Meet Jamie
Hi! I’m Jamie I.F., the Founder of Endorsely, and AffiliateFinder.ai. I have around 7 years of experience in affiliate marketing – first as an affiliate marketer myself driving traffic from SEO mostly, and then running affiliate programs for brands we run.
Jamie, what inspired you to build Endorsely and Affiliate Finder?
I was heading up marketing at GetLasso, and while we had a lot of success – scaling the affiliate program to around 40x the revenue in 10 months – I was frustrated with the affiliate tracking software we were using.
It didn’t do some of the things I wanted it to do, and I felt like it didn’t give me the data I needed to focus on the right affiliates.
So, with Endorsely, I basically built the software I wish I had at the time.
Then, we have a throwaway feature within Endorsely, called the “Affiliate Finder”. I didn’t expect that much from it honestly.
But, several billion-dollar companies reached out to us, asking if we could make it available to them (they were in e-commerce, whereas we had built Endorsely specifically for SaaS).
So, AffiliateFinder.ai came by as a happy accident, where people wanted that one specific feature more than everything else.
What was the biggest challenge you faced as a founder in the early days?
It’s difficult when you have a long-term vision for a product, to build short-term things based on user requests, and balance that with your long-term vision.
And, I probably didn’t listen enough to customer feedback. We’ve overhauled this process now so every single customer message, sales call objection, and any other source of information is tagged so we can improve our messaging and product – but we weren’t always doing this well enough before.
What’s your long-term vision for both Endorsely and Affiliate Finder?
I would like Endorsely to become the best SaaS affiliate program software in the world. That also helps people to be successful the most, with the built-in affiliate recruitment features.
For AffiliateFinder.ai, I want it to become the best affiliate and influencer discovery software in the world – to save busy founders, CMOs, and affiliate managers 20+ hours per week and help them recruit profit-driving affiliates on autopilot.
What’s one mistake you made early on that turned into a valuable lesson?
We priced Endorsely free, but the free plan was too generous. It led to a lot of signups, but few upgrades. We still have a free plan now, but it’s not so generous that it prevents people from upgrading for the Pro features.
What makes Endorsely different from other affiliate software in the market?
Well, firstly, we have the most generous free plan in the world from any affiliate software. You can use Endorsely for free up to $1,000 in revenue.
And, we have some of the most advanced affiliate recruitment features where we help you identify your competitors’ top affiliates, as well as the top content creators in your niche to recruit to promote you.
How easy is it for a SaaS founder to get started with Endorsely?
Very easy! It’s free to get started, and you can get set up in around 10 minutes. You just need to install one piece of code on your website to track clicks, and another in your Stripe checkout to measure conversions.
We’ve designed it so that even non-technical people can get set up with ease – and if you do get stuck, you can message support and we’ll help you.
What problem does Affiliate Finder solve that founders usually underestimate?
I think most people underestimate how much time it takes to recruit affiliates manually. That’s what we’ve set out to help people reduce time with AffiliateFinder.
As instead of manually searching Google, Instagram, YouTube, etc, you can now just enter your website, and we’ll find all the affiliates across all these channels for you – and filter out all the bad fits so you just need to win them.
We also find their emails for you – including YouTubers which are typically hard to find the emails from.
So, a big problem is it takes a lot of time – and we’re trying to solve that for you.
What makes Affiliate Finder more efficient than manual affiliate research?
It takes a LONG time to manually search, evaluate, find the emails, and outreach affiliates.
And to find 5-10 perfect-fit affiliates, it can involve combing through 1,000+ bad fits.
We’re trying to just surface those perfect-fits for you so you can focus on these, and save the 20+ hours of manual research it can take to find these.
Why do you think many SaaS founders overlook affiliate marketing?
It’s slow at the beginning, and it takes a lot of effort to make it work. It’s not easy, and it’s often not prioritized as much as it needs to be.
But, when it works, it’s SO good. You only pay for performance, and you get all the non-revenue advantages such as extra social proof, better conversion rates, and all that content affiliates create gets pulled into LLM data training, so it helps the AIs like ChatGPT recommend your brand more.
Did you enjoy our interview? Do you have anything to say to our community?
I enjoyed it! Thank you for having me on.
And, for anyone reading, if you’d like me or my team to take a look at your affiliate program and give you some free recommendations, then just go to AffiliateFinder.ai and message our support saying you found us from SaaS Pirate! 🙂
