Hi and welcome to the Affiliate Insider podcast with me, Liam Johnston. This is the podcast of digital and affiliate marketers. Listen up as I explore the latest digital and affiliate marketing trends and give you the insidest view on what's occurring in affiliate marketing. My last as least will affiliate strategies host expert interviews with leading affiliates and tech entrepreneurs and discuss the latest affiliate and digital marketing trends. If you want to stay at the cutting edge of affiliate marketing, you're in the right place. Join me for this week's episode and let's get started.
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SPEAKER_03Welcome back to this season of the Affiliate Insider Affiliate Marketing Podcast. And today we're interviewing someone I've been reading a long time to meet. And anyone who's ever looked on Google to figure out how to set up an investor deck for your affiliate or entrepreneurial business would probably have come across a really useful website called SlideBean. Today I'm fortunate enough to have SlideBean, CEO and the founder of many entrepreneurial businesses, Jose Canaso or Kaya, as he's known to his tribe of social media followers online. Hey Kaya, how are you doing today?
SPEAKER_00I'm doing good. Happy to be here. Thanks a lot for having me, Leon.
SPEAKER_03Thank you so much for being here with me. And we're going to talk about entrepreneurship, about amplifying, about pivoting, about persevering, words that most affiliates and brand entrepreneurs listening to this podcast will be identifying with right now. But before we get started, I want to let you introduce yourself and I want you to start off by setting the scene and giving our audience a little bit of a rundown of your backstory and your entrepreneurial journey itself and how you got here with me today.
SPEAKER_00All right. So uh well, my name is Kaya. I am the CEO and one of the founders of Slight Beam, which is this fundraising platform for startups. And yeah, before that, I started a couple other companies. I went through a couple of accelerators, and probably the biggest highlight of this is how much of a crash course entrepreneurship was for me. Like I didn't set out to be an entrepreneur when I got out of college. I sort of stumbled upon it or sort of happened by accident. And I'm a big believer that a lot of good companies can get started because people stumble upon these business opportunities.
SPEAKER_03Well, and also that they follow their passion. And their passion isn't necessarily running a business. I definitely fall into that category, which is kind of how we met, really. I mean, I'm passionate about affiliate marketing and about helping brands to grow their businesses that way. But running a business is a completely different set of skills. And I know that you've done several entrepreneurial businesses that you've launched and scaled. So you have a very impressive period trajectory. And that's why I wanted to bring you on this podcast because I want to start our conversation on the YouTube videos that actually connected us in the first place. The ones where you talked openly about failure and about perseverance and about pivoting your business when you've launched it. So tell us why you made these videos for entrepreneurs in your YouTube community.
SPEAKER_00Hmm. Okay. Yeah. So, well, that's another thing I stumbled upon by accident. Slightbee has always been a very content-focused company, and a lot of our marketing, a lot of our growth, a lot of our customers have come from our content marketing efforts. And those were written content for years. And we grew the website. I don't know if these numbers are relevant or not, because it's a completely different scope. What we do, but we grew our website to 300,000, 400,000 monthly readers, mostly promoting our own product. And we came to a point where there was no low-hanging fruit to say double that audience. So how do we go from 400 to 800k in the niche in the audience that we're trying to capture? There was no obvious way to do that with Google. And that's when we figured, well, what's the next search engine that we should look at? And you know, people like to think of Bing, but really the next second largest search engine is YouTube. So I have a bit of a background in video production. And at the very beginning, we figured, well, let's just try and make some videos, see what happens, see how they perform, see if we can build an audience around this. And we would have given up on this long ago if we had had to pay for each one of these videos because producing a video is very expensive. But since we were doing it in-house, since it was kind of a bit of my passion and some other team members kind of had a video background, even though we hired them for completely different reasons. It was nice to kind of get together and make these little side projects of videos within our job. And we did this for 18 months or so until finally we found a video recipe that resonated with an audience that started ranking well and started driving traffic and customers to us. And we've just been repeating that for the last couple of years.
SPEAKER_03So there's a couple of things that I want to pick out from there because we've got a lot of affinities that are building YouTube channels. You know, it takes a little while for them to grow. And I think you touched on that a little bit here. It was consistency. You were consistently producing content, sometimes outside of your main job spec and posting that online for 18 months before you started to actually really build the resonance in the audience that you have. And for those of you who haven't checked out Kaya's videos, I would highly recommend that you go and log into the YouTube channel because he speaks about things that entrepreneurs don't normally talk about, which is quite refreshing and why we're kind of connected. Because it can be a very lonely journey. And I think the other thing to think about here for affiliate managers that might be listening is if you are dealing with a YouTuber or a streamer and that's the content curator that you're talking to, understand how long it takes them to actually build traction. So how you're relationship managing this partner compared to an SEO or PPC affiliate could be completely different. And you need to adjust your relationship building strategy with them as well, because they're not going to be able to just turn on traffic sources and drive customers to your side. But I mean, you've grown your YouTube channel to, I think it was something like a million or gag views recently, which is just like phenomenal. Okay. Considering that you're talking to a really niche audience of entrepreneurs. I mean, talk to us a little bit about the content strategy that goes behind that because your target audiences everywhere, right? But how do you make them find you?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and I want to elaborate a little bit on what you said about consistency because during this first failed 18-month period, the first time we tried YouTube, we were consistent. We would put a video out there once a week and we would do this, but it's a bit of consistency and a bit of kind of watching and understanding what you're doing that that's working and that's not working, right? I think that back then, in retrospect, we were just not paying attention to YouTube. And and I think with YouTube, the reality is you should get to publishing as soon as you can. Your first videos will be terrible. There's nothing you can do about it. They will be terrible. But only after you try and fail and you start to kind of get in the format and you start to get into the schedule of producing content weekly, you can start to improve on that. But also kind of learn and understand what people like, what people don't like. So the character or persona or the YouTube persona that you're trying to portray. Like I said, during these 18 months, we were consistent, but we were not good at really listening or watching content that fellow channels were producing around our topic. And therefore, we just were way, way off on the format that people were expecting to see. So this was a process of more than being consistent, of quick iterations. Okay, this is not working, so let's try this. It's not working, let's try this. Normally, what we'd like to do is do three or four videos in a single format. Take a thesis, for example. We did a thesis not too long ago on news where we produce content that's more like newsworthy, that's about the stuff that happened in starters during the week. So let's give it four videos, see what happens with those four videos, and then decide. And many times we've done the four videos, not seen any results, and just archive the project and move it to something different. I think that during this first 18-month period, we should have done that more often. We probably had a series that took us three months, four months to kind of decide, like, oh, this is not working, we should do something else. But you know, those four videos in a single style, check if they work, if they don't, try something else, try something different. Once we found that recipe, that new recipe, which for us was kind of like a talking head video with a green screen and some innovation in the background, videos that were 10 to 15 minutes long, that was our ideal format. Once we found that, we started seeing traction, we started seeing those videos ranking in search, and then we just doubled down on that.
SPEAKER_03Okay. So find your niche, be authentic, and test reiterations over and over again until you find the right mechanic. And really, that's like basic marketing. I mean, I know you're making it sound super simple now because I know that a lot of people are dabbling in Google and search engines and then they're not getting it right, but somehow you've managed to make something really complex, really, really simple, which is great to hear. I want to kind of move into the entrepreneurial side now because this is really like the nuts and bolts of where your expertise sits. And I really want to delve a little bit deeper into that on this podcast because I know a lot of affiliates are actually small business entrepreneurs. You know, they're 10 to 15 people strong. They may be have, you know, outsourced partners that are working with them in their businesses. And arguably kind of the biggest challenges that digital entrepreneurs face is finding startup funding and learning how to kind of connect with investors or angel investors, whoever it is that they're pitching on a very personable level to explain their business because sometimes it can be a little bit complex. So, what are the key tips that you can give to, you know, agency entrepreneurs, affiliates, brands, anybody that's looking for startup funding, what are some of the key tips that you can sort of tell them to get their story perfect and get their presentation perfect?
SPEAKER_00Good point. So I'll first start by saying that a lot of people get confused about kind of like what venture capital investors are after. Because I think there is a line to be drawn between more traditional businesses and sort of like the classic Silicon Valley type. There's a line to be drawn there because you know, for example, I've seen agencies, say development agencies, uh, a few engineers get together, they're building software, and these guys are going after uh Silicon Valley investors. And that would be incorrect. Why? Because Silicon Valley investors are usually looking to invest in products or in services where there's a very big technology aspect to that. So, you know, you you'll see the obvious candidates. You think Facebook with Uber and these companies. So there's a product associated to it. There's a huge capacity to scale where this business could be generating a hundred million dollars in revenue or have hundreds of millions of visits or traffic, and they can do that with a handful of staff. One of my favorite examples in that place is Instagram, for example. When Facebook bought Instagram, Instagram had 350 million users and 13 employees. So that is the type of scale that Silicon Valley looks after, and that is the type of scale that raises that type of venture capital. What about the rest of the businesses? It's very different, the type of investor that they want to go after. It's an investor that's definitely in their space, that understands their space better, that has probably had successful businesses in that space. They can't get away with valuations as the Silicon Valley startups can. To give you an example, Silicon Valley type company who's building a new product can easily go with a team and a very small product prototype, raise a million and something dollars on a $7 million valuation, which means the investors are going to get 10, 15% of the company. That's very quote unquote normal in the Silicon Valley world because this is a company that if investors are putting their money in this company, it's because they're expecting a unicorn, meaning a company worth a billion dollars or more. If you're not a unicorn, that's perfectly fine. Most businesses are not unicorns. Most businesses are not set out to build that. So if you're the other type of business, then like I said, you know, you're looking at investors closer to your space, closer to your relationships, closer to your family, even, who have experience in space, who are investing in you, who expect a larger percentage stake in the business because the only way they can actually make a return on that business is if they own a larger stake. Because this business is while very profitable and with great potential, it's not going to go unicorn like the other type of business.
SPEAKER_03Now I think we speak more to that second audience group. I mean, we have seen in the affiliate industry that I work in companies that get listed on stock exchanges because they're just huge media groups in the end. They've just built so many trafficable websites that they become huge media groups like Catena Media or Better Collective, and they just have loads and loads and loads of trapping and become publicly listed companies. But the majority of people listening to this podcast are going to be small medium enterprises that need to figure out how to actually present themselves in a way that attracts investment too. And I think, I mean, I know I've used SlideBean. So, you know, that's one of the things that I really love about your website is that it is absolutely filled with information. It's like the go-to resource place for startups, as far as I'm concerned. Or even SMEs, you know, like people that are really looking to take that next level and that next step. What made you actually decide to build SlideBean?
SPEAKER_00So it's funny because I think if we would have started SlideBean as a startup for startups, like we kind of are now, I wouldn't have bought into that story because you know, you don't necessarily have that experience. The idea for Slide Bean came trying to solve design on presentations. That was kind of like our first thesis. You know, can we automate design in a way where it's easier, faster for companies or for users to just create a presentation that looks good? That's what we set out to build first. A couple years in, we had gathered some users, we had some growth and we had some paying customers. But the reality of it was that most of the people who were using this product were startups trying to build a pitch tech. So once we sort of saw that audience, saw that this product was resonating with them, it was being useful for them, combination of factors, the templates, kind of our marketing and our own uh messaging kind of resonated with this type of user. Once we saw that, we figured, well, why don't we double down on them rather than trying to go so broad and you just target anybody who's making presentations? That kind of set us into this path that we are on very knee deep now in this path of focusing on helping startups.
SPEAKER_03How many people actually come through your service model? Like is the startup industry actually growing? I mean, especially since COVID and you know, people are now looking to do more things online. What are the numbers that you're seeing?
SPEAKER_00We get around 30,000 signups a month, more or less. And most of these guys are looking to start a company, looking for one resource or the other. We've seen that audience shift a lot from the US to other parts of the world. I think it's a combination of our YouTube audience being much more international than just US. If you look back, you know, five years, 60% of our customers were US-based. Now it's probably like 40, and the rest come from the rest of the world. But yeah, we don't see that slowing down. And on the contrary, I guess pandemic being one of the best examples. You know, if you remember how bad March and April was last year when the pandemic started, everybody was desperate. We saw it in our traffic, how nobody was interested in pitch decks or anything. They just stopped. But you know, coming May, June, July, we sort of saw this spring of entrepreneurship, spring of new companies coming up, and therefore for us, a spring of new customers.
SPEAKER_03It must be quite interesting sitting at that beginning phase, because obviously you're getting the touch point of these amazing ideas and things that are being pushed through your platform with all of these presentations that are being made. You must get an insider's view, like a bird's eye view of what's happening and ideas and things that are coming through. What are your thoughts on starting a business today? Like what are the key pieces of advice that you can give to people listening to this podcast as they're getting started?
SPEAKER_00I think that the topic of the day, I see a lot of pitch decks happening and a lot of stuff going on is in Web3 and decentralized technology. We don't see a lot of, and luckily, we don't see a lot of pitch decks on NFTs or stuff like this, mostly because most NFTs today are just these art collections, right? And that's what honestly, like as a believer I am in the technology of decentralized and NFTs and in blockchain in general. I think most of the people working with NFTs today are just trying to flip them and make some money before the bubble bursts. But long term, I think that the technology does have potential. And you see, you still see a little bit of that. You still see a little bit of the companies who are not thinking about the immediate money that they can flip just reselling monkeys, but uh long-term potential of Web3. Like I think that that is a good portion of what we see that looks very exciting.
SPEAKER_03Okay. Because I'm seeing a lot from my side as well in terms of marketing tech coming to the fore. Like every day I'm finding new technologies that can make my job quicker, faster, better, and even improve cost margins for clients that we work with. So, you know, I came across a piece of technology, I can't for the life of me remember it now, but essentially it monetizes banners or pictures, images on affiliate sites with multiple tracking links, which has never really been able to be done before. Like normally it's one link per image, right? So, like just the technology that's coming forward and it's coming fast, really, really fast, which is probably why your business is growing so quickly too, is quite pleasing for me because I think it's quite an exciting time to work in digital right now. There's a lot of content on your side, there's a lot that you're doing to help startups and communities of entrepreneurs to do more and to get the support and expertise that they need in order to move businesses forward. But what do you think the future of entrepreneurship looks like? Because as you've been talking about, you know, decentralized stuff, we're talking about cryptocurrencies. Do you think that funding is going to change for startups as well in this new economy?
SPEAKER_00I think yes. Probably the main shift that I'm seeing is for good or worse, a lot of people are now rich thanks to cryptocurrencies. And that's just the truth of it. We have tens of thousands of people who are now millionaires because they invested in crypto early. You could speak what you want about crypto, whether you like it or not. But the reality is that these people now have that money, now have that disposable income that they want to invest, and that they are willing to invest in projects using the same technology that made them rich, right? That is an interesting variable that we're seeing where a lot of these decentralized projects are just raising funding from their own communities without having to go through investors. Now, again, this is a very much a double-edged sword. I do believe that, you know, the traditional venture funds that will fund the next I'm speculating here. I think that in the next 10 or 20 years, you know, the companies that will go public, the brands that we'll know about, those are gonna be venture-backed brands, just like they have been for the last 20 years. But I think that after that, there is an opportunity for these new types of funding, crowdfunding, even now being on a more popular approach, are gonna start, you know, we're we're gonna see a uh crowdfunded unicorn in the next few years.
SPEAKER_03Doesn't surprise me at all. I mean, we've got a couple of clients that have come to us who have started through crowdfunding. And even like things like Cedars and, you know, I mean, I I invest in a couple of businesses on C anybody can become an investor now. Anybody can actually invest in a business. You don't have to be a millionaire, right? You just need to like the idea and the concept. So I think that is quite interesting in terms of how the future of entrepreneurship is going to change the way business gets done. I just want to go back a little bit quickly and just talk a little bit more about slide being and what you guys actually do to help entrepreneurs because it's not just about the pitch deck, it's not just about the funding. I mean, your website has got the most amazing amount of content that I've ever seen on a site. So I do want to say, you know, get over there and have a look at it if you're listening to this podcast. But what's the typical journey that you take with a customer when they actually hit SlideBe? Can you just walk us through the kind of services and things that you offer to people?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So we've essentially shifted from this presentation platform that it used to be into what we called internally a slide bean hub for a while. Externally, it's just slide bean now. But it is kind of like a hub, like a dashboard of tools for the entrepreneur, right? So now PitchDake, which used to be front and center, now it's just one of the modules where it's shared with some financial modeling tools, which are essentially really a spreadsheet, but you know, a pretty well-built spreadsheet so that you can run some estimations. We have one for content marketing and for affiliate as well, where you, you know, you can run estimations on your traffic, on your percentage, affiliate fees, on how much that traffic grows, and how many writers do you need, and that sort of thing. So running this spreadsheet can give you an idea of well, okay, when can I hire people? When should I hire people? How big can my business scale if I know or you have some guesswork on these numbers, right? So that's another one. We have this startup checklist.
SPEAKER_03That ties back to the fact that you know these tools are readily available, they're very cost efficient because I I did actually have a look at that spreadsheet before I got on this call. And they will really help people to sleep prog forward really quickly because you might be passionate about driving traffic and building a website, but you might not be a business person and you might not be ready to hire that business person yet. So tools like this are actually incredibly important for businesses that are starting out.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, yeah. So a bunch of these. So we have that. We have a bunch of, of course, the lessons that we publish on YouTube, a couple of courses included. We have an investor finder, which is essentially matches you with investors and let's keep track of those conversations. We have what we call the starter checklist, which is essentially, you know, if you're looking to raise money, like what documentation, what stuff do you need to have as a data room, as a back office that investors are going to check? That's another one. Yeah. So essentially a big suite of tools. Last one that we launched is a tool called Recurring, which lets you track your recurring expenses, like your SaaS services and that sort of thing. Because for us, you know, we're a team of 35 people now and it got crazy. Like the the SaaS tools that we had got crazy. It was tough to keep track of them. We were we realized that we had duplicate tools. We try to find a tool to help us bring this to order. We couldn't find one, so we we built it ourselves.
SPEAKER_03I have to be honest with you. I mean, if my team's listening to this podcast, they're gonna go, yep, yep, Leanne. My name's Leanne and I'm an I'm a SaaS product buyer. Like we have so many SaaS product tools in our team that eventually our ops manager had to come in and go, hang on a minute, like slow down on the buying of the things. But maybe we should have just come straight to slide being so I will get you to check this out. I wanna kind of move forward a little bit and talk about the pivoting and the persevering again because I kind of want to throw this question in here for you and just say kind of what's the best piece of business advice that you've ever received.
SPEAKER_00I want to name two. So one not received, but one of my favorite books in entrepreneurship is a book called The Lean Startup, which essentially kind of changes your mindset as to how to approach businesses in the startup way. In traditional businesses, say run a market study, run some projections, run these things, and then raise capital. Whereas, you know, lean starter approach, which is essentially what a lot of most startups are doing these days, is you know, build, learn, and measure. Sorry, build, measure, and learn is really the cycle. So you know build something quickly that takes a week to iterate, test it out, measure your success against it, and then learn from those metrics, and then start building again. If you iterate in these really quickly, one or two week cycles at the very beginning of your journey, then you know, your essentially a business is how many cycles you can run before you run out of money or before you find product market fit, right? Uh so the faster you can run these cycles to find product market fit, the better your chances of succeeding. So that's one. The other one is very random or very real. One of my investor friends, Steve, was been a guest in their channel sometimes. This was kind of like the first remember. I'm from Costa Rica. The first experience I had with startups was this excitement I was accepted in nine years ago. And first session, we come into the office, we have like some motivational talks and whatnot, and his end slide was don't run out of money. Like your first job as a CEO of a company is not running out of money. And you know, you can talk all you want about you know building a team and about building a product and so on, but none of that stuff happens if you run out of money. My first company, we went out of business because we ran out of money, and it's painful letting people go, having to let people go because you made the wrong call in terms of money is painful. But that is your first job. Anything that you can build depends on that one base requirement, which is not running out of money.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, but also I think just to be really kind of honest and raw and real, it's realizing when to also stop. Because as entrepreneurs we are passionate about what we do, and sometimes the passion can overtake the reality. So having tools in place that can give you the breakdown and actually go, here's your break point, like this isn't working, or you need to find something else to add to it can also be incredibly painful um to go through. So I I thank you for sharing that information, and I'm definitely gonna go and buy that book and have a look at it. But yeah, I think it's really good to get you on the show. Thank you so much for your time. I know you're incredibly busy, and I think you had such massive nuggets of wisdom that you've shared here with us today. So really appreciate your time and thank you very much for being on the podcast with me today.
SPEAKER_00Thanks so much for having me and hope this is useful to everyone. Happy to answer any questions you guys have as followed. So just look me up on Twitter. I'm Kaya here on Twitter. Thanks a lot for having me again.
SPEAKER_03And go and check out the YouTube channel, guys, because I'm on it pretty much every day now. So thank you very much for all of the content that you push forward and really looking forward to seeing you, hopefully, at some point in the near future if we can travel again.
SPEAKER_00Awesome.
SPEAKER_02And that's a wrap for this week's Affiliate Insider Affiliate Marketing Podcast. If you're loving what we're putting down in this series, head on over to Apple iTunes and give us a five-star rating and subscribe to our podcast channel so you never miss another insightful episode. Tune in next week for more digital marketing insights and traffic driving tips, tricks, and strategies to keep your digital marketing fresh and your affiliate program driving consistent sales.
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