I am excited to be kicking out this blog with our new website!
Wow, it’s been a long journey until we finally landed on a solution like Affi Network.
I spent over a decade in the media and marketing space. I wore several hats (management, sales, recruitment, screenwriting, producing, directing, and much more), working with some really talented people along the way and having loads of fun! In my years, I had the chance to build businesses that produced ads for global brands like Apple, Netflix, and Airbnb, collaborating with some of the largest ad agencies worldwide.
In late 2019, I registered a company in Singapore called Brandface to build software in digital media. We planned to build an agency, gain insight, and then launch a product. In early 2020, we launched Brandface Innovation, a tech-enabled influencer agency in Thailand to help brands manage nano-influencer marketing at scale. In 2021, we continued to work with some global brands like Decathlon and several others to create over 2,500 influencer jobs. Through this experience, we learned that we could create more value for advertisers by building a performance-based product on Web3.
The critical insight gained was that advertisers wanted to pay on a performance basis (even for engaging influencers) versus the current flat-fee model, which can be pretty risky. Many of the brands we worked with were consumer brands that wanted to “pay per shoe sold” or “pay per IoT device sold.” It would have been challenging to build and scale this solution for several reasons; however, we found a way to do this for tokenized assets (e.g. NFTs).
I've been involved in the crypto scene as an investor since 2017. My passion and curiosity in crypto led me to explore the different projects and solutions being built. I was deep-diving into community groups and spent hours understanding each product's tech. As time passed, Web3 got bigger and bigger. Blockchain TVL started growing. In 2021, some friends and I started investing in DEXes (decentralized exchanges). One DEX we got into early had an internal referral program for one of their pools (one I was already farming in). That was my eureka moment!! On-chain performance marketing!
Of course, the DEX’s referral program had some issues (e.g. I was referring to myself and made an extra 3%), but the idea of on-chain performance marketing made a lot of sense! I spent some time researching further and found that transparency was a massive issue in the traditional affiliate industry. 11% of all ad budgets, or about $100bn in 2023, is the size of ad fraud! How valuable could a fully-transparent decentralized performance marketing platform be? Can we create our own economy? Should we have our own token? Should we be a DAO? What are the barriers we need to be aware of? I had a lot of questions.
In early 2022, I started spending more time researching the space, getting consultations from experts, and trying to get some of these questions answered. We spoke to Web3 projects, marketing agencies, and several publishers to understand what they liked or didn’t like about our concept. We spoke to several developers to understand the challenges of building and automating our services. After gathering feedback and validation, Affi Network was born… and our adventure began. Our adventure to build the world’s largest blockchain-based affiliate marketing platform that fuels publishers of tomorrow with a stream of paid opportunities.
‘Affi’ derives from the word ‘affiliate’. Affi Network will enable advertisers to work with publishers on a pay-per-sale basis. All conversions will be verified on-chain. Advertisers of tokenized assets will be able to control their CAC (customer acquisition costs) and have access to a tracking dashboard that displays on-chain verifications for each conversion. Publishers will have access to more opportunities, less friction to join campaigns, and real-time payments. Consumers of Web3 will have a chance to support their favorite publishers and receive cashback on their purchases! What excites us as much as the innovation is the social impact - We hope to make Affi Network home for more than a million publishers.
To be at the intersection of marketing and blockchain, so early, and to do nothing about it - that would probably bug me a lot later down the line! We wound down operations at the agency and started focusing on Affi Network full-time. We had to go for it! Tokenomics. Whitepaper. Logo. Branding. Website. CxO Recruitment. User Flows. Legal. Pitch Decks. Fundraising. The whole shebang and more!
I can not be more excited about the leadership team I've recently onboarded as founding members of Affi Network. We will release more information about the team members in another blog post, but I can share that everyone is an A player in their domain. We are currently working 10-15 hour days - driven by passion, extremely unsustainable, but perhaps until product launch! We look forward to welcoming high-caliber candidates and developing cross-functional teams over the following months and years. If you are passionate about Web3 and think you are a good fit, please get in touch! There's a lot of work ahead, and we can't get it all done alone. Come and build with us!
We also invite marketers, publishers, NFT lovers, and other users of Web3 to join our community and learn more about how you or your project can benefit from Affi Network. There are learning resources in our Docs that can help you get started. As a DAO, we are truly building Affi Network for our community. This is why 50% of our revenue goes to AFFI stakers. This is why 100% of our treasury is governed by our DAO. We are incomplete without our community. Please reach out if you resonate with our values of transparency, fairness, unity, inclusion, empowerment, and innovation. No bs. We are here to kick ass and we can not do it without our community.
We have thought very deeply about our users, the features we need to build, the value we need to create, and our purpose behind it all. We welcome all walks of life to explore how they can contribute or benefit from joining our community.
Are you excited to shape the future of Web3 with us? Join our community. Read our docs. Follow us on social media. Invite your friends. Share our website. Send us a partnership proposal. Come and change the world with us!