Affiliates Are a Revenue Layer, Not a Side Channel

Machine-generated transcript from the episode video. Speaker labels are not included and some names and product terms may be transcribed phonetically.

[0:00] I've learned that the best founders are always selling. Welcome to the GTM Vault podcast hosted by Rick Kleta. We uncover the strategies, the pivots, and the breakthroughs turning startups into giants. Let's crack open the vault and find out how. Welcome back to GTM Vault, the show where founders and revenue leaders decode how the fastest growing companies go to market. I'm your host, Rick Ketta. Today I'm joined by Ian Brody, a product marketer turned repeat founder and now CEO of Levant, the leading Amazon affiliate platform, helping sellers connect with revenue driving creators. Ian previously co-founded Grovia, which was acquired in under two years, led GTM at Acceleration Partners, and was recognized on Forb's 30 under 30. In this conversation, we break down why affiliateled GTM is making a comeback in the AI era, the playbook behind building Levant as a performance engine, the biggest shifts Ian made the second time around, and how to turn affiliate partnerships into repeatable growth channel. Let's dive in. You know what I

[1:12] see a lot? Companies with solid strategy but terrible execution. They've got dashboards, reports, tools everywhere, but no one knows what to actually do next. to scale their business. That's why I've been paying attention to what Zoom Info is doing. They're not just a contact data company anymore. They built a full system of execution. They're calling it GTM intelligence. And it actually works the list, writes the outreach, and triggers the play. No guesswork, no manual grind, just pipeline movie, predictable growth strategy that actually delivers. Check it out at zoominfo.com. Let's start at the beginning. what pulled you into the world of GTM and how did your early product marketing experience shape how you build today? Yeah, and thanks Rick for having me. Uh, I actually started my career as an SDR even before PMM. So, I was an intern at an enterprise software company called Aptio and making cold calls like 150 200 a day. And in that experience, I found myself just so much more attracted to messaging, value propositions,

[2:22] enablement. Like I felt most impactful when I was partnered with my fellow SDRs in a meeting room with a whiteboard talking strategy. And so when that internship finished, you know, a couple years later, I graduated and I reached out to the CMO of Apio. And I told him I was interested in in these areas that I I found, you know, intriguing about the STR role, but I didn't actually know what role that was. And so I was like, maybe it's a product role, maybe it's something else. I don't even know. He's like, I actually think it's PMM. I think it's product marketing. And he he brought me in right out of college as a like PMM specialist. And at the time, I don't know about these days, but back then, Apio had just a world-class PMM org. I was very lucky to to be there. And I reported up into just some extremely talented PMM leaders, and they kind of took me under their wing. And what's so cool about PMM specifically is you just get exposed to so much crossunctional work. So, I was pulled into CS conversations, product, sales, partnerships, PR, engineering, pricing, you know, list goes on. And it just had a huge impact on my ability to build a quick foundation for my entrepreneurial

[3:32] career because I just got exposed to to so much across the business. You scaled Grovia and exited under 2 years. What worked and what are you doing differently now with Levant? Yeah. Well, with Grovia, we just had really strong product market fit. Groia was an affiliate and influencer recruitment services and software company. And before launching, we just did a bunch of early market research. We actually started on Fiverr and just put out like an ad on Fiverr that said, "Hey, we're we do affiliate recruitment." And overnight, we had like 150 inquiries and like, "Okay, so this is we're on to something here." And in 2022, there was just a lot of free money flying around due to the low interest rates. And at the same time, content creation was at all-time highs. You know, people might remember in 2020 a lot of folks were inside their homes creating content and businesses wanted to get in front of those audiences, but they didn't know how to recruit affiliates. Uh they didn't know how to recruit influencers. They just didn't know how to break into that channel. And my co-founder and I both had experience in affiliate marketing from previous work we had done in college and other kind of like early stage startups. And we both had experience as SDRs. And so we kind of combined these two things to build a channel. um and a and a agency

[4:45] that was all about recruiting affiliates. What's one hard GTM lesson you had to learn firsthand in your first startup? Yeah, good question. So, I think a big one is don't build something just because you think it's a good fit. You know, our at Grovia, we had built a software tool. So, we were originally a services business, but we came out build a SAS tool that was fantastic for our internal teams. We built it to help us scale out and automate a lot of our affiliate recruitment. And we figured, okay, this would be great for us, but we'd also sell this product as as a SAS tool to all types of affiliate teams that want to go and do affiliate recruitment. Well, we didn't really do enough market research. And it turns out that the SAS tool we built, while it was amazing for us, the market wasn't big enough for that because a lot of folks didn't actually want to do affiliate recruitment. And so when we'd go try and sell the SAS tool, they'd be like, "Yeah, the SAS tool's cool, but you offer this services product um that we'd rather have you do it for us." And so a big lesson coming out of that was, you know, always continue to do market research and really pay attention to what your customers and what your customers actually want and what the market can actually support.

[5:57] Affiliate and creatorled GTM is back in the spotlight. Why now? Yes. affiliate and creatorled go to market really has been steadily growing since I mean for a long time but especially since the the co era as I was mentioning earlier there's kind of a lot of factors that brought a lot of attention into the content creator affiliate space and since then it's just continued to grow one interesting thing u that's happening right now is AI is continuing to captivate audiences and it's especially pulling you know, eyeballs away from Google search and publishers and bloggers who have previously been all about SEO. Now all these eyeballs are going to chat GPT. A lot of people are saying, "Man, is this like the end of like old school affiliate?" I think the answer is is no.

[6:50] People are still seeking the authentic voice and they want to hear from real people. I just think that perhaps Google search and SEO is not as uh as hot and not as much brand awareness going in that direction. But what is getting a lot of attention is social and content creation on platforms like Instagram reels, Tik Tok, YouTube. And what powers a lot of that world is affiliate marketing. That's how a lot of those folks actually make their living, of course. And so while, you know, old school affiliate could be declining, we're seeing a rise of a new age of affiliate marketing. Um, and I think that that's bringing a lot of, you know, creatorled GTM back into the spotlight. What are the biggest mistakes companies make when they try to run affiliate programs? Expecting them to start up like paytoplay channels. Affiliate is not a set and forget channel.

[7:42] Affiliate is a relationshipbased channel. It's it's essentially like an outsourced sales or marketing team. And too many people treat affiliate like search or social ads where they think they can just set a budget and let it run where in reality you need to nurture hundreds of relationships. You're going and building relationships with affiliates and you have to convince them that your product your offer is worth promoting. Often in the world of affiliate marketing there's not always like a flat fee component. A lot of it's completely revenue share based and so they actually take some media risk. you know, they are building content and promoting your brand, your product, without necessarily a guarantee that it's going to sell. And so, you know, it's it's not only dependent on their content being good, but they're also trusting that your product's good enough to sell, and they can make a commission off of that. So, it takes a lot more than just setting a budget and pushing it out. You really have to go and and build a really strong actually go to market motion towards affiliates.

[8:40] How do you think about performance versus brand in your current GTM mix? Yeah, they're both super important. I mean, we've been pretty performance driven from the beginning. We run our business in a pretty capital efficient way and we always have run it in a pretty capital efficient way. We've been profitable every year of our existence. And a huge expense in early stage startups is usually just, you know, shredding through cash and marketing. But we've been performance driven from the get-go. We're always paying attention to ROI. Brand is also important and getting the the brand out there, developing a brand, showing up at events, you know, having the booth, making sure the website looks good, you know, that stuff's really hard to tie to, you know, ROI, but it obviously matters. So, I'd say in the early years, we were very performanceoriented, cared less about brand, and actually lately, we've been investing more in brand, and so it's it's it's a balance, and it'll continue to be a balance. What does a modern affiliateled GTM engine actually look like in 2025?

[9:39] Yeah, it's a big question. Answering this question like fully would probably take longer than we have today. But I'll talk briefly about some of the areas that are really kind of new and hot in the affiliate world. One of them is a lot of teams are using AI for personalized affiliate recruitment at scale. So a lot of folks are limiting their AI utilization to like customer acquisition. You know what's very hot right now is like the AI SDR for B2B sales. What's interesting is it's actually a great top offunnel strategy for attracting initial interest from affiliates. So you can use AI to build large lists of affiliates, enrich that data, and send out outreach at scale. And of course, as I mentioned, you know, it's still a relationshipbased channel.

[10:27] So, you know, you can use these strategies for top of funnel work, getting that initial interest, but an AI bot is not going to be enough to actually like nurture an affiliate to activation, at least not yet. And I don't suspect that's going to be something that happens in the near future. Again, because affiliates want to trust that what they're promoting is going to make them money. And often today, what that requires is either an extremely strong brand, you know, like like Nike, right? Obviously, that trust is already built, but if you're a mid-size brand, there's more you need to do to kind of build that trust and nurture those relationships with affiliates. So, AI is a really good way to get your foot in the door at scale with affiliates, but past that, you're really going to want to still have that that human layer. And then another new area of affiliate is also something that Levant is investing in. You know, historically in the e-commerce world, affiliate has primarily only been for direct to consumer brands and sellers.

[11:24] e-commerce sellers who actually sold on marketplaces like Amazon or Walmart. They have never been able to invest in affiliate relationships. It's just something that like Amazon and Walmart like managed on their behalf. But again, I've been mentioning this whole time, affiliates, a relationship based channel. You can actually get a lot more out of an affiliate program if you have a relationship with these affiliates. And so these three P sellers selling on Amazon and Walmart had never been able to engage with influencers in their niche and you know affiliates in their niche to go and promote their products. This is something that Lavanta has kind of pioneered is the ability for these three sellers on Amazon on Walmart on Tik Tok shop to go and connect with influencers at scale and recruit them at scale to promote their brands on these channels. AI is a huge part of this this kind of current trend and this current affiliate goto market. And then another big trending area is expanding affiliate programs from just your DTOC channel to your Amazon channel to your Walmart channel to your Tik Tok shop channel. Uh and Lavanta is supporting all of it.

[12:24] What's working for Lvanta right now in terms of channels, tactics or playbooks. A big area is really a successful channel that Lavanta has utilized over the last few years is partners, partnerled growth. There are hundreds of affiliate agencies out there and historically affiliate agencies have been really isolated in just the DTOC channel and Amazon and Walmart were actually kind of an enemy of affiliate agencies because they didn't get attribution if they sent a sale to Amazon or Walmart because there was no tool to track attribution on those channels. So affiliate agencies were always trying to push sales through the DTOC channel so they could get attribution so they could show up to their customer and say, "Hey, look, I'm I'm driving this revenue." What Levant has unlocked for them is the ability for these affiliate agencies to have attribution on Walmart and and on Amazon and on Tik Tok shop. And so now they can kind of own all the channels and drive traffic to all these channels and and make sure they show up well to their clients. And so when we went and originally pitched affiliate agencies on LVA, you know, their eyes lit up like, hey, would you like to own all of these channels outside of just DTOC? Of

[13:34] course, the answer is yes. And so that initially allowed us to scale really quickly because these affiliate agencies not only brought their clients to Levant, but they also brought their affiliates to Labont. So it kind of helped us get over the marketplace cold start problem by recruiting all of these agencies. They're bringing both sides of the marketplace. And then on top of that, what is the service that affiliate agencies provide? They run affiliate programs and they help recruit even more affiliates. And it's kind of had the snowball effect where these agencies are not only bringing us customers, bringing us publishers, but also supporting the accounts and providing, you know, customer success. So, we've expanded since then past just affiliate agencies. We've gone to e-commerce agencies, Amazon agencies, Walmart agencies, even PR agencies, influencer agencies. And by investing in all these channels, we have this network of folks who are bringing a lot of attention and new users to the platform.

[14:27] What's one way AI has tangibly improved your GTM motion at Levant? Yeah, so we are building AI automation into our sales outreach and our creator outreach right now. So we're investing in it both to attract sellers to our platform and creators to our platform. I was touching on it a bit earlier, but by getting smarter GTM intelligence like real-time insights like a seller launching on Walmart or data showing that our creators are promoting a particular seller on a different affiliate channel. This makes prospecting much more targeted. So using intelligence like this helps us spot the best fit partners and prospects much faster. And you know, we're using tools like Zoom Info to provide these signals that kind of make this all a lot easier. Are you using AI in areas like partner recruitment, segmentation, onboarding or activation?

[15:20] Definitely for partner recruitment as I was mentioning earlier. So I guess when I say partner recruitment, I'm talking about um like our affiliate agency partners. We're also doing it with affiliate recruitment. Basically all of our outbound motion right now, we are investing in in AI to make it faster. So for segmentation, onboarding, activation, we're still early, but we're making some strides in our platform around AIdriven product recommendations for creators and creator recommendations for sellers. And so we can provide a lot of information early to help creators that are joining our platform find a seller quickly to partner with. And vice versa, right when a seller comes into the platform, we can find a good fit creator that's promoting products in that niche. so that when they come onto the platform again they're finding that partner quickly and using data sources that provide additional enrichment helps us move much faster in these areas.

[16:10] How do you see AI reshaping the affiliate or partner ecosystem over the next few years? Yeah, publishers in Google are getting hit right now pretty hard by chat GBT and other LLMs. Right. I mean again I was mentioning this earlier but eyeballs are getting taken away from the first page of Google and being pointed towards chat GBT or even on Google rather than clicking into a link you're just reading the Gemini summary at the top. So all these publishers who are previously making a large commission off of clicks and ultimately conversions, Google and chatbt and other LLMs are just kind of providing the answer right there. Not to mention Chat GBT is now integrated with Shopify. Chat GBT is now integrated with Shopify. And so rather than having to point you to a website where a publisher is recommending a product, Chat GBT is actually allowing you to check out right within the platform. So they don't even need an affiliate model at CHPT. It's an integration. They're becoming a marketplace, a retail marketplace themselves. So there's this massive shift happening. And while the underlying model that is affiliate will

[17:24] persist, the exact players and how they interact will transform. It's what I was talking about earlier. Even with AI, buyers are still craving an authentic voice. And it's why platforms like Tik Tok and Instagram and YouTube are still so popular because people still want to hear from real people. Oh, Reddit's another one. You know, Reddit is such a good example of folks craving a real opinion. And so, these channels aren't dying at all. They're actually growing pretty heavily. And so, I think AI is taking eyes away from Google search and SEO, but it's still a really great pairing with the creator ecosystem, creator channel. When people want a very quick answer, you go to AI. When people want to hear from an authentic voice, they're going to go through the content creator ecosystem. Got it. I want to segue now to uh a little bit about your entrepreneurial uh journey. This is not your first rodeo. What's the biggest shift in how you lead as a repeat founder?

[18:24] Yeah, I think a lot more about long-term risk mitigation than I did at my first company. My first company, we, you know, we exited after 2 years and that business was built to be exited quickly. And so thinking super long term wasn't something that was top of mind. I was always thinking about short-term risk. Are we going to lose this big customer, you know, are we going to have an unexpected legal expense that causes to not be profitable this month, etc., etc. You know, at Levant, I spend a lot of time thinking about how to mitigate risks in the long run. So how can we make sure our product roadmap stays ahead of you know the everchanging landscape that is digital marketing and e-commerce? How can we continue to to innovate and make sure that these changes don't impact our product market fit? So my mind in this business is often like operating a year in advance as opposed to what is right in front of me.

[19:19] What do you know now about team culture or scaling that you didn't during your first build? There's a lot of classic things I could say that are true like hire a great leadership team, you know, instill strong values into employees. Like all that stuff is true and great advice, but perhaps something that's, you know, less classic is providing a lot of autonomy to employees and leaders is a very powerful tool. And it can be really scary for early stage and series A founders to let go and let their leaders and their employees work without significant oversight. But by letting them go and enabling them to work autonomously, you can actually gain a lot as a founder. You know, they're going to learn to figure out challenges without you, often better than you can because they are specialized in that field and they have more time to think about it than you do. And better yet, if they're successful in working without micromanagement, fantastic. You know, you've now freed up more of your own time to go work on other areas of the business. And if they fail, which is often what founders are worried about, like, well, what if they what if they mess up? What if they don't do it as good as I can? Well, they're not going to hide. You're going to learn really

[20:30] quickly when you give them the reigns that they're not the right fit for the role, and you replace them. So, I think many founders feel this like really intense need to be heavily involved in every decision. Um, and this mentality is touted by, you know, big leaders like Brian Chesy with, you know, founder mode. And I think that mentality is important when you're driving significant organizational change. But in day-to-day operations, it's better to let the team go. If you were starting Levant today from scratch, what would you do differently? I would hire a finance and ops person much earlier. I waited a year into the business to hire my first finance and ops person. And you know, in my previous company, I was doing all that work, too. And in Lavant, I I thought, "Oh, man. I I'll just keep doing it and I'll save that money." But I was doing all that work on my own. And it it just slowed me down a lot. And I got caught up in work that I should not have been doing. And it was just it was truly life-changing when I brought these folks on. And they again, they do it better than I do because they're specialized in those areas. So, it was a win-win for everyone.

[21:30] One GTM lever you're most bullish on this year? Definitely enriching prospect and creator outreach lists with AI. Favorite AI tool in your current workflow? Chat GPT. Sorry, I can't give a more interesting answer. One GTM experiment that surprised you in a good way. I promoted one of my top sales reps to director of go to market, which is a difficult thing to do. We moved a top performer into more of a cross functional role and it has just paid off immensely to have someone dedicated to driving our GTM strategy and especially from someone who's already been so successful at it on an individual level to then go kind of take that insight and broaden it out to the the whole company. So especially as we're launching stuff like Walmart, Tik Tok shop, other these big releases, it's super helpful to have someone dedicated to it.

[22:18] One piece of advice for founders trying to build a partner-led growth engine. I'm gonna say it again because it's just so important, but partnerships are a relationshipbased channel. You can use as much AI and automation as you want and it could be helpful and it can help you get your foot in the door, but at the end of the day, what builds great partnerships is great relationships. So, be kind, be generous, and make sure what you are striving for is mutually beneficial. Ian, this was packed with insight. appreciate you pulling back the curtain on affiliateled GTM AI powered execution and what it really takes to build smarter the second time around. For anyone listening, check out levanta.io and follow Ian for more lessons on partnerships, growth, and modern go-to market strategy. This has been GTM Vault. If this episode sparked an idea, share it with someone scaling partnerships and make sure you're subscribed on Substack, YouTube, or wherever you listen. See you next time.

[23:20] Tech founders and VCs careers lessons GTM.