platform itself. Are you guys a tracking solution? Are you also helping the customers succeed in some kind of way? Like and like what? What level are you helping them succeed?

Noah Tucker: 8:09

So we are a software product, so we're not like an agency that's actually used, like we're not fulfilling the service. We are a software product but we do have a lot of resources to help brands and their influencer managers, their affiliate teams, execute strategy. Well, um so, like we create a lot of content around, like we have, like, high production video courses and written content around different strategies that we, you know, we have a little over 2,000 brands on the platform, so we get to see what's working, what's not working. You know what's hot right now, and we just create a lot of educational content to help brands and support them execute strategies using our software.

Dustin Howes: 8:44

Oh, excellent, so you don't do the agency work that traditional OPMs are out there doing, so, uh, you, you must point them in the right direction and somehow, uh, to get that work done and and you guys are strictly on shop. Okay, I love how you guys niche down into that and I don't even know if, if there's like a specific big commerce, like platform, like you guys, so I don't know if that exists Not that I know of, at least, um, but we'll definitely.

Noah Tucker: 9:15

we'll definitely end up branching into those other platforms as well.

Dustin Howes: 9:19

Oh okay, cool, Cool. Um, I am a. My origins come from a Volusion. I ran their affiliate program way back in the day, and so that's how I got my taste in the e-commerce space. And, um, nobody's making a platform for Volusion. At least say I can. I can guarantee that. But uh, tell us how you like found this necessity. You talked about your career and and talked about affiliate platforms being clunky for the normal day. Creator and influencer, and how like this necessity. This is why you created this platform, essentially.

Noah Tucker: 10:02

Yeah, I mean at the time like there were a few really specific pain points that existed across every other platform I tried. That was really like the main reason I wanted to start social snowball. Since we launched, we've learned from our customers all these other pain points that, uh, these brands are experiencing with other affiliate platforms and that's kind of what's guided our roadmap today. But at the time, like the two main things that were really frustrating with other affiliate platforms uh, one was paying out affiliates. So with most platforms you would have to do this manually or through PayPal or like a bank transfer, and it was a really clunky experience, not only for me on the brand side trying to send payouts, but also for the affiliates as recipients trying to redeem the payouts. It just wasn't a smooth experience. It was very limiting into how they could redeem and it took a lot of work on my end. So that was like the first thing we wanted to solve.

Noah Tucker: 10:52

And the second one was the ease of turning customers into affiliates, and we wanted customers of our brand to be in the affiliate program.

Noah Tucker: 10:58

We didn't want it to be in like a loyalty refer, a friend program, because it just wasn't driving revenue and the incentives weren't significant enough for customers to care, so we wanted to enroll them into an actual affiliate program, but the only user experience that existed to do that involved like expecting your customers to, let's say, after they make a purchase, navigate back to your site, find a sign up link in your footer navigation, go to a third party application form, fill out all this info you know, request to join the program, then wait for someone on the brand's team to approve them into the program, then they could generate their code and link and then they could start sharing, which is obviously just an unrealistic expectation of a customer to go through after.

Noah Tucker: 12:18

Like you know, the rest of your site experience and their experience with your brand is like a one click checkout super smooth, easy, everything. So it was a huge disconnect there, and so those were like the two big features that social snowball launched with I think it's what helped us get traction in the early days is turning customers into affiliates and easy payouts.

Dustin Howes: 12:39

Very nice. Yeah, the customer to affiliates. I've never understood why every company I go to to consult has some form of like refer a friend, and it is the most underutilized thing that I've ever seen in all of marketing and I instantly like suggest we just crash it and bring them over to the affiliate program. It's just never made sense. I've never seen one flourish, essentially. But like I love how you guys are solving for those customers that aren't as tech savvy as publishers out there to give them a solution to go promote the brand in a firsthand user experience. That's amazing, Exactly Awesome. So let's get into our topic of the day here, and that is, you know, leveraging creators through affiliate marketing, and let's let's take a step back and say what are creators? What are they in your mind? Are they influencers? Are the affiliates? What are creators? Good question.

Noah Tucker: 13:40

I mean there's so many words that people use interchangeably for this kind of thing. I mean a creator like to answer that specific question In my head is any individual with the capacity to create content, regardless of their following. An influencer, I think, by definition, has a following that they're creating content for, and an affiliate is any individual or entity that you're partnering with on a performance-only partnership. But they could all be interchangeable, because an influencer is a creator, because they're creating content, and you could partner with an influencer in an affiliate deal, so they could all be the same. And then there's also words like ambassador and referral word of mouth. There's so many different terms we use, but I think they all have slightly different definitions and one individual can be more than one, depending on the structure of the partnership a brand has with them, depending on if they have a following or not and those kinds of factors.

Dustin Howes: 14:39

OK, well said. And what is that affiliate creator ecosystem really look like in the Shopify world? It's not something I'm in tune with enough. I don't spend time in e-commerce. I focus on B2B and SaaS products, so I'm not in this world. What does that ecosystem look like out there? Good question.

Noah Tucker: 15:02

So there are a lot of what I call legacy affiliate platforms which are fully affiliate platforms. It is an affiliate platform that helps you facilitate affiliate partnerships, but they're really built for publishers and media buyers, like that type of affiliate, so those don't really work well for influencers. Then there's also these influencer management CRM tools that are meant just for influencers but they aren't really focused on affiliate and driving revenue. It's more just like UGC and tracking posts and social listening and all of those kinds of things. So even though it's meant for influencers and the user experience for an influencer might be intuitive, it's not really revolved around driving attributable revenue. And then, on the other hand, there is also refer a friend loyalty programs, which are meant for customers and is a smooth experience for customers, but the incentives are all loyalty based, like coupons and points, and they don't really drive a lot of revenue because of that. So that's what the existing ecosystem is.

Noah Tucker: 15:52

And then social snowball sits kind of in the middle Because although we do have a really smooth user experience for influencers as well as a really intuitive user experience for customers to be affiliates, we are fully focused on driving attributable revenue. So we're not an influencer management CRM focused around tracking posts. We're also not a refer a friend program tracking loyalty. We're also not an affiliate platform built for publishers. We're an affiliate platform built for what we call the modern affiliate, meaning customers, creators, ambassadors, influencers. So that's kind of what the ecosystem looks like without social snowball, and we sit somewhere in the middle.

Dustin Howes: 16:29

OK, got you and within your guys' platform is very collective.

Noah Tucker: 16:34

The influencers are creators, whatever you want to call them, that sit on your platform that new brands can come on and tap into, or these all individual to each brand's like entity, essentially so we do have an influencer search and discovery sourcing product, but it is a non-opt-in for the influencer, so it's just like a database of Instagram and TikTok creators that you can get their contact and phone reach out to. We do have an opt-in affiliate marketplace in the roadmap, but that doesn't exist right now.

Dustin Howes: 17:10

Ok, got you Now if I'm not a Shopify customer, but I would love your access to your influencers that are actually working in the affiliate capacity. Can I come in and check out your platform in that coming day? Yeah, we can still source influencers for non-shopify brands.

Noah Tucker: 17:26

It's just really the tracking and payouts and more like the actual platform for management that is Shopify exclusive right now, got you.

Dustin Howes: 17:36

And does your guys' platform work in conjunction with other affiliate platforms or is this like? This? Is your one-stop shop?

Noah Tucker: 17:43

It can, so I would say like if you were partnering with like publishers on Share a Sale, for example, and those publishers don't want to leave Share a Sale. Don't make them leave. Share a Sale, like Share a Sale is maybe not the greatest user experience, but if that's what publishers are used to, there's no reason to force them off of it. As far as everything under the umbrella of modern affiliates like influencer, creator, ambassador or customer all of that can live simultaneously in social snowball and you could build out separate programs with separate incentives and reward structures for each group of affiliates that you want to partner with.

Dustin Howes: 18:18

Amazing and one of those ways I, you and I connected essentially is my buddy oh no, that's not it. My buddy, ivan, reached out and he made a comment on LinkedIn highlighting your product and my product over at AfiStash and like, and I saw you repost that. But Ivan's a big fan of you guys, so naturally I'm going to, I'm going to gravitate towards you guys and I'm glad we're having this conversation today. All right back into that creator economy essentially, let's talk about those best practices for brands that can leverage their creators. What, what would you say like as a great starting?

Noah Tucker: 19:04

Sure, well I'd say. Like you know, seeding product is a great way to partner with creators and initiate a long-term partnership.

Noah Tucker: 19:12

But you define define seeding, just gifting, just straight up. Get a fine, get the creators, influencers, and gifting them product. I'd say like a best practice would be you don't want to ask for too much in return off the bat. You have to imagine influencers get hit up by a lot of brands and you want your. You don't want to just seem like you're selfish and just asking like what can I get from this? So we usually suggest that brands will reach out to these creators with like a no strings attached approach where they're either asking for nothing at all and just saying, hey, I'd love to send you a product, or just saying, like I'd love for you to send you a product and if you like it, like maybe you could post about it. But don't be like, okay, I want to send you a product. You have to do three posts. You have to follow this content brief and then we're going to I'm going to do the affiliate program.

Noah Tucker: 19:53

These are your reward tears, like if you make it to transactional like that, usually the the influencers lose interest in the beginning. But all of those things that I mentioned, that I said don't say in that initial outreach. You can implement those down the road, but this is after the influencers use your product, likes your product, post it organically about your product. Now they're already like, connected with your brand and it's a great time to then invite them to the affiliate program. You know, invite them to everything else that you might have in your program, but you don't want to just come across too strong off the bat. That's definitely a mistake I see a lot of brands making yeah, that's a that's a really great point.

Dustin Howes: 20:27

And what's the best way essentially to approach those creators? Is it, is it through DMs, where they're popular? Is it via email that you guys have access to, like as an affiliate manager, reaching out? What's my best approach? Email, the best approach.

Noah Tucker: 20:47

Dms just usually get very crowded because these people are celebrities and are like, famous to an extent right, not celebrities, but they have a following. So they get a lot of DMs from fans and sometimes your DM can get lost in that. And a lot of times these influencers also are checking their email actively because they want brand deals and they know that's where the brand deals go and they also sometimes even have like managers that are checking those emails very frequently. So I would say email is the best, not only for like as far as reply rate, but even for you on the brand or agency side. Managing this email makes it really easy to manage that scale. Dms are like a cluster, you know it's like a bit of a. It's just difficult to stay on top of. So I would recommend email for sure.

Dustin Howes: 21:30

Okay, that's what I'm accustomed to. I don't love being on a DM. I find it crowded and makes me anxious enough already. So with this approach, you made a really good point. Don't ask for too much early. Give them a gift of some sort, and that might be easy for the companies out there that have a you know $30 product. You can just gift that all day. No, no real big hurt. What if you have a big ticket item like a, like an ice bucket or like a red light sauna machine? Oh, is like you'd have to shoot for the stars, like trying to get the bigger influencers, rather than giving this to every little guy. Right, that's a really good question.

Noah Tucker: 22:15

So there's two answers that happen. One, with gifting your like actual product. You want to be just really selective. You don't want to do like a massive seating program where you're sending thousands of packages a month because that's really expensive and probably not worth it. But there are some brands that have gotten really creative with how to send a gift to an influencer. That's maybe not necessarily their actual product but is enough of their product that it could show the influencer and their audience how it works.

Noah Tucker: 22:42

For example, um, I think it was purple mattress, it was one of those magical mattress companies. I'm pretty sure it's purple. Um, they would gift so their whole thing where their mattress has had this like really interesting, like texture, like almost like uh, beehive, like that's what I was looking for honeycomb like pattern. So they would send a little cutouts of the honeycomb, like this big, to influencers at scale and the influencers could play with them. They could put eggs on it and show it not breaking. They could create videos with it. It was like a fun little toy that showcased what the actual like you know, whatever $5,000 mattress Was made out of and it was. It was like a probably a $1 gift to send to influencers and it was enough that they could talk about it and tag purple and showcase the value of the product without them, purple, having to send a mattress to everybody.

Dustin Howes: 23:29

That's smart. Uh, I like that. So, with, with. Uh like to wrap this up, this is this is an extremely important part of our role as affiliate managers and outreaching. Um, when you ask for whatever you said, don't ask for too much early because it might scare them away. You're gonna send them the gift with an email and say hey, I would love to send you this gift of our product for you to test it out. Anything else I need to add to that email? I would say that's, that's good enough for step one.

Noah Tucker: 24:00

Once they accept the gift, you're good to enroll them in your affiliate program so that they're more motivated to post. You don't even have to ask them to post necessarily. You can just say here's your code and link and we'll send you, you know, $10 every if you refer any sales. That could just be extra motivation for them to post, and they've already redeemed the gift at that point. And then, once they're in the affiliate program, once they have posted, then you know you could enroll them in like your engagement email flow Showing them other content. That's worked well. You could create like different Giveaways for performance milestones and bonuses for performance milestones, and you want to make sure you're communicating what those milestones are so they know, you know the goals that they have in their head. Um, but, yeah, so, but to answer your question, yes, I think for step one, all you want to do is get them to accept the gift. Okay, gotcha.

Dustin Howes: 24:42

Getting back into these best practices, something that comes to mind is like creating a community within the community, within the affiliate Creator group that you have. Have you found this as a is a good practice for brand? Absolutely.

Noah Tucker: 24:58

Yeah, I think some of the best programs. This is like a huge piece of it and the brands will create like a facebook group or a discord channel usually, and that will be like the home base for all their creators to communicate and collaborate, as well as for the brand to communicate to all the creators. You know, oh, this month we're doing this giveaway, oh, we're doing this bonus. Oh, look at this post that went viral. You guys should try to make up similar posts, because this you know, you don't have a ton of money if your post went viral like this, it's a great. It's a great to have like a home base for everyone to kind of congregate and communicate.

Dustin Howes: 25:33

And do you find it to be like a giving community, like the affiliate realm? Essentially we Educate and and we're very open, even if we're competitors, but on the affiliate side of things I don't know how true that is. You find like influencers and content creators Are friendly, like giving away what's working?

Noah Tucker: 25:53

often yes, because these are all fans of. They all have one thing in common which is like a connection to the brand. So usually these influencers although of course there's Excuse me, a selfish incentive for them to you know get the most sales and drive revenue. They also want to see the brand win. They also are genuinely a fan of the brand and they are part of this community. So, yeah, for the most part, I would say yes. They are friendly and collaborative.

Dustin Howes: 26:19

Awesome. Okay, any other best practices you you want to mention before we move on?

Noah Tucker: 26:25

No, I mean, I would just say like the lowest hanging fruit of all of this is turning your customers into affiliates. It's very set and forget it. So if you want, if that's like you know some, a program you're not running currently, it's an easy one to launch and it generates good results. So every brand that we onboard that's, you know, maybe has like a really robust influencer strategy, we always encourage them to also turn customers into affiliates because it only adds incremental lift to the you know, the entirety of the program.

Dustin Howes: 26:51

Yeah, that that can be a fine line to walk, though, as well. Like I, I've always been at companies where we don't send an email that says, hey, we'd love a review from you. Uh, like a day after they get the product. We wait a month before we send that email out. Right, and I think it's probably true in this capacity, like for all the customers that you have, you probably wait a little bit time for them to get familiar and love the product first, right Again?

Noah Tucker: 27:21

but you don't have to, I think sometimes just the purchase experience dopamine rush. If someone buys a product that really excited about, and right on the thank you page they get a link to share with friends. Sometimes they just take that and text it into the group chat right away, or they do throw up an Instagram story right away because they're just so excited about the brand. Obviously, that's not the case for every brand, though, and not for every customer, and we definitely have some brands that also set up a delay period where it's not even until a customer purchases twice that they'll ask for a referral, so there's a lot of different approaches.

Noah Tucker: 27:49

I wouldn't say there's a right and wrong, but we do have some brands that are correcting it with, like an immediate post purchase touch point to drive referrals.

Dustin Howes: 27:59

That's interesting. Okay, gotcha, all right, we're switching gears. I'm going to thank our sponsor the day and pay some bills over here, um, and that is Clovio my friend's over at Clovio. So every time I create an affiliate program or take hold of it, clovia is one of those first partners that I go and reach out to.

Dustin Howes: 28:21

The best reviews. As a premier content platform with over 100,000 monthly visitors and specializing in extensive review content about best in class SaaS products, its audience consists of consumers and business professionals looking for the best products and services in a specific category. The company's primary vertical is internet security, online privacy, communication, marketing, accounting, business software, computer optimization and data solutions. I love working with them. Uh, very easy people to get along with and get deals done and very affordable rates to get your foot in the door. With them. You can reach best reviews. Team over at partnerships at Cloviocom. Go check them out and I want to thank them for being a proud sponsor of the show here today.

Dustin Howes: 29:15

Um, one thing I want to get into before we wind down is the coupon leak that we were talking about. Um, this is a big problem in the affiliate world is, if you create a vanity code that is specific to one affiliate. Chances are they're going to go Well, not chances are, but a lot of the partners out there will get it on user generated content sites like a retail, me not, and put that code up and then get a bunch of credit that they don't really deserve. You guys have a solution place.

Noah Tucker: 29:51

Um, and before I even talk about the solution, it often happens that the influencer didn't intend for it to end up on a coupon site, because it's also tools like honey that will just pick it up from checkout and then put it on their own coupon site. So yeah, although it does happen intentionally, I also wanted to point out like sometimes the influencers have only the best intentions and it still gets leaked, which is just super frustrating.

Dustin Howes: 30:12

I knew that very true and I didn't need to ensue anything like that, but I know what happens out there I it's part of the influencers do do it sometimes also, but it's, it's, it's, yeah.

Noah Tucker: 30:22

So essentially we created a product called safe links, which is essentially a coupon code alternative, and it allows affiliates to share this account with their audience without the risk of a code leaking to a coupon site, and it looks just like a normal affiliate link. So affiliates would share it how they would normally share a code or link. Um, it could be customized like an affiliate link, it could be shortened like an affiliate link. But how it works is when a shopper clicks on that affiliate link and gets taken to your storefront in real time, a unique single use discount code will be created from your Shopify backend and given to the customer during their shopping session. So if I'm an affiliate and I post, you know, click my link to get a discount or swipe up here to get a discount, and the shopper goes through the link. When they get taken to the store in real time, they'll have a single use code generated for them for them to use right there in their shopping session. The next person who clicks on the same link will have a different single use code generated for them to use during their shopping session.

Noah Tucker: 31:12

So me as the affiliate, I still have a shareable mechanism that I could pass along a discount to my audience through and as the shopper right as the customer you still get the same discount. But every single code is unique to each single customer. So if any of those codes were to leak or get picked up by a coupon site, it doesn't matter because they're all single use, so there'll be no like lost revenue. And if the link itself were to get leaked onto a coupon site, we have like a huge like banned list of referring URLs. So if someone clicks a safe link from a coupon site, it won't generate a single use code. So it essentially allows all of your influencers, all of your affiliates of all kinds to share discounts at scale with their audience. And you never have to worry about a code being leaked by a coupon site and you could trust the attribution that goes through it.

Dustin Howes: 32:01

Oh, that's amazing. That's a great fix and a brilliant way to go about it. I love that theorizing and the execution that you guys done. And for a Shopify store to do that, they would have to put something on their back end to like create this memory coupons, I would assume.

Noah Tucker: 32:21

So I mean so social snowball like that. You know safe links, liz, within social snowball. So we're just a Shopify app that you would connect to the to your Shopify store. As far as the actual coupon generation, we created the coupons in like folders, so it's just a single line item in your discounts tab and then the discount the individual discounts generate under that. So it's not like going to clutter up your discounts tab and Shopify either.

Dustin Howes: 32:44

Okay, that's smart. Okay, yeah, I've never heard of such a solution anywhere else. So that's, that's brilliant, and then a great way to fix these things. Awesome to hear. Thanks for showcasing that. And now it's time for you to defend your posts. So this is something I found on your LinkedIn, and it looks like you partnered up with another tech company in Sendlane and you guys did the super trendy where blank.

Noah Tucker: 33:20

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dustin Howes: 33:21

Yeah, and did this video like? How did this idea come about between you and another founder of a different company?

Noah Tucker: 33:31

So, yeah, we've been working on an integration with Sun Lane.

Noah Tucker: 33:34

Integrating with your email service provider is a huge piece of, you know, creator and influencer affiliate marketing, so Sun Lane is a great partner of ours now and essentially, I was just with Jimmy, who's the CEO of Sun Lane, at, like you know, there was an event here in LA, so we were just hanging out at his Airbnb and having dinner and we were just sitting there thinking like how do we make this integration announcement Not like every other SAS integration out? How do we make it more exciting and how do we actually Get eyeballs and get people to care? And so we were just sitting there brainstorming and, basically, this is one of the ideas that was tossed around and we were like let's not even make the video about the integration, let's just make a funny video and then we'll say we'll announce the integration at the end of the video after people have already watched it. And that's exactly what we did and yeah, I mean it went, went as viral as an integration announcement can possibly go, so I'm happy with this.

Dustin Howes: 34:24

That's great. I've always thought about doing that as an affiliate manager and having a couple of my friends Join in with me and and do that that thing. I I don't know if it's overplayed or not, but you guys did it Well. I like the mix of it. It was. It was pretty fun. Yeah, awesome man, All right. Well, how do people connect with you?

Noah Tucker: 34:49

so LinkedIn is is a great way. Twitter is also a great way. My LinkedIn is just my name, noah Tucker, and my Twitter is at NOATUCK. I'm pretty active on both, so that'd be a great way to chat.

Dustin Howes: 35:06

Awesome, did I lose you I?

Noah Tucker: 35:11

Yeah, it got a little choppy, but I could still see you.

Dustin Howes: 35:15

Okay, cool, we're winding down anyway. No, I really appreciate your time today. Thanks for joining us and Good luck out there. I'm gonna be a fan and an affiliate partner of yours moving forward, so looking forward to working with you in the future here.

Noah Tucker: 35:31

Likewise appreciated Dustin, and thank you so much for having me. This was a ton of fun.

Dustin Howes: 35:36

Awesome, glad, glad to hear it. And for those folks out there that are affiliate managers, keep on recruiting and we'll see you out there. Take care. I.