Anyone working with SmashRevenue? You might want to read this :( (14)
Anyone working with SmashRevenue? You might want to read this :(
Hope it wasnt posted yet, here is a blog post made yesterday by one of the founders of smashrevenue - an affiliate network focused mostly on adult offers.
Looks like they are done.
"From having Millions to having $200 in my pocket
Many of you wonder what has happened the last 5 or 6 months and I am here to give you a detailed explanation to clear the air and put an end to all the rumors.
In the middle of 2015 SMASHRevenue was a thriving company. It was stable, not exactly growing like a year ago, but affiliates have been well catered to and payments have always been on time.
I can’t take credit for it – but Tuan can. We used to be equal partners but there is no doubt that he held everything together and I single handedly ended screwing it up.
So lets back up for a second before anyone gets confused. Tuan sold his equity in SMASH to a 3rd party while things where still running fine and dandy at the offices of SMASH. What followed after his leave, has nothing to do with him or anything he could control in any way, even if he wanted to. Nothing but props for Tuan who was at that time my best friend and business partner but I managed to screw that up as well.
I was the only publicly known face left behind SMASH and simply went from one pitfall into another. Unlike other people I am not very good at separating my emotions from my business, therefor I had no qualms about calling out – a certain advertiser – for their unethical and illegal sexual preferences in their private life.
This obviously caused a huge drama between myself and the advertiser in question. The advertiser in question felt threatened for what ever reason – maybe because one of my old/ex-friends killed a cop in his Ferrari and never got convicted? I don’t know, not that I am friends with the person in question anymore but that’s one of the few things I can think of.
I didn’t expect things to go exactly the way they did but the new, 33% partners of SMASH brought on a couple of affiliate managers and had plans to revamp the network, put it on CAKE and all that kind of stuff. I agreed to it and basically threw in the towel at this point as I wasn’t a majority shareholder as per contract anymore.
Now in the meantime while SMASH was ‘being worked on’ – I went into bed with a certain group of Trial advertisers. Things seemed to go well and decent money was made (on paper) in a matter of weeks, then one of our partners decided it was a good idea to install a script on our sites (without our knowledge), which basically acted like a key-logger. This caused a domino effect on all our banks which I am going to explain you in detail now.
If you have no processing history it’s quite hard to get direct merchant accounts, therefor you go with a processing company that will simply place your account under an existing one and blend all transactions in. Now remember the key-logger I mentioned earlier?
The partner with the key logger had no interest to make this a long lasting venture like the rest of us – he simply sucked down every credit card that ever hit our join form and charged the hell out of it. This had a domino effect on our entire business. Of course we got hit by a wave of chargebacks, which caused our bank to fold, so we cascaded (PCI compliant!) all our existing customer to another bank and the same thing kept happening over and over again. After we went through roughly 12 banks, we finally realized what was going on, but by that time it was already too late. I had put up all my personal assets to pay for affiliates, network sales, fulfilment, call center and so on. Every time we received a payout we had to use it to pay another network which fell behind because Bank A, B, C or D decided not to pay us, based on the domino effect. The sums we are talking here are in the $200,000/day range. So not exactly chump-change.
(nothing of it got paid out!)
Regardless, I still believed in the business and thought it could be resurrected but I was already a dead man walking but refused to realize it. You have all seen my collection of cars on Facebook and how I used to live, but I sold all of my cars in a matter of days to raise around $1.200,000 to pay our bills and move forward.
Now we are talking about about having put around $5M -$6M USD from my own money into the business already, just to keep the lights the on with little to no return on our investment and every sane person would have put a stop to it, but I believed that we came so far and that was our only way to make things right. I worked relentlessly, obsessed and with nothing else in mind but to make it work. Christmas and New Years I sat at home eating McDonalds and wondering how to pay the next bill. I started to panic – which is never a good – and made some irrational decisions while trying to keep my sanity but by that time, it was already over.
In the process of liquidating everything from paintings to dinner tables..
I simply trusted the wrong people to handle our money and believed what others advised me to do and we ultimately got screwed over by every bank we ever worked with.
Now everyone thinks, why don’t you sue them?
Of course we are going after them but how long will that take? Months, years? It’s not like everyone is US based and it’s a clear cut throat case – if it was easy like that, I wouldn’t have to worry if that’s going to be my last blog post as I don’t know if I can afford my internet bill by the end of the month or not.
Now I can do only one thing and that is to right my wrongs. Unlike other networks and advertisers out there, I am not running and hiding from anyone. I have been extremely transparent with everyone I have worked with and will continue to do so.
It’s business, nothing personal and everyone (besides me) knows that, but I made it my personal mission – as I was the front of both operations – to pay everyone back. Even it wasn’t intentional and there are others to blame, I signed the deals and I am not passing the blame to duck and hide.
Of course I can’t just sit here and wait for a miracle to happen, so I have to get my ass back up and start hammering away to have a realistic chance to pay all my debts in a timely manner. I am not asking for your sympathy here or anything, I am just explaining all of you in detail what happened and I am literally stripping my pants down in front of you.
Unlike other people who ran networks or trial offers before, I didn’t see this downfall coming and put myself a nice nest egg aside. I literally don’t have a pot to piss in anymore.
I don’t know what I will do, but I will do everything I can to get back on my feet and pay every cent that we owe, regardless if you are an ex-SMASH affiliate or one of our network partners.
My apologies to everyone who got caught up in this mess, but I am here to make it right and sort things out!
Thanks for taking the time to read this and I hope it clears some of the rumors out there and again, I am not asking for your sympathy or empathy.
I am just explaining you the chain of events and the domino effect it had on our businesses and myself.
I have lost everything I had in the last 5 months and I have honestly no idea right now how I will get through the next month – but I have been broke before and worked my way up to where I was 5 months ago – therefor I still have hope and keep my head up high to make it all back again.
My haters will have a field day today and might get a good laugh out of it, but I am not entering any pissing matches. I’ll focus my energy on keeping a roof over my head and paying back whats owed. That’s all I’ll be doing until the last cent is paid off.
Thanks again for all your support over the years, it won’t be forgotten and I won’t let you down!
Again, nothing but props for Tuan for trying hard to keep everything together and he had absolutely nothing to do with the downfall of SMASH. I want to make this a clear point, not only because I owe it to him but because I value him as a friend, regardless if we haven’t talked in weeks or months.
PS: There is so much more to all of it – most certainly the nutra part but the post will give you an idea of what went on and how things went down.
http://www.jayknowscash.com/2016/03/...ns-200-pocket/
Yeah I read that, crazy story!
oh that's a sad story.
you got to know the people you are partner with that the moral of the story.
easy to say one of the hardest things to do .
can only hope that all the affiliates who need to get pay will somehow get their money.
I used to work for Jay for almost 3 years and still have nothing but respect for him. I was doing most of his day to day tasks, from coding to design to passing things on to contractors and dealing with some of his affiliates or his campaigns or edit and proof read his blog posts since english isn’t his first language.
We didn’t get to meet often as he had a hectic lifestyle and he had a very close circle of people he trusted, including me with some of his most important aspects of his business and personal life. He let me work from home and didn’t give me a fixed schedule but if he needed something done it had to be done no matter what. He would just call me and say he need this and that and by the end of the day it had to be in his inbox. Then there were weeks without any tasks or word from him at all. He would just do his thing.
From the times I met him at clubs, dinner, meetings, at his home or other places he was always a relative humble guy. Not what you would expect if you followed him on instagram. If you made millions or just introduced yourself as a newbie. He would talk to you anyway or offered anyone to join his table almost every time I saw him. Lots of people took advantage of that too but thats a different story.
The Jay I got to know was a very generous but also very sharp guy. I won’t tell you about his personal life but the guy went through a lot over the years.. health issues, family.. Two things I can tell you are that there was never any grey area for him. It was black or white and nothing in between. Now we all see what that meant. If he saw his friends cheating on their girlfriends, he stopped trusting them. If you fuck your girlfriend over you will end up fucking your friends over too. Those are the things he would say.
Personally I don’t know what happened in the last 7 to 8 months but after after my salary didn’t come in, i knew something was up.
The guy was always on point. Every meeting he took me to he showed up early.
I don’t know why but he was totally into his new project which turned out to be Nutra trials and refused to let go from it. Obsession would be an understatement. What followed is written by himself in his blog post…
We still live on the same street (i think?) but I haven’t seen him or any of his or his friends cars in quite a while.
You could hear them a mile away and neighbours would complain when he and his friends would meet up on weekends or at midnight. Racing cars was the only thing he did besides work from what I know.
Others that know him, probably know that he always stuck to his own circle of friends and didn’t socialise much outside of his circle of (rich)-thai friends.
Saying rich as they pay 300 or 400% import tax on cars here and normal people can’t afford to pay a million or two for an Aventador and all the other toys he had. If you went to see his parking lot it looked better than a motorshow if he had friends over. For the people that know Thailand can imagine what jobs those kind of guys had. If they even worked at all. I never asked but if there was a problem it got ‘taken care’ of very quickly.
In my opinion he must have been taken for a ride, fallen into a ponzi scheme or something else must have happened. For a guy like him to admit that he is broke and give up everything he owns doesn’t only make him lose face in front of his thai friends but also tells you that he is a no bullshit type of guy.
It takes lots of balls for someone like him to come out like that. If you live in Thailand you know that people will kill to not lose face.
I wish him best of luck and hope he sends me a text or email some day. Not saying the guy is a saint but he isn't or wasn't the bad guy some make him out to be.
Brian
Don't personally know the guy but that's one of the saddest IM stories I've heard. We all have our ups and downs, that's a part of the business..but to go to absolutely nothing must be very hard to take. I truly hope he works his way up again. Looks like he genuinely got f'ed over.
Its a sad story one way or another, I just hope there are not many affiliates left unpaid after this fiasco, thats what I hate to see the most 
Wow. Very majorly interesting stories. It makes me happy i dont run my own rebill offers.
Can anyone here connect me with jay? I recently started my own network, we are weak in dick pill type offers, and believe there are ways i can help him out with his situation. Just ping him, and pm me contact info and ill take it from there.
Jay was a good guy, too bad this happened to him. Hate when people take advantage of good people.
Sad to hear this, he seems to be a good guy with most excellent taste in cars and poontang.
He did fuck it up tho.. it wasn't exactly an external factor beyond control (like a meteor killing the dinosaurs) bringing this whole operation down.
He had signals, he just didn't read them properly or rather react to them properly.
It is kinda of a recurring theme in IM and business in general.
Hell I've been on a similar roller-coaster twice, but I've learned from it and now I am able to say this:
1) Never ever pump personal money to cover business loss (or if you still are inclined to do that, define a limit and honor it - same mentality as with daytrading stocks - define a stop-loss)
2) Don't borrow money to business or people.
3) Don't be greedy.
4) When you hit the bottom, force yourself to mentally detach from the loss. Focus on the baby steps. Getting daily, weekly, monthly goals done is the priority. The only goal now is completing the mini steps. When they are all complete you've done a good job for the day/week/month, and you move to next period and thats all that matters.
Thanks for posting this, Matuloo. I always wondered what happened to SMASH as I was an affiliate with them. I heard Jay had written about why they had to close down the network on his blog but I didn't get a chance to read it before he took down his site. Jay was my AM on SMASH, only really talked to him twice but he was a really cool guy, gave me some good tips. I had XXX amount in SMASH but didn't end up getting paid, but it's all good. I now understand what he went through. Wherever he may be right now I wish him the best.
Don't know him personally. Based on his tone, I am sure he will be back sooner or later.
Jay, if you read this, you have a good soul. You shall pass this wave. Be strong.
Originally Posted by victor s
I'm sure they were making mad money at some point but... all their operations went down pretty fast, looks like Tuan was still able to leave he ship before it sunk, I think he has some new network now, tho not sure how well he does. It's a sad story anyways, but such is live ... shit happens.
Any updates about these guys? I think Tuan started his own network, what about Jay?
Originally Posted by erikgyepes
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