In 2008 Alicia Navarro was struggling to keep her online social shopping start-up afloat. Having failed to secure funding, she directed her efforts towards developing alternative revenue streams. The project resulted in a brand new business, Skimlinks, which has since gone on to take both sides of the Atlantic by storm. Here, Alicia explains what’s made the business such a success and how she’s turned a global downturn into a remarkable opportunity.
Skimlinks is a content monetisation technology that rewards content creators for the role their content plays in driving purchases. Our technology turns product links and product references into money-generating affiliate links. For example, if you’re a blogger or online content site talking about shoes, we help you get paid a commission if what you write about results in someone buying something on a retailer’s site.
Our customers range from small blog sites to online newspapers. Some of our larger clients are The Telegraph, The Sun and Cosmopolitan.
Retailers pay us for online referrals that go through Skimlinks. They pay us and we then pass that on to the publisher minus our commission.
Affiliate marketing has been around for while and sites such as eBay and Amazon have long had their own affiliate marketing programmes. I had originally started a social shopping site called Skimbit and was trying to make money from it through affiliate marketing. However, it was such a time-consuming and cumbersome process to have to create each affiliate link, hard-code it into the site and then do all the manual optimisation.
In response, we built ourselves a way to automate that process and the result was a technology which was particularly aimed at user-generated content sites such as forums and social shopping sites. When the recession hit and we still hadn’t got funding for the Skimbit, we realised we could take the technology we’d built for ourselves and offer it to other websites. We were our own first customers. In one respect it was really difficult to change direction because essentially I had to throw away two years of my life in a day. But as an entrepreneur you have to remove your pride from the equation.
Up until 2008 publishers had been making good money from display advertising but when the recession hit, revenues dived and they became desperate for new ways to make money from their sites. The recession was the best thing that ever happened to us. If we had been around a year earlier I don’t think we’d have had a business. We were a new company with no experience and no track record so without the recession the big publishing sites would not have been as open to experimenting with new monetisation technologies.
Affiliate marketing has been on the periphery of mainstream monetisation technology for years but wasn’t widely used because of how complex and time-consuming it was. It was a very fragmented industry with no technical sophistication whatsoever. What we’ve been able to do is take away the technical difficulty. In 30 seconds, and some copying and pasting of code, a publisher is able to do what would have take days and weeks of effort. Suddenly, affiliate marketing is accessible, ubiquitous and mainstream.
Generally brand is more important for a consumer business, but for us it matters enormously. We’ve made a very conscious decision to communicate that we’re not only an innovative company but one with soul and personality. So much of our business has come from word-of-mouth. One of our company mantras is that we don’t just sell our technology, we sell ourselves.
I think it’s the challenges that come with growth. When I started it was just me. Now it’s 30 people in three different geographies. That takes a whole new level of organisation, people management and incentivisation. To be efficient, swift and innovative with a larger team, spread across different geographies is a challenge.
Most recently it’s been the decision to acquire Atma Links out of New York. Their technology with our network and architecture creates something really beautiful. It means we can broaden our market opportunity, and takes us to a level of distinction that will help us stand out further.
Take care of your greatest asset, and when you’re in a start-up, that’s yourself. It’s so easy to burn the candle at both ends, become exhausted and take yourself away from friends and family. You need some kind of balance because if at the end of all this you succeed but you’ve lost your family and friends, it’s not really worth it.
In this video Alicia offers her thoughts on UK innovation. She considers the potential impact of UK start-ups being more internationally ambitious from the outset and suggests this could help the UK’s entrepreneurial success rate.
We'll be publishing advice guides from more of our CEOs over the next few weeks - so watch this space!
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