Chase Clymer
Software is just a tool and without a strategy, it's never going to just make you money.
Yash Chavan
Yeah, exactly. So the analogy that I like giving brands when we speak with them is like, “Hey, we have the world's best gym. But if you sign up, [it] doesn't mean you're gonna get a six pack or doesn't mean you're gonna lose weight. You're gonna sign up and show up. And we've got coaches at the gym, which are our dedicated account managers who would help you with the right strategy.
They'll give you the diet plan. They'll show you the workouts. But you got to show up and do them. Like you can't just sign up for a good gym and then magically transform your body. Right. You're going to do the work.So that's where I tell brands that we speak with.
Chase Clymer
Honest Ecommerce is a weekly podcast where we interview direct-to-consumer brand founders and leaders to find out what it takes to start, grow, and scale an online business today.
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce. Today, I'm welcoming to the show the CEO and founder of not one but two amazing companies in the Shopify ecosystem, Yash Chauvin. Welcome to the show.
Yash Chavan
Chase, thank you for having me. Been watching your show for a long time. So excited to be here.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. I'm excited to chat. So before we dive into your history and obviously what we're going to talk about today. For those that don't know, give me the elevator pitch for obviously the newest company, SATI, and then I'll ask a follow up about the previous one.
Yash Chavan
Yeah. Good question. So the elevator pitch is if you're a DDC brand on Shopify, you want to run an affiliate program that tracks everything that's supposed to be tracked even if people have cookies disabled or ad blockers enabled with affiliates. And catches any sort of affiliate fraud, which is rampant in this space. We can talk about that. Our platform is best in class at that. So if you want to own an affiliate platform that does both those things really well, get SATI.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. And you also are the CEO and founder of Saaril, which is similar but distinctly different. So what's the elevator pitch for that one?
Yash Chavan
Yeah. Yeah, the pitch for that one is if you want to manage all your influencers in one place, you get SARAL. If you want to find, reach out, track, pay, do all of the influencer marketing funnel inside of one platform versus traditionally, it's done in spreadsheets or cobbling together like four different platforms. If you want to just do it in one, that's SARAL for you.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. And obviously, running both these companies, this question probably doesn't need to be asked. But how did you learn so much about this industry? Why was this a problem that you wanted to solve?
Yash Chavan
Yeah. I mean, I almost stumbled into it. My first business was a marketing agency. So started that pretty much right out of college. Super young, me and four other guys just in our bedrooms building this business, taking any project that people threw at us, to be honest. So did that for a while.
Did a lot with Facebook ads. Eventually found out that influencers had a way better ROI. Plus with the privacy changes with iOS 14, where it first started [asking] apps not to track. Our Facebook ads just started tanking. This is 2021.
Chase Clymer
Oh, I remember where I was when this happened in my life and in the agency journey.
Yash Chavan
Yeah, exactly. So pretty significant moment. And we were like, “Hey, let's pivot to this other channel, which seems to be working really well for brands. And then we run influencer campaigns end to end. We did it all manually in spreadsheets, cobbling together three different tools. And we were like, “There has to be a better system for this.”
Turns out there wasn't really anything that did things exactly the way we wanted things to be done. We’re like, “Hey, let's just build this. You know this as an agency founder, like we're always coming across all these problems across all the clients. And I was like, “Hey, let's just build a platform here.” So we built a platform.
We rolled it out across some of our brands. It was successful. That was SARAL. And then we scaled that platform. Once we built that whole influencer platform, we were like, “Hey, there's this other tangential problem with affiliate marketing where brands on the SARAL platform are running affiliate programs.”
But they were seeing two main things because most affiliate platforms now are not working with bloggers or more traditional affiliates, but are working with influencers. This lack of all affiliate tracking is broken in two ways. It's the last click. And it's cookie based. So if somebody has cookies disabled or they have an ad blocker on, your affiliate sale is not going to be tracked.
And it's all last click, which is just fundamentally different from how a conversion happens on Instagram. Five influencers post and then one person's discount code is used for the purchase, right? It's like you're under attributing your influencers. And the second issue was fraud. Coupon code leakages, affiliates running paid ads against your own keywords and getting sales for themselves. A bunch of those things.
We saw that at scale because we still work with 200 brands on the SARALplatform. We're like, “Whoa, this is a serious problem. Let's launch something that's maybe a little bit smaller that addresses the tracking and the fraud issue. And that's the new platform, SATHI. So that's effectively the journey.
So [i] did it myself at the agency. Saw a lot of aggregate data across hundreds of brands at SARAL. Used the learnings from both to launch the third platform, second platform or the third business at SATHI.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. Your story is amazing. I guess my first question would be, as you are launching this platform and you still have the agency, I guess what happened to the agency? Did it slowly spin down as you spun up the growth of the first platform? I think there's a lot of agency owners that are now dabbling into building a product.
Yash Chavan
Yeah. And they'd be curious to know what you guys ended up doing.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, I'm happy to talk about it. It's like exactly what you said. We sunset at the agency as software MRR grew and I liked the software business model a lot more. I was in a little bit of a dream land there. I was like, “Hey, it's recurring.” I don't have to do [anything]… like [in] an agency, you sign on a client, it's more work. In software, you sign on a client it's not technically more work because it's the same software.
I was like, “Whoa, this is like the most beautiful [thing]. I was ignoring all the onboarding, customer success support, everything that it takes to onboard a client on SaaS. | was like, “Yeah, this is great.” So we were sunsetting the agency as we built the software. The good thing about the agency was because it was so cash flow positive, we were able to use all the cash from the agency to build the software.
And both the companies are bootstrapped profitable. So we are not that typical like Ecommerce SaaS, raise money from investors and then slap on like annual contracts on brands to pay our investors back.. We're super brand focused, self-funded, sustainable. And that's how I like building businesses. So that's what we did, basically.
Chase Clymer
So if you had advice for entrepreneurs out there that do want to eventually end up in the SaaS space, would you say maybe follow your playbook? Launch a service business in a particular niche? Find problems that are sticky for those customers? Build a solution? And then fund it with the service until you can kind of sunset it?
Yash Chavan
Yeah. I'd be very interested to see if somebody actually has that forethought and does it. I kind of just stumbled into it. I didn't plan this like, “Hey, I'm going to start a service business to then figure out a software solution.” But yeah, it's a great path because the best thing about the service business is you can make money tomorrow versus with software.
It's like, it's going to take a cup. Back when I started, it took me six months to build the original version. Now it'll take at least a month with AI and everything. You got to build it for a month. You validate it. There's going to be bugs. It's like a six month process until you get to revenue. With services, you can throw up a landing page. Maybe run ads, reach out to your network and start making money like literally next week. So great for cashflow.
And as a new founder, if you want to build a software business, I think it's a great way to just do the work that your SaaS users would do for brands and get paid for it. So I think looking at it retroactively makes a lot more sense. But I just stumbled into it. But yeah, I think it would be a great path if somebody wants to do it that way.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. Well, we're giving people the truth right now. We're telling them the secret. Yeah. I almost want to say that I read about this in a book somewhere. I just can't remember the book. And I'm going to remember next week and I'll email you what the book is. And maybe I'll put it in the show notes if I remember [it], everybody.
Yash Chavan
I'm a big business book guy, so send it to me.
Chase Clymer
Oh, absolutely. Awesome. So you eventually start to go all in on SATHI. Well, SARAL and then now SATHI. I guess first, we kind of talked about it, but I really want to not brush over what the core differences are in the platforms. So let's rehash that. What is the correct fit for SARAL? And then how does SATHI play in with that ecosystem? I know that they go hand in hand at times.
Yash Chavan
Yeah, they definitely go hand in hand. The core difference is if you want a full suite solution where you want to be able to find influencers. If you're an influencer marketer, and you want to build awareness campaigns. Do paid campaigns with large influencers, send them contracts, like that sort of more traditional influencer marketing, you go for SARAL.
Versus let's say you're a new or emerging brand, you want to test out a little bit of affiliate marketing, maybe turn your customers to affiliates. So that sort of stuff? then SATHI is the way to go. Most often what happens is brands start with affiliate marketing. Get a feel for things, see if it's working. And then when you really want to scale, you want to acquire influencers, [and] turn them into affiliates when you go for a SARAL.
So the way I semantically think of it is like a MacBook and an iPad. Like, if you just want to watch video content and maybe listen, watch movies or something like get an iPad. Or if you want a full suite, like a computer, get a MacBook. So that's what I think of the MacBook SARAL and the iPad is SATHI.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. Now, this is something that I often have to challenge our clients with at the agency. They will often have a misconception that just buying software will then also equal [you] now have a program. Right? I think you know where I'm going with this. Just when you sign up for a software like SARAL, it doesn't mean that you now have an influencer program.
So what is the work that the team on the other side of the table needs to be prepared to do. Do they need a dedicated influencer manager or an Ecommerce manager? What does it look like in 2026 to run an influencer slash affiliate program for a modern brand?
Yash Chavan
Yeah. A little bit different for both. So if you're running an influencer program, we recommend having... If you're at scale, most brands that we work with have an influencer manager in-house dedicated full time on the channel. But if you're just starting out. And we have those sorts of brands as well. It's like you have at least someone part-time 15 to 20 hours a week dedicated to building a program.
So even if you don't have a titular influencer manager, have somebody, maybe it's a marketing manager, maybe it's an Ecommerce manager. Maybe sometimes the founders themselves. They are acting as if they were like a part-time influencer manager. So yeah, it takes 10 to 15 hours of work because you're finding creators, reaching out, managing conversations, seeding free products, and making sure that they're posting.
And software now, especially now with AI, does a lot of this heavy manual heavy lifting. But then you're coming up with creative briefs, looking at data, building reports, like doing more higher level stuff, which maybe used to take teams of three. I mean, we've like drastically seen that transition because when we started what used to be typically teams of three or four people is now one person.
Chase Clymer
Yeah.
Yash Chavan
So we've seen that happen because AI and software is doing the heavy lifting. But still [have] one person at least [in part-time who's responsible for this. Versus on the affiliate side, it's not that much lift. Even if you're a small lean team [who] want to build up, because affiliate is like the dream channel, right? Because on Facebook, you're paying for views. On Google, you're paying for Clicks. On affiliates, you're paying for sales.
So it's like, “Hey, if I'm only paying when a sale is happening, great, right?” So you need maybe a leaner operation. You can also turn your customers to affiliates. There's automations we have in the tool that do that. So it's a much lower lift, but it's still like a couple of hours of work every week on the affiliate side.
Chase Clymer
Hey everybody, just a quick reminder. Please like this video and subscribe if you haven't. We're releasing interviews like this every week. So don't miss out. Now back to the interview.
That goes beyond affiliate and influencer marketing. It's just a core tenant, I think. Software is just a tool and without a strategy, it's never going to just make you money.
Yash Chavan
Yeah, exactly. So the analogy that I like giving brands when we speak with them is like, “Hey, we have the world's best gym. But if you sign up, [that] doesn't mean you're going to get a six pack or doesn't mean you're going to lose weight. You're going to sign up and show up. And we've got coaches at the gym, which are like our dedicated account managers who would help you with the right strategy.
They'll give you the diet plan. They'll show you the workouts. But you got to show up and do them. You can't just sign up for a good gym and then magically transform your body. It's like, you got to do the work. So that's why I tell brands that we speak with.
Absolutely. So let's dive in a little bit more into the newest business and how you're helping folks. So first, you mentioned a big problem these days is brands are losing money through affiliate programs. Let's speak more to that problem.
Yash Chavan
Yeah. So there's two sides. So maybe diving back a little bit, we've seen this at scale. So brands on SARAL for the last two years have driven $59 million in affiliate revenue. So we've seen this at scale happen and there were two sides of the same coin. Brands are not paying the influencers that are actually doing the work. And they're overpaying the people who are maybe fraudulent. And here's why.
You're underpaying the good ones because all of their traffic is being sent through like a cookie based link that's generated by an affiliate platform. And if most consumers like myself are using a browser such as Brave or Safari, that's by default no cookies. Or if they just opt out of cookies or they're using an ad blocker or a VPN, cookies are out. So you're naturally just losing 20 to 30 % of potentially tracked revenue, right? And you're underpaying these affiliates.
On the other hand, there are some bad actors who might leak a code or honey.com Or they might start running paid ads against your keywords and get all the traffic or they might do like send it to a click farm, get a lot of clicks if you're paying CPC for affiliates. Like there's a bunch of affiliate fraud that happens or self-referrals or use a fake credit card to make a purchase. And then get the commission and then refund it later or whatever.
Like there's so much of this affiliate fraud that happens. There's two sides to the coin where you're like under crediting the good people and over crediting the bad people. And we're like, “Hey, this is like a serious problem to be solved.” Which is why we created SATHI that addresses both these problems.
Chase Clymer
That's amazing. Now, if I'm running an affiliate program, what are some of the KPIs that I should be tracking or my team should be tracking or we should be using to judge the health of the program or the health of the relationship with an individual contributor?
Yash Chavan
Yeah. One of the things that we've built our new software around SATHI is a lot of apps in this space prioritize scale. Like they want you to get thousands and thousands of affiliates. But again, having run SARAL before we have that benefit of hindsight. Like the volume of your program doesn't matter. If you have a hundred affiliates that are promoting you every single month, they're driving a thousand dollars in sales.
That's like a 100k a month revenue channel. Right. So you need a very small affiliate pool. The goal is that they need to be active. So we've built features that automatically drive activity and flag inactivity and things like that. But speaking of metrics, obviously track the basics like total revenue, total commissions.
Cost of this is one thing that most brands don't track because it's not easy to track is like seeding cost. Typically you would send free products to your affiliates. How much is that costing you a factor that into your ROI or ROAS metrics. So crack all of the basics. Some of the metrics that I have found useful are I guess like activity rate.
So you have a thousand affiliates, about 100 are active. That's a 10 % activity rate. You got to boost that over time. So make sure you're creating the right insight. I can talk about how you can boost activity rate. Activity rate, another metric that most brands don't track.
What else? CAC and AOV. Again some of these basics. But for affiliates, what's the new customer acquisition cost through our affiliates? New versus returning split. Sometimes you may find that your affiliates or influencers are only driving repeat purchases. Which may or may not be your goal. So here's all this revenue, but it's all repeat versus new, and then it's different.
So track the split, new customer CAC, AOV from affiliates. Is my AOV from affiliates higher or lower than my average AOV? Ideally, it should be higher because it's coming from a place of trust. Typically, people buy more when somebody recommends it versus it's like,
“Hey, it's a cold Facebook ad and I've never heard of you before.” So those are some of the metrics that come to mind.
Time to revenue is a good one. Like, “Hey, once I'm onboard, how quickly do they make their first dollar? I think that's pretty important. And there's a few others we show. There's earnings per click, revenue per affiliate, blah, blah. Bunch of orders per affiliate, things like that. But these are some of the ones that come to mind.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, absolutely. Some of those I hadn't really thought about before. So that's fantastic. And I guess it's just for total transparency to the audience. At our agency, we don't manage or run an influencer or affiliate type programs. I would put that more into your advertising marketing team's bucket. More retention, maybe. I don't know. All we do at the agency is split testing.
So it's like these are things that are a little bit outside. So we've got a lot of friends that we can refer people to. But it's not something that I'm necessarily running every day. So I'm obviously not the most informed about it. And that's why I love having conversations with experts like yourself to learn more about it.
Yash Chavan
Yeah.
Chase Clymer
So with me admitting that I am not the smartest about this, is there anything I didn't ask you about that you think would resonate with our audience or that's worth bringing up?
Yash Chavan
I guess maybe we can talk about one of the questions that I often get asked. “How do you decide what affiliate commission to give?” Because there's best practices around it. And then most brands go for the best practice and end up losing money. That's like one question I can answer. Basically, give as high of a commission percentage as possible without losing money on the sale.
This is a good thumb rule if you're brand new to affiliate marketing. So if you have a 60 % gross margin and you can afford to spend 40% of that, like the first 40% on marketing. You can then allocate that to an affiliate commission and to a discount. So I can do maybe like a 20% commission, 20% discount or 25 commission, 15 discount, whatever that works.
But with affiliates, you can reverse engineer your CAC pretty much. Like a 10% affiliate commission is effectively like a 10X ROAS, right? Or with like a 20% affiliate commission is a 5X ROAS. Like you can reverse engineer your ROAS or your CAC effectively with affiliates. So whatever you want it to be, just set it at that and then see how it does in the market.
I think this is like a great thumb rule that anybody can use. Later on, you can do more advanced things. can set up a different higher commission for new customers, lower commission for returning customers. You can set up different commission tiers like, we've got a default at 15%, a special at 20 % and then a VIP at 30%.
And you can have different commission tiers in your program. If you have a high repeat order rate brand, you can afford to lose money on the first sale. We worked with Obvi. At one point, they were doing a 70% commission. So lose money on the first sale if you're a recurring subscription product. Things like that.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. Absolutely. This is something I see a little bit out there. It's getting into deals where it's more of a flat rate type situation. Less about tracking and more about the relationship. What advice would you have for influencer managers? Or folks starting those programs when they approach an influencer. And they're like, “This is my rate,” versus wanting to do something that's a little bit more tracked?
Yash Chavan
Yeah. On a strategy level, reach out to smaller influencers. If you're reaching out to people with less than 10k followers, it's very less likely you're going to be hit with a rate. Right? They all are open to affiliate deals. They're also not full-time creators. So it's not an influencer at a 100K ask like asking for a fee makes sense. That's literally their business.
And you're seeking services, you're not working with an influencer. You're literally hiring a service for exposure. That's what you're doing at 10K, 15K, 20K followers. You're working with a person and maybe has a day job and does this influencer stuff on the side. Right? So they're more open to affiliate collabs.That's one.
Number two. If you are hit by a rate, see if it works for you. If you know that this person's reel typically gets X views, like 1 million views on average per reel. And then they're charging me $5,000 for content that is this much in CPM. I am saying, that's $50 CPM. I'm paying $70 CPMs on Facebook, on my ads already. Might as well invest money here because I'm getting exposure at a cheaper cost.
One, you can do that math if you're after impressions and like you want to take that bet. Secondly, if it's a smaller influencer most often it's not going to be like somebody at 5k asking you for money or somebody at like 150k. It's going to be somebody like, “Hey, I've got 35,000 followers. I want to charge 700 bucks for a reel. What should I do?”
In most cases, you can give them data around like, “Hey, our average affiliate makes this much. They probably make more with affiliates than what you're charging right now. Are you open to that?” So you can always pitch that. Start by seeding. Kinship, who's again, one of our biggest customers.
Like Dave, that's an agency. They are big at this strategy where first they don't do any affiliate upfront. They're just sending free products. Like, “Hey, here's a free product, no strings attached. If you like it, we can work together. If not, no problem.” Right? So you can try that approach. Again, it's a little bit trial and error and seeing what sticks.
If somebody is throwing a rate at you. If a lot of people are throwing a rate at you, you're reaching out to the wrong people, mostly very large people. You can do a lot with many small affiliates versus like one or two big affiliates. Reach out to smaller people. If somebody is hitting you with a rate, you can do the CPM math and choose to take that bet.
Or try and negotiate by showing data like, “Hey, the average affiliate does this,” Or honestly do a bit of both. There's this thing called a base plus bonus offer. “Instead of a $700 flat fee, I can pay you $300 upfront and a 10% uncapped commission. And maybe you make a thousand bucks off of this. And it's your job to look into [it and] educate the influencer around this.”
So because what they're looking for is, “I want to be compensated for the 45 to 60 minutes. I'm going to spend time making this reel for you.” Right? So even if you put like an hourly cost plus editing time and blah, blah. $300 [a] fair amount to pay for a reel. Right. Pay that and then give commissions on top instead of paying like a $700 or $1,000 fee. So you could do any of this.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, absolutely. And that just goes to show that there's no right or wrong way to do it. Just got to watch your numbers and make sure that you're not over investing in this type of stuff.
Yash Chavan
Yeah.
Chase Clymer
You mentioned Kinship in that. We work with them on multiple brands. They're a great partner of ours as well.
Yash Chavan
Nice.
Chase Clymer
So if you are looking for help in the influencer and paid growth space, shout out to them.
Yash Chavan
Shout out. Yeah, totally.
Chase Clymer
Yep. Awesome. Yash, now, before I let you go. [Say] I've been listening to this episode and I'm super interested in either of your solutions. Obviously, we're here to talk and promote SATHI. But obviously, SARAL is still in the wheelhouse of things that you're doing day to day. You're the CEO of both.
Yash Chavan
Yep.
Chase Clymer
Where should I go? What should I do? How do I get a hold of you?
Yash Chavan
You can find me on LinkedIn. Search for my name. You'll find me. Best place. LinkedIn or Twitter. Search for my name. You'll find me. If you just want to have a conversation about any of this. And if you want to go to SATHI, That's mysathi.io. And then it's getsaral.com.
If you want to check out either of the platforms. But yeah, we're happy to chat. Feel free to there [are] links to book a meeting on both the platforms. So feel free to just get on a call with us and we'll advise. We've actually driven brands away from SARAL if we think that SATHI is a fit and then told brands like, actually SATHI won't be a fit. You actually need SARAL. Go to SARAL and be happy to chat about either. So yeah.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely, Yash. Thank you so much for coming on the show today and sharing all those amazing insights.
Yash Chavan
Thank you for having me, Chase.
