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From $1,000,000 to Net Worth of $184,000,000 & Cover of Forbes Magazine (49)

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Congratulations on your success! Ok, one question all affiliate marketers want to know, how was the Ayahuasca experience ?

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It may seem a bit ironic to ask this on an affiliate marketing forum but I'm probably not the only one interested in this topic:

What are your plans to take your business more mainstream (outside of the AM circle), if you have any?

Could you also elaborate on this dynamic between what insiders in AM know and think of the business compared to how it's viewed by outsiders?

This is a topic that I think most people who have been into affiliate marketing only struggle with, and also why they don't see the point of building a so-called "real business".

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What an achievement! Mad Propz for what you built up!

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Congratulations! Great story!

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I could not agree more. IMO, this is one of the most powerful opportunities that AM brings to anyone who succeeds in it.

It's one of the best "muse business" models I've ever encountered.

Congrats on your success, and on becoming a role model - that's fantastic.

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Dude

How did the ayahuasca go? Any recommendations for what to bring to an aya resort? That's real high up there on my bucket list

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Tremendous!

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F*****g wowwwwww... Cheers!!

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Not too shabby!

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Hope to see you cross Billion $ valuation in few years.

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I tried to put it into words to share with everyone, but it's simply not possible. It's best to keep the experience to yourself as trying to put it into words can undermine it. What I can say, is that it was without a question the most profound and beautiful experience of my life and I feel everyone should do it at least once. I'm planning to do it again soon, found a shaman in Poland

Bring as little as possible you don't need anything and don't create any expectations. If you're doing it for the first time and want the genuine experience in a safe environment this is the best place to do it: http://www.etnikas.com/

Otherwise if you want the real hardcore authentic experience you can head to the Amazon jungle and do it. When I landed in Iquitos airport all you hear at arrivals is "Taxi? Ayahuasca? Taxi? Ayahuascha?!"

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Good Job, seeing someone from STM making it onto forbes and being worth so much. It goes to show everyone that STM has many nuggets to help people to build if they put in the time and effort.

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Congrats rob!! That's huge

PS: Fire your designer, the floor plan is missing the jacuzzi and swimming pool hahahaha

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Luv it! Congrats Rob!!!

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Absolutely, that's where most of the $230 billion in digital advertising is. That is why I took the biggest gamble of my career when I saw that Voluum tracks over $1 billion of ad spend, putting everything on our DSP (it will of course cater to affiliates as well). We opened our London office last year and I made my first strategic hire (ex managing director of Millennial Media) for this purpose late 2016. The mainstream world couldn't be more different from what I'm used to. Going after big agency and brand budgets is a totally different game. It's why we've been dropping massive budgets on exhibiting at Mobile World Congress and Dmexco sometimes just to meet with the Facebooks, Googles, Omnicom, GroupM and other big players to show them that we're serious. It involves a lot of wining and dining, networking at Cannes Lions and other events, but once you're in (hopefully soon) you are in.

Our DSP is in large part built for mainstream clients. Mainstream, but still very much performance orientated which will always be our core. We're also going after game and app developers both with our traffic, our tracking and we're going to be extending our SDK for in app attribution.

We may or may not be building a solution to compete with HasOffers and Cake? Consolidation is the name of the game.

At the same time we will never forget about affiliates and performance marketers as that is where we come from and that is where everything will head.

In this context I prefer the term Performance Marketer over Affiliate, it encompasses more. All affiliates are performance marketers. There is a negative stigma as a lot of shady shit goes down. Autoredirects, cloaking, etc but affiliates don't have as bad a rap as some think even though it only takes a few to ruin to reputation of many. It's part of the game, it's just considered part of the ad ecosystem. I even know large exchanges which at the end of certain quarters write DSPs saying that they can run otherwise illegitimate campaigns just so they can meet or exceed their quarterly targets. It really is all a game, a very complex one. Shady affiliates aren't the biggest problem though.. far from it. Fraud is what is ruining the industry for many.

Something most people are unaware of is the scale of fraud in the industry, some say it's as high as $50 billion a year, making it the most lucrative criminal activity in the world. Lucrative and virtually without legal consequence. Just late last year White Ops uncovered a $5M a day video fraud operation out of Russia. Fraudsters are always a step ahead, the reward and incentive is so incredibly high. We have a anti-fraud team in our office, and they always say that fraud is so much easier to generate than to fight. I would go as far as speculating that the Russian government sponsors the fraud generating companies sucking out billions of brand dollars from the US without consequence. But I digress

The problem starts with brand budgets. CPM budgets with no measurable goals for awareness and "eyeballs''. Billions of dollars from the biggest brands and agencies in the world. It is these budgets that fuel the fraud as there aren't any measurable goals so these campaigns consume the fraudulent traffic creating the incentive to generate it. The big exchanges are all aware of the fraud, some say that 50% of all impressions are bots. Having said that, some of the bots are so sophisticated they are indistinguishable from real users. They utilize residential IPs and behave in very real ways making it very difficult to distinguish from real users. Even so, it is in the interest of exchanges to keep selling fraud as they make more $. These are typically public companies so it inflates their growth and market cap. And so.. the industry is broken because a large part of it prospers and grows with fraud in the current set up. And it all starts with the brands that don't understand how they are spending their billion dollar digital budgets.

The reason I go into such detail is because it brings me to the following.. You will be pleased to know, that the whole industry is starting to move towards performance, metrics, measurable goals and KPIs. Just this January, the Chief Brand Officer of the single biggest advertiser in the world (Proctor & Gamble) announced that they will start battling fraud. This is huge. As other brands will follow suit. Agencies are worried (they typically get a flat cut of all budgets) as they should be and exchanges will be inclined to clean up their inventory. This will all be a long process but I'm excited to see fraud being spoken about as for a long time it was this taboo subject.

This is great news for affiliates as in the near future, everything will be performance oriented, all campaigns will be metric based not blind and basic CPM. This will create countless opportunities for all of us. We will have the advantage.

You can start to think about opportunities you've never even considered. Maybe start a performance agency, an ad network specializing in and geared towards specific verticals, maybe dig deeper in the world of anti-fraud tech (and no, I'm not suggesting that you start generating fraud!), there really are a ton of areas to which your affiliate marketing career could lead where you could build a massively successful business.

If at this point you're overwhelmed and thinking, but I'm just a noob, I have no idea how to build shit. Well, when I had the idea for Zeropark, I no idea how it's to be done. I am the worst programmer in the world. You hire people to do that for you, you just focus on making sure the product is perfect.

I'm not sure if I answered your question, but I feel it's important for all affiliates to understand the wider scope of the industry they operate in. There are so many exciting opportunities for everyone here.

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Big brands burning CPM's will never disappear tho'. It will take a generation at least to replace the old fashioned marketeers who are on top now which have a huge offline trackrecord and are in between the offline/online transistion. They have strong connections with the traditional ad agencies still so their budgets will be there for a while. But after this generation comes the performance people who grew up with all the metrics,stats and possibilities the interwebz is offering nowadays to measure results very precize.

That being said Coca Cola, Hankook Tires and Haribo for example will always splash CPM budgets since their products are almost impossible for performance marketing... tho' the shift and focus will definitely be there indeed!

Even cpa/cpl models will move more and more to rev share like casino has been offering for years. Just simply bring in a customer to Asos during a big sale and get a fine cut isnt hard, but paying the affiliate to bring in customers re-ordering is for both parties more healthy on the long term!

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Yes, you've answered my questions, thanks!

Regarding brands burning budgets, it's also because it's people's jobs to spend it, otherwise they will always be criticized for not spending it all to gain more (whatever more means in their view). And they choose the easiest way of spending it. That's what I've been told time and again when we tried to build an advertising network, 2 years before I got into affiliate marketing.

Furthermore, if people are very mechanical in their jobs, they won't think like a shareholder and business owner, where how the money is spent matters in detail - they have too little skin in the game and downside, at least visible one. Of course, they are slowly working themselves out of a job, since performance will take over, but if that happens after they retire, why would they care?

The main reason I asked for the outside view you've gained is simply because I also see the limitless potential affiliates have in the so-call mainstream businesses. They have to learn the game there, like you explained, but I am quite certain there are many businesses who want to hire affiliates, or entrepreneurs who would like to have affiliates as co-founders.

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Dude thats rad! Congratulations!

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I'm not suggesting that they will disappear, but things are headed in the right direction. Towards performance based programmatic buying which is a win for all of us. Big brands and corporation are profit driven - once they learn how wasteful their digital advertising spends are, they will take action. I don't think it's wise to assume that things won't change quickly, look how rapidly RTB has penetrated the interwebs.

Many don't know this but programmatic TV (PTV) is growing at 200% a year and will be the next boom in digital advertising. TV advertising is a $200 billion market worldwide and it's going to go fully digital and PTV.

We're already preparing for TV advertising with our DSP. It'll be the next massive boom in digital advertising.

Further down the line, imagine digital billboards that dynamically display ads based on the user(s) that are in viewing distance. Imagine Bluetooth beacons and mobile wallets and how they can connect the offline world to the online in terms of tracking. You view an ad on a digital billboard, or you view a brand ad on your mobile. You go into a store to buy the item of interest and either a Bluetooth beacon registers your presence or you checkout paying with your mobile. Postback fires and commission is paid to affiliate for offline purchase. All of a sudden brand awareness becomes measurable.

Think of this for car sales, real estate, think of this creating affiliate based opportunities in industries that could never before utilize this amazing channel of marketing. In the past you were creating LPs for PIN submits, now you're running a creative agency that makes TV adverts for Tesla collecting a commission for every sale of a car. Offline companies can now launch and utilize the services of affiliates to do all of their marketing and sales for them. The possibilities are really endless and this future isn't that far off. With time everything will be more and more measurable, even what we once considered completely unmeasurable. Everything will be about data and information exchange. It's exciting and a bit frightening

Absolutely true. Agencies get punished for not spending budgets. The campaign goal is often just spending the budget. Ridiculous. It will change as awareness grows.

I also feel the future of affiliate marketing is exciting as hell as I outlined above. It's important to sometimes take your head out of grinding, spying and churning out LPs and think about the future. I know that to a lot of people AM is about copying what works, but if you take the chance and try to innovate, create something new, use your brain to try to come up with something, that's where the real money is. The crazy ones that anticipate changes and developments that everyone else considers impossible or too far in the future.. those are the people who make it big. As performance marketers, you're all in a great position to do so.

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Offline sales will be better to measure in future for sure, with the methods you bring in. Just want to mention Coca Cola will splash their cpm bugets still with their feel good commercials ofcourse. Maybe I am narrowing down too much on the European market of ad agencies which is a small and slimey one.

I have been around for a while and know friends on certain positions keep their heads up together wih moving budgets and opportunities. It's still an attitude thing and ignorance/arrogancy nowadays, these brand/cpm guys reaching their targets by kissing ass etc... as long as these key positions are filled with retards technology can do it's thing, as it does for guys, barely anything chances... but I am with you hoping the developments will go so fast they have to...

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Hey Rob,

any books or resources outside of affiliate marketing that you recommend that helped you build your businesses?

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Really amazing and motivational post! Thanks a lot for writing it. To some people (who are probably not on this forum), it may sound too genetic or fairy-taley... but when you have the right mindset, you can achieve even what you thought was impossible. And you are the living proof.

Seeing your post from 2012 makes me realize that in 5 years you achieved what most people don't achieve in their entire lifetimes. I've also moved forward a lot (both financially and personally) during the last few years but nowhere near building a 150+ people company. On one hand I feel like I gotta do something like you did, on the other I'm quite lazy and too comfortable in my position. I've achieved more than most of my friends but then I read your post and I feel a bit inferior haha.

Here's some questions for you:

1) Is the Forbes interview in Polish only or is there an English version?
2) do you keep in touch with daily operations of the company on a low-level (when you're not abroad) or do you have just a general image? Is there some area where you want to be maximally informed?
3) If you were to start again, would you start alone or with co-founders?
4) If you were to start again and something like Zeropark already existed, which area would you move into?
5) Do you think that trying a regular 9-to-5 employee position helps in terms of founding a successful business?

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Good job and very interesting info

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How to Get Rich by Felix Dennis. Don't mind the title, he was a mad genius and named it that for laughs. It's the most underrated book that I know and it's brutally honest.

I read this book twice before I ever even started a company and I've applied many of the principles to achieve what I have. On its own, it's a great story too.

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thanks! just ordered on Amazon

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Definitely a great book, read it a few months ago. Very good business advice and also very entertaining - Dennis doesn't hold back when it comes to sharing his rockstar lifestyle, haha.

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I've heard very good things about that book from a variety of places!

He definitely walked the walk, too - Dennis Publishing dominated the UK magazine market for a long, long while.

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I'm pleased to hear! The simple truth is that your life cannot be better than your mindset.

Something that was crucial for me, mind you it took me years - was growing out of comparing myself to others. I used to do it a lot, and it made me feel inferior too. I started off wanting to prove to everyone, the world, that I was worth something, this kind of "I'll show you all what I'm capable of!". It drove me forward for a while, but I grew out of it, and out of comparing to others, I had to, and these days I simply do it all for myself. At the end of my life, I want to look back and say to myself "Shit Rob, you really gave it everything you had.. you pushed yourself harder than I thought you could." Because at the end of the day, nobody else gives a shit. They'll see what you've done, either be jealous or say "Damn, that guy got lucky.", forget about it soon after, and move on with their own lives and their own problems.

So if you can get to a place in life, where you are really proud and pleased with yourself and what you're doing, and you feel accomplished etc. Where you feel you're not being too lazy or too comfortable and are instead grabbing life by the balls and squeezing everything out of it - I feel that's a good place to be, because I hate regretting things, opportunities that you only have once. You know, every day, I remind myself that I have around 15,000 days of life left. 15,000 days. Think about that, that's not a lot when you put it into days. I'm by default lazy and a creature of comfort too, I feel everyone is. It's the ones that figure out how to break through that, and continue breaking through that every single day that achieve the levels of success that are thought to be unattainable by mere mortals. Every day I fight with myself to continue charging forward instead of letting myself get comfortable. I went off on a bit of a tangent but it's something close to my heart, and something that is the key to having done what I've done. On the other hand, if you're pleased with your situation and are happy working a bit, being a bit lazy and comfortable - that's perfect too. You gotta figure out what makes you really tick. What makes you feel proud, good about yourself and happy with where you are.

This one is only in Polish, here's another interview which I had translated. https://codewise.com/news-and-media/ "On an Iceberg"
Truthfully, I have little idea of what's going on in the company. What's being worked on, who's being hired, what's going on. I get a weekly finance update from my CFO and as long as numbers are going up, I know things are rolling in the right direction. While in Thailand, I watched our monthly company meeting which is streamed live on Youtube, other than that I was offline. My role has become very high level, and I have worked hard to get it to this point. I wanted to create a machine that is autonomous, that is always moving forward whether I'm there or not. Where I am the antithesis of a bottleneck, I am "The Enabler". We have a pretty specific company culture, an open organization that's as horizontal as possible without procedures and bullshit bureaucracy. This obviously only works if you hire very smart people with a specific mindset and character. You can see more by reading about our missing and principles: https://codewise.com/mission-and-principles/
At this point, I feel experienced enough to be able to start again on my own. Even so, I'd prefer to do it with a co-founder that I respect and work well with, it's more fun. The beginning is the most stressful so it's good to share that burden. My recommendation to everyone is to always try to do start-ups with a co-founder. Someone who completes you in terms of skillset and character - where together as a unit you are stronger than on your own.
I'd probably move into the same area, pops and redirects are a $5 billion dollar market. There's a lot more that we can do in this space. It's exciting as it's not that competitive as the rest of the advertising space I feel. Look at popads.net, it's a six figure a day operation run by one 20 something year old. I wouldn't do a tracker again as that was insanely hard work compared to Zeropark. Other than that, I would get into the data, DMP, retargeting and auto-optimization space. That's where the money is at, that's where you can really shake shit up if you get it right. Figure out what to bid on and what to ignore from the millions of bid requests available every second and you will be a wealthy man.
Absolutely not. My corporate experience was an intership at Orange, where I quit on the 2nd day, went out for lunch and never came back. I hate corporations. Which is why I put this up on the biggest billboard in Europe



I got my "MBA", I like to call it, working at a Czech startup called Elephant Traffic, I got an internship there shortly after I finished my masters degree. It was a small startup, dealing with domain redirects (that's where I got the idea for Zeropark), when I quit 1.5 years after I joined I was COO, I had dipped my fingers into everything at the company, finances, management, IT, design, marketing. It gave me the opportunity to learn what it's like to run a company without the risk - at someone else's cost. More importantly, I learned what not to do for when I would start my own show which I feel was even more valuable. My recommendation to everyone who wants to start their own thing, but doesn't feel ready, or experienced enough, to try to get a job at a startup and just learn what it's like to run a company, get involved in everything you can there, even a year can give you the courage and experience to do your own thing - and it'll increase the chances of you succeeding.

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Congrats on your success @rob_gryn I cant even begin to imagine the feeling of landing a Forbes cover mug shot. Bragging rights for life

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Awareness -> Acceptance -> Change

It is hard to break out. I'm still stuck. Years ago, I spoke to myself honestly and discovered deeply inside me that I'd been lying to myself for years. You lie to yourself so much that it became a reality. I'm aware of it but I'm not willing to accept. Last year, I spoke to myself again and finally accepted it. I have to accept that I'd been lying to myself and face the reality. It's been almost a year and I'm still unable to completely change the mindset to compare. The little voice still surface time to time. Any secret you can share on how you complete eliminate it? I'm progressing to change the mindset but probably 60%. So hard to fight it sometimes as it is subconscious.

Playground. Real version

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Incredibly inspiring! Thank you for sharing your story.

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I love how you set up your office! Amazing story bro!

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Great read. Thanks for sharing.

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Hey Rob,
What an amazing story. I really enjoyed your interview with Attila.
In that you spoke a few times about how becoming an entrepreneur and building codewise has taught you about the "true nature of the world"
"Your deep understanding of the inner workings of the world that everyone else is blind too puts you in a position to change it — it’s the most liberating feeling I know and it’s worth every cost."

Could you elaborate more on that idea?
-tom

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amazing

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So much respect for you. Being on Forbes cover is too awesome!

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Respect 🤠👍

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Read your attila interview and just WOWWW! I did join STM just yesterday since felt lonely in biz. Really great interview and I get that 'aha' moment. Thanks and wishing you a happy and satisfying life!

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Congratulations

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Thanks for the great post.
Building a business is my dream as well!

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Incredibly inspiring! Thank you for sharing your story. Congrats!!!

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Amazing post! I am glad that I read this. I am semi-experienced in AM and this post right here has motivated me to turn up the heat.

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Wait, why was this deleted yesterday? Was it a mistake?

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This has been deleted, I will really like to read

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The original poster decided to delete the article when the sale of their company was happening, we cannot bring it back, sorry.

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It was a fascinating article from Robert. I downloaded it and saved it on my PC (and I was just able to find it again
You might want to check out his interview on iamattila blog which is still online and which has a similar tone: https://iamattila.com/interviews/cod...f-codewise.php

I would like to know what happened to Robert, why he decided to sell, and why he decided to delete his motivational post. But I guess I'll never know. It just leaves us (who still have to grind every day) with a strange feeling.
But I guess that's our industry. Only very few affiliates decide to become "public" figures (which I personally would never want to do), and many of them disappear again really fast - or at least become silent. Just look at the affiliate blogs that many started - most of them are abandoned. Only very few affiliates were able to remain successful and consistently post new materials.

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I don't think it was the intention of Robert to delete his post in a private forum only to see it published publicly on Mega!?

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Probably not

I'm pretty sure the decision to delete it from all places he could, was the ongoing sale... the new owners likely preferred to get rid of info that would link their new acquisition to any "public" articles, especially since valuations were posted in those.

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