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TikTok Shop Insiders
Euka.ai: The TikTok Affiliate Marketing Hack No One's Talking About (But Should Be)
00:26:03
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- [00:01]
Ivan
Welcome to TikTok Shop Insiders podcast, your.
- [00:05]
Jeremy
Source for actionable news, trends and strategies.
- [00:08]
Ivan
If you want to build a thriving.
- [00:10]
Jeremy
Brand or Creator presence on TikTok shop, this is your essential listen.
- [00:15]
Ivan
Let's get started. Hey, everyone, I'm Ivan. This upcoming podcast episode is an interview that I have with Jeremy at Yuka AI. It is a TikTok shop affiliate marketing platform that helps sellers find, reach out and manage affiliates automatically. Right. So this is a bots and automation tool, as everyone knows, but they're a little bit different. They go in depth in kind of how they created it through a database, not just through scripts and easy ways of doing it. They have their own database of hundreds of thousands, millions of affiliates, and they reach out onto your behalf. Some of the things they do differently versus other tools are they have a email option. Right. So not only is it direct messages or target collabs, but you can email these affiliates, which is a new avenue, as well as a CRM. And we'll a CRM of affiliates and you know how to communicate with affiliates in your network. So awesome stuff. There's a great interview ahead of you, so thank you. All right. Hey, everyone. Welcome to TikTok Shop Insiders podcast, your source for the latest news and strategies for TikTok shop. I am your host, Ivan, and we have a very special guest today. We have Jeremy from Yuka AI, a TikTok shop automation outreach tool for affiliates. So, hey, Jeremy, welcome to the channel.
- [01:42]
Jeremy
Thank you for having me today.
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Ivan
Yes, sir, of course. So, yeah, we connected. Where? On LinkedIn a little bit ago. We were both kind of in the TikTok shop space and talking here and there, and you reached out to me.
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Jeremy
So, yeah, I saw you have such a big, you know, LinkedIn presence, so love to have a chat and hear your thoughts on TikTok Shop, because everyone wants to learn more about TikTok Shop all the time.
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Ivan
For sure. For sure. Yeah. I'm glad you reached out. We had lots of conversations prior to this talking about TikTok shop and all the tools, but, you know, one, our first conversation, funny story, you actually reached out to me and you're like, yeah, Ivan, you know, I get. I get reached out to all the time by people with tools and hey, my tool is. Is great. And you're like, hey, Ivan, my. My tool's head and shoulders better than the rest. Like, there's no one that could hold a candle to my tool. And I was like, okay, here's another guy that's like. Or whatever. And I was like, okay, let me see the tool. And so essentially you showed me the tool and I was like, okay, this is legit. If you can give me some like, well, let's talk about the tool later. Sorry. But maybe a little bit about your background, like where, you know, we're before TikTok shop. A little bit of background. Background. And then also like as you got into TikTok shop, your experience there.
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Jeremy
Yeah, I've been like in the e commerce space for last four or five years. Right. Right after business school. So I started my career actually as an engineer and I working in auto industry. Right. I like cars, but I just felt like a car space is too boring, right. Too slow. And then really wanted to start something that's more e commerce, more trade related stuff. Because the province I grew up from in China is called Fujian province. Right. And the Biden's founder, me Ton's founder, are from that space. So this space is a very interesting space where everyone wants to do some trades with, you know, even locally or internationally. And we are the first province actually open up to the. To. To other countries. Right. Like back in the time of Xiaoping wanted to open up China. So yeah, I think just deep in my heart wanted to do e commerce. And I was a product manager at TikTok for a year and then I was a PM at DoorDash for another year and most recently I was working at the $3 billion e commerce unicorn called Pepe.com for the last two years. So yeah, we've been in this space for a few years so far.
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Ivan
So pretty big names under your belt, right? And then all in the PM space, the project management space. Okay.
- [04:19]
Jeremy
Yeah.
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Ivan
For those not aware, it's kind of like the man orchestrating the developers, the designers, et cetera. So they have a vision for a app, let's say. And then he kind of orchestrates all that. Is that correct, Jeremy?
- [04:33]
Jeremy
Yeah. Basically you are the kind of CEO of your product, right? You decide what kind of direction you want to go, what kind of customers, features, needs that you want to serve. Right. A lot of prioritization, cross functional communication stuff.
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Ivan
All right. So that's the main part of your background with some pretty big companies. So how did you stumble upon TikTok shop? The need for affiliate outreach tools? How did that come about?
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Jeremy
Yeah, so for my last job I was a head of product@pepe.com As I mentioned, it's a 3P and Daughters Ecopos unicorn. So they sell baby and kids clothing from China to overseas countries. We sold. We are selling to like 50 countries and have a P, E, P, A, a P, A T. P A T. Pat. Pat. Ah, yeah, okay.
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Ivan
P, A T, P A T. Okay, got it.
- [05:22]
Jeremy
Yeah, yeah. EP was the first brand got invited by TikTok to join TikTok shop last year. So I built an internal tool for. For TikTok to. To help them to. To find creators, to reach out to creators. Right. And then just discover this is a much bigger opportunity because, yeah, like more than 70, 80% of the TikTok shop GMV are from affiliates. If you wanted to do well on TikTok shop, you have to solve this problem. So, yeah, decided to quit my job to start Yuka with my co founder, Kevin. Kevin was engineer from Amazon. So both of us are from this E commerce space.
- [06:04]
Ivan
Right, Great. So Pat, Pat. To running kind of their affiliate outreach in a way, building a tool to help them with their affiliate outreach. And so they're one of the first companies on TikTok shop and you saw an opportunity. Hey, if they need this tool, every other company is going to need a tool. Let me build it. Right?
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Jeremy
Yeah, exactly.
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Ivan
Love it.
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Jeremy
And I really believe in the future of commerce. I feel like the future of commerce is going to.
- [06:31]
Ivan
Driven by influencers, micro influencers, et cetera. Yeah. Okay, so you have the idea. And as anyone listening to this podcast, as myself, there's a handful of other outreach tools out there, you know, bots, automation, you'll call it. And as I was alluding to in the beginning, you know, you reached out to me like, hey, mine is head and shoulders better than the rest. And I was like, okay, let me prove you. So you showed me the tool. I was kind of surprised and astonished. And, you know, there's a. It's another level per se. I will say most of the tools out there, most slash, all of the tools are, you know, scripts, AKA you know, telling the computer to push a button, then push another button and push another button. Right. And that's fine and great and it serves the purpose a lot. But you decided to take a different approach and, you know, be more in depth. It's a lot harder road, but it allows you for more flexibility, more options, et cetera. I'll pause here and let you kind of describe, like, how you wanted to do that kind of more difficult road, which turned out to be more fruitful and more kind of higher quality.
- [07:38]
Jeremy
Yeah. I would like to touch on this maybe like on the three different levels. Right. Maybe on the product level. I think in the beginning we put lots of thoughts onto Our product, right. We don't want it to just to make quick bots out of this TikTok shop boom or whatever. And then we really wanted to build a big company for the long term, right. And then that's why we we wanted to build this kind of platform. It's not just a tool to be like end to end affiliate marketing operation tool for artists, brands and sellers. And when I think about it, this tool has to be really user friendly. So compared to other bots, probably just sending DMS using script that you mentioned about, we have multi channel approach to outreach. For example we can do dm, we can do target collaboration, we can do emails and that really give our brands and sellers artists and bells and whistles to reach out to their target creators. So that's number one. Number two, both me and Kevin are coming from this technology background. So we are a big believer in AI. So we're building a lot of AI features and automations. Right. For example you can craft really personalized message by our AI. So if you don't know how to sell your product, we can craft those by really compiling product selling pitches for you. And then we will be able to do this intelligently. We know who didn't reply to you, who you should reach out to. Again we build this automatic follow up on top of our current outreach flow. So that's just on the outreaching automation. On the CRM side we have these tools for brands who continuously engage with their existing creators whether they are content pending or posted video. We upgrade automatically update those statuses. So brands can just slice and dice those creators and then put them into a different segments and to send those like mass communication to them. For example, oh, this creator or this group of creators are content pending. You probably want to send a reminder and say oh it's time for you to post your first video. Right. And then for those creators who already post video, you probably wanted to send them a reminder, ask them to share the Spark codes with you so that you can run Spark ads on top of it. So a lot of this kind of automation we think really through and wanted to enable it for our sellers.
- [10:05]
Ivan
Yeah, so what one so for the audience, one thing that really drew me to this tool and was head and shoulders is the CRM so more specifically the affiliate CRM so customer relationship management kind of section. Right. And I think a little like my, my perspective on it. Let's say you have a thousand affiliates that have made you videos, right? Or you have a thousand that are in your network, some of them haven't received the product yet. Some of them received it and not made a video. Some of them have made a video. Some of them had made a video and generated a million dollar gmv, some have generated zero and et cetera. Right. All throughout the life journey of affiliate. Well, Jeremy's tool Yuka can now filter between did they make a video, did they not make a video? And and like Jeremy was saying, if they haven't made a video, well, you give them a nudge, an email. So you can bulk say those that receive product and not have and not made a video, send this message and it can send a message. All other tools cannot do that. Another one is, you know, let's see, you can sort by gmv so your top creators, you can send them a message and saying, hey, you know, we're going to boost your commission rate if you create more videos or et cetera. Right. So it's just a way more advanced way of, you know, communicating with your affiliate network. So is that correct? Correct me if I'm wrong.
- [11:27]
Jeremy
Yeah, that's on the product level. Right. Secondly, we are really the customer focus. I think one of the biggest thing that we differentiated from other bossel company. We are like a team of people who really cared about customers. I think that's probably the number one reason why our sellers at UC want to work with us. We have like a policy. We have to respond to our clients within 24 hours no matter what. Right. Solve the problem for them. So I think that's really differentiated in terms of cultures. Last part, we are TikTok shop partner so we are legitimate. A lot of sellers are concerned about, oh, whether this tool is going to get our stores banned or whatever. Right now we are actually working with TikTok and try to make the first app on the TikTok shop. So yeah, please come to talk to us and trust us.
- [12:13]
Ivan
Yeah, I would say that too. Kind of just like they're doing it the right way, if you will. Right. Doing it the long kind of more developed way. But it's worth it for sure. I will say, you know, the CRM. Oh, another point that I, you know, was really astonished. That's the differentiator between you and others is the email. Right. The email contact. Right. Most bots out there just, you know, DM and Target collabs and it does it at scale which can be done by a script. But you guys have email as well. Email. You know, you can contact these affiliates. They're very registered email on your TikTok. You know, as far As I know you do that through your own database of affiliates. Right? You, you. So that's another differentiator. Can you go into a little bit about that, about your own database emails and allows you to do this CRM as well? A little bit. That's for me, that's your key differentiator.
- [13:06]
Jeremy
So yeah, I'm glad you mentioned it. Part we actually started from a data driven type approach, right. We started like collecting, scraping, crawling data from different sources. So for each creators we'll look at their profile. If they have emails on their bio, we will scrape that. So over time we have collected over like by far probably close to 100k email information like contacts from all these creators. And then we have a private database of 500k top, top TikTok shop creators who have sales history. Right. And then on top of that we have a TikTok database which have 30 million creators across different countries. So yeah, we have taken very, very data driven approach and really feel like this is our core asset, right? Have the data of our setters, have the data of our creators and then the question is how can we make this data more powerful to enable setters to sell better, to enable those creators to create better content and earn more commissions.
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Ivan
Right? Yeah, yeah, so agreed. I think that's super valuable. Again, not like these other tools out there. They're not able to do this type of thing without that database. So definitely a competitive advantage that you guys have. All right, so one thing I wanted to talk about was kind of like the future of Yuka and kind of like roadmap and what you guys have in store ahead of you guys and how do you see TikTok shop? But let's start with TikTok shop. Like how do you feel the next year of TikTok shop is going to go in growth or any ideas or top three things that you're looking forward to or what do you think?
- [14:58]
Jeremy
Yeah, I believe in social commerce. Right. I'm firm, I'm a firm believer. And then I just wanted to quote this sentence from JP they're, they're their head of product marketing at TikTok shot. So failure is not the option for TikTok. Right?
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Ivan
Yeah.
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Jeremy
Has to invest billions of dollars into e commerce and then they will stay right as long as the company and even all this legal, political stuff going on. I feel like TikTok is going to survive and that's my belief and I agree. My, my, my data point that is TikTok's second biggest investor, SIG is the biggest Donor of Donut Trump. Right. So hopefully everything works out well. We'll see, we'll see how follow the money. Yeah, yeah. But like for me I'm really looking forward to see whether life could really like take off. Right. All of us probably know, you know, TikTok has been dumping all this money into their life. Agencies and brands got a lot of Money sponsored by TikTok to, to educate those hosts, right. Live hosts and creators and try to do discounts to. To run like 24 hours like show, you know, marathon shows to join for sales. So I think my life is pretty new here, but it's a very mature model in China or Southeast.
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Ivan
Yeah, that's what I was gonna say. Do you know the breakdown of lives like GMV versus. Yeah, I just know it's crazy. More like the, the. The ratio is a lot more in China than it is here. It's like 50, 50. It's up out of my like I'm making this up but like it's so huge over there. But here it's like a fraction of what it is in China.
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Jeremy
In China it's actually close to 80. 80, 90%.
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Ivan
Really. So lives around like the majority by far.
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Jeremy
Yeah, majority. And here's flip, right? Like 70, 80, probably affinity like shop of videos. Now 10% probably less than 10% are live.
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Ivan
So do you think it's culturally or you think it's mature wise? Like we're not there yet. We just need to get more custom or combination of both. One or the other one more than the other.
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Jeremy
I think there might be a mix of the factor here. Right. And then historically like TV live shopping is. Yeah.
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Ivan
QVC.
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Jeremy
Yeah. You can watching all these nice shopping TVs whatever. Yeah. And then you will buy stuff from them. And then I just feel like the, the people wanted to go live to sell a product is not as culturally accessible for those younger generation. Right. Those influencers, they alive. What should I do? Do? I wanted to be there like just talk about this for hours, right. I think this is a thing that probably a little bit takes time to educate this market. Right. To actually cultivate good host to show some examples like how to do this well and then would this be a full time job for those creators? Right. That's a question mark to see whether that makes sense. And then from brand side, right. If they run this show for hours, whether the cost of labor, the unit economic actually makes sense. Yeah. It's worth it, right. I think there's some question need to be answered here because it's Just the cost structure is very different. Like here in the States, labor is so expensive. Like in China. Right. A host is not expensive and like it depends. Yeah. And then all this audience, they are used to this like social, you know, selling that kind of stuff. They like to watch videos. And here I think like shop of videos that number one, that number two go to live that is more like engaged and a little bit longer term of, you know, audience engagement. Right. Where they can pin up. Then I think it will. It will. Time will tell.
- [18:51]
Ivan
Yeah. Do you. Do you have any live features going expected in Yuka or that you can talk about?
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Jeremy
We don't have any live feature right now about in a creator search part. We are working on the new feature where you can search for live creator versus shoppable video. You know, creators. Yeah.
- [19:12]
Ivan
I noticed that recently more and more people asking for lives. More and more clients and people asking like do we have these live ones? And it's hard to tell in the affiliate space of, you know, especially when doing mass outreach which ones are good on lives.
- [19:25]
Jeremy
Right.
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Ivan
If you had like a database of really good live people that to reach out to, that'd be pretty cool to.
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Jeremy
To. Yeah, yeah. Something that we definitely think is needed.
- [19:35]
Ivan
Cool. What else is I guess Yuka. I know you guys, you know, you told me earlier that you hired a couple developers really kind of key members of the team. Tells me you want to grow the product line. What are some like roadmap things they have going on at Yuka?
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Jeremy
Yeah, we. We have a big vision here. We wanted to automate everything, like part of marketing for e commerce. Right. And I think like in the next year or so there are three things we want to do really well. One is like cross platform. Right. So TikTok shop is our number one, like number one stop. But like you know, YouTube is picking up their affiliate program and Instagram is doing the similar thing. Right. So Facebook eventually. Yeah, Facebook is like Instagram is like currently you can tag. Tag actually product in the videos. So we think there's opportunity for us to go across platform because all the sellers are cross platform. Right. They have a different shop on different platform and 90% of our affiliates, they also have accounts on other platforms. So I think we would like to go across.
- [20:41]
Ivan
You're setting yourself up for cross cloth platform. That's super smart. Yeah, I know we talked about it earlier but like you talk about the potential ban of TikTok and like me and you always say we're not backing TikTok shop per se. We're backing social commerce and being able to buy off these viral videos. So cool. Yeah, so that's one cross platform is what you're preparing for.
- [21:00]
Jeremy
What else are you looking forward to then? Second big piece we're working on is content. So we are working on some AI to see whether we can help brand to generate content at a lower cost or automatically. So just imagine for example you have already had all these UGC videos. Whether we can do a miscutting or like regenerate those videos at a very cheap affordable rate, right. So you can post two, three videos a day. Really like drive yourself. So the content generation, content analysis is another part like whether we can you know use AI to analyze massive amount of like social media content. Start with TikTok Shop Book Video and then really boil it down to like pickup bones like hooks, CDAs and angles and that kind of stuff and help brand to generate those like creative brief, right. So they can make better content. So those two things that really heavily on content side that we are working on right now.
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Ivan
Yeah for the AI, you know, because you know reposting and reusing content, TikTok will flag it pretty fast. Like so you're talking about using AI to generate something kind of totally new.
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Jeremy
For the brand as not totally new but like some regeneration, you can still use majority part of it.
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Ivan
Okay, something to not get on TikTok's radar.
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Jeremy
Exactly.
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Ivan
What's the magic ratio there? Do you, do you know, do you have one in your mind? Is it like 50 has to or like 20 has to be new? 50 has to be new. Like what in your mind do you think?
- [22:33]
Jeremy
I, I think like there's no like magic number here, right. Because like TikTok also updating their algorithm very quickly, right? So there are like some signal for example, some overlay tax for example like some CDAs. We can just like use AI to completely regenerate those CTAs right? And this kind of stuff, it will help to circumvent algorithm at this point.
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Ivan
Okay, so you got cross platform content. What's the third piece of the puzzle in your future?
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Jeremy
Yeah, the third piece is creator enablement. So we are thinking about whether we can build some useful tools for creators, right? For example, like whether we can help them to just sift through all these brand deals, for example.
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Ivan
Yeah, I saw that actually recommend like.
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Jeremy
10 deals right for them every day. They can swipe left. If they don't, they are not interested, they can swipe right to join this brand deal. Right.
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Ivan
Tinder for affiliate, something like that.
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Jeremy
Something like that. I think it should really help creators to really work with the brands they want to work with. They have a better chance to be successful in promoting their products. Right. Because this is mutually beneficial. And then nowadays, like all its creators are overwhelmed by all this message DM's and emails or whatever. Yeah, that's something that wanted to build.
- [23:57]
Ivan
In the groups I'm in. That's one of the big things for creators. They're getting all these messages, you know, not only are they getting these messages, but they're like I'm getting emails and I know some of them are valid. I need someone to help me figure out which one's the valid ones or not or, you know, whatever.
- [24:10]
Jeremy
Exactly.
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Ivan
So. But do you have open communications with your affiliates in your network now or is that something you intend to build going forward?
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Jeremy
I think wanted to do some experiment on the side whether creators will be willing to work with us. Right. If we can recommend those good brands, good collaboration deals with them to them, then if they are willing. Well, if they are willing, then we can build an app, for example, to help them to use it more extensively.
- [24:40]
Ivan
Love it, love it. Yeah, I think so. That concludes kind of my questions and my thoughts here. Did you kind of have extra thoughts or are you kind of good at this point?
- [24:51]
Jeremy
Yeah, I think it's good. Okay, cool. I just feel like this is a great conversation. I really enjoy it.
- [25:00]
Ivan
Yeah, yeah, likewise. I mean we could talk for hours on TikTok shop, but again, just for everyone, you know, Yuka AI TikTok shop automation tool. Much more than just an automation tool. Right. It's a database and it really goes four levels deep on what you can do on TikTok shop. And yeah, there's a lot more to come, you know, as you, as you heard from Jeremy on the roadmap, I will say there's going to be a link to the tool in the show notes below. Is there a kind of, you know, I guess Yuka AI right? UKA E U K AI is where you can find Jeremy. So yeah, I think that's it. Thank you for your time, Jeremy.
- [25:42]
Jeremy
And until next time, thank you so much, Ivan. Really enjoy it.
- [25:48]
Ivan
All right, thanks guys. See ya.