I was always fascinated about Affiliate marketing, ever since I was on high school, I used to arrive at school around 07:20 (school started at 08:00) I did that not because I didn’t like sleeping, it was actually the only possible way (school was around an hour from home).
Around the age of 18 I think I used to spend those 45min sitting in a coffee place next to school, reading books on building a business/entrepreneurship & financial blogs/news sites with a cute mini laptop my father bought me.
One day I saw an ad for a meetup at TAU (Tel Aviv university) the meetup was about affiliate marketing, I signed up and went there in the evening after school. In the meetup I saw one of the biggest affiliate marketers in Israel (I’ll save his name close in the system for now) he spoke about it with such passion and mentioned his blog where he writes on a daily basis about his progress in the field of affiliate and online marketing.
I started reading immediately, every day I used to “go back in time” and read his old posts (I think I had 2/3 years of posts to go over:) ), I’m pretty sure I went over most or even all of his posts and I knew that this is what I wanted to do, I started exploring and trying many of the different tips there, some worked for me some didn’t, but I kept trying.
While I was in the army, my cousin and I started taking things seriously, we built few simple websites and started promoting them in google, we did SEO only, nothing paid, we hired a team of freelancers from the Philippines and slowly scaled our operation (side note, I always loved working with Filipinos, their loyalty and work attitude are something special), it worked, we started making what used to be serious money for us, from affiliate commissions and from google Adsense (google ads on our sites) moving fwd when I finished my service and rented and office with friends (other affiliate marketers) we ran into some monetization problems with our sites and had to rethink our strategy, we thought, instead of promoting our own sites why not do it for others?
Why not promote high end startups and serious business and get paid to do that, after all, if we can promote our own sites, a serious business can benefit greatly from our knowledge.
But how can we get clients in such a high competition market? How to differentiate us from all the other agencies that are getting paid retainers to SEO different business.
As a true affiliate marketer, who believe (still to this day BTW) that performance based marketing is the fairest model online, why not offer our services on a performance base model ?
We started doing just that, it worked, we started offering clients to do SEO for them and to get paid ONLY if we deliver the services successfully. Today this agency is prob the biggest one here in Israel & the biggest one to work with crypto projects worldwide.
Getting back to our story, because of few different personal reasons I had to stop being active in that agency and I knew I’ll go back to the source, to affiliate marketing, I knew many niches we can target, Online Casino is a huge one for affiliates, VPNs is another one, you have software / SAAS niche, Forex/CFDs, and many more. We kept brainstorming where we can deliver the best product, where we can grow the fastest and where we can deliver the highest value to our users.
While we were researching the different niches and different players, an incident came to my mind, I got remembered of an employee in Bulgaria asking me if its ok to be paid early one month and not by the 10th the following month like everyone else, I said yes of course, but I remembered the reason for this request, the reason, the sad reason actually and this is something pretty unfamiliar to us living in Israel is simple, In Bulgaria there are almost 0 credit cards (today there are a bit actually as this happened few years ago, but still not like in Israel) without credit card, for those only using debit cards, what you have in your bank account is well, what you have…
When the funds in your account are done, and the month is not over, without anyone lending you more to make it to the “pay day” you have a problem, an economy without credit, without the ability to scale/leverage financial services is a dead/stuck economy, the US & Israeli economy I’m guessing are growing in a rapid speed exactly because of this simple fact, credit/ability to leverage funds.
From that moment, I knew that we can and should get into personal finance, we might not be able to do it in the US or UK for example because of the insane competition and huge companies in the field, and to be honest, those markets didn’t really attract my attention, “they will be ok” I said, there are enough options for them, we wanted to go to where we can deliver the highest value & impact, we started exploring the different GEOs, the different offers and players in the field, we knew we are going to use SEO to drive traffic to our site but we wanted to provide serious high value to our readers.
That’s when we started planning our tech, we knew a simple website with content recommending this/that brand won’t be enough, we want to test and work with the different brands and make them offer our users the best services possible, no more loan sharks, small tiny letters with insane commissions for applying to “free loans”, no more crazy interest for those who miss one payment by 1 day, we aim to level the playing field, just like AskGambler is making sure online casinos are not ripping players off, just like Uber lowered fare prices in different GEOs, like WOLT suddenly made food delivery actually work here in Israel (without waiting 2 hours for a pizza, thanks “Ten Bis” :/) and many others, I know the right combination of tech, funds & marketing can do the same for those different GEOs that are currently being served minimal/low level/bad service personal finance services.
We are going to build the best ecosystem for both advertisers and customers with the huge help of our partners & affiliates, that will hopefully help the general economy of those countries we target, just like I was able to build a business in the age of 16th solely because 1 bank gave me an AMEX platinum, without this minimal trust and credit ability I wouldn’t be able to build anything.
Soon we are going to launch the best platform for embedded financial services for growing markets. Our partners will be able to leverage tech & Open Banking while working with top rated service providers making it possible to compare financial services in every market, allowing people to choose the right service for them, stay tuned 🐽
Thank you for reading,
Ofir.