Categories
Affiliate Growth Innovation Troubleshooting

Business Model Shift

(3/20-9/20)

Challenge

Given a steady stream of revenue, fundamentally alter the underlying business model towards CPC/CPA.

Action

Phase 1

In March 2020 pre-COVID, did a quick dive on Skimlinks documentation and put together a quick explanation/overview to demonstrate how easy it would be to include. Business climate wasn’t right so didn’t pursue.

Phase 2

Sep 2020, post-CEO-stepping-down and several months after Phase 1, explored use of Viglink (Sovrn) only to discover that business had previously been CPA-based before fulfillment was brought in-house ~2017.

Digging around, found some old Skimlinks code, then leveraged updated documentation to prove click-tracking with custom params could still work.

Phase 3

The business, being unsure whether to use one or several affiliate networks, needed partnership to figure out the best implementation path forward. For four networks, I kludge’d scripts into production and verified clicks, evaluating custom parameters as they’d flow through the lifecycle and eventually be reported through APIs.

When the business decided to focus on Commission Junction and Skimlinks, I led development to integrate JS libs (monkey-patching CJ to play-well on the same page as Skimlinks) and verify clicks / custom params.

Result

Overcame fits-and-starts to deliver affiliate model.


Categories
Affiliate Backend eCommerce Frontend Full-Stack Growth supply-side

Selling More

(Shop It To Me : 6/10-7/12)

Results

  • Iterating with Product to scope, implement (Rails w/MySQL,) and A/B-test pixel-perfect sign-up/refer-a-friend/search/browse/opt-out/profile experiences
  • Drove conversions in the form of signups, virality, and clicks for not only our flagship web and email products (used by 4M+ users) but also eight new product launches
  • Architected company’s newest Ember.js-based product
  • Quickly integrated into a small, fast-moving, startup engineering team
  • Became proficient in all things Rails
  • Ensuring quality through the use of code reviews, TDD, unit, functional, integration, and regression tests under continuous integration, testing plans, and mentoring/pairing to deliver functionality, fix bugs, refactor legacy code, and transfer knowledge
  • Have assumed lead (primarily frontend) responsibilities while reporting directly to CTO
  • Established F2E guidelines and best practices
  • Architected the company’s newest product, an Ember.js-based Single Page Application
  • Leveraged Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest APIs to increase our social reach (including the use of Facebook Connect and the Like Button during signup and tell-a-friend experiences)
  • Prototyped iPhone app for user to navigate item stream during in-house Hackathon
  • Contributed improvements to our Nokogiri-based data-harvesting framework.
Categories
Affiliate Emails

Email Newsletters

(Shop It To Me : 2/10-5/12)

Below are a few of examples of the types of one-off marketing materials we sent to our users. They tend to fall into several categories: tell-a-friend promotions, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, special sales/announcements, and new product announcements.

All newsletters are designed and created in-house.

Results

  • Created numerous hand-crafted, one-off HTML newsletters
  • Reduced the time it takes to create a newsletter from two days to two hours
  • Normalized a set of legacy tables to reduce the possibility of error when assigning subject-line and other trials