You're listening to the Affiliate Marketing Podcast brought to you by Affifast.com, the chapter and verse of everything you need for running successful affiliate programs and partnership management. This is a podcast for digital and affiliate marketers, publishers, networks, agencies and Martech providers who operate in affiliate marketing. If you want to launch, scale, and grow successful affiliate marketing programs, you're in the right place. In this podcast, you'll learn how affiliate and partner marketing is changing. Gain behind the mic access to affiliate marketing veterans. Listen and learn tried and tested program management tactics. Discover what's new and trending in affiliate and performance marketing. The truth is, you simply won't find this information anywhere else. This podcast is brought to you by AMP. The Affiliate Manager Performance Program is designed for ambitious affiliate program managers working at brands, agencies or affiliate networks that are looking to grow and scale their affiliate programs and partner performances. We've already helped hundreds of affiliate program managers from a range of industries get the best out of their affiliate partnerships and build consistent sales within their affiliate programs. With just one hour per week over a 12-week period, this program is unlike any other. You'll learn proven tactics, tested strategies, and accessed decades of experience with industry veterans who have launched, scaled and grown multi-million dollar affiliate programs around the world. Book your seat on our next cohort by visiting our website, affiverst.com, and hit the training menu. From there, you can register your interest for our next cohort launch or contact our sales team to find out more at www.affire.com. Now, here's your award-winning affiliate and performance marketing host, industry veteran, and your affiliate marketing guide and founder of Affiverse, Leanne Johnston.
SPEAKER_02Welcome to the Affiliate Marketing Podcast with me, your host, Leanne Johnston, and today I am super thrilled because we've got Mike Schmidt from Shopify Colabs joining us this week to talk about everything that's happening over there because there is a lot happening and it's being drip-fed through to us. But I just thought let's nail it and get to the crux of the matter and get him on here and just chit-chat about everything that he knows about what's coming up ahead in Shopify Colabs. So, Mike, it's an absolute pleasure to have you here. Thank you so much for being on the podcast with me today. Let's get started.
SPEAKER_00Thank you so much. Yeah, excited to be here.
SPEAKER_02Cool. So before we get going, let's start off with a little bit of storytelling because I always think it's interesting to tell our audience a little bit about our guest first, and then we'll get into the nuts and bolts of what we're going to be talking about. So talk to me a little bit about how you landed up in digital and performance marketing, because I always think a good storytelling kicks us off well.
SPEAKER_00I have a very weird story. I started off studying chemical engineering and somehow arrived at selling products in e-commerce. Super weird. Yeah, so I studied chemical engineering in college, sort of fell in love with entrepreneurship through a program I was doing at University of Toronto. It's called The Next36. That program basically turned my life upside down. I thought I wanted to get a PhD in chemical engineering and go into clean tech. I still kind of love clean tech, to be honest. Like most of my most of my like extracurricular research, if that's a thing, um, is in clean tech. So I really like the field, I really like the space. Uh but my world was turned upside down when I learned about Silicon Valley because growing up in Canada in you know the early 2000s, you basically don't know a ton about how that world works. And like now it's a very different story, right? So it's now like every business school in the world basically studies Silicon Valley. But when I was reading about some of the projects and different things and just learning about like how the world actually works, I sort of fell in love with this idea of creating companies and creating projects and you know, not really worrying about too much of the you know professional career path. So I have like mostly the next 36 to to thank for my interest in entrepreneurship, but I was I was I was super interested in in that world. Anyway, so I started a company, didn't work out so well, and then I kind of like licked my wounds, I guess, and then started again. I was I was really interested, probably it's like 2012, 2013, started a company called Listen, which was like a mobile music consumer app. So think like Instagram for music. So in the same way that you connect through your friends via pictures and videos, we just did the same thing for music. It got pretty popular. You know, we got several hundred thousand active users being young guys out of college. We were really excited about that opportunity. The way we got a lot of customers, because we had no money, is we reached out to influencers. We were like, hey, you know, Vine influencer, Vine creator, would you like to promote this app? We were one of the first companies to promote our app on Vine. And as like mobile installs, it was a really great method to acquiring customers. That company was acquired, turned out pretty well for the founding team. And we were like kind of on to the next journey. So I spent about a year at the company kind of earning out, and then I basically like moved on to starting Dovetail. So Dovetail was sort of just like all of the initial thinking that we had built um via listen, and we turned that into a company basically. We turned that into a SaaS product. Took us a couple of years to kind of figure it out, generate some money, and then the I can go into more details about like how we exploded on Shopify, like we built out a Shopify solution. But the TLDR is like started off as a chemical engineer and then somehow ended up in the world of digital marketing and e-commerce.
SPEAKER_02I love it. I mean, everybody that I bring on this podcast has got some weird and wonderful story about how they landed up in digital and affiliate marketing. Now, for anybody that's been hiding under a rock and doesn't really understand the e-commerce space, can you tell us and just kick off this conversation about what Shopify Collabs is and why we should all be excited about it?
SPEAKER_00Certainly. Yeah. Shopify Collabs is an absolute rocket ship. So bring yourself back a couple of years when Apple changed the rules around tracking. I'll try to basically break down the simple language here because I hate talking about like ATT and some of the changes that's happening in the world of digital. So Apple changed the rules, made advertising super hard. Small businesses struggled to acquire customers. We said, hey, you know, advertising is one way of going to a customer. You put your credit card in on Facebook, select your audience, you spend a thousand bucks, you can reach a million people, right? Like that's the way advertising has kind of been done for many, many years. And not to say that going direct to creators and influencers is like net new, because it's definitely not. Like people have been doing this for years, like endorsements with Michael Jordan or like different things like that, like it's sort of the same thing. But the base problem we're trying to solve, like earliest days with Dovetail and now Shopify Collabs, because it's really not that different, is we're trying to help merchants reduce their customer acquisition costs. So when you go to Shopify Collabs, the reason why this is so exciting is because we give you all the tools as a merchant. So if you're selling, you know, mattresses or you're selling microphones, or you're selling like, you know, cups or whatever you're doing on Shopify, you can go into Shopify Collabs, set up a program, you can sync your products to it, and you can like invite and recruit creators to sell those products for you. So it's like it's an extended sales force of your business. So you're just collecting maybe 50, 100 of these folks that really love your products, and they're giving you're giving them a code and a link. So just like the same mechanic that's happened for like the last several decades, I feel. And you're giving them that code and a link, and they're promoting on their social media, their DMs, their friends and family, whatever they're doing, and they're getting a commission for everything they sell. So it's really, really simple when it comes down to it. But like when you look at the main goal and why this is so exciting, is that we're like building a full creator management suite. So as a merchant on Shopify, you have this customer database. Shopify's done done an amazing job of building you like the customer records, the orders table, like everything you do on Shopify. But what they're what we've now added is like this amazing system of record to house all the relationships you have with these like super fans, these advocates, these creators, these ambassadors. And those people are selling like at a super, super high frequency. We have many, many merchants now making like over a million dollars through like this channel. And this is like in Shopify land, this is like a year old. You know what I mean? Like going from like an independent company to an acquisition, like many, many companies generating over a million dollars in sales through like a net new channel that scales. What influencer marketing company out there today can say, like, hey, this company, like we just did an amazing case study with this company called Moon Boon. Moon Boon is like Moon Boon is an is a super cool company. Uh, you can see our case study on on the on the website, and they are like absolutely crushing it with mom influencers, like all these people. And you can say, like, if you put Shopify Collabs plus your brand, you generate sales. And I think that's a really unique place to be if you do it right, right? Obviously, like we have a lot of things to do to make it a little bit more turnkey, as in put your credit card in, get sales, but like if you do it right, you can get a lot of sales from this from this channel. And it kind of like levels the playing field, makes it easier for small businesses, even big businesses.
SPEAKER_02It's also it's it's kind of like word of mouth marketing, but on steroids is what kind of sprung to my mind when you're talking about this influencer content creator community, because the next generation, like everybody's talking about Gen Z and how they interact with digital, how they interact online. They're not even going to websites anymore, they're just going straight to TikTok. And they you they're buying from people that are telling them, showing them, you know, um, you know, promoting these products as part of their lifestyle. And the whole content curator community is becoming a much bigger piece of the partnership economy. So you're actually enabling and making it a lot easier for smaller businesses that have a Shopify, you know, e-commerce platform, they've they've got their you know products um categorized or whatever, to then leverage and actually push reach very, very quickly with a switch of a button, I would imagine. It's quite, I mean, if it's integrated into Shopify, it must be quite easy to set up, right?
SPEAKER_00You're 100% right. Like being a Shopify customer now, like you get all these amazing tools. Like it's a no-brainer. Like, I'm not saying that just because I work at Shopify, but it's like you look at everything that's out there and you're like, you know, why wouldn't I use Shopify? It's like it's such an easy decision now. Like, I mean, it kind of has been for a while, but like now you get all these advertising products, these demand products, that it's in it's really cool. But coming back to your point, like word of mouth advertising is like the key, but like authenticity is like this other piece that like creators and influencers can really like exploit. Um, and like I love this piece too, because like so many brands come to me and they're like, I have this really polished material. I spent like 10 grand on this content. I'm like, you know, people want to see your content with like an iPhone 6, you know what I mean? Like they want to see like the close-ups of your packaging. They want to see like what an unboxing looks like. They want to see how it's made. Talk to your supplier, talk to the CEO. Like, you know, like what makes these brands tick, like making that authentic world feel a little bit more real through the like the advocates, the influencers, the creators that are like really supporting the business. That sounds really simple when I say it out loud, but you'd be surprised on how many merchants just don't do this. And kind of like we're introducing, you know, them to like this more authentic way of selling through people that truly love their brands. So I think there's like something super interesting there, and like it's also kind of like how we've scaled this thing super well as well.
SPEAKER_02It's also it's it's about a culture change, really, I think, because from an affiliate management perspective, most affiliate managers have grown up in this industry used to working with content providers. So, you know, comparison sites, cashback voucher sites, everybody with a website. Now we've had to shift our focus to working with these content curators who are building massive followings across multiple different social media channels, and just the administration part of managing all of that becomes difficult. So when you said earlier you can kind of you know run your affiliate program in you know whatever network you're in, but then turn on Shopify Collabs alongside it and just amplify your entire performance literally overnight because you you're getting access to all of these content creators. But also it means that affiliate managers need to change the way that they're thinking about their programs and the content that they allow their partners to uh promote and push. So there has been a bit of a cultural shift, I think, on the brand side in terms of brand managers not being so overly protective of brand and allowing these content curators to authentically sell the product. And it isn't always going to be on brand, but that actually is what makes people sit up and take notes. So when the message is changing and it's being reflected back to niche audiences in a way that they can consume it, it's actually beneficial for your brand. So I think we're seeing this cultural shift internally on the brand side where affiliate managers are getting a little bit more leeway to allow themselves to work with content curators and brand managers are kind of loosening the grip and going, well, yeah, actually we need to allow these content creators to promote the products in a way that makes sense for our clients. But you actually touched on something else, which is, you know, people want to see boxes being opened, they want to see, you know, the packaging, they care about how it's how it's received. And that brings us on to the topic of gifting, which you and I actually touched on at our Amplify Summit earlier this year, but we didn't really get to talk deep on. So I wanted to, now that I've got you, get you to talk a little bit about your experience of gifting with influencers and content creators, because a lot of affiliate managers I speak to, they see that as a cost and they're not actually looking at it as a way to engage new partners. So talk to us a little bit about your experience in the gifting area and why you think that's so important for affiliate managers to actually embrace.
SPEAKER_00I want to segue this into like something really important you said is that like the world of affiliate management and like just marketing customer acquisition is changing so rapidly. But like think about how exciting it is to be an affiliate manager with all of these super tools on your hands now. Before it was like the world of like, you know, you have like crappy UTM tracking tools, and like, you know, you'd have just like kind of rudimentary stuff at your fingertips where you're kind of like brokering these relationships with publishers and you know, even creators or like whatever it is. And it's just like it's a very tough world. And now like things are finally catching up to like the sophistication that people kind of always expected. So from a software point of view, we are like really trying to up level everything. So like gifting is a great example of this, right? Like every affiliate manager probably watching this that's like been in the industry for like maybe 10, five to 10 years, is like, I have a spreadsheet of all the creators and all the publishers and all the people that I have to send all these products to so that they can kind of get behind in an authentic way. I remember going to like the PNG offices and like they're like, oh, this palette's going out to this agency, this palette's going out to this agency. And I'm like, you guys are like, you guys are operating this in like the land of spreadsheets still. This is crazy. Like we live in you know, 2020, whatever. And I'm and I think that gifting is like one of those superpowers that like every like they call it seating, gifting, whatever you want to call it. It's just like, how do you get the product in the hand of the person that's gonna be talking about it? That's the goal. That's the like as quickly as possible. And the reason why I think that there's some apprehension toward this, although there's like not that much for like savvy merchants when you go directly to the merchants, they're like, ask them this question How much are you spending to acquire a customer on Facebook right now? How much are you spending to acquire a customer on TikTok right now? And it's probably the cost of your product. It's probably like if you have if you're just starting like whatever else it is, or at least the the cost of the margin. Like what is what is your what is your net cost on this product? Um, so I'm basically like, you know, why don't you just send out a bunch of products to your to your favorite creators, your favorite influencers, your super fans that are happen to be creators of some really cool tools out there that will tell you the customers that are also creators, when you send them something new? There's two things that will benefit from that. One is that you'll get the product in the hands of the person that could potentially say some really nice things about you on social media. They have friends, fans, followers, whatever else it is. The other thing is that they can give you feedback. What happens if they like hate your product? Well, if someone cares enough to give you feedback on that product, that means you know the the index is pretty high for someone to like eventually buy it because they're willing to give you feedback. The worst case scenario here is that you send a there's like a third case. You send a product to someone, it ends up in their lobby's mailbox, and they just never talk about it, they never open it, just kind of sits there forever, or they end up just like throwing it out. I call that like basically the cost of doing business. So gifting is sort of just like think about also like on the other side as a creator. So, as we're just talked about affiliate managers, we talked about merchants, we talked about founders, but think about a creator. Creators are getting bombarded every single day by these merchants that are trying to work with them, right? And you kind of have to like sympathize with this too, even though it's like a ton of opportunity. It's great to see the world of like this economy spreading out. So no longer, you know, Condé Nass taking all the media dollars, it's like all the influencers and creators that are kind of distributing this money, which is great. The economy grows, it's you know, rising tide lifts all ships, it's it's really cool to see. But like when you think about it as a creator, you're like, how do I know this brand is serious about working with me? If they can't even send me a gift or something that's like shows like that intent, maybe a handwritten letter or whatever else it is, how do I know that they're serious? And I think that's like one of the really cool things about this.
SPEAKER_02And let's be clear, what you're saying, you've you've hit the nail on the head. Affiliates have a choice of who they can and should be working with. Because there are multiple products that are similar to each other, and they all have the finer nuance. Like I always say, shoes is shoes, whether it's Adidas, Nike, Puma, like how are you going to build that relationship? And it starts with something as simple as here's a product with a little handwritten letter that makes them feel special, that makes them feel like you've actually taken the time to look at their business, you understand their traffic, you know how you want to get into their community. And that is what actually makes you stand out now as a program manager. It's no longer spray and pray, here's my product. Those that pick it up, hooray, we've made a 10% uplift in sales. Like we have to think a little bit more strategically about how we get our products and services into those niche audiences via our partners and content curators. So I love what you've just said there. It's 100% correct.
SPEAKER_00We're not landing rockets on you know ships, right? Like we're not this is these are simple concepts that are like they're definitely very difficult to execute because you're dealing with people here, right? Like all we're doing at Shopify Collabs right now is trying to execute on the simple things and make it super, super simple. When you go into like any modern product, you open your iPhone, you don't need an instruction manual. You open collabs, you don't need an instruction manual. Don't need anyone to like really tell you what to do because it just makes sense. So I think that there's like a product philosophy in how we're building these things just to like make sense, which is you know why I think like we've got to be like the biggest creator platform in the world at this point. Like, I don't know how the I don't really spend my time on competition or ecosystem or any of those types of things. And given that we're like Shopify, we we love to support every single affiliate solution, every single influencer marketing solution. I think there's a world where like Collabs is growing incredibly quickly, but like there's also a bunch of other tools and solutions out there that have amazing capabilities that you know promote specific use cases. Maybe it's like I am the digital gifting tool or I'm the product to give away digital gifts. And that's like the that's like the niche that you're that you're focused on. Whereas like we're more physical products for gifting. And like we just teach the industry, like developers and different things like that to build all these cool things and to like adopt the principles, the paradigms, the primitives that we have built inside of Collabs so that they can like expand on other opportunities. There's so many opportunities in affiliate, marketplace, gifting, like influencer, creator, artificial intelligence. Like there's just so many opportunities here. And we're just like kind of at the start of this.
SPEAKER_02And I think we're we're kind of all exploring it as well. So there is no right or wrong way. Because another thing that I get asked a lot is how do you spot the kind of bad actors and influencer and collaborators? Because I think some people have entered into this space and they've got burnt because they just haven't understood how to work with influencers in a way that makes sense for their business. So they've either paid upfront costs or um, you know, they've they've fallen into that third category where they've sent free gifting, but they haven't maybe done the the like research properly, and the gifter just has just sat there, so it's money waste or cost of doing business, as you said. Like, how do you spot signals to kind of make you understand that this is or isn't the right kind of relationship that you should be entering into? What are some of the things that people can look at?
SPEAKER_00The amount of times I've talked to a merchant that has kind of like come to me and they're like, Mike, you know, I try. This thing and I spent a bunch of money on software, spent a bunch of money on creators, spent a bunch of time, I hired virtual assistants, I did all the things. The amount of times I've joined a call where it's like that is the general sentiment or like the general strategy is like it's a lot, it's a lot of times. And you have to kind of like quickly just figure out where the business is at first, because some people just expect influencer creator marketing to be like a silver bullet, and it is like certainly not. Coming to like bad actors, like the reason why I mentioned this too is because like the way that Dovetail started out is we started out before we were collabs, because it just kind of was a rebrand. Before we focused on like a fraud identity, so or uh like an identity check for fake audiences, before like kind of like APIs became a little harder to use. So we would identify creators that have like you know, nefarious audiences, like audiences that have been purchased, like audiences that are you know, whatever it was. I don't know how people do it these days. Um but we could tell. We could tell, like basically, if a creator was just like, this is not an audience that is gonna buy your products if you kind of like work with them. And that's like the key piece here. Think about Shopify now. Shopify kind of knows who buyers are, right? Like we know in our ecosystem who buys things and who doesn't buy things. It gives us like a pretty interesting advantage when you think about like creators that are partnering with merchants. What if there is a world where creators have this opportunity to tell merchants that like they're not just selling the dream on sales, they can actually prove it. So I won't give you much more than that, but like there is a world where you know, like we can actually swing the needle in favor of our merchants and say, we can predict the future if you work with this creator. We can say you have a higher chance of working with this particular person that drives sales versus like this person over here that's just gonna drive impressions, or this person over here that's gonna be maybe kind of like a big risky move if you kind of work with that person.
SPEAKER_02That's pretty much a game changer. I mean, I've never seen, to my knowledge, an affiliate network that can predict whether a publisher is actually going to be able to bring you the KPIs that you're setting, whether that's brand reach or uplifting sales or incrementality or whatever the case may be. They've got reporting that can help you to map that journey. But this would be a game changer, I think, and it would probably enable a flood more of advertisers to enter this marketplace because there would be a lower barrier to entry, because they'd be able to protect. And data transparency is something that I think we all want in the industry because we want to be able to make database decisions that are meaning that our budgets are being spent more efficiently. So I'm very much in a hurrah state of mind after hearing that because I'm like, bring it on. You know, for 20 years we've been doing affiliate marketing the same way. So I think the industry's waiting for disruption like this. So if there's any networks out there listening, like maybe you want to take a chip off the old block here from Shopify Co-Labs and start looking at your reporting. But what are some of the best practices that you can share with our audiences thinking about getting into the infrared space as part of their like affiliate partner program mix? Because it has been a bit touch and go up until now. We've got some brands that are doing like phenomenally well with ambassadors and content curators, and then we've got some brands that have obviously come to you and gone, I tried this and it just didn't work. So, what are some of the best practices that you can give as you know, examples to to guys listening into this podcast?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean the the thing is is like more time in equals more impact. That is basically like the summary of most of my conversations with folks. Because again, like a lot of people come to us and they're like, if I just press a button, will the people sell my products? I'm like, it's not really how it happens. You know what I mean? Like, you have to build these relationships with people that truly care about your products, and maybe you'll get lucky. Maybe for six months you'll find a creator and influencer that doesn't need a lot of you know hand holding or communications or anything else like that. But like eventually they're just gonna be like, I'm gonna go somewhere else. You know what I mean? Like there's so many products out there, there's so many things. And like also maybe their audience has just been their audience has already purchased all the all that they can. You know what I mean? So, like one of the things I think is like really important when you're starting off working with creators and influencers is like put the time in. Here's an example. I know a company is gonna be successful day one if the founder of the company jumps on the phone and says this is my number one or number two priority. Because creator and influencer is like no joke, like you have to put the time in, but if you put the time in, you're gonna generate a lot of really valuable sales. As long as your product is aligned, you have supply chain that can support it, like all the base stuff that you're doing as a merchant. I'm only, by the way, speaking on behalf of like merchants and creators, not the other stakeholders, like publishers and different things, which I think are super, super fascinating. It's just like not really where we're focused right now. But I know the second I jump on a call with a merchant that's like, here's the founder, here she's taking it really serious. We're we're going down in this path, and it's just like I know that they're like this one amazing woman. She she has this this uh this brand, and she does like a monthly Zoom call. She's like one of those famous creator influencer merchants, um, and she does this like monthly Zoom call with all of her, like I think she's like 55 or 50 or 60 creators in her network. And those are like her super fan creator influencers, they're selling her her stuff all the time, and they just like want to be around her, you know what I mean? Like, just want to be like engaging with her, and like they just feel like so much advocacy toward the brand because they engage with her and like they sell her products for her, they make great commissions. The other thing great about collabs too is like I'm pretty sure like across the network, like compared to something like Amazon, where Amazon has like a like a very low commission rate, it's like less than five percent on average. Like collabs is like significantly higher. Like, we have brands sending 15-20% commissions to their creators. You can make a decent amount of income via via that method. So you just see like this direct-to-creator model, yeah.
SPEAKER_02So, how do people get involved? Because last time I spoke to you, and and it was a couple of months back, this was only really available in the US and Canada, but when's it kind of moving out to the rest of the world or has it already?
SPEAKER_00It has, yeah. So we've we've expanded. Um, so basically, as a merchant, you can you any merchant that's on Shopify can use Shopify Collabs. Um, you can recruit your own creators, you can use our search and discovery tools, you can use our affiliate gifting and payouts tools, and there's like literally a mountain of things that are like being developed all the time. Like we were shipping like six different projects in like two weeks, you know what I mean? Like all the little things that make your life 10 times simpler. So, yes, but you can as any merchant on Shopify utilize the tool today.
SPEAKER_02And what about getting in as an influencer? Because we do have some influencers that listen to this podcast too. How do you get in?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so as a creator, basically you have to have a thousand followers on any of your social channels to get in. That being said, that's going directly into collabs. So if you are a merchant that has invited, say, like I don't have many followers, right? So it's like if I apply to work with one of the merchants that are on collabs, they can actually let me in irregardless of my follower account. So it is truly like a uh merchant-controlled system. But if you wanted, if you wanted to like apply to collabs and like get access to all the merchants, you have to have a thousand followers.
SPEAKER_02I think I'm gonna apply to collabs because I've got way more than a thousand followers, but I don't know what kind of products I'd be able to sell. Yeah. Um okay, so my last question to you as we wrap up this podcast, which has been super informative, and I'm really grateful for your time because I know it's early where you are. What do you see the future of partner collaborations looking like? And what kind of key trends are you seeing now at the early start of rolling this out globally? Like, what's what do you think is going to blow up in the next kind of two years?
SPEAKER_00Key trends, wow. Um okay, so I think there's like a couple things. Maybe I'll just rapid fire them. The first one is like affiliate won't feel like affiliate, it'll feel much more like a checkout experience. I'll kind of leave it at that. That's that's like something I'm really interested in right now. The blue links all over the web kind of gotta go. You know what I mean? Like I want to make this like a little bit more of a like a native experience. I think there's something really interesting about that. Uh number two, I'll give you two. Um I really do think the world of machine learning is catching up to a place where it can like automate a ton of these like amazing things that we can do with creators and influencers. That being said, a human will always be necessary to build a relationship.
SPEAKER_02Amen.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. That being said, you can you can automate a ton of the the like the nitty-gritty. You know what I mean? Finding people, sending comms, like reminders, like you can do all these like really, really simple things like to make it easier on both sides. Like, I think there's some really interesting things that we're we're working on here to uh to automate a lot of the a lot of the like kind of I don't know, boring work.
SPEAKER_02I think that's amazing. Well, listen, Mike, it's been an absolute pleasure to have you on this podcast this morning, which is quite early for you. So I do appreciate your time. It I just I'm super excited to see how this is going to impact and help programs to grow. I think you've given us lots and lots of interesting insights in terms of how to work properly with influencers and creators and how to actually make sure that the work and the campaigns that you are doing match back to the KPIs that you actually want them to deliver and getting very clear on the strategy that you want these partners to do for you. Because I think that's also where sometimes the misunderstandings creep in is when you're not really clear what you want these partners to actually do, but then you judge them on the fact that they've delivered a piece of content and hasn't, you know, delivered the the nuts and bolts of the KPIs that you wanted them to deliver. So getting really clear about what it is that you need and want from these partners and then doing your due diligence as well to select them. And it sounds like you're doing some stuff to help people with that, which is which is quite exciting, I think. It's been a pleasure to have you on the podcast today. And um, thank you for sharing all of the insights. And guys, if you haven't checked out Shopify Co Labs and you've been hiding under a rock, now's the time to go and look at it. So if you've got a Shopify plugin or Shopify backend and you're running an affiliate program, go and have a look. That's why we get people like Mike on this um podcast to share what's happening in the world. So thanks so much for being here, Mike. It's been a pleasure to have you.
SPEAKER_00Thank you so much, super fun.
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