How CustomGPT and AI affiliate programs are changing the game with Ethan Housen

In today's episode, I’m catching up with Ethan Housen, Affiliate Director at Custom GPT, to explore how AI affiliate programs are taking the spotlight in the marketing world. We’re putting a spotlight on how AI affiliate programs create fresh opportunities and bold strategies for affiliate marketers. 

Whether you’re new to the scene or looking to upgrade your current approach, this show is packed with insights all about AI affiliate programs and their real-world impact.

AI affiliate programs are more than a trend—they’re transforming how professionals build success. Listen in as Ethan shares practical advice, inspiring stories, and tips you can use to boost your own results with AI affiliate programs. If you want to scale your business, stay on top of the latest tools, or just discover what works in today’s landscape, you’ll get plenty of value from this chat.

Find Ethan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ethan-housen/
Website: https://customgpt.ai/

Chapters & Timestamps:
0:00 - Welcome & what are AI affiliate programs?  
2:00 - Ethan’s journey and Custom GPT overview  
5:00 - Standout use cases for AI affiliate programs  
10:00 - Growth strategies and recruiting affiliates  
15:00 - Tools and final tips for affiliate pros  

👉 Learn more about Custom GPT customgpt.ai  
💡 Hit subscribe & keep recruiting brilliance!  
#AIAffiliatePrograms #CustomGPT #AffiliateMarketing #Podcast

Gizzmo is the ultimate tool for publishers like you to create high-quality, optimized content in minutes, not hours. With Gizzmo, you can easily craft product reviews, roundups, comparison articles, deals pages, and listicles—each fully customizable to suit your audience and style.  Save time, boost engagement, and drive conversions effortlessly. Go to DustinHowes.com/gizzmo for your free trial.

Dustinhowes.com/affistash

For more tips on how to scale your affiliate program, check out https://performancemarketingmanager.com

Transcript

0:26

Hey folks. Welcome to Affiliate Nerd Out. I am your narrator, Dustin Howes. Spread that good word about affiliate marketing. You're gonna find me here on LinkedIn Live every Thursday at, noon on Pacific Time. Say hello to my new guest, Ethan Housen. He's the affiliate manager over at Custom GPT. Welcome to the Nerdatorium buddy. Dustin, thanks so much for having me. I'm really excited. I watch your show pretty much weekly. I know you've had a lot of my compatriots and colleagues on the show, so really excited to be here and thanks for having me on. Yes. Awesome. Thanks for tuning in. Appreciate you. And I know you're green to the affiliate game, but you've got a lot of incredible background. Tell us a little bit about your story and how you came to custom GPT. Yeah. Thank you so much. Definitely green relative to a lot of your other guests. Been in the affiliate space for around a year and a half only a couple months after joining custom GPT. But to take it back a little further, I'm 26, native to the Boston area. Grew up here and then ended up going to New Orleans for school at Tulane University with a. Marketing and film background. Had a couple of cool stops on the way, mostly in the marketing space. Worked for Netflix for a little bit, worked for the Saints and Pelicans organizations respectively and then the Louisiana Restaurant Association. And then found myself joining this bootstrapped startup in Boston. Could not be more of a 180 a little over 18 months ago. Okay. Joined as the marketing manager as a generalist touching, email, SEO, some social work some SEM work, but three months in, like I mentioned before, found myself taking over this affiliate program that was fledgling at the time. And then to some luck, to my CEO and his kind of affiliate acumen. Ended up growing this program from around $10,000 MRR each month to around 120 where we sit right now. So definitely experienced a lot of the trials and tribulations of the affiliate space. I've met a lot of people on my journey. I've learned a lot. I've failed a lot. I've succeeded a little bit. But this has been a wild ride and I'm really happy to be here. Great. We're gonna talk about those epic failures you had and those wins as well. I love hearing that kinda story. I fell in love with affiliate marketing on my first year when I was doing it, and here I am 15 years later. So we'll see where your career progresses if you stay in here or maybe you go on to other things and be your CMO. Kind of lifestyle, but great to have you, and thanks for taking the time to hang out. Let's start off with your guys' product. It is custom, GPT, and there's a QR code right here. I think a lot of the companies that are listening to this podcast might be interested in what your product does. So tell us who you're serving out there. Love that, Dustin. Thank you. Yeah, I'll give a quick rundown. Fairly simple. We started around three years ago, right on top of the chat. our domain name is Custom GPT ai. So that nature alone got us somewhere. We got us into the door. and what our system does is we are a B2B tool. Our lowest price point is $99. And what we allow you to do is basically ingest. Any qualitative information you have in your organization it's a YouTube channel or a website site map, or your HubSpot. To get it more in depth, you can ingest, any sort of P-D-F-C-S-V file. You can take your SharePoint, you can take your Confluence, pretty much anything under the sun that you use as an organization on a day-to-day basis. We allow you to ingest that into what we call a custom GPT AI agent. And in that agent, it ingests using a vector database and RAG based. Because we're rag based technology, we don't train on any of that data. It's completely private and secure. So that's not getting out to chat that's not getting out to Perplexity or Google. It's simply in our system and stored within pine cones vector database. And basically what that allows you to do is once you ingest, once you customize the settings, pick your LLM, pick your citations, we allow you to search across that. Document, pair of documents, YouTube videos, whatever you have under the sun, and instantly retrieve accurate answers from your business content. And the perfect use case is, let's say a lawyer has a 1500 page PDF or a couple of files here and there, they basically. Upload that documentation into our system, and within a couple of minutes they're able to search across it with complete accuracy, pulling a citation from the exact page. So if you're dealing with a massive amount of information and you need accurate answers from that content, rather than having a paralegal go through and comb through and try to find all the keywords that match that exact clause or that exact instance that you're looking for, use custom GPT. It basically allows you to search across it with complete accuracy and that citation component, it'll pull from the response source, say Hey Dustin, this is where your answer is. If you want to take a look in two-factor verify, it'll give you the exact paper. And then we allow you to deploy this. So you can basically put it on your website if it's customer facing or user facing. Can put in a Slack channel for your employees if you have sales information or product information, or you can put up on a paywall. If you have. Industry knowledge that's valuable. And you're selling courses, or you're selling a YouTube subscription or a Patreon or whatever it is. This could be an added value where you basically put your knowledge base behind a paywall or already a part of subscription. And anyone anywhere else can basically query that and find whatever they're interested in as long as it's in your knowledge base. Okay. That sounds really cool. And something I would love to check out a little bit more. one of my most difficult tasks is Hey, here's a website I would love to get a soft review. Can you go do some social listening on this and tell me what this page is all about. And then getting more in depth on that is difficult. it sounds like you guys are solving for that and business owners out there could absolutely use that One of the first things that comes to mind is using this as an affiliate. you could take all your content and conglomerate it into one page and do all of your customer support in there. if people have questions you, you don't have to answer it. You can just have your custom GDT, answer that for you and share your affiliate links in there as well. There's a lot of really good use cases. I see it happening. So yeah, we actually, have the exact instance where one of our pro affiliates asked if he could basically put, respective, 25 different affiliate links. Incredibly easy with our persona feature. He basically included whenever you mention X product, include X link whenever you mention y product, Y link, and so on and so forth. It's an incredibly popular blog, we gave it to him for free because he's a longtime affiliate and he basically has this awesome customer support agent on his website that's actively making him money and just exists as his knowledge base. So we could potentially, throw it up on your website, we'll train it on your YouTube PDFs, whatever you have, and just place it there.'cause users like it. It's not invasive. It's not salesy, it's not a lead capture thing. It's basically used as a custom knowledge management tool. That is sick. Sounds like another piece of content that we can create. Let's do that live. Me and you, we'll hang out and build this out for me. Andrew Huberman is that the guy you're talking about? No, I wish that is so funny. 70% of our examples whenever we give to customers is let's say you take Andrew Huber Man's YouTube. Everyone says that same exact, either Lex Friedman. Or Andrew Huberman that's funny. I ran into this use case not too long ago and I'm like, I wanna build that for me. how do I do it? So this is the tool that's freaking awesome. Okay. We're eight minutes in. I'm so apologize to the audience here, but we're talking affiliate marketing. We wanna go through what it's like in the AI space because this is a infancy. Industry like B2B has been around for a while. SaaS has been around for five plus years. But the AI space is just super rare and like early on. And so we wanna pick your brain and see what's working out there, what's not. So let's start off small in your opinion with an AI product like you guys have, I know you fall under the B2B and the SaaS realm as well, but in your opinion. When is the right time to start an affiliate program? Is it like immediately or do you have to get some kind of revenue? That is a great question. Excuse me. And I took over our full transparency. I took over affiliate program after it had been started. Okay. My job was just to scale. I think if you're a bootstrapped AI organization or you don't have funding, you don't have the opportunity to paid placements or big advertising pushes affiliate's a great space to be in as long as you have a clear product offering. That's the biggest distinction between a lot of success stories I hear. And fail stories that I hear. Okay. It's invaluable. It's a CPA model. You go with a first promoter or a reward full or, an affiliate program that allows you to scale with use, you're paying a very low upfront fee and it's paid to play. So the opportunity is phenomenal, especially if you don't have a lot of funding. the issue comes in attracting these high level affiliates because the marketplace is very saturated. Anyone and their mother has an affiliate program right now. So it's about picking the right program for them and basically attracting them to your program. And we can get into that later. But yes, absolutely, especially if you're in the AI space. AI is really hot right now. People wanna talk about it, people wanna share their stories on it, and people wanna experiment with it. A hundred percent, yes. I'm really happy that we started our affiliate program. Honestly, it led to our lowest CAC of all time. Like our cost of acquisition for customers that are referred by affiliates is tremendously lower than Our brand campaigns or, running social campaigns or doing paid placements. It's a phenomenal way to scale, and especially if you're a good affiliate manager, if you have a good affiliate program, your affiliates can become your best. Acquisition partners for sure. Great points. Tell us about the influencers and the content creators that you're working with. In my viewpoint from SaaS perspective, it is been hard finding influencers in that space and it's growing. But it's not, anywhere close to an e-comm product. you can find hundreds if not thousands of influencers for any kind of health brand. But for SaaS products, it's few and far between. You got your Adam and Freys and your Pat Flynns that are monsters out there. But how are you going about finding influencers and content creators for this? Yeah, that's a great question and hard issue to tackle. I'll go macro and little more micro in terms of our actual strategy, but who we're really targeting. YouTubers are definitely a space where we like to exist in. The issue with YouTube is they often require a paid upfront fee for their time and production energy, which is completely understandable. And definitely had some success stories on YouTube and some not successful stories on YouTube. But YouTube's a great space, especially in the tech sphere. The issue with our product and YouTube is, it's a business tool and a lot of people on YouTube are, I find to be a lot of consumers. Of course there's businesses that are referred from YouTube, but primarily if you really wanna engage with an audience, B2B requires a lot more nurturing than your average B2C. Product, you can simply click a link in the TikTok shop, purchase that bad boy a couple minutes, if not seconds later. But with the business tool, there's more stakeholders, there's more nurturing. You have to try it out for a couple of days, see if this is fit, and then the $90 price point versus, a $10 price points much different. So YouTube we had a lot of success with early on as we had our basic plan, and it was a lot more affordable for consumers. But as we went more businessy, we started having to change our perspective on what affiliates we wanna attract. And honestly, to this day, our most successful affiliates run search campaigns on Google and Bing. we have the branded terms that we're taking advantage of. We give them guidelines and strategies on all the long tail keywords, all the non-branded campaigns, and transparently some competitor campaigns that we're allowing them to run. That's been incredible just because a lot of the audience is on search. We already do really well in terms of SEO and ranking for a lot of the topics that we want to rank for and that are relevant for these longer tail keywords. So pairing that with the affiliates and their drive to make money and their. acumen and Google Ads, or Bing ads or Duck dot Go or whatever it is. That's been a perfect kind of marriage and we've had a lot of success with that. Some others represent, bloggers or people on Medium that are creating really high quality content. And typically it's not just one piece of content. I'm working with a creator card Arturi Jolly he's got a really large following on Medium. He's created a sequence of seven different articles that basically break down different use cases. Four people oftentimes aren't gonna convert on that first article, or they might not convert on that third article. But by the seventh article, they've read so much about custom GPT that it's time for them to start that free trial. Interesting. Once we get people in the door, in our trial, our conversion rate's phenomenal. So it's just about people understanding what our product is and making sure that we talk to affiliates that communicate that accurately. Outside of that, we've explored some other opportunities with different affiliates in different spaces, but that's been our biggest success story is some YouTubers that have driven a lot of traffic. A couple of SEM people, a couple of listicles. Top 10 AI chat bots for x. Top down AI solutions in 2025 for businesses. Okay. But that's the realm we exist in. We stay away from Instagram, stay away from Facebook, stay away from Twitter, stay away from TikTok.'cause those are, we find those are more consumer and honestly, I just don't have the bandwidth to deal with those guys. Oh, for sure. And, you brought up like, native and digital marketing experts that are great with search campaigns and those are just absolute gold if you can get ahold of a, the right kind of experience. And those guys are already in digital marketing world all day. Like of course they're using a AI and they're probably using AI to build those campaigns that are winning out there for the remarkable thing, Dustin, is they were recruiting customers better than we were on our branded campaigns. And that was when, that's when you know you got something good, when you are just doing better than you are. So that is the case a hundred percent of the time. I kid you not every product that I've been, working with native advertisers and digital marketers that are doing search campaigns, they will beat the in-house team every single time because the in-house team has a difficult time seeing the eyes through a consumer, right? They're working for that company, they're in that brand, but they're not a consumer. And those guys know how to be a consumer and talk to them, so they kill it all the time. Not an uncommon story, but also very difficult to find. You can't find influencers. Or you can find influencers, they have a good copy of, or footprint out on the internet, right? These guys are ghosts. Most of the time. They have to come to you or you have to have a Rolodex of them to tap into'em and they have to be in that niche. Hard to find, but so glad you've got some. But for those of you that wanna find more content and influencers out there, go use affistash. This is the affiliate recruitment software tool that will help you find hundreds of influencers in a matter of minutes. Go check 'em out. Ethan you've gotta go try out Aash. I'm gonna give it to you a trial here as well. Okay, wonderful. Can't wait. Awesome. Alright. Now getting into like the strategies on the growth hacking side of things what about affiliates that you're trying to recruit? Are you giving these guys free products or are you just telling them how cool your product is when you're doing this outreach? Great question, Justin. It really depends on what they want. It's all about what's easiest for them. Our higher touch affiliates, and that's part of the reason why we're building up this solutions partner program and reseller program. Those are for higher touch individuals that are actually in person. Building and deploying AI for customers, like very high level affiliates with those guys. Absolutely. We want them to know the product. We want them to fully understand the use cases, the pain points, and what our product actually solves. So absolutely for those guys I'm willing to give a trial to pretty much anyone who's interested. Great. Just because we want, the custom GPT name out there and we want people To be able to go to their customers, go to their end users, and have a seamless interaction with no friction about what this product actually accomplishes. With general affiliates, oftentimes they don't really care, and that's totally okay. we have an onboarding process, we have an email drip, we have an affiliate starter guide that basically locks them. There's 15 different channels that our average affiliate kind of takes advantage of. We have clauses. Positioning and graphics on each, that basically, you don't have to talk to me, you don't need a trial of the product, if you just wanna plug and play. That's perfect. And we're totally okay with that. So we've set up the system where it's very easy to sign up. It's very easy to identify what affiliates wanna do in promoting the product and then basically give them that ancillary material. And that's 75% of the interactions I have are just. Don't really want a trial, let me know what this product does. Lemme know what the positioning does and we'll take it from there. The 25% that really, truly convert high value customers are the ones where I'm talking to them on a month to month basis or walking their customers through the end product and how to deploy much more high touch. Yeah. And this would seem like a product that you would want your customers to become your affiliates. So are you guys tapping into that? And how soon do you ask those customers to become your affiliates? That's a very pertinent question because I have a research project right now to dig into this. I'm working with Reward Full right now and their CEO Emmett to try to get that referral friend program cooking. It's just the build out and working with engineering. we're bootstrapped, we do not have a ton of bandwidth in terms of, my time and our engineer's time to actually set this up, but you're right, your best. Acquisition partner is your customer. That has a success story. So frankly, just walking through what I would do, probably just take our core customers or identify, a core 15 to 20 that are really high usage, that are in industries or markets that have a strong voice and they're able to project and then basically offer them. It's also finding the value that they care about. A discount might be good. Or they might want social proof for a case study or they might want their friend to get three months off. So it's finding that balance, what I think is very important. And then also building up the program. So it's in the works, this refer friend program that we think is gonna be really valuable. But not quite yet. We haven't really launched that. Another aspect I really like about. This product is the opportunity for JVs for joint ventures. There are other companies out there that match your demographic but aren't exactly your ICP, But There's no overlap and no competition between the products. There's some great apps out there that would make great partners that can, flip their. Email list with your email list and you guys help each other out. I think there's a real big win there especially in the space, the AI space just has that aura to it. I think there's a lot of opportunity. We do worry about, a lot of people have proposition, that email share list, Hey, why don't you guys pitch our product and we'll pitch your product. We are worried about not disintegrating, but. Watering down the brand. Sure. And we do want to keep custom GPT'cause it's a real business solution. We have enterprise clients right now. We wanna keep that as pure as possible. So that has been something we haven't really explored in the. Past. But if it's a seamless partnership, like you said, Dustin, and there's great synergy between their clients and our clients, then it's mutually beneficial and it's valuable. we've been propositioned to do some AI marketplace or something that's like a little less. Legitimate than we would've hoped. So We'll partner with anyone that makes sense. We have to in this kind of game, and it's incredibly valuable for both of our audiences and our growth. But we wanna be really selective with which partners we decide to move forward with. Oh, for sure. Okay, awesome. Let's switch avenues and go into that startup culture a little bit. You guys are a super small team and you seem to be wearing a lot of hats. You came on as one marketing person and you rolled into this affiliate role and started getting it going. So what kind of tactics are you using in terms of like employment? Are you hiring interns? Are you hiring virtual assistants? What's been your game plan here? Yeah, it's been Like I mentioned a couple times, we are as lean as can be. We are in person. It's our CEO Alden. We have a marketing manager, Luke, who takes care of a lot of our SEO, our ad spend website management. We have two sales guys and a customer support guy and me, and that's as lean as it goes. We also have engineering abroad. Those guys are incredible. We meet with them consistently, but in terms of each of us building out our charters and we are all Independently responsible for each of our numbers and driving those numbers. We've each had to build out a team and respectively, I built out a team for this affiliate program, which involved three other stakeholders that I met on, Fiverr and through my CEO and his connection one of which does cold outreach for us, and basically acts as a BDR. We offer certain incentives for book meetings. He and his team, actually, he's got three people working underneath him are searching across LinkedIn to try to find. Any affiliates or any marketing agencies that could be valuable for us. we've created a script and a different structure with different options based on responses. So for him, it's very plug and play as well. he is just basically able to book those meetings, get that commission at the end of the month in a very bootstrap sense. That's one end. We've done that cold outreach. I use instantly cold outreach too. we scrape massive amounts of information, honestly, from competitors and their affiliates taking their emails and doing a five or six sequence long email, attracting our program with our offering or our bonus structure, commission structure, something like that. We also have an individual named Hira, who we've been working with for two years. Shout out Hira. She's one of the best people, hardest workers I've ever met in my life. She is an absolute dog. You give her any task, she will figure it out. It's phenomenal. Her intuitiveness, she's been helping me with this. Hub and spoke model for the affiliate program. Basically, we're creating content around really strong pillars in the affiliate space based on really high intent, high volume keywords that people are searching for, and we've had a lot of success, like we are thought leaders in the affiliate space. One of the guides I created. here are the top 10 AI affiliate programs in 2025 is ranking number one for maybe 15 different affiliate searches. So she's running that SEO hub and spoke model continuously coming out with content. We're gonna do a new hub and spoke model for the solutions partner program and reseller program, which we hope will have the same because every day we bring in organically 25 to 30 affiliates into our program without. any touch, which is great. Mostly because of these articles and the self-selection process. And then I've worked with other people. Basically I've worked with a gentleman who was on Reddit who was in the affiliate spaces, in the thought leader spaces basically building up his karma, building up, his respect in the communities. And then when a given opportunity arises, he would basically point them towards custom GPT. He would make a sub affiliate commission 5% commission on whatever they earn. These guys would earn, 15 to 20% based on our commission structure. All right. I get very creative. Those are like three of the methodologies. I will not share the other ones'cause they're proprietary, but That's what we got right now. And that's kinda the team of three or four individuals that I've been working with for the past nine months. All right. A lot of the listeners are gonna know you're talking about Nick at, over there on that last one, but that's for another time. But awesome. Share man. Really appreciate that. And great tactics as well, like the. Usage of a VA doing the hard grunt work of. Not just targeting, but doing the outreach and then booking calls. Super smart, getting your link to your calendar in there and booking 10 calls a week is just keeping that engine going. So yeah. Great work out there, man. Yeah, shout out Daniel. He's in Nigeria. He's one of my favorite people on this planet. He's been incredible. Probably not listening to this, but I'll email him later mentioning, I shout him mouth. Oh, everybody loves a shout out. What about ai? You gotta be using your own tool for a few things, right? Oh, wow. Yeah. our tool's phenomenal for customer support and we actually, like I will give in the intro email, in a drip email, I will give them access to this affiliate super guide and basically they're able to query the agent whenever they want. There's an unlimited amount of queries. I'm on a custom plan. So they'll ask questions whether it's, how do I increase my commission, or what do I do if I don't have a graphic that's not there? And what I'll do is I'll make iterative changes to our document source. So if someone asks a question that we don't have an answer to, I know that's valuable. So I know I'm gonna create content for that. We upload it to the agent, respond to that individual who asks the question, and then moving forward, next time affiliate or a partner has that same question, we're gonna pass that content gap and we're basically gonna have that answer for them. So that's how we use custom GPT. We use 10 or 15 different AI solutions outside of this for some of those strategies that we talked about. One is instantly, I already mentioned. I love that. We use Gamma to create presentations. It's phenomenal. Darby on YouTube got me a custom code for that. He's great. We use Apollo to enrich leads. Yeah, we use different AI web scraping tools. So we use a number of different kind of AI solutions and tools out there. But for custom specifically, because it's that custom knowledge base, that's what I give everyone when they start. It's Hey, if you have any questions, email me or please respond to this agent. He knows more than I do. So super smart. Love it, man. You're doing all the things right, dude. Really appreciate this knowledge drop. Where can people find you and get ahold of you? People can find me on LinkedIn, Ethan Hausen, or, my email is ethan@customgpg.ai. Or, go to our. website, custom gpt.ai and submit a ticket to the help desk. But LinkedIn, I'm on there too often. I should probably get off. But yeah I'd love to work with everyone. We're basically building up this new Solutions partner program, marketing agency program for. Agencies and more legitimate companies that have clients and customers that are interested in deploying ai, specifically deploying custom GPT. We offer phenomenal discounts. You can join our solutions partner directory, which basically allows us to refer customers that need additional implementation to you guys. There's a ton of parks in the program. It's, it's getting off the ground right now, so get in while it's, while we're still keeping the doors open. Fantastic. The agencies and the affiliate managers out there that are not utilizing AI are falling behind, and this seems like such an easy solution. If you guys wanna support this channel, go hit Custom GT up here. Go to dustinhowes.com/customgpt, help support this channel and make me some money so I can feed my content making habits here. Ethan, so great. Appreciate you and for all those out there watching. Keep on recruiting and we'll see you next time. Take care. Appreciate it. Dustin, thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate it. We'll talk soon. You got it, man. Later.