My Experience Working for a Startup - Know Your Worth (17)
So... I've had a handful of FB campaigns on profitable auto-pilot for a while, and I was quickly growing less efficient.
My free-time turned less towards optimizations/scaling and more towards gaming & going out. I decided that I wanted a taste of the 9-5 (affiliate full-time, here) and slap a new 'marketing' title to my resume.
I apply around, and get in with a startup based out of an incubator in San Francisco (1355 Market St, the Twitter building, to be exact). I'd heard around the woodwork that there were a few STM'ers also working from the "Runway" (the name of the floor). PM me if you work there, i'd love to chat over coffee in the city.
My initial reaction was complete culture shock. A football-field size floor filled with what looked to be 10% of Apple's revenue from hipsters and established businessmen. The atmosphere was something out of a movie: young and hungry twenty-year-olds just grinding it out. I was overwhelmed with motivation.
I'll cut-out the messy drama, but I will say that a startup can be a great place to start building your skills/career. It's an open-minded collaboration where anything is tried and a broad strategical approach. You're essentially a white-collar private detective, trying to solve a riddle. The problem I encountered was: the vast majority of these guys are glorified trust-fund babies throwing dollar bills at a dart board and using common-sensical (contrast from data-driven) analysis to justify their aim. This specific "startup" had been "starting up" for a total of 4 years, still being in series-A funding.
That should've been my first red flag.
To cut to the warm center of this apple pie, they were looking for a "1 month testing period" where they'd require my advertising services for 8 hours/day, 5 days/week, 4 weeks in total without paying a DIME. Of course, I was told this after i'd revamped their entire ads manager and set them up with ads that were already seeing 80% cheaper cpc's and a better defined target audience based on the specific niche of customers they needed. I almost laughed out loud when I saw how serious they were.
They wanted 160 hours of a "trial period" to see if I was worth what they would pay me. Mind you, their only source of clients would come from Facebook, as their product demands a very specific audience that only Facebook could provide (or a targeted email list).
Their current advertiser was someone who was a first-time FB ads user who had zero clue what to do.
In essence, they had a ship that they needed to sail across the Pacific, and their captain was a first-time captain who was being compensated well. They then look to hire an experienced captain (I have over $500k in FB Ads Spend in total) who has the know-how to drive their ship, and they see fit to request this captain work for free as to ensure that his pioneering is better than that of the first-timer.
Mind you, my ads were already seeing a $0.40 CPC, whereas their current were averaging $2.00-2.50, and had spent over $3,000 at this price point thus far. In the first 7 hours of being with them, i'd reduced their ad costs by 560%, and the $3,000 in ad spend could've been reduced to a mere $535 for the equivalent # of clicks.
In any case, I made my offer final and contingent upon a paid offer. They didn't bite, and i'm sure will piggy-back my handout ads i'd created for them until the next young fool comes and teaches them how to drive their ship.
My only purpose for this thread was to raise awareness for you all. These marketing skills you have aren't only applicable in an affiliate sense. Degree or not, there are businesses paying hundreds of thousands each month, driven by first-time sailors. If you're in a rut, throw yourself out there and see who bites. Clean your resume up and don't think of yourself as "just an affiliate". These hours we spend grinding, optimizing, and coding are valuable skill-sets to have. We monitor and optimize both front-end and back-end metrics, of which almost zero degree-driven marketers have experience with, and thus their ads are a great showing of this.
Know your worth. NEVER consider yourself as "just an affiliate". We are the TRUE young and hungry. Go stack that FUCKING money.
interesting story. did you try any other start ups?
Awesome story mate!
It is definitely true that most experienced affiliate marketers underestimate the applicability of their skills to the wider marketplace, e.g. start-ups, media agencies, etc.
And of course... if you are good at something, don't do it for free. A start-up unwilling to invest in recruiting talented staff is going nowhere fast.
I've been on both sides and what I can say is that it's very common of startup founders, and employees as well, to be extremely arrogant even without the proper results.
As a first time founder, I always wanted things as cheaply as possible and expected we were the next huge thing.
When shifting to professional IT services, we initially wanted to work with startups, which is a nightmare. It opened my eyes how bad my attitude was as well. Very little respect for the value, wanting everything as cheap as possible. This was in Vienna, and from what I know, San Francisco/Silicon Valley is a whole different level of arrogance.
There's a chance that startup didn't even understand how much proof of your value what you did is.
There's a nice explanation that I first heard from Dan Ariely, about how people judge worth:
Imagine there are 2 locksmiths that you hire. The first one does his job in 10 minutes and charges you $100. The second one breaks his ass off and finishes his job in 2 hours. He also charges $100. Which is the better value?
People are usually outraged by the first for charging so much for so little of his time. But they forget how much skill it takes to be so efficient. They would much rather pay the clearly more incompetent person because it looks like the job is harder.
Originally Posted by manusit
Why didn't you just offer to work for them as a performance based agency instead of an employee?
My experience in the startup industry and in fact most businesses in general is that people don't care about your claims or what results you say you are able to deliver. Do you think the hungry business development people and high level salesmen go in promising they will deliver a superior branding experience? That they'll deliver sub-par results? No, they promise the world and more -- and better yet they're far better at selling in person than most affiliates on here will be out of the gate.
Yes it seems stupid, but i would make a pretty fair wager that in a job interview: if you pit an affiliate who is like "I run a 4-figure a day profit campaign on Facebook all by myself" with a pencil-pushing marketing puppet who has been at BBDO and Ogilvy for 2 years, the latter would win out almost every single time even if technically his skills were far inferior in the area of direct response marketing.
All I am saying is that before you run out and think your direct response marketing skills gained from AM will directly translate into a logical sell for most companies, you should probably ask yourself how a startup CEO will feel when you tell him his product is utter garbage and that there are 40 things that he is doing wrong. If you were Mark Zuckerberg telling him that, he would probably bow his head, look at your info and actually weigh if your statements have any validity to them. Meanwhile, if you are Mr. no-real-world-experience and trying to push your "superior" opinion onto him, cognitive dissonance will make it more likely that he will think you are some sort of crazy hack than someone who knows what they're talking about.
In other words, expecting people to buy your "skills" without having developed the necessary sales skills to really sell and influence someone in person is the same thing an advertiser does when he believes he will create an app that will "sell itself." If you log onto any CPA network, you'll see that the existence of our industry means that almost nothing in this world "sells itself."
Originally Posted by manusit
Originally Posted by cmdeal
Originally Posted by timtetra
As affiliates, we're programmed to be profit driven. Your average marketing graduate isn't. The difference between an affiliate working for a company/startup and a glorified textbook is that our goal, in essence, is to grow this company and have them making a profit in doing so. Their objective is to expect and AIM to grow at a loss for the first year, when WE know that doesn't have to be the case.
But yes, absolutely. Don't walk into an interview with your $X,XXX/day campaigns thinking they'll get wet just because you say you're capable of 1, 2, and 3. In my case, I specifically reduced their advertising costs within 7 hours by 560%. If that doesn't sell itself, then I don't know what does.
Originally Posted by mindovermoney
Most start ups have no interest in marketing or data driven feedback on there product. They want to build what they think is awesome in a nice little bubble and then release it to the world and it's sheer awesomeness is what will spread it.
They see marketing as evil, easy and a waste of time for a "good" product. After all they themselves are immune to marketing and only chose products based on value and ethics of the company selling the product. Marketing doesn't play into any purchase decision they make. /s
Start ups really don't like product feedback from sales/marketing guys that you know, actually talk with the customers that buy.
OP I'd go ahead and send them a $700 invoice for your work and if they don't pay you report them to the CDIR - there is nothing legal in CA about having someone spend 7 hours working in your ad account and not paying them. Even if you signed something ahead of time saying you were doing it for free that's a violation of California law unless you classify as an intern, and optimizing there main ad campaign would in no way shape or form qualify as intern work. Asking you to create sample ads for a theoretical campaign to see your skills they wouldn't have to pay for, you creating actual ads for there actual product? CDIR will fuck them hard for doing that if they refuse to pay you anything.
You might not need the money but I'd do it if I were you simply to send a message to the stuck up people running that company that think marketing is worthless. As you said they are mostly glorified trust fund babies and are smug as hell even though they haven't actually accomplished something.
hey just one comment on this thats somewhat relevant
When your selling to a business marketing skills like this, never talk about how much money they are going to save. No manager ever really truly cares about saving money. What people care much more about its making MORE money.
Look at these two phrases and tell me which one makes you want to buy:
a: I can cut your cost per customer 50%
b: For the exact same monthly spend I can double your current revenue
It's two sides of the same coin but I can almost guarantee whatever fast talking salesman the "social media agency" they use had them imagining the dollar signs!
Originally Posted by rdigital100
This is important in affiliate marketing, and this is important if you are trying to sell yourself to a company for a job.
There are many different startups in the world, and millions of ways to classify them. One useful way, however is to separate them into revenue (top line) focused and profit (bottom line) focused.
rdigital is right, that if the startup is a topline focused one (e.g. Snapchat, Uber, etc), trying to sell them on the fact that they can save money by hiring you is not really going to be as appealing as trying to sell them on the fact that they can double revenue. This is because at that stage in that startup's evolution, the company is valued primarily on a multiple of revenue and revenue growth basis.
Originally Posted by cmdeal
Throwing blind money at an ad on facebook with a google image will still increase revenue, so in that example i'd argue that talking about price per acquisition is a huge factor, and arguably most important.
1 Strategy Worth Trying......
Pit one company against another.
*Read this gem from a Richard Branson book. He use to call advertisers and tell them he only had 1 spot left in his magazine and it was either going to coke or pepsi, who ever answered his call first got the ad spot*
I use to do this with SEO contracts back in the day. Instead of trying to get clients by impressing them with my IM skills - I went an alternate route.
I use to frame the sale by saying I was picking a client to work with (I don't take everyone on) and i was interested in taking on a client from their niche. I would tell them straight up that I have meetings booked with the top 3-4 competitors in their space and I was going to drive leads for one of them. Usually most of them were eager to meet before i sat down with their competitors.
Lastly, in person to person sales, I have found that pushing the prospect back makes them want you more. When i pushed back I got a lot better response. For example saying things like this really worked:
"We do charge $5,000 for site build / SEO, were not cheap because we know what we are doing, perhaps we aren't the right caliber of agency to be dealing with, try calling x,x,x they are cheaper than us, but they don't do the same work". Most prospects were thrown off by the fact that we would even suggest a competitor. It usually ended up in a sale, very rarely did it ever back fire and in those scenarios I didn't really mind because i didn't like working with penny pinching clients
So to sum it up, perhaps you would have got a bit better response had you lit a fire under their ass.
Just tell them you were taking meetings with their biggest competitors and you were going to drive leads for someone in their space, hopefully it would be for them, if not their competitor.
To speak to CMDeals point, the stage of a company really does matter. Some companies don't have the affiliate mindset of profitability. They have their own motives (series financing, exit plans, licensing their tech,etc). Each startup has their own gameplan / monetization strategy.
I think you could get big $$$ if you approached maybe 10-15 companies, refined your pitch, and worked to find one that aligned with your profit driven mindset.
Just cause one lame startup tried to exploit you doesn't mean you can't strike a million dollar rev share deal with 1 of the 1000 companies in SF.
Last Idea: Google search who the biggest FB marketing consultants in SF ---> Go to their site and look for the clients section -------> Take one of the clients names and Google search "Client X vs" -----> Once you find out who their clients biggest competitor is contact them ---------> call them and say "Hey your competitor X, is using a company to consult on their FB campaigns, I can help you beat them...here is how we can do it."
Originally Posted by cmdeal
Hiring is tough so I can understand a trial.. tough 4 weeks seems ridiculous.. But, if they interviewed your correctly they should have know you got results in what did last and there's a good chance you could get similar for them..
My concern would be.. why would someone who can make thousands per day as an affiliate want to work for someone else? To me it would mean either they are lying or they're up to something.
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