Effectively Managing Affiliate Partnerships with Everflow’s VP of Marketing, Michael Cole

Yeah, I mean, if you want to go way back, I grew up right next to Yosemite, in this little tourist town called Oakhurst, California.

3. Definitely. I’m a big city person now. Like growing up in a small town, I always had this deep fear, it was pretty irrational, that it would just never leave because there are always some people that never leave. You’re in a small town, and you’re like, I want to do something more than that.

But yeah, growing up in Oakhurst was super interesting, especially because my parents are, were, I mean, are video game designers. So we have this tourist town. There’s nothing in this town except tourist stuff. And there used to be a video game company called Sierra Online. So anyone who’s familiar with old school computer games may have heard of this company.

What’s interesting about this company is, again, small town—this company, if you’re familiar with video games, there are two major companies now, Blizzard and Valve. Both of these companies were originally co-owned by Sierra Online, so it was like the small town small company, but like, they owned the biggest video game companies in the world for a long time.

And so my parents were video game designers for one of their first four major adventure games, in this case, Quest for Glory. The way that company came about was really fascinating. They came up with this idea for creating a graphical adventure game before any graphics had really been in video games.

They made one of the first video games with graphics, and they said, “If we sell more than 100,000 copies, like, we’re going to move to Bass Lake next to Yosemite, because that’s where they always wanted to live.”

That game sold millions, it spawned online, which became this huge video game company, and then eventually got bought off by a massive French conglomerate.

So yeah, it was a weird childhood, and the combination of small town and big town company.

So I was an only child, which means I’m perfect for COVID because I’m very used to keeping myself entertained with friends and no one I can see. I used to live a mile down a dirt road from, like, the next neighbor, so even seeing friends was like, seven miles away, which means it didn’t happen that often.

Yeah, I’m just in Oakland, which I absolutely love.

Oh yeah. Just the video game industry, especially back then, was like the worst industry to work for, in a lot of ways, because, like, you’re talking about the early days of video game companies, and the way that they hired was—they would hire suits to be the managers.

Video games were so new, none of those suits had any passion for video games, etc. The word like, it’s famous for like, crunch mode and for like, the Dilbert-type bosses who had no idea what was going on, but would be like, “Why isn’t it done next week?”

So a lot of the early games were very, very buggy because they always had a hard deadline where they just had to release it. No matter what, no matter how broken the game was, it always had to come out.

So I was like, I do never want to be on the programming side. It’s always better to be on the business side because then you have more control over your own destiny. It turns out that all those engineers ended up becoming the managers and, like, tech CEOs and stuff. So it was a wrong inclination. But at that time, it was like, not for me. I don’t want to be told what to do by someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

So I went to college at UC Santa Barbara, which I highly recommend. It’s one of the most useful schools to go to for success in life because UC Santa Barbara is famous for being a party school.

And it turns out, knowing how to drink, be sociable, and still get stuff done is like the most valuable tech industry skill out there.

16. Oh, yeah. So, I mean, I always wanted to be involved with startups. So I actually majored in business economics with an accounting emphasis because my original plan had been to go join an accounting firm, be so bored out of my mind that it would force me to create a startup. That was my original plan.

As it ended up happening, instead, I got a job with a marketing agency. I was the only applicant, so that was great. Yeah, so I was at a marketing agency doing affiliate management for like, the first five years out of college, and it was sweet.

I’m sure you know the affiliate space really well in terms of the players and stuff. Obviously, Santa Barbara is where CJ was—the major early affiliate marketing stuff all centered around Santa Barbara. So we had access to amazing clients. And it’s really funny looking back at it now because we were this little boutique agency in Lompoc, which is like 45 minutes north of Santa Barbara. And yet, for clients, we had both BigCommerce and Shopify, we launched both their affiliate programs, and then we had some companies that were like just starting out, like Quest Bar, which was this protein bar that is now a billion-dollar company.

So we had just amazing clients. And for the very beginning, I was able to, because it was like a two-person company when I joined, and I was the second person, which means that I was hands-on, like, launching all these affiliate programs.

So I have a really strong background and understanding of what actually works, and appreciating where things have started, what has continued to work all of these years. And then, what’s really cool about what we do at Everflow is that it’s going to solve a lot of the problems I experienced back then.

Yeah, so I minored in Japanese, which was definitely really fun. Languages are a great thing to study in college, just because if you think speaking in public is hard in English, once you’re doing it in a foreign language, it’s 10 times harder. So it makes it a lot less stressful to talk to people and present in person in English.

Yeah, it was really, really fun. I got to study abroad for six months in Japan, which was such an interesting and fascinating experience because so much of what we like about Japanese colleges, just a side note, are very interesting.

I’m sure you’ve heard that Japanese high schools are famous for all these exams and how hard it is. So once you finish that exam period, you get into college, and you’re basically just smooth sailing for four years. Japanese colleges are actually really easy.

What matters is what college you got into in the first place, more than anything you do in college. The standard, the challenge level, drops off as soon as high school’s over.

22. Yeah, so once you make it, it’s basically “easy mode,” which is really interesting.

And then the other thing that was just crazy was that, like, at the end of college, you basically have to get a job. This is going to be your job for your life in Japan. So when students reached their fourth year, if they didn’t get a good job, they would literally fail that year and retake it to try and get into one of these big firms.

There was this feeling of hopelessness because they knew that this was going to be their entire life, decided by this one thing, and if they didn’t get it, they may never get another opportunity for a good job. It really makes you appreciate American entrepreneurial culture, where you can always try something new, fail, and then hop onto a new venture. In Japan, however, if you don’t make it now, you might not get another chance, which is pretty crazy to think about.

Yeah, so the company I was with before Everflow was called Boldscreen Media. They were a video ad tech company, and I actually consulted for a while to suggest them launching a mobile user acquisition side, which is what I had been doing previously.

I joined Boldscreen, launched their mobile UA side from scratch using Everflow, which I was already familiar with before joining. I built up the mobile side, grew it from scratch to about $6-8 million for the year before I left to join Everflow.

I did a really good job there, built up a team, but the reality of the Bay Area is that I’ll never afford a house here just on a high-paying salary in ad tech. The only way you can afford a house here is if your company IPOs, and that requires a tech platform or something similar that takes off and becomes worth a billion dollars.

So it was a very mercenary reason for looking for a new opportunity. It came about in the classic UC Santa Barbara style—just a night out drinking, and Everflow wanted me to join. It made sense. I spent about two months finding replacements, getting a new manager at Boldscreen, and sorrowfully making the transition. Fortunately, it worked out well for both sides, and I’m still close with that company. But it was a tough decision. Still, you need a rocket ship if you want to stay in the Bay Area and afford a home. It’s intense.

Yeah, so Everflow is a partner marketing platform. That means it’s for managing all of your performance partnerships—whether those are affiliates, influencers, referral partners, strategic relationships, or even tracking all your media buying channels and such.

The biggest problem with affiliate marketing is that from the agency perspective, you’re often siloed from other marketing efforts at your clients. You’re constantly fighting about whether affiliate marketing deserves any credit, or if the expensive paid marketing done internally should get all the credit.

What’s really cool about Everflow is that you can have all your performance marketing in a single platform. Everything’s tracked together, so not only are you seeing performance results and revenue, but also all of the engagement events. With everything in one place, you can actually do an apples-to-apples comparison of where affiliate A provides value versus influencer B, versus your internal media buying, etc. You can really understand how everything provides value.

Yeah, sure. The primary way we do attribution is through something called direct linking, and the easiest way to understand it is that it works a lot like Google Analytics. Instead of using the traditional redirect link that’s common in affiliate marketing, you actually have the partner or influencer sending traffic to, for example, like nike.com?pid=9 if they are partner 9 in your Everflow system.

When they get to Nike, our system has a JavaScript on that page that detects PID 9 and starts tracking that click for that partner. Then, when the purchase happens, we reward partner 9 inside your Everflow platform.

What’s really cool about this is that it’s easy for all types of publications, influencers, etc., to link without needing much understanding. And it works for media buying too, because media buying platforms don’t allow redirect links and they get flagged all the time in Google and Facebook. In this case, they just send the traffic straight to the advertiser’s website. You don’t have to worry about anything being flagged because it’s going to a legitimate placement and then starts the tracking process.

For influencers, we work in the way that’s best for them. We have coupon tracking, and one thing that’s really cool that we do is tracking code URLs. So, say you assign a promo code to an influencer. When you do that, it creates a custom destination page using your internal tracking domain. For example, go.nike.com/influencer. When that page is visited, it redirects them to the normal landing page and starts the tracking process. This works really well for influencers who use video or Instagram, where they can’t easily link but can shout out a quick URL for their followers to visit to support their show.

Yeah, so first off, let’s look at the ecosystem of companies out there. You have two types of companies: affiliate networks like CJ and Impact, where the program lives inside their platform, and then companies like Tune or Cake, where they give you an internal white-label platform to manage your advertisers and partners.

Everflow is kind of a hybrid. We’re trying to blend the best of both worlds. In terms of features and functionality, we’re already far more advanced than any of them, partly due to the company’s origins.

Let’s talk about the origins of the company in a bit, but just to finish this thought: With Everflow, you have your own white-label platform, so you own the relationships, both on the advertiser and publisher side—whether they’re affiliates, influencers, etc. You have your own platform, but also the ability to recruit from our marketplace, which is different from CJ or Impact. They have millions of affiliates, but as we both know, most of those affiliates are not performing. At Everflow, we curate partners with proven results, and you can easily connect with them. You invite them to your platform, they accept, and boom—your offer is automatically promoted by them.

Yeah, exactly. You can say, “Oh, I recruited this new performance affiliate, and they’re driving 1,000 sales.” But when you bring up the really cool opportunities from Everflow, that’s the stuff that really stands out and gets the attention.

Yeah, and then the other part I was going to explain this just the origin of the company, because I think that that makes a big difference. Everflow was launched in November 2016. While our competitors are almost 10 years old, we’ve built on newer technology. The three co-founders originally launched one of the first mobile ad tech networks, Mula Media, which was eventually acquired by Opera and rebranded as AdColony.

After their successful exit, they saw the pain points in the industry and realized no one had built a platform to address them, so they started Everflow. We’re a bootstrapped company, self-funded, and we’ve seen massive growth. Now, we’re at 600+ customers and $9 million in ARR.

The key difference is that Everflow was built on Google Cloud. Because of this, we have infrastructure designed to scale and handle real-time data access. A great example is our analytics report. You can click on any partner—say, Partner A—and immediately filter out all of their placements.

From there, you can click on individual placements to see metrics for each one, and everything will filter around that data. This real-time data comparison is a game-changer. It used to be something important but tedious that you could only do occasionally. Now, it’s something you can do on a daily basis, which completely changes your ability to manage and scale your program.

Exactly. And mobile has its own set of challenges. Trying to upgrade an existing system to handle mobile traffic, app installs, etc., is no small feat. A lot of older platforms just can’t handle it because it requires a fundamental redesign.

The cool thing about Everflow is that it was designed from the beginning to handle massive volumes. We’re dealing with billions of clicks per month from our biggest clients. In the desktop world, no one hits that number, but in mobile, we do. To handle that scale, you need the right infrastructure in place from the start. If you try to add that scalability later, it could ruin a lot of the functionality that’s already working.