Scaling With People
Tired of spinning your startup wheels but never gaining traction? Buckle up, founders and CEOs, because this podcast is your rocket fuel to profitability! Every week, we ignite explosive conversations with bold-faced founders, brainy experts, and even a few out-of-this-world vendors. Get ready to crack the code on growth, master employee engagement, and blast through your scaling goals. We’re talking real-world strategies, actionable tips, and perspectives that’ll make your business do a cosmic dance. So, strap in and prepare for lift-off!
Scaling With People
Human Connection Wins When AI Content Floods the Market with Tye DeGrange
Trust has become the scarcest resource in the digital marketplace. As consumer skepticism grows and advertising costs skyrocket, brands are discovering that third-party validation isn't just nice to have—it's essential for survival and growth.
Digital growth strategist Tye DeGrange pulls back the curtain on how affiliate marketing has evolved from a misunderstood, often maligned tactic into a sophisticated trust-building ecosystem. "Affiliate is probably the most misunderstood and the most underrated part of performance marketing," he explains, detailing how his agency Roundbarn Labs has helped technology companies like Nextdoor, MetaQuest, and Grammarly build authentic performance marketing programs that deliver measurable results.
The conversation takes a fascinating turn when exploring the intersection of AI and affiliate marketing. Brands are now seeking partnerships not just to reach consumers directly but to secure citations in AI systems like ChatGPT and Google's various LLMs. With AI-generated influencers gaining millions of followers (sometimes without disclosure), the premium on genuine human connection continues to grow. DeGrange predicts platforms facilitating authentic communication—particularly YouTube—will dominate by 2025 precisely because they're difficult for AI to replicate convincingly.
For founders and marketing leaders, DeGrange offers practical guidance on when to implement affiliate strategies (typically after achieving product-market fit, around the $5M revenue mark) and how to approach matchmaking between brands and potential partners. The key? Authentic alignment that audiences can feel. As he puts it, "Kim Kardashian might be great for skincare, but maybe not for a tire company." This thoughtful approach to partnerships creates the foundation of trust that makes modern affiliate marketing effective.
Ready to transform your marketing strategy from chasing clicks to building authentic trust? Listen now to discover how performance marketing can scale both your reach and your credibility in an increasingly skeptical digital landscape.
Welcome everyone to today's Scaling with People podcast. I'm Gwenevere Crury, your host and CEO and founder to Guide to HR. So what happens when affiliate marketing grows up? It stops chasing clicks and starts building trust. In this episode of Scaling with People, we sit down with Ty DeGrange, digital growth strategist and founder behind some of the most authentic performance campaigns in the game, to explore the wild evolution of affiliate marketing. We're talking AI that scales trust, not just traffic, and why human-centric strategies are the next frontier for brands that actually matter. Well, welcome, ty. Super excited to dive into this content here and I think you know, introduce yourself to the audience, because I have a couple questions I can't wait to get answers from you Absolutely.
Speaker 2:I'm so happy to be here. You've done a great job of getting this up and getting so many people excited about your pod, and congrats on approaching 100 episodes. It's not a feat. I know what that's like. I'm getting there closer in my mind too, but I'm happy to be here and excited to talk to you today.
Speaker 1:Great, so tell me a little bit about you and your business.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely so. Roundbarn Labs is a performance marketing agency and we focus on affiliate, influencer and partner marketing, and I often say that that is the most misunderstood and the most underrated part of performance marketing. It's just a little complex. I mean, basically, as I was sharing with you, affiliate is a brand like Nike can pay on a performance basis to access hundreds or thousands of great content, sites and reviews and trail running, basketball shoes, cross trainers. That's a use case that is often deployed, so we do that for brands of all shapes and sizes. As we've grown and evolved, we've seen in the data that technology companies like Nextdoor, metaquest, atlassian Grammarly have really been our sweet spot. We've been able to build out partner marketing programs for them, so we really honed in on technology for consumer and B2B SaaS.
Speaker 1:And so, for those listening, that might not be market savvy. Partner marketing or partnership marketing and affiliate marketing are they one in the same or are they different? And if they're different, how so?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think the way I like to describe it is partner marketing is kind of a broader terminology. You might have a lot of in-house teams that own partnerships or run partnerships. Affiliate is probably underneath that umbrella in my definition. Influencer marketing is probably underneath that in my definition. Influencer marketing is probably underneath that. So that's kind of how I think about it. But they do get interchanged and used frequently. A lot of people call affiliates partners. A lot of people call affiliates publishers. It gets very confusing. To be perfectly candid, it's been. They've tried to rebrand it a number of times. It's had a checkered past, to say the least. So a lot of times people are kind of like trying to polish it up. The good news is, if you're doing it the right way, you know you could stand proudly and say like, hey, this is providing really good value and we can talk about that. But that's kind of how I define it.
Speaker 1:Awesome. I appreciate that Because, yeah, I feel like I hear all different terms and analogies and it's like is that the thing or not? I'm not quite sure. So, as a founder, you know, maybe you're one to five people, maybe you're not even at your 5 million, maybe you're getting your 10. Like, when should you start thinking about adding this as part of your marketing tools?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think, just starting a little bit behind the why, I want to share the challenge we're facing with before going in. But basically, brands are in a weird position. Right In the last 20 years in particular, trust has just gone down like crazy. All these scandals, all these things that have come up. People are kind of questioning things more than ever. They question CEOs, they question businesses, they question authority and all that stuff.
Speaker 2:Being able to come in and just do a TV ad and say, hey, I'm brand XYZ, I'm new to market or I'm somewhat recognizable, is much harder than it used to be. Meta and Google. Costs are much higher and the results are not as necessarily getting any better. Are they needed, absolutely. So we're kind of saying hey look, you need trusted third parties to come in and vouch for your brand. Is that an influencer? Is that Gwenevere talking about how great your HR software is on her show? Is that an amazing fitness influencer on Instagram? Depending on the business, business, that's where we play, um, we. We are also seeing that ai is completely changing this and flipping it around, as you've observed, and brands are now coming to affiliate us to get citations in AI. Llms, chat, gpt, perplexity, grok, gemini, you name it.
Speaker 2:And it's crazy. And so we have validation on this. We have world-class SEO experts saying this is valid. So that's the why behind it. It's it's becoming a nice. It's going from a nice to have to a must have.
Speaker 2:When is a really good point? I recommend after product market fit. I recommend after you have some healthy retention, a nice healthy retention curve in your cohort analysis. I recommend typically we enter a little bit later than other providers and consultants and agencies, but I think if you're starting to look at hey, I'm close to that, you know 5 million a year range, it's probably time to start thinking about it. At the very least. I like to typically see you know healthy or average order values, lifetime values, conversion rates healthy enough to support. And if you have some paid marketing movement, either through Meta or LinkedIn or Google, that's really helpful because it validates. These affiliate partners will often promote you on their own and then hope to get payment back in the cost per lead or cost per sale. So, yes, there's flat fees involved, which I won't get into right this moment, but the short answer is they're putting skin in the game and so having that the ducks in a row a little bit really helps and enables them to perform better.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. I mean, they're using their brand to talk about yours and they want to make sure it's a brand that's able to last right, and it's what say they are and able to talk about it, yeah, yeah. So what are some of the things that, if you are past that 5 million, 10 million mark, maybe you're starting to think about this. What's like a first step or maybe a couple steps that a founder or CEO could be taking with their partnership of internal marketing? Or even if they don't have that quite yet, hopefully at five to 10 plus million, they have some marketing in their house, right? But what's some of the things that they could be thinking about, maybe directing or guiding or pushing their marketing team to be considering?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think great. You know, obviously reviews and trust validation from users is extremely helpful. That kind of creates a virtuous cycle of partners picking it up too. There's even an your customers could become affiliates or influencers or evangelists of some sort. I think having your customer personas really dialed in and being able to speak that language and give that to providers like us is really powerful, because then it allows us to tee up those affiliates and influencers and matchmake really well.
Speaker 2:We don't want. For us, matchmaking is a huge part of the game and it gets very nuanced on that front data, customer demographics, psychographics, et cetera but on a high level. Kim Kardashian might be a great promoter of a skincare product, but maybe she's not, maybe the best for I don't know a tire company. Again, maybe flip that on set a little bit these days. Maybe she'd be good at that too. But the point is you want to really match make and be thoughtfully right. Are they going to be a customer? Are they going to be a matchup with the customer audience? Is Tom Brady going to be good for XYZ? So you want to think through those things at the at the smaller level and at the micro level to make sure that match is really strong and that authentic people want to feel it's authentic and trusted, and so that's a big part of what we do also yeah, so talking about the authenticity in humans, right.
Speaker 1:How does digital marketing? How's it shifting to be more human-centric and focusing their strategies to be human-centric?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think a lot of things are happening. In the last 10 years, the last 15 years, we've been in this golden age of performance marketing, direct response marketing, tracking, and it has been a boom for Google, for Meta, for a lot of people in the space, and people have tracked things down to almost to a fault. Google and Meta will at the default level of your settings. A great tip don't just trust those default settings. Really get some counsel and consider maybe making those a little bit more stringent so that you're not just giving meta and Google credit for everything you run on paid marketing. Obviously, if you're the only thing running, hey, that's more okay, but it's not generally. So I think we're seeing the privacy changes are happening. There's a lot of restrictions now on the targeting and the ability to leverage those profiles like we used to.
Speaker 2:I think we're getting to a place where that, coupled with the fact that the trust is not there like it used to be, people really want to hear from someone they trust or family, but oftentimes people that don't even know. They'd rather hear from someone who's used the product, looks like they could use the product, someone they aspire to, someone that has some credibility. So I think that. And then you've got the AI thing coming too. Where there's AI content, there's a flood of things that are being thrown at them. There's AI generated ads. I think that really brings formats like this to the forefront of like we're two humans. Yes, we're on zoom, we're in two different areas, but we're talking connecting. Yeah, yeah, I'm not I'm not a an avatar.
Speaker 2:Um, I, I think that there's a lot of value in that. B2b has seen a big demand for in-person events that are done well. So I think the human I don't want to say something silly like humans coming back but I think there's a lot of, there's a need for that human connection and I think that's where the trust play comes in. You can't really have the trust without that human connection in a lot of cases and I think all of those factors are causing people to really go back to that, for lack of a better term. A little bit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. I actually just saw a couple of months ago a post about how AI is becoming influenced. There are AI profiles out there on LinkedIn, on, on Insta, on other social medias, where they are fully AI, but they're showing pictures of themselves Like this one was about a gal that was at Wimbledon, right, and pictures of her at Wimbledon and her cute little tennis outfit and basically kind of like it's like the perfect picture of someone you know tennis outfit at Wimbledon.
Speaker 1:And she had this profile, I shouldn't even say she this profile. It, the it profile, had over, I think, 900,000.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's right. I saw that and she wasn't even real, right, yeah, and she's not real and it's not even a real.
Speaker 1:It's not a real person. It is.
Speaker 2:AI.
Speaker 1:And there's they were talking. This article I was reading was talking about how they had found this one AI profile that had over 2 million followers and it's an AI, it's not even real and how it's now becoming the influencers of the you know of the influencers. Right, because they can influence and they can create content 24 seven and it's the perfect content for the coaches and the piratas and all these, like you know, and the tennis companies and whatever, right, so it's like it's, it's scary. I mean I looked at the picture and you really have to look hard and really go. Yeah, I could see how this is ai, but like on a glance, especially on your phone, like it looked like someone just taking a picture of themselves. You know it's crazy. So how do you build that trust when that's starting to happen more and more?
Speaker 2:The thing I think about is, you know, we're required to disclose quite a bit FTC wise, in terms of if there's a compensation piece. You know you're seeing more crowdsourcing of like, hey, this might be false information out there. I think we're seeing a movement where I would not be surprised if perhaps, like, there has to be some type of labeling or some type of detection. I don't think that's impossible and I think that that would help people. The reality is, like we tinkered with that a little bit and thought about it. I think there's a way to probably leverage that for your advantage as a marketer. I think that the reality is there's just a lot of benefit in um these types of conversation.
Speaker 2:We actually have predicted in back in december, youtube would be the best performing channel of 2025, and I don't know how that's not the case. If you look at all the data, the reports coming out of youtube, it's it's running away with the connected tv uh competitors in terms of like viewership, um, and obviously that means a lot of different things. On YouTube, you can access watch your local news, for goodness sake. So it's, it's not exactly uh videos or whatever.
Speaker 2:Yeah, learn, learn how to change a tire?
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but this show is going to be on YouTube. Like you said and I think, like my you know my shows on YouTube it's like a good you know, you want to learn something. It's it's really um. Anyway, there's a lot of reasons why that's happening. There's a big movement there. It's a big movement on Reddit, google, reddit's partnerships widely publicized. We're seeing a lot of conversation and real reality of citations improving in AI and AI um, llm and queries and those types of things where YouTube and Reddit and content sites are really helping that we are literally getting clients improvement in citations and tracking those citations to get them exposure on onto those LLMs.
Speaker 2:So it's a bit of a you know all out effort to catch where the eyeballs and attention and things are going. But I do believe that the human trust is is still very much there from influencers and affiliates and that's what that's what it's all about it. For a lot of it affiliate, all what we do is trying to buy in a performance basis, more than say it's just search or it's just social, it's just content. Affiliate and really it's kind of like a mechanism to say you know, you can get multiple channels, we can even get connected tv on a cost per acquisition basis for brands. So that's that's the cool part about affiliate it's it's it's sort of a misnomer. It's almost like paper performance at scale, with some flat fees involved, to be clear, but very performance-based.
Speaker 1:That's awesome and just kind of thinking. Going back to the AI thing, I think the other thing that is interesting is how are you guys thinking about the fact that there's just so much there's already a ton of content out there, and now you have AI, where people who may not have done content creation are now starting to do so because they can so easily you can create videos and create avatars, you can create all this content out there. I just feel like we're going to be by the end of this decade. We're going to be just drowning in content. And how do you break through that noise to actually get to your target audience? I think that's going to be a key for businesses in the future.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it kind of reminds me of some of the evolution of web 1.0. And like what happened when people were running ads for the first time and going hog wild on Google search and there would be trademark bidding and search people printing money literally on on it. You know it's not going to necessarily be the same outcomes, but I think as a similar you know wave of technology where people are rushing to figure it out and first to figure it out wins a little bit and the bad guys get caught and it gets professionalized and improved over time. So I think we're going to see a lot of that. Um, yeah, I, I think I, I one of the.
Speaker 2:There's actually some really interesting conversation about like, if you really look at ai, like, some of the suggestions are not actually as valid. We're doing deep analysis on that to debunk some of the things to say like is this really real? I think a lot of the depth of Google seems to be signaling a lot of like, the depth of conversation, the depth of knowledge. I'm seeing examples of like longer form things performing better. There's also conflicting stuff saying, like with AI and LMS, that the sheer number of mentions is helping a lot more than it maybe used to be. It will be very interesting. I don't think anyone has a super clear crystal ball at this point.
Speaker 2:I think anyone that says they do is missing it, but I hope that's somewhat helpful.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think it's just. You know, we talk about it more and more, we make it become something that's in the forefront of all of us as we start to work through things Right. I think that's also the power of conversation. So, as we wrap up today, is there any last final thoughts or tips or tricks you want to share with the audience?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think really, if you can start thinking about tapping into third parties to build up some trust, I would highly recommend that, and part of my shtick in terms of what I talk about on my podcast is always thinking about testing, carving out some testing budget, enabling your teammates to spend a half day. Reward it, compensate for it to spend a half day or more a week on AI learning the basics, test some things out. There's a lot that can be done there and I think you know the podcast and YouTube is really interesting opportunity. I think those are vehicles where that authentic trust can kind of come out.
Speaker 2:Conversations like this are hard to really fake and so you know, yeah, you've got Google's notebook LLM that cranks out a podcast in two minutes, my goodness. But it's not going to be like this and I think the human element will continue to do well. So I would just say lean into that, use the AI in the back end and improve your operational efficiency and cut down on time and effort and money, but I think that to get that human front end, you want to continue to lean into that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that. That is such a powerful key there. So, ty, it was so great having you on our call today and audience, I hope you pulled some great information to help either start taking action or have this be in your back pocket as you start to grow your business and get into that 5, 10 million plus sweet spot. And thanks for joining us and we'll see you on the next podcast. If you enjoy this one, don't forget to make a comment like it, share it and follow us for our next podcast. Thanks everyone.
Speaker 2:Thanks Guadalajara, Thanks everybody, Thanks for watching.
