Affiliate Marketing Was a Mess. Here’s the System That’s Fixing It | Ep 230 with Victor Boechat de Carvalho Founder of Glidescale

Summary

Founder's Story: Episode 230 – "Affiliate Marketing Was a Mess. Here’s the System That’s Fixing It" with Victor Boechat de Carvalho

Release Date: June 16, 2025
Host: IBH Media
Guest: Victor Boechat de Carvalho, Founder of Glidescale

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Introduction

In Episode 230 of Founder's Story, hosted by IBH Media, Victor Boechat de Carvalho, the innovative founder of Glidescale, delves deep into the tumultuous world of affiliate marketing. The episode, titled "Affiliate Marketing Was a Mess. Here’s the System That’s Fixing It," explores the inherent flaws in traditional affiliate marketing systems and introduces Glidescale’s transformative approach to resolving these issues.

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The State of Traditional Affiliate Marketing

The conversation kicks off with a provocative question from the interviewer:

Interviewer [00:01]: "Some people might say that affiliate marketing is dead. I’d love to understand why you are so excited and what do you say to those that would make that statement."

Victor responds candidly, acknowledging the shortcomings of existing affiliate marketing frameworks:

Victor [00:22]: "When it comes to traditional affiliate marketing systems, they are absolutely correct. They are limited in their reach, fraught with security concerns, and often bogged down by cumbersome infrastructure. The real question is, can we develop a system without all that bloat? Through Glidescale, we’re pioneering a version of universal affiliate marketing that I believe is the future."

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Identifying and Solving Industry Problems

Victor outlines the core issues he aimed to address when founding Glidescale:

Victor [01:13]: "During my time in college, I experimented with digital marketing agencies and quickly realized how inefficient they were, primarily due to the excessive middlemen involved. Affiliate marketing appeared as a partial solution by reducing intermediaries, but it was still hampered by security issues, technological limitations, and inconsistent payments. This inefficiency sparked my mission to create a more streamlined and secure affiliate marketing system."

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Glidescale’s Innovative Solution

Discussing the foundational principles of Glidescale, Victor emphasizes efficiency and security as paramount:

Victor [02:32]: "Our first goal was to enhance efficiency by eliminating middlemen. Affiliate marketing inherently allows affiliates to utilize their expertise, whether through cold emailing, videos, or Google Ads. However, the challenge was making this universally compatible across diverse platforms, not just Shopify or standard e-commerce sites. To tackle fraud—a persistent issue—we engineered unique innovations that ensure traffic authenticity. For instance, when someone clicks an affiliate link, they first see a preview of the website, prompting them to confirm genuine interest. This mechanism filters out irrelevant clicks, ensuring that affiliates are rewarded for legitimate traffic."

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Reception and Benefits for Users

The discussion shifts to how Glidescale is received by both affiliates and brands:

Interviewer [04:09]: "Do you find that the affiliates are more excited about this or the brands, or is it both?"

Victor elaborates on the enthusiastic response from marketers:

Victor [04:41]: "Our primary users are marketers who manage campaigns and those who participate as affiliates. Affiliates are particularly drawn to Glidescale because of instant, reliable payments and minimal fees. Unlike traditional systems where affiliates are often burdened with high fees and delayed payments, Glidescale ensures that affiliates receive payments automatically and promptly, with only a small percentage retained by us for maintaining security and efficiency. Our focus is on maximizing user growth, even if it means keeping fees as low as possible."

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Joining Glidescale: A Seamless Experience

When asked about the onboarding process for affiliates and brands, Victor provides a detailed walkthrough:

Victor [06:26]: "Joining Glidescale is straightforward. Affiliates can sign up using their Google accounts in just a few seconds. They can then browse public campaigns—though these are rare due to security concerns—by default, we offer public campaigns and also provide the option for private ones. Upon joining a campaign, affiliates receive a unique link to share. Payments are processed instantly via PayPal or direct bank transfers. For brands, creating a campaign entails setting up the campaign details, including name, banner image, description, and location targeting. Brands can choose between public or private campaigns, with private ones often offering premium rates due to their exclusivity."

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Optimizing Marketing Spend with Affiliate Strategies

The episode further explores strategic allocation of marketing budgets, highlighting the advantages of affiliate marketing over traditional channels:

Interviewer [08:48]: "When you look at how much marketing spend someone should be doing on, let's say, affiliate marketing versus social media ads versus email marketing, what do you feel is a good percentage?"

Victor counters conventional marketing budgets by advocating for efficient spending through affiliates:

Victor [09:45]: "For traditional affiliate links, I’d recommend a bare minimum of $11,000 to see meaningful results, assuming no organic growth. However, with Glidescale, you can start effectively with as little as $1 per click. This minimal investment leverages warm traffic from affiliates' networks, as anyone joining a public campaign can share it within their circles, ensuring higher engagement. For greater impact, scaling up to $10,000 or more allows for extensive experimentation with various pay-per-click rates, identifying what strategies yield the best results."

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Connecting with Glidescale

Concluding the episode, Victor provides avenues for listeners to engage with Glidescale:

Victor [10:59]: "To connect with us, users can utilize the inbuilt support system within Glidescale to send tickets directly. Additionally, we have a dedicated email available on our website www.flightsfellow.me. By navigating to the 'Contact Us' page at the bottom of the site, anyone can reach out for support or inquiries."

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Closing Remarks

The interviewer wraps up the episode with enthusiasm:

Interviewer [11:23]: "Thank you so much for joining us today on Founder’s Story. I can’t wait to dive in as an affiliate and as a brand to check this out because I really see affiliate marketing being an incredible opportunity for a lot of people."

Victor reciprocates the gratitude, marking the end of a compelling discussion.

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Key Takeaways

1. Addressing Traditional Flaws: Traditional affiliate marketing systems are inefficient, security-laden, and hindered by excessive middlemen. Glidescale aims to rectify these issues by creating a streamlined, secure, and universally compatible platform.

2. Innovative Security Measures: Glidescale employs unique methods, such as previewing the website before confirming interest, to eliminate fraudulent clicks and ensure that affiliates are rewarded for genuine traffic.

3. User-Centric Approach: By minimizing fees and ensuring instant payments, Glidescale transfers maximum value to its users, fostering a thriving community of motivated affiliates and satisfied brands.

4. Seamless Onboarding: The platform offers an easy signup process for both affiliates and brands, with comprehensive tools to manage and optimize campaigns effectively.

5. Strategic Marketing Spend: Glidescale advocates for flexible marketing budgets, allowing brands to start small and scale their investments based on performance, thereby optimizing their marketing ROI.

6. Growth-Oriented Vision: Glidescale prioritizes user growth and platform adoption over immediate profitability, positioning itself as a future-proof solution in the affiliate marketing landscape.

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For more insights and updates, visit Glidescale's website and follow their journey towards revolutionizing affiliate marketing.

Transcript

[Interviewer]

So, Victor Boisha, founder of Glidescale Some people might say, and I've heard this, that affiliate marketing is dead. I know you are all in on affiliate marketing and I've had my own experiences, but I'd love to understand why are you so excited and what do you say to those that would say that, that statement right now?

[Victor Boisha]

I would say that when it comes to traditional affiliate marketing systems, they are absolutely correct. The traditional systems for affiliate marketing are, let's be honest, quite poor. They are limited in the way that they can reach their clientele. There are security concerns and usually they're built around infrastructure that gets in the way of the seamless transition of things. So the question becomes, can we get a system that doesn't have all that bloat? And I think I was able to do that through light skill. So in that regard we're talking about this version of universal affiliate marketing. I say that it's the future.

[Interviewer]

So when you, when you talk about the future of affiliate marketing and how platform needed to change, it needed to be adapted, where was the, what was the problem that you were trying to solve in this marketplace?

[Victor Boisha]

So when I was in college, I briefly tried my hand at digital marketing agencies and I had some experience with that and some fun even with that. But what I taunted the Yelchin clients was just how inefficient everything was, how you're working through these middlemen who are then hiring middlemen. And that just seemed absurd. I noticed that some people had some success with affiliate marketing where you almost cut out a bit of the, of the middleman. But then I saw how limited it was on the use cases as due to security concerns and limitation technology, very limited number of things you can do. There were concerns about some of the list, not even getting paid on time. That was a constant concern, I heard. And so all I thought was why can't we make this more efficient? And that's what I began working on two years ago.

[Interviewer]

I like the idea of when you're in an industry, when you're working in an industry and you can see where the problems are and then you can start to solve it. So once you saw this problem, you're in the university, which is amazing. The fact that you're in university and building a company I think is incredible in itself. How did you start to figure out like this is how I actually will solve the problem.

[Victor Boisha]

So I thought first, first issue I wanted to deal with was efficiency, cutting out the middleman. And I saw that affiliate marketing had a way of Answering that, pretty straightforward. You just get the affiliates directly. They do their expertise. Doesn't matter if it's cold emailing or if it's videos or Google Ads or whatever, whatever works for them. That's how they do it. So that was a good starting point. And an issue became, all right, but how can I make that universally compatible? As in, any link works because as things are, you have to go to a Shopify store or an E commerce platform, very limited use cases. And I began to see, okay, well, the issue here is security. Affiliate programs already suffer from fraud constantly. Is there a way of breaking this chain of fraud? And so I looked at the human incentives and how you can disincentivize that. We also did some unique innovations which I can't fully disclose, which we can then guarantee that this is genuine traffic. And one of the things that canvas flows is that we have constant human input. When someone is clicking on one of our affiliate links, we show them a preview of the website, not the true website, where they then have to effectively confirm, is this something we're even interested in or is this just false traffic? Because say I get someone my affiliate link, they press it, they realize this is completely irrelevant to me. I'm not the target, goddams. And so our software first confirms, all right, you are interested in this, therefore it's a valid click, therefore the affiliate gets paid.

[Interviewer]

So do you find that the affiliates are more excited about this or the brands, or is it both? Who, who really resonates with the, with the software? And I can, I can relate to the things that you're saying just because we used to do a lot of affiliate stuff and I could see where these problems arise, you know, as we were going through it barely, you know, barely have been done it before. I was really new to this and I could see how, how this. So, so who are the ones that you're finding are, are saying that they benefit the most?

[Victor Boisha]

So I've talked mostly actually with marketers. So we differentiate the users between manager users and marketing source. Manager users are the ones who make campaigns and marketer users are the ones who go in, join light scale and then do the affiliate program, do the affiliate marketing for them. And I mostly tagged with people who are very interested in the affiliate marketing side of things. And they were particularly interested because they saw if I put honest work in here and actually get those clicks, my payment is automatic, it's instant, and the fees are super low. Comparing that to the other infrastructure where affiliates were usually getting taxed pretty heavily on Top of fees like lightscale doesn't have these concerns. We try to transfer as much value as possible to our users. There are no commission fees. For example, if you get a sale, you got a sale. That's. That's that you generated traffic. Generated traffic. We take a very small percentage. And the reason we can afford such low rates is because since we don't need all this additional infrastructure to guarantee that our affiliate systems are not susceptible fraud, because we built 30 into the affiliate program, therefore we can afford to transfer pretty much all the value to our users. And our goal right now isn't even income. Our goal is maximizing our user count. So we might even experiment with making that low, that low fee even lower.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. Victor, thank you for sharing that. Appreciate you answering that question. I'm curious on the process and the experience of joining it. So if I want to join as an affiliate, what's that process like? Or I have a business that I'm really thinking about bringing in affiliates and I've been thinking for a while, what's the experience like as the brand, he.

[Victor Boisha]

Joins glidescale, he creates his account. It takes two seconds because you all have. You can just sign in for Google, have Google account, then you have two options. You can go down, you can look at the public campaigns. Now public affiliate programs are quite rare because there are security concerns, but we're quite confident in our security. So we do offer public campaigns. In fact, that's the default setting, but you can choose private. And so you can look at the public campaigns that are currently active. There's a join button. It's a blue join button. You press join, then you get your link. And from that moment on, it's up to you. Share your link. However you do that, that's up to you. As long as you're getting genuine traffic, you're getting paid immediately. And the moment that money hits your account, you can just withdraw. We use the PayPal API integration. So if I have a PayPal account, that's ideal. If not, PayPal can transfer directly to your bank account. And that's all you have to do. If you know people who are using Lightskill or who are interested in affiliate marketing, you can ask them to create a private campaign. And usually the private campaigns have a more premium rate. So if you look at our normal campaigns that are public, it's about 50 cents per click more premium campaign, about 60, 70, 80, sometimes a dollar I click, depending on how specific it is. Now, if you are a company, we're trying to set up your Affiliate program. It's also pretty straightforward. You make your account, you get them. There's a button that says new campaign. You fill out the details. We're going to ask you for what name you want. We're going to ask you for a banner image that we're going to be using in the preview that I've talked about before, and a small description, things to verify that this is genuine traffic that you want. Where we ask you for location, if it's location sensitive, for example, because let's say you're a dentistry practice in Sao Paulo. You don't want someone in New York hearing about you. That's pointless. And so you put out that information. You then decide, these are amount of funds I'm allocating to this campaign and this is how much I want to pay the marketers for it. And then you decide if it's going to be a public campaign or if it's going to be a private campaign. And if it's private, how you want to do it. Like we have a system where you allow marketers to apply to join, so anyone can apply to join your campaign and they have a profile that they can share. Or it's a pure private system where you have to be the one inviting people in. And that's usually done by LinkedIn rights.

[Interviewer]

When you look at how much marketing spend someone should be doing on, let's say, affiliate marketing versus social media ads versus email marketing, what do you feel is. Is a good percentage? And the reason why I bring this up is people. People in marketing always complain about like, you know, ad costs go up, you know, ad bidding goes up, or people aren't reading their emails. Like, there's a lot of reasons why people always, you know, complain about different marketing channels, whether it's a brand or even an agency. But I feel like affiliate is always an interesting one because it's, you know, people's community. It, it's a totally different. It's somebody, a human going out there and reaching out with other humans, which I find very fascinating. And we've had a massive success in the past working with affiliates in all different angles. It's something we do right now. So how do you feel in terms of, you know, what percentages are you thinking about leveraging this versus other channels?

[Victor Boisha]

So if I were to market for traditional links, I would argue, especially depending on my product, at least $11,000 bare minimum for you to have anything meaningful happen. Assuming no organic on Glidescale. I think if you want to do bare minimum, one dollar is enough. You you can get away with one dollar. And what will happen is because anyone, if you choose a public option, anyone can join, they're going to see your campaign and then think, okay, well, I know a friend who is interested in this, so I must not just join here and then I'm going to share this in my group chat. And there you go, you have warm traffic from people actually know the client. So you know, $1 2, let's go $2 to be a bit more ambitious. But you can then also then scale that up for as much as you want. You can put $10,000, you could put $100,000 or you can leave it at a few. I would actually recommend making multiple campaigns where you experiment with different PPC rates. That's how much you pay the part, so that you can see exactly what works, what doesn't work, if you're enjoying the traffic, that type of thing.

[Interviewer]

So, Victor, if people want to get in touch with you, they want to find out more. How can they do so?

[Victor Boisha]

So in lightscale we have an inbuilt system where you can contact us directly that's used for customer support. But also really any question right now is available. So anyone who wants to log in and quickly send us a ticket, we can. We'll answer that. We also have a dedicated email on the website www.flightsfellow.me. if you scroll to the bottom, you'll see a contact Us page there.

[Interviewer]

And thank you so much for joining us today on Founder Story. I can't wait to dive in as an affiliate, as a brand and really check this out because I really see affiliate marketing being like an incredible opportunity for a lot of people. But Victoria, thanks again for joining us on Founders Story.

[Victor Boisha]

Thank you.