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

Episode Date: June 16, 2025

Victor Boechat de Carvalho built GlideScale as a university student, challenging the outdated structure of affiliate marketing. In this episode, he breaks down why traditional affiliate models are broken and how his team rebuilt the system to be universal, efficient, and fraud-resistant. Key Discussion Points: Why most affiliate platforms are built on bloated, insecure infrastructure How GlideScale automates instant payouts and slashes fees The tech breakthrough behind universal compatibility Why brands and affiliates are both winning with his model How GlideScale validates real traffic before paying affiliates Takeaways: Disruption often starts with questioning what feels “normal” Building for universality can unlock massive scale Trust and automation are the future of digital marketing platforms Closing Thoughts:Victor's story is a reminder that real innovation doesn't just improve a system—it reimagines the foundation. GlideScale may not just fix affiliate marketing—it may redefine it. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

So Victor Boisha founder of Glydescale, 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 statement right now? 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, their security concerns, and usually they're built around infrastructure that gets in the way of the seamless transition 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 affiliate marketing, I say that it's the future. So 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? 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 while I taught at the Galcum Clients was just how inefficient everything was.

was, how you're working through these middlemen who were then hiring middlemen, and thou just seemed absurd. I noticed that some people had some success of affiliate marketing, where you almost cut out a bit of the middleman, but then I saw how limited it was on the use cases, as due to security concerns and limitation of technology, very limited number of things you can do. There were concerns about some of the it's 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. 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? 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. It doesn't matter but 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 instantly. Is there a way of breaking this chain of fraud. And so I looked at the human incentives and how you can disincentifies 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 I can disflows 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 even interested in? Or is this just false traffic? Because, say, I guess someone on my affiliate link, they press it, they realize this is completely irrelevant to me. I'm not the target audience. And so our software first confirms, all right, you are interested in this. Therefore, it's a

ballot click. Therefore, the affiliate gets paid. So do you find that the affiliates are more excited about this, or the brands, or is it both? Who really resonates with the software? And 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 who are the ones that you're finding are saying that they benefit the most? So I've talked mostly active marketers.

So we differentiate the users between manager users and market users. 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 targeted with people who are very interested in the affiliate marketing side of things. And they're 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 these, likes. 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're a sale, that's that. You generate the traffic, generate a 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 to make a fraud, because we built security 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 account. So we might even experiment with making that low fee even lower. Yeah, Victor, thank you.

Thank you for sharing that. I 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 joins Blydeskill. He creates his account.

It takes two seconds because you can just sign for Google. You 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 they're 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 Prina. 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 lunch. And for that moment on, it's up to you. Share your lunch.

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 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 Light Skill

or 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, a 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 him. 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. In a small description, things to verify that this is genuine traffic that you want. We asked you for location, if it's location sensitive, for example, because let's say you're a densest street 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 my 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 invited people in. And that's usually done by LinkedIn rights. When you look at how much marketing spends 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? And the reason why I bring this up is 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's a totally it's somebody a human going out there and reaching out with other humans uh 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? So if I were to market for traditional means,

I would argue, especially depending on my product, at least $1,000, bare minimum for you to have anything meaningful happen, assuming no organic. On glide scale, I think if you want to do bare minimum, $1 is enough. You can get away of $1. And what will happen is because anyone, if you choose the public option,

anyone can join. They're going to see your campaign and then think, okay, well, I know a friend who was interested in this. So I must not just join here, and then I'm not sharing this in my group chat. And there you go. You have warm traffic from people asking no declined.

So, you know, $1, $2, that's really $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 can 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 parking. So you can see exactly what works, what doesn't work, if you're enjoying the traffic, that's the thing. So, Victor, if people are to get in touch with you? They want to find out more. How can they do so? So in Vlidescale, we have an in-built

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.glyt.fell.m. If you scroll to the bottom, you'll see a contactless page there. And thank you so much for joining us today on Founders, sir. I can't wait to dive in as an affiliate, as a brand, and really check this out, because I really see. see affiliate marketing being like an incredible opportunity for a lot of people. But Victor, thanks again for joining us on Founders Story. Thank you.