Nelson Keating

tl;dr: Finding external advocates for your product is one of the most foolproof ways to build developer trust. If you’re generous enough with your incentives, loyal customers don’t just become endorsers — they become revenue-generating machines. Your biggest fans could be generating 10% of your revenue. At ScraperAPI, our affiliate program did just that by converting loyal users into top salespeople. Here’s how we spotted the opportunity: We realized that a lot of our customers would outsource web scraping tasks to freelance software engineers who would use the same tool over and over again for different companies. That left us with a great opportunity to build relationships with those freelancers who had the potential to bring us more and more new customers over time. Here’s how we did it in practice: It’s super simple. We offered killer incentives to everyone involved: -25% recurring commissions for affiliates -10% first-month discount for the new customers they referred Because our product was well-designed and easy to use, freelancers were happy to recommend us over and over again.

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This week, our Creative Director Phillip Maggs spoke at Figma Config 2024 about "Building an AI Design System at Scale". Maggs covered how Superside’s unique AI-powered design system lets us handle massive volumes of design work across critical marketing channels. In fact, our clients have seen over 17,770 design hours and $1.4 million in cost savings by leveraging this advanced system. Here are some takeaways: ➝ Generative AI and Knowledge Graphs: We're integrating generative AI into our design systems to revolutionize content creation and maintenance. This goes beyond basic AI tools - we have deep integration that lets AI generate and refine designs with precision. Knowledge graphs also enable dynamic, contextual relationships between design components, making the system more intelligent and adaptable. ➝ The Future of Design Systems: Static design repositories are out. We're building dynamic systems that generate on-brand content in real time. AI and knowledge graphs help us achieve new levels of efficiency and consistency, reducing manual effort and errors.  We also develop custom AI models trained on our brand data to ensure high-quality, perfectly aligned outputs. ➝ Practical Applications and Innovations: Maggs showcased a proof-of-concept for Vimeo, demonstrating how they use our advanced systems to streamline their design processes and maintain brand integrity. This isn't a solo act - it's the result of collaborative efforts among designers, developers, AI experts, and partners. The key is creating flexible, scalable systems that can integrate new tech and methodologies. At the end of the day, design systems are code and when you integrate them with a large language model you can write code that translates into design. It's a bit of an inverse way of looking at design - where in general everyone thinks about pixels - but in this new AI world language and code are the most powerful tools. At Superside, we're at the forefront of this design-tech revolution. We're actively building the systems, processes, and tools to keep our clients ahead of the curve. By leveraging the expertise of the world's top designers, our AI-powered design system uses their creative vision as the foundation for generating high-quality, on-brand outputs. Ready to put the power of AI-enhanced design to work for your business? Send me a DM, let's chat. P.S. If you want to watch the talk, link is in the comments!

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Hi everyone! I don’t share too often on here, but we’re at a very exciting moment at AptDeco, and I wanted to let you all in on it. AptDeco opened a community investment round and the response has been incredible. We’ve raised over $2M so far from institutional investors, customers and supporters. Nothing is more validating than customers doubling down with their own capital. And now, I’m inviting you, my network, to be part of our journey. When we started AptDeco, we set out to make buying and selling furniture easier. Over the years, many of our competitors have come and gone, but AptDeco continues to thrive. Why? Our technology, logistics and branding continues to set us apart and that's why major retailers including West Elm, Pottery Barn, La-Z-Boy, Article and 30+ more have partnered with us. The beauty with this investment round is that anyone can be an investor. Learn more and invest directly at wefunder.com/AptDeco.

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Loved getting the chance to sit down and catch up with Katherine D'Zmura Friedman, CEO of Thumbprint Furniture. They’re creating a design tool for the commercial furniture industry that engages interior design teams and furniture manufacturers. Time to augment some more clunky processes with technology (and by default, yes, AI). 🕰️🛋️🪑🏭🏢 Watch the video and learn more below!

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This is not your typical podcast episode. We just went deep on all the web3 growth strategies we're seeing work today! Definitely one you won't want to miss. Thanks for having me, Jax!

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Ten years ago brands like Zillow and American Express nailed it as pioneers of brands launching media companies - while hundreds tried and failed. Now we're in a new era for brand publishing... What's different? 🚀 The Journey For the brands mentioned above, the strategy was a success. But many brands struggled to find their footing, leading to the shutdown of countless content initiatives. Today we’re seeing a resurgence and a true new era for brand publishing, fueled by lessons learned from past challenges. 🔍 What’s Different Now? Today, successful brand publishing has 3 important components: 1. Distribution Focus 2. Strategic ROI 3. Measured Investment. More on this in my latest article - link in first comment. #BrandPublishing #ContentMarketing #BrandJournalism #EarnedMedia Image Credits: Roman Samborskyi - Shutterstock

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The best Product folks have this insane ability to deconstruct consumer behaviors from other apps and apply it to theirs. MPL’s game design, CRED Mint’s referral flows, and Urban Company’s service descriptions are all great examples of these!

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What better way to start the weekend than with some awesome news?! 🎉 I just got off the call with a D2C apparel brand, and they’re thrilled with how Cooee is performing. Founder’s update: "Visitors are down, but conversions are up by 20%🚀!" How we did it: 🎯 Set clear goals. 📊 Kept an eye on traffic like hawks. 🔍 Gave them the juiciest insights. 🚀 Used data like wizards. 👀 Stayed agile and adjusted on the fly. 🔄 Kept the feedback loop flowing. 📚 Armed them with data and tech.

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🎙️ Exciting insights from SaaS Academy's CEO Johnny Page on the Expertise Economy podcast! Johnny breaks down their two-step approach to helping SaaS founders: 1️⃣ The Discovery Call: Uncovering the founder's "why" and long-term vision 2️⃣ The Strategic Game Plan Session: Creating a 90-day action plan to achieve 12-month goals 🔑 Key focus: Identifying and solving business constraints Want to dive deeper on the secrets of building a successful SaaS business? Check out the full episode here: https://lnkd.in/dju-Be2u #SaaS #BusinessStrategy #SaasAcademy #ExpertiseEconomy #Podcast

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💡 What’s the best tech stack for my consumer brand? I get this question a lot, especially as we head into BFCM prep and code freezes. 📅 Whether you’re getting organized or just curious about the tech behind your favorite DTC brands, we’ve got you covered. At HSR, we’ve done the heavy lifting and identified the must-have components for an early-stage tech stack that every founder should know before the most critical quarter of the year. 📈 Ready to power up your business for Q4 and unlock the secret tools? 🚀 👇 Dive in here: https://lnkd.in/ga6BQQXS #DTC #TechStack #BFCM #BusinessGrowth #Scalability #Entrepreneurship #ConsumerBrand

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Why we're leaving 70% of potential revenue on the table. And why it might be the smartest business decision we've made. After our $130M exit with Olapic, we had a choice to make with Remotely. The traditional playbook was clear: - Optimize for maximum margins - Scale rapidly - Raise significant capital - Keep pricing opaque Instead, we chose a radically different path with Remotely. We did something "irrational": showed our customers exactly how much developers make. In an industry where companies typically pocket 70% of what customers pay, we decided to charge a transparent flat fee (that effectively makes our take rate at 18%). Everyone said we were crazy. "You're giving away margin!" But here's what happened: → Customers started referring us to other customers → The best developers chose us over higher-paying competitors → We grew entirely through word-of-mouth while others spent heavily on sales 4 years in: - 300+ developers placed - $37M paid directly to developers - $25M in annual GMV - Small, profitable team - Still charging a flat fee And we’re just getting started :) We’re publicly documenting our journey and sharing our metrics on our newsletter, you can subscribe here - https://hubs.ly/Q02-mH5S0

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If anyone is in North County San Diego, on Thursday May 2nd, we will be hosting a tech entrepreneur and investor meet up at 5:30pm. We’ll have a couple speakers, one of which is a fin-tech start-up raising a round, followed up by a presentation on the state of the stock & crypto market. We host these events quarterly and usually get a lot of founders and investors to attend. If anyone is interested, please message me and I can send you the details. LaunchPad San Diego #startups #startupincubator #entrepreneur #investing #crypto #meetup

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Jordan Lange and Elisha Amar at Gorgias are absolutely crushing it when it comes to partnerships, and they're using Dataland as the control center for partnership referrals. Gorgias is a titan in the eCommerce space. They serve 15,000+ merchants with their leading customer support platform, and operate a partnership ecosystem of 2000+ vendors and tech partners. So how do you keep the ecosystem going? Jordan and Elisha designed a novel partner incentive + loyalty program, powered by tons of data across BigQuery, Hubspot, and Segment. That's where Dataland came in. They used it to bring all their data together and build a command center for handling referrals, payouts, and tracking - all in one spot. The outcome? Thousands of top-notch referrals and a partnerships machine that's running smoothly. Jordan and Elisha's strategy shows just how powerful it is to mix your data with your day-to-day work. When you've got a team that can make that happen, the results are game-changing. I'm psyched to share this case study as a reference for other GTM teams looking to. Huge thanks to Madison McIlwain for introducing us a while back. Check out the full case study: https://lnkd.in/gAFbMC-Z

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Beware❗ — do NOT make this all too common goal-setting mistake... Brand founders of scaling DTC brands often feel tempted to pivot their goals when they don't seem to be working out. But here's the kicker: they're going about it all wrong. Let me clarify: well-crafted, clearly defined goals are sacred and should not be changed frequently. But do you know what SHOULD be changed frequently? The strategies you implement to achieve those goals! If you find yourself struggling to gain traction on some of your growing brand's goals, don't make any changes to them right away... Instead, get your team together for a brainstorming session on new and creative strategies you can implement to move your goals closer to the finish line. -- Did you find this post helpful? If so, consider resharing it and giving me Jon Blair a follow. #dtcbrands #scaleyourbusiness #founders

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Video put together for Zillow Is AI getting out of hand? Or paying $1,000s for UGC creators + usage rights is out of hand? I think the latter if you want to make videos like this for 2% of the cost Comment UGC and I'll send you the link (must be following)

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A marketing measurement perspective that I don't see represented often is that, for a substantial proportion of advertisers, last-click really is optimal. If a fairly new mobile app with low TAM penetration scales exclusively on Facebook, how much actionable insight is gained by introducing complex measurement machinery? While I'm certainly guilty of advocating it, the viewpoint that more sophisticated measurement infrastructure is always better strikes me as overly generalized. In certain contexts, orchestrating experiments or building, tuning, and deploying probabilistic models probably won't meaningfully impact advertising efficiency. And in those specific (again: not all!) contexts, with limited data and a homogenous (possibly, single-channel) channel mix, reducing interpretability and overhead might do more harm than good. Creating complexity where last-click may perform just as well as an ensemble of methodologies doesn't actually optimize the bias/variance tradeoff -- it may not reduce bias sufficiently to compensate for a large increase in variance.

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What are the most important boxes for a startup to check? We're #hiring a product manager for one that I think checks them all - 1. Mission driven (serving underdeveloped communities) 2. Profitable (over a billion dollars in sales last year) 3. Innovative tech (in the fintech space) 4. Competitive compensation (in sf) 5. Elite leadership team (and early funding led by greylock) Please share and dm for more details! #growthstage #startuphiring #sftech #product

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What's going to happen with venture studios in 2025? Here are a few predictions: 1️⃣ More venture studios are coming That shouldn't be a surprise, and overall it's a good thing, but with a grain of salt. I believe the bar will go up on quality + expectations of venture studios (from founders, partners, co-investors, etc.), b/c the more hype, the more questions that people will ask (that's a good thing). There are 3 types of studios that will emerge more in 2025: * Vertical venture studios: Focused on a narrow industry * Geographic-specific studios: Focused on a geography (often used in part for economic development in a location); I believe these should also go vertical though * Corporate venture studios: Big companies are learning about venture studios and more of them will see the potential to use a venture studio as a vehicle for growth. 2️⃣ More VCs will warm up to the venture studio model Some VCs will never invest in a venture studio deal. Totally fine. But more will in 2025. The cap table for many deals will remain an issue, but in the end as more quality, scaling startups get built through the studio model, VCs will join. I've never belied there's one way to build great businesses. There are patterns, but no formulas. Venture studios have and will create giant companies. Others will get built in other ways. VCs will invest across the board. 3️⃣ More capital will fuel venture studios (but it's early) I think we'll see more capital allocators investing into studios, but it's early days. Studios are more complicated than VC funds. Investors are still learning about venture studios. There's confusion about what they are and how to position them with / against VC funds or other investment opportunities. 4️⃣ More venture studio failures It's not all rosy. Building a sustainable venture studio model is tough. The business model is messy, b/c most studios can't live exclusively off management fees like VC funds. So they need alternative revenue sources. Plus they have more costs per dollar invested. I've already seen a few studios shutdown in 2024 (or slow down drastically / reduce staff). More will come in 2025 and beyond. That's part of a maturing market. 5️⃣ Fuzzy data on performance Believe the hype! Just not blindly. :) There are a few people working very hard on collecting more robust / quality data on venture studio performance, but it's tough. I'd love to see Peter Walker at Carta get into it (if Carta can figure out what startup actually came from a studio, which is not always obvious!) Realistically the data on venture studio performance will remain fuzzy for awhile. I fundamentally believe the venture studio model will generate strong returns, otherwise I wouldn't be doing it! But the industry-wide data is rough/early at best. I think it'll get better in 2025, but will still be fuzzy.

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DTC brand founders, I've got a game-changing leadership secret for you 🤫... Saying "I don't know" can actually make you a better leader. It shows humility, builds trust, and encourages open communication within our teams. Admitting when you don't know something can also lead to better decision-making. How? Because it prompts us to seek counsel and gather more information. Next time you're unsure, try saying "I don't know." You might be surprised by the positive impact it has on your leadership and your team. -- Did you find this post helpful? If so, consider resharing it and giving me Jon Blair a follow. #dtcbrands #founders #scaleyourbusiness

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