Pay Per Callers Show - Sam Darawish, CEO and CoFounder of Everflow

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Find out what it takes to build a successful technology company in the performance marketing industry with Sam Darawish, CEO and CoFounder of Everflow.

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Show Notes
  • Everflow is a performance affiliate tracking platform.
  • Entered the performance marketing industry in 2006 focusing on Mortgage leads.
  • Cofounded a mobile ad network in 2009 that was acquired by Opera Software.
  • There are lots of ups-and-downs. Identify and work with the right partners.
  • Unlimited caps / not caring about quality for Advertisers and previous experience for Publishers.
  • Top verticals: Mobile App Installs, Leads and Pay Per Call.
  • Lead Generation can easily be converted into Pay Per Call!
  • Being aware of developing features for a single client over solving a market problem.
  • Having a technical cofounder helps enormously in the developer hiring process.
  • Dedicated customer success team for onboarding and working with clients.
  • Lots of people are getting into Influencer marketing for social media channels.
  • Anti-fraud tools for analysis, prevention and automation.
  • Releases every 3-4 weeks along with publicly available release notes.
  • Everflow Pricing: Usage-based with no long-term contracts.

About Everflow

Everflow is a Performance Marketing Platform, built to solve the needs of modern marketers. Performance marketing has grown sophisticated, and Everflow helps companies stay ahead. Everflow handles scale through Google Cloud, offers the best solutions available, and provides 24/7 in-platform live chat support. Created by veteran marketers, with a simple clean experience, for facing their challenges as marketers.
Website: https://everflow.io
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/everflowio/

About Sam Darawish

CEO and CoFounder of Everflow.
Email: sam@everflow.io
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samdarawish/


Episode Transcript

Adam Young:
Welcome to the Pay Per Callers Show. My name is Adam Young the founder of Ringba and today I have a very special guest Sam Darwish the co-founder and CEO of Everflow. They're an affiliate and click tracking platform based out of San Francisco, California. He's been in the affiliate space for over a decade and is an expert in all sorts of subject matter and I'm very excited to have him on the show. Thank so much for joining us today Sam.

Sam Darawish:
Thanks, Adam. It's great to be here.

Adam Young:
So just for our viewers that aren't aware, can you just give us a high-level overview of what Everflow actually is and what it does?

Sam Darawish:
Yeah. For sure. So Everflow, like you said, it's a performance affiliate tracking platform. We started it about two and a half years ago. So versus our-- our competition I would say are names that you're probably very familiar with like HasOffers or [inaudible] or those folks. But we started two-and-a-half years ago. We looked at the industry and thought we could bring in something better in terms of both functionality, pricing, UI etc. So we started this. We worked with some of the folks that we've known for a long time. We're up to about 130 customers right now. So it's been great growth. We have 20 employees, a big development team in Montreal and then I'm based in San Francisco as well. So it's been great. My background is more on the affiliate network of running side of things. So for me, I was building a platform as a user having used different platforms over the years. So it's been a great experience so far.

Adam Young:
And I think that's a great way to start a technology company. It's to actually understand the business that you're in by doing things as opposed to trying to solve something for an industry that maybe people haven't been a part of. And so I see a lot of startups fail and most of the time it's because the founders have never worked in the industry that they're actually trying to solve problems in. So I think that's really cool. And also a lot of our clients at Ringba have mentioned to us that they want to integrate with Everflow, that they're migrating their HasOffers or [inaudible] or Voluum or whatever it is over to Everflow and that's one of the reasons we had you on the show today because very rarely do I get that kind of amazing feedback about a team and a product from so many of my clients. So I just thought it was an obvious good fit to have you on the show.

Sam Darawish:
Yeah. And I appreciate that.

Adam Young:
Absolutely. My pleasure. So let's rewind for a minute. How did you get started in affiliate marketing? What was your background?

Sam Darawish:
Yeah. So I went to college for engineering. So I have a more technical background which is helping me now [laughter]. But I started in affiliate marketing, I would say, back in 2006. So this was very early on with a company called [inaudible]. I was an employee there and I was running the mortgage business there. This is pre-financial crisis. We were selling subprime mortgage leads. That market was booming. But that was my foray into lead generation. [inaudible] did mortgage, we did personal finance, education. And it was really one of the early big successes in performance marketing. So I stayed there for a couple of years. And then 2008, actually around the financial crisis, and actually when the iPhone first came out. Me and a couple of friends we looked at the mobile market and were saying, "Okay. I think mobile could be the next thing. So we started one of the earliest mobile affiliate networks called Moolah Media. And so we started that in 2009 and ran it for a few years and eventually I actually sold it to Opera Software - which is the browser company. And we sold it for $50 million which was great for a bootstrap [laughter] company. So that was a great outcome for the founders as well as the employees there. And then after that, I started Everflow two-and-a-half years ago. One of the reason why I started Everflow is we had all of our own tracking at Moolah. We even tried to build our own call tracking which was not great [laughter] back then in 2008, 2009. I'd definitely recommend people to use something like Ringba. Don't try to do these things yourself. So yeah, that's kind of been the journey.

Adam Young:
And what were some of the toughest hurdles you had to overcome as an affiliate network operator?

Sam Darawish:
I think the toughest hurdles in-- and this is probably what a lot of people run into, is really a lot of ups and downs especially when you start. You're going to have great months, you're going to have crappy months. And it's really identifying the right partners to work with and that's both on the advertiser and publisher side. You could really waste a lot of time working with the wrong advertiser, working with the wrong publisher. So that to me is the biggest. The first couple of years at Moolah Media, there was a lot of ups and downs but through persistence through just finding value in different areas, that's kind of what kept us going.

Adam Young:
What are some of the qualities you see in an advertiser or a publisher that isn't good that you want to avoid? What are some of the behavior patterns that a viewer should watch out for?

Sam Darawish:
Well, I think there's definitely a few red flags. I think advertisers who claim they have unlimited budgets or they're just kind of shooting by the hip, not focused on quality, you're going to run into issues where they're not going to pay you or they're going to return a lot of the leads or that sort of thing. So I think over the years, I've been able to kind of filter those out. With publishers, I look at the track record of that publisher. You'll get approached by a lot of different people to work with and I would look at where they've been successful.

Adam Young:
I think that's something that is transparent across affiliate and pay-per-call is the fact that when someone says they have unlimited capacity or budget available, that is a huge warning sign. Because it means they're not paying attention to anything, they're not watching anything and they don't care. They just want to generate cash flow. And that may sound good in theory but typically it's situation that's ripe for fraud of abuse.

Sam Darawish:
Exactly. Yeah.

Adam Young:
So what are some of the companies that are working Everflow now focused on? What types of verticals and industries do you see that are really hot right now?

Sam Darawish:
So for us we're in a good position just because we kind of see a lot of different industries. Our bread and butter has been mobile. So we still work with a lot of - what I would call - CPI, cost per install, app type of networks. But I'm actually seeing-- and this is kind of interesting for everybody here. I am kind of seeing a very strong presence in pay-per-call. So Aargon is one of the companies we work for. They have a very strong pay-per-call. And we're seeing a lot more of those companies popping up especially in personal finance. Those types of areas. So there is a lot of demand for quality lead providers, lead generators and pay-per-call. So I think those areas are very strong.

Adam Young:
I think what a lot of people are starting to realize in the space because we see the exact same thing on the growth front. Is that lead generation can be very easily converted into pay-per-call. And it gives you the opportunity to monetize this data and those leads in a new way while generating real-time revenue because you know immediately on a phone call how much you're getting paid, whether it's legit or not and a bunch of other criteria. So it's a really cool thing. And that makes me happy to hear because we focus a lot on growing the community and the industry as a whole and what I'm seeing right now is just a lot of new entrants into the space and there is a ton of opportunity available and the fact that it's growing is not really causing anyone any loss. It's just creating new opportunities for everyone which is really exciting.

Sam Darawish:
Yeah. Just to add to that, we are kind of a platform that's, I would say, parallel to yours. A lot of companies would use both and we are getting a lot of demand of saying, "Hey, integrate with Ringba or any other type of pay-per-call. So that's great to see.

Adam Young:
Cool. So when it comes to building technology, tell me some of the things that you guys have experienced that maybe weren't great, maybe were a little painful. What are some of the lessons that you learned over the last two-and-a-half years building your company to where it is now?

Sam Darawish:
So there's always going to be-- in a software / SaaS company, there's always going to be a pull between customer-- I would say, customer pull versus market pull. And one of the areas that you can really, really kind of dig yourself into is if you have a-- especially early on if you have a big customer who just pulling you in a very, very niche or a very customer-specific area because you end up developing custom solution for that customer. And that's kind of one thing that you've got to be aware of. And then another thing I would say is stay agile. Don't lock yourself down into five, six-month releases. Just stay agile. Do it every two, three weeks if you can. Obviously, as the company matures that tends to get bigger in terms of the development cycle. But that gives you the flexibility to work with a lot of folks. So one of the things that we hear from some of our customers that are maybe unsatisfied with our competition is that they have functionality they're requesting and it's years until it happens and that just causes frustrations.

Adam Young:
Very cool. And when you hired your first set of developers, what was that experience like?

Sam Darawish:
Well, I mean, I'm kind of very blessed to have a partner-founder who's our CTO. My other co-founder is the COO. But our co-founder CTO based in Montreal, he's been doing all the development hiring and he was our top engineer at our last company as well. So known him for a really long time. So I really defer a lot of the development hiring to him. But having someone like that who has been in the space, knows the business side, that's been super helpful for us.

Adam Young:
Absolutely, right? So having a technical co-founder on your team and someone that has a vested interest in the company and owns part of it is critical for success if you're going to build software. I see a lot of entrepreneurs that want to build software and want to build companies and they don't have a technical founder and they're like, "Well, we'll just outsource it or we'll just hire some people. And that's a recipe for disaster. You really need that expertise on your team and they need to understand the technology you're going to build so that they can drive that process. So it's not surprising for me to hear that. We also have a partner Peter who's our CEOs who's one of the owners of Ringba and without him, on our team, we would've never been able to build our technology the way it is today. So I think that's really important to note for anyone that's listening right now that maybe wants to build technology or start a business that does technology. If you don't have that partner that has a vested interest in it, you're basically screwed.

Sam Darawish:
Yeah. I mean just to add to that, it allows me to focus on business development, marketing, sales etc. So the way our company is, we're three co-founders, we all have our areas of specialties. I mean obviously we meet frequently and we have our weekly calls but everyone kind of owns their piece of the business and execution there.

Adam Young:
Sounds like you guys have a lot of trust on your team.

Sam Darawish:
Yeah. And that's the thing. We've worked with each other a long time and one of the other things is a lot of our employees used to be ex-employees over at Moolah or Opera and so it's great to have that continuity.

Adam Young:
That's really cool. So when you're working with a new customer, what are some of the onboarding challenges that you run into? What are some of the problems that you face when someone new comes onto your platform?

Sam Darawish:
So that's a great question and I think for most technology SAS company, that's a huge issue. So first of all, we have a whole customer success team that's dedicated to that and you gotta have that otherwise it's not going to work. So one of the issues is training and that's a big deal. So our customer success team, they organize kick-offs, they have training with everybody there. I mean our software probably like others in the industry, it's a complex piece of software. It's not something that's simple. And you have a variety of skill levels on the customer's side. So managing that. And the other thing, especially if it's a migration from another platform, just managing the migration of the data - which usually happens where they'll be either on something else and they just want to move everything over. So organizing that whole project with customers.

Adam Young:
Yeah. It's a very intense process especially when it comes to resources and getting set up. And it sounds like you guys have a handle on the whole thing. I think that having that customer service success team available to your clients is imperative. And I don't know how companies do it without it. I see a lot of companies that don't have that, don't provide that level of support especially for enterprise software like ours. It doesn't make any sense to me because we work with customers on a one-on-one basis every single day of the week. And it's really important to us and one of the driving factors of our success. So I can see why you guys have made the investment too.

Sam Darawish:
Yeah. And I mean [laughter]-- I always say it's SaaS. It's software and service, right? And as a technology company, a lot of your brand is your service. I mean you could have a great product, but if you have no service, no customer's going to care, right? And that's what people remember.

Adam Young:
So when it comes to the future of marketing and performance, where do you see the industry heading? What do you think some of the things that are going to be really great for our mutual clients on the horizon are?

Sam Darawish:
So I see a lot of positive things happening in the industry and I think affiliate marketing is growing. We're seeing a lot of customers move into influencer marketing which is kind of the same thing. I would say it's the next generation of that. So basically using the social channels. So that's definitely exciting. We're also seeing a lot of brands that are requiring performance marketing, they're requiring metrics, analytics, all that. So I think the industry is just expanding and will continue to expand. There's been a lot of "shady stuff" that happens over the years. But I think a lot of that stuff goes away and the good players, the legitimate advertisers, and networks, they all stay and their business is growing. So I'm excited about it.

Adam Young:
It's great to see brands starting to step up to the table. I've been in the industry a long time and it always surprised me how a lot of these companies spent a lot of money on marketing and don't track any of it. Still today, on the phone side, we still see all sorts of brands that are like, "What is call tracking? Why would I want to track my phone calls." Those are the same companies that aren't tracking their clicks either which is just incredibly surprising to me.

Sam Darawish:
Yeah. I agree. And we're starting-- a lot of our customers right now I would say are networks or agencies but we're starting to work with a lot of direct advertisers and a lot of that is actually coming in inbound where they're just saying, "Hey, we need something to track, we need to understand all of our metrics or our performance data” etc.

Adam Young:
So where do you see the future of your platforms technology going? What are some of the things that in the next 12 or 24 months, if you're willing to disclose, are going to change the way that affiliates do business?

Sam Darawish:
Absolutely. So there's a few areas that we're focusing on in our roadmaps. So one is anti-fraud and we see this a lot in mobile but even in other areas, I'm sure there's a lot of pay-per-call as well. But providing a lot of anti-fraud tools for people. And it's not just what I would say scoring or fraud which has kind of been historically the case. More actually understanding the data behind the fraud and really preventing it before it actually happens. So that's a big area and we're seeing a lot of customer pull there. The other is automation. There are just so many offers, so many campaigns that people are running and there's very specific KPIs that folks need to hit. So automating a lot of that, whether something is below a certain conversion rate or above or a certain click-through rate etc. There's a lot of metrics you can optimize for. So just automation so that people are not just doing things manually. And that's where we see this type of technology going. Not everything's just manual. A lot of stuff is happening in the background.

Adam Young:
So you're talking about maybe automated report monitoring where your system is watching all of my campaigns and if certain thresholds aren't being met, I'm getting notifications. If there's potential fraud or abuse--

Sam Darawish:
Yeah. Automatically blocking it.

Adam Young:
Real-time. Awesome. That's the type of technology that I think would really help a network out, would really help a growing organization out because quality assurance is kind of a double-edged sword. You have to invest in it, it's very expensive, there's not a lot of return on investment there and so your team spends a lot of time and energy trying to do that quality assurance. And then so what happens is they end up neglecting it because it's expensive and complicated to do and then that in the end can potentially destroy their business. So it's like this balancing act that's not fun to do and it sounds like you guys are going to help solve that problem in the future.

Sam Darawish:
Absolutely. And I think as you know being a network, you ultimately want to be sustainable. You want to stay there for the long-term which means you don't have fraud in your traffic. So we will view ourselves as the tools and the partners for a lot of these networks to just provide value and be sustainable and really not just go down with any sort of issues like that.

Adam Young:
Amazing. And so when it comes to your technology, what is your actual release cycle? How often are you guys putting out updates?

Sam Darawish:
I would say it's pretty frequent. We're doing updates maybe three to four weeks. And one cool thing that we do which you can actually find on our website is we actually put all of our release notes out there. So each release note we'll send out to all of our customers and it's published in our website. And we're very transparent. We don't keep any of that stuff and we don't care competition - if they want to do it, they can do it as well. It's not something we're going to hide.

Adam Young:
Well, if no one's copying, you're not really winning.

Sam Darawish:
Exactly [laughter]. Exactly.

Adam Young:
And by the time they get around to copying you, you're onto something else and most of the time when someone rips off your features or what you're working on, they get it maybe 70, 80 percent of the way there and it ends up like a really bad version of what you designed [laughter]. We see this all the time. I love when people copy us. People copy our user interfaces, they copy our marketing materials, they copy the show, they copy everything we do and then do it in a way that's not as good. And so I think it's entirely flattering [laughter] and I love when I see that. And if no one was ripping us off, I'd be very concerned about our future.

Sam Darawish:
Right. No, that's a great point and we feel the same way. So that's right.

Adam Young:
It's cool that you put those release notes out there too because it lets your customers understand what they can expect in the future and what's changed and where your guys heads are at. And that's a really important thing when you're not only a SAS company but in reality, both of us, we're powering other people's business and so without that communication and trust our clients can be in a really bad spot because for every dollar they pay us or you, they're making a substantially larger amount of money than that. And if the technology doesn't take care of their business correctly, they stand to lose a lot more than we do too. So I really appreciate your methodology and your mindset on how you handle those types of things.

Sam Darawish:
Yeah. Absolutely. And we view ourselves not just as a vendor. We are partnered to a lot of our companies and we're vested in their success as well. If they're not successful, we're not going to get paid. We're not going to be successful [laughter].

Adam Young:
What type of pricing models does Everflow work with?

Sam Darawish:
So our pricing, again, we like to keep it very simple and transparent. And this may go against the grain with a lot of SAS companies. So we don't believe in long-term contracts. We're month to month. And basically it's essentially if you like it, you should use it. If not, then we're not going to force anybody into it. And if people do use it, they will continue to use it. And we're usage-based. And what that means it's click-based. That means if you're using more of it, it's going to cost more. If you're using less, then it's going to cost less. And we start at $200 a month and goes up from there. And we have different tiers basically based on clicks that we charge. So yeah, we try to keep it simple. I'm not going to lock people into kind of ridiculous tiers and then kind of fight them over stuff like that which kind of seen in the industry. So that's basically the model.

Adam Young:
Well, I like that a lot because a contract essentially says that you don't have to innovate for me anymore. You've got my money for 12, 24 or 36 months and there's nothing else that you would need to do or deliver because now I'm in that contract. And so I'm also a firm believer of no contracts. It forces guys like you and me to actually give a shit about our clients and where we're going and what we're doing. Ringba also does not do contracts in any shape or form. And it's something that was a founding principal of our business so that our entire team knows that if we don't do a good job and constantly innovate, our clients will leave us and there's no repercussions for doing so. So I absolutely love that philosophy and I'm really glad that's how you guys handle it. And so if anybody watching wants to do business with Everflow or wants a demo of your software or wants to check out where the affiliate marketing tracking technology is going, how can they get in contact with you guys? How do they set that up? What do they do?

Sam Darawish:
Yeah. I mean you can go to our website. You can reach us at sales@everflow.io or you if you want to reach me directly sam@everflow.io. We have a good business development sales staff here. We're ready to give you demos or just even have a conversation. We always like to start by having conversations even before we get into demos and just to see if it's a good fit. So yeah. And we're available and I'll be happy to address anybody who wants to get in touch.

Adam Young:
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate your time. It was great having you on the show.

Sam Darawish:
Yeah. Thanks, Adam. That was great as well.
 
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