Lessons - Getting Paid to Share What You Love | Aurelien Amacker - CEO of Systeme.io

In this lessons episode, you will learn strategies for building a competitive product, setting up an affiliate program, and scaling a remote team for growth. The discussion covers maintaining profitability without funding, balancing risk, and staying resilient. You'll gain insights into overcoming challenges and finding fulfillment in the journey. So you built an incredible product, but simultaneously, you're also being very competitive on price. Take the market strategy was hitting your email list, and then but also the affiliate program. So these are all making sense. Walk me through the affiliate program and how that was set up to encourage people to, I guess, refer business. Yeah, sure. So I love the affiliate program business model. I think it is just great. I remember back when I was sending courses, I could hear stories about people having. So people having just products like in fitness or in another industry. So just having products and an affiliate program and nuts. Not focusing on traffic generation because it was completely relying on the affiliates. I was like, this is a great business model. You know, I wish I could do that someday. So with our tool, we launched our own affiliate program in 2017. So I told people, I told my lace look, I'm going to pay you 40% on all the series you generate on our courses and on the software. And this also started attracting affiliates, you know, little by little. I mean, it's really a combination of the product is good. The offer is good. I mean, you know, like the price and the affiliate commission is good. And today, we paying our affiliates close to 100,000 euros per month in affiliate commissions. And so you set it up so that you get affiliate commissions for lifetime or as a for a year. And it's a percentage of all the recurring monthly payments as well. No, no, it's 40% as long as the customer space. You know, that's the thing. It's funny. When you discuss about affiliate programs with many business owners, very, very funny. It's the same story that I'm going to try to, you know, like I'm going to try to, you know, I'm going to pay you that for one year or, you know, I'm going to try to game the system, you know, and I'm like, this is stupid. Like I want to being an entrepreneur, we all know it's about building value, right? So I want to be the value for my customers, for my affiliates and for my team members, right? So I mean, it would be a very short, short term, uh, decided to try to, you know, like, uh, flow my, my affiliates like, I want them to make as much money as possible. So they keep promoting us, they keep working hard and I'm telling you that's what, that's what's happening because I can see some people who, you know, are trying to make money online, but, you know, they don't really, uh, succeed and then they promote our ship program and they start making money and it's great. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Um, and now you have grown the business to your updated numbers, four million annual recurring revenue. Uh, this year, I saw that point here that you sent over five to six million in ARR, still bootstrapped. No plans to raise money. You're just keeping it going as is for now, correct? Yeah, yeah, I mean, yeah, it's, it's a very simple playbook. I mean, I'm already make, I mean, we're profitable. I'm already making, I mean, yeah, I mean, I'm making the money I'd like to make, which is a lot more money than I need, you know, so I can, we bought our dream house with my wife. Uh, so we're going to pay off our, uh, mode gauging, I don't know, two or three years, we're investing, you know, I mean, we're doing great and come reinvesting everything that comes on top of that. Very nice. And, and the one other point that I thought was interesting that you are a hundred percent remote. And I know that a lot of companies have done this, but you, you went a hundred percent remote from the start. So how do you, how do you manage, uh, how many staff do you have now? How do you manage them? How do you be remote effectively? Yeah, so I think it's one of the, uh, one of our strength in, uh, in my company is the ability to lie higher people and trade them and make them grow. So today we have, uh, 65 people on the team in about 10 different countries. So French speaking ones, English speaking ones, Spanish speaking ones, because we're expanding to different markets. And, um, I don't know, it's funny, you know, because I think that's, I mean, I mean, it's the future, you know, you have a boot by the founders of, of Bay, Bayskamp, you know, 30 city webinars. They wrote a book actually about it that's called remote. And it's great because they explained to you what are the benefits, why it's better. And, uh, yeah, we've been doing it since day one and it, it works fine, but you have to, I mean, everyone uses time doctor, uh, a software to track their time and it takes some screenshots. So I don't spend my time, you know, like, uh, talking at the screen, obviously, but like when you have someone who's lacking or, you know, you're not really sure, you can check, check out what he's doing. And sometimes unfortunately, I mean, it happened, you know, people doing like, uh, watching series or whatever, but it doesn't happen much. I mean, you spot these people very easily, right? Um, so I mean, I think this is the future. I mean, you don't have any expense for the office space for, you know, computers, whatever. I mean, this is so much better. I mean, the best, the best benefit that people don't think about is that I don't have to go through an office, you know, and show up and show that I'm there and leave late so that the employees, I mean, I can do whatever I want. I just take my, my phone, I have the Slack app and it's easy, like I can go to the gym, I can go to the shopping center, whatever. And yeah, reply to my team members if I need to. Yeah. So, so you said it out and, and are you, you're not personally managing the 60 people. Have you, like, introduced layers of, of, uh, virtual management, uh, remote, like, managers? Yeah. Yeah. Of course, we had, we had to, I mean, uh, so the way it works, uh, so me, I'm in the company, I'm like the CEO, the marketing, uh, director, manager, I don't know how you, how I should call it. And I'm also the product manager. I'm the one supervising the product, you know, making sure it's great and taking decisions and discussing with the customers and developers and team members and stuff. So, um, I mean, the customer support, we have a manager, um, we have like 15 people in total, uh, in our customer support, we answer our customer seven days a week, uh, usually under two hours. So people, our customers love our customer, our customer support, you know, because it's very, very effective. So I, I have someone managing that. Uh, then, then the developers, it's mostly our lead developer, which is our first developer. Um, I mean, I have a, a lot of different small teams, you know, and I manage them. I mean, I have one assistant that manages that supervises different teams. Um, okay, okay. Yeah, we have a lot of different teams. I mean, obviously, so you set this up this entire, this entire corporate structure has been set up remote and that's how it's managed. Now, very impressive. I think that you're right. It is 100% the future of, of how organizations can work and it saves you a ton of money. Very effective. Like, I remember I was working in the office, you know, like 15 years ago and I was like, uh, sometimes, I was like on dating websites, you know, I mean, you know, like, uh, it's not because you're at the office that you're effectively working, you know, so yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's true. It's true. Um, and, and you know, question for, for you and also some advice for people that are looking to start their own thing. So like you said, you started a blog, you went to courses, you went to, you went to software, you turned down a job. If you were going to do it again, would you do it the same way? Would you go all in or would you do it? Maybe less risky. What's your, what's your take on that for somebody wanting to start? No, I mean, no, I would do the same. Obviously, you know, like, uh, there is this question in podcasts like if you could talk to your 20 year old, that's my, that's my other question I ask at the end. Yeah. I'm like, you know, like, uh, what, what could I say? Maybe I would tell, I would tell me, look, but he don't, uh, you know, don't stress out. It's going to be all right. Uh, enjoy the ride because, um, I was, uh, yeah, I mean, I mean, there were some tough years. I'm not going to lie, you know, it's easy after Worlds to say, everything is great. You know, no, it wasn't. I was actually feeling like a failure after I left, Jeff Walker was messing my group because I had my, uh, buddies making, you know, a million euro long sheets. And I was just on my own making, yeah, making your, making actually a good income and I was feeling even worse because I was like, dude, you're living in Portugal, the minimum salary is 600 euros per month. And you're living 20,000 euros and you feel like S, you know, and, yeah. And I read the book, you know, uh, the subtle art of not giving your F. Yeah, yeah. And the main idea of this book is it's okay, not to feel okay. And I was like, oh, that's amazing. So yeah, thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.