StatsDrone recently found that MyAffiliates holds a 15.6% market share in affiliate marketing software. Could you tell me three factors you feel have contributed to that?
The human touch. Our company motto is that we are going to be human. We know all our clients, we speak to all our clients, we have a friendship with our clients. We know if a client is sick, if the children are sick, if they’re getting married etc; something I wanted to do was keep the human touch. We
work in a very flat organisation where if our client needs to speak to me, they always find me and there will always be a reply on the other end. It’s giving names, but not only names. There is a life story behind every client.
The second thing is what we have invested in our support. Our support is trained to be there answering questions, answering issues. That’s very important. That’s how you build your reputation. You can have products, but if you have good support, automatically, it makes it better. We have a very good product, which is essential and it’s not because I say it!
We keep learning with competitors. We are thrilled by competition and we want to keep having competition because that’s what keeps us on our toes. That’s how we keep improving, developing, giving what clients want. When they tell us, these guys are a competitor, they have this, we understand what they have and how we can make it better. So, we not only make it for you, but make it better so that we make sure we’re on top. So again, it’s an individual approach.
That’s the three major things that have gotten us here today.
MyAffiliates has been in operation since 2007. What would you say were some key moments that impacted the trajectory of your product?
The first key moment is 2007 when Betsson signs up. At the time there is no company in Malta; it’s three software developers sitting in Australia. Somehow, this picks up. It’s completely robotic, practically no backend or frontend – it’s mostly code out of a box. I think Steve (Steven Harris, Director) met the right people at the right time and Betsson bought it. This is how the product started going, because Betsson would send requests, ‘This is what we need to be able to do. This is what the market requests.’ We started that and these are the building blocks.
For the first four to five years, the product was built on mostly Betsson requests. When I joined in 2012, there were about six clients. I’d worked for the competition before, I knew what major software needed to look like. I knew the potential of what I was seeing. But there was a lot to do. So, we started from scratch. Investing in people, investing in development. Our first conferences, we had no stand. We’re walking with our little leaflets that we had in our hands. But we started building relationships and this is where it starts. While we’re building the software we’re also building relationships. The success comes when you listen to your clients, so no matter the size you still listen to each and every one of them at the same level. You give the same importance to every client, whether it’s a small-sized client or a very big client. This is how you grow a business. It’s not only putting money into it, but it’s putting people into it.
Like you said earlier, it’s that personalisation you bring in.
It’s also investing in the right people internally; understanding a fit form. A customer team to your own clients, is it going to fit the MyAffiliates company and atmosphere and vibes and culture, but is it also going to fit into what our clients expect from us? From our support, tech support and so on, it’s investing in the right people.
How do you balance innovation with accessibility?
It’s a difficult balance, because development in 2024 is very expensive and the industry is always trying to drive down the prices. However, again, it’s communication. When someone comes and asks you for a discount, there is a point where you need people to understand that you don’t buy a price, you buy a product... You need to be profitable, but you need to keep your expectation of profitability down because we need to make money. We need to be able to pay our people, but we don’t need to become millionaires the day after.
You keep grounded and say this is going to be successful because we invest in the project, because we invest in people, because we pay people the right way. But, we also give the right price to make it accessible. If you price it well, you give it exposure. This exposure means affiliate managers that move from one place to another, the next place they go they’ll say ‘No, I don’t want to work with this system, because I know MyAffiliates.’
There is a lot to look at, but if you build on your reputation, you can make things accessible. You remain human. You remain human to your staff, your company, your clients. Even in the size of the product and the way you design it, you understand the needs of people. That’s the base of everything.
When it comes to using new technologies, how do you evaluate whether it is something that would benefit you and your clients? What’s the integration process like for new technologies?
We don’t really integrate new technologies because we have our own. We get new technology on databases or coding or coding languages, but we develop our own technology.
If we want to speak about how we integrate AI into our system, we looked at what one of our competitors did back at iGB, saying, ‘We’ve integrated AI.’ The minute you dig, you see they haven’t actually integrated AI, they have integrated a chatbot that gives you something the report gives you. This is not integrating new technology. This is integrating a chatbot. If we had to integrate AI and invest in this, we’d want something that gives added value. For now, we haven’t done it because we haven’t found any technology that could give added value. I have in the report how many new deposit customers I had, what the deposit amount was, etc. We have it already. Why would I spend that much money putting that in words? Managers are better than that.
What do you plan to do to keep your top market share position?
First of all, we need to keep doing what we’re doing, because we’re doing something right. What we plan to do is more market analysis. We’ve taken a step into doing this with the Head of Sales and that’s a very good insight. It’s an insight most of the industry didn’t have. Now we need to dig more.
We need to convince people that migration can be done successfully. A pain point of our industry is that people are scared of migration. So, we need to be able to put across the message that we have experience migrating people. We have migrated hundreds of systems from the competition, and we can do it and do it well. We need to be able to reassure people of this because this is always a scary thing. Once we put that message out there and convince people that it’s not that hard, then we’ll be able to go to level three. There are big plans for level three; it’s coming.
