How Geni CEO Jesse Lakes grew Geni to $1.6M revenue and 9K customers in 2019.

hello everyone my guest today is jesse lakes he's a former global product manager for the itunes affiliate program at app1 consultant to the microsoft store affiliate program geniuslink ceo jesse lakes has seen many affiliate programs from various perspective perspectives he's also the pleasure of working with influencers and creative creators worldwide to help them monetize their work that's the focus of again genius link jesse you're ready to take it to the top yeehaw let's do it all right so first off if people want to follow along with this what's the url to the company geni.us okay good g n i dot yes very dot it's good okay and then tell us what the company does and what the revenue model is are you pure play sas or something different sure it's an intelligent link management platform so a lot of people are familiar with bitly the url shortener bitly does a great job as taking everyone from one place to another that doesn't work so well for commerce works great for content but not so well for commerce our intelligent links are more dynamic so we can have different shoppers in different work parts of the world go to a store that sells or caters directly to them even if they're selling the same product so give us a use case i think people might have troubles following this so give us a use case of how someone uses you so your your book right you've got your your book right there and in the back um your book is available worldwide amazon's doing a great job selling it worldwide uh but on your page on the um the book.your yourname.com um you have a link directly to amazon.com so someone coming from germany or the uk click on that link then go to amazon.com amazon.com does a great job selling to us here in the u.s amazon has spent billions of dollars optimizing storefronts across europe uk in particular to sell to a european audience the uk audience in particular so it'll be local language english is not a big of an issue but local currency uh their amazon prime account is uh country and storefront specifics they'll be able to take advantage of free shipping etc so using a genius link to promote your book versus just a raw amazon link will make sure that your worldwide readers get sent to the place where they can most easily buy that book and it gets a little more complicated with your book in particular because it looks like you're running through a more traditional uh distributor where the ids will change etc that's not a problem for our technology it'll map that all automatically uh finds it so ryan holiday uses you does he use you on all of his book launches to make sure international sales are what they should be exactly as well as the books that he recommends as well so yeah uh ryan's a great client of course that's interesting um let me ask you another use case uh whenever i email about the podcast i never know like i have to always put like two or three links like android if you're on android open this if you're on itunes open this or you know spotify open this could you could i essentially set up a url with your platform where it says if they're opening on an android device send them directly to the play store if they're opening on itune on apple go to itunes exactly so that was the original thesis is that by using some basic logic you can take advantage of people's location language device operating system et cetera and build this smarter link what we're finding now is that logic worked great in early years where it was a difference of itunes versus android but now you have spotify right spotify is on on both platforms spotify is also a great place for for podcasts so kind of this evolution of the company we've been we've been doing this for a number of years now as it's when you launch we started building the technology in 2009 um started working full-time in early 2012. um so yeah where were you in 09 what company were you building this inside of i was a raf guide bomb that would spend my summers in colorado winters in costa rica and then fall in spring i crashed my parents house to work on these websites that were listing out soundtracks from extreme sports films using itunes and amazon's affiliate program so i was um living living the illinois summer lifestyle but uh at that point found these itunes affiliate program in particular was incredibly lucrative for these soundtrack websites but there was zip for documentation uh so 2009 i wrote a well my uh my best friend my roommate from college helped me kind of build out this basic technology to allow my links to be uh my websites to be intelligent with kind of the international users i started writing a book about kind of the problems that i saw on the affiliate program fragmentation that book uh sent over to some people at apple who um i thought were going to love it because they were missing a bunch of documentation and i got to see some desist so kind of went from from one extreme to the other in that day of finally having the book ready to go and getting threatened to be sued by apple but we uh we talked shortly afterwards they offered me a job uh as a program manager for the affiliate program um so went and uh yeah gave up the endless summer lifestyle moved to cupertino uh traded my flip-flops for for for a commute and helped take this affiliate program that i loved and made it uh significantly bigger and significantly more what year was that so that started that 2010. so 2010 2011 when my my apple days and then you left in 2012 and how are you able to keep the tech with you i imagine apple would say no we own this just you know don't do it so built the tech before before i came to apple but yeah exactly so disclosed that the tech disclosed the websites to close the other pieces but i was the only person they knew that could kind of solve this um these problems they were having that there was a woman that was managing it she was she was awesome but she was not technical there was an engineer that built it that was really the extent of their affiliate program um and then so they needed someone to kind of glue these pieces together so i got very fortunate apple's an amazing place i work with some amazing people um but the other day i was an entrepreneur i saw that we were making this problem worse i got paid handsomely to double nearly triple the size of the program program which doubled and tripled the size of the pro problem because it's all digital rights at the same time amazon was also significantly increasing their global footprint and amazon is again very very geo fragmented where you have storefront specific affiliate programs those storefronts are optimized for a region so there was no real clue that was holding together a single link to work across multiple multiple storefronts work for a global audience okay and then back to you here for a second obviously to scale this you need to hire people you need to make money obviously revenue to invest in growth are you charging on a kind of a pure place sas model we we were for a while so that's been one of our biggest challenges when we first started out we uh we used this whole model we called click share or we would take a percentage of the clicks that we were optimizing for our clients would use the affiliate revenue uh with our own house affiliate token so we were essentially up money being left on the table we were taking a portion of that and helping our clients typically you know double if not triple their affiliate revenue but also keeping a chunk for ourselves which worked incredibly well it was a team of three of us we were doing doing quite well uh amazon threw a fit about that affiliate revenue uh model so forced us to move to this kind of pure place wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait hold on hold on what year did amazon throw a fit that was 2014. and why did they throw a fit like how much volume were you doing in revenue where it was enough to show up on their radar and make them throw a fit um we were making 30 40 000 a month in affiliate revenue so jesse that's like a blip on their radar why were a lot of people doing this yeah we well there there are now a number of people that are definitely in our space but the the model that we use we were as far as i know the first ones to do it there are more people kind of showing up it was it was a lawyer in the uk team that didn't like the idea of us syndicating clicks so this is where things get really interesting we actually purchased one of our competitors uh shortly beforehand so i did this whole round of due diligence and talked to the head of the affiliate program in the uk for europe as well as out here in the us and everyone loved what we were doing we were solving a real problem everyone was winning amazon's selling more the publishers were making more affiliate revenue in consumer was a better experience et cetera uh just this one one lawyer didn't like that we were important with syndicating clicks which was against their terms of service so essentially threw a wrench in the whole revenue model which was unfortunate because it was essentially free for everyone so that was that was 2014 this happened yeah so 20 end of 2014 uh january 2nd 2015 um got an email from the uk team saying hey we're taking all your money back and we're kicking on the affiliate program whoa hold on guys what's going on here so what happened after that you're doing 30 40 grand a month and what you lose like all of that overnight we that one actually was a little bit better we uh we actually...