Today, we are bringing you an inspiring interview with Adam Young, the CEO of Ringba. Adam is leading the way in the pay-per-call vertical with his innovative call-tracking software company. He shares his journey from starting out as an affiliate marketer in his parents' basement to building a successful tech company that empowers affiliates and businesses.
He discusses the challenges he faced, including the "affiliate curse," and how he found his true calling in creating lasting value for others.
Adam Young
Q: Adam, why don't you tell everyone how you got started online and what the affiliate marketing industry was like back then?
Yeah, so you know, my first business was e-commerce and I was selling store returns on eBay. This is like when eBay first started, they didn't even have their feedback system yet. I tried to run a physical business when I was a teenager and it really didn't go well. I hired a bunch of my friends, I had no idea how to run a business. It was a really incredible learning experience for me, but it was super painful.
So then I went door-to-door. The only company that would give me a job was a door-to-door commission-only sales company. I went downtown Detroit in the snow, in the freezing cold, banging on businesses, selling phone service through bulletproof glass to liquor store owners. It was brutal.
Then every night I would come home and try to make money on the internet, because I was like "I need to find freedom, I need to get away from this, I want to be an entrepreneur again, I want to create value." It was literally like 12 hours going door-to-door and then going home and working until I fell asleep on the futon in my parents' basement next to my computer.
Then one day I discovered affiliate marketing. I discovered one of the first affiliate networks and they offered to pay me $1.25 per email address submission on a free iPod Nano offer. I stayed up all night - this was around 2005 to 2007. I got one lead, and I woke up on that futon, saw the one lead in this shitty HTML homegrown interface. I was like, "This is it." I quit my job that day. I just knew that I could build a business in this industry. So that's how I got my start.
Q: So what was next?
At that point, I actually got talked into going to a trade show by one of the affiliate networks I was working with after I had sort of created some volume and a real business. When I went to that trade show, it was just super eye-opening. I got to see so many different opportunities, and I met so many amazing people.
I realized there were all these different types of promotional methods - email marketing, Google search, Bing, all sorts of mid-tier traffic sellers. I realized at that point that there are thousands of offers and all these different traffic sources. There's just so many ways to make money in affiliate marketing. At that trade show, I knew that this was for me and I haven't left the industry since.
Q: What did you find a lot of success with earlier, like what types of offers, what traffic sources, and what years were these?
This was 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008. During that period of time there were a lot of rapid evolutions in affiliate marketing. I found my niche in lead generation – all different types of leads. I did co-reg offers like the free iPod Nano, I did a lot of dating offers, people search, and anything that was lead-based, not a physical sale or a physical product.
I really liked that a lot because I could get into the mind of the consumer and it had lower CPAs. That allowed you to get more conversion data so that you could try to optimize things. It wasn't like today where you have the Facebook pixel that you can just YOLO and you'll get traffic exactly the way you need it.
You had to do a lot of that legwork yourself. I really liked those offers and I became really good at them.
Q: So fast forward to starting Ringba - how did you go from affiliate to "Hey, I want to start a SaaS company"? Was it to serve your own needs and then it opened up from there when you saw it working? What happened in that time period in your life?
The thing about affiliate marketing - and I call it the "affiliate curse" - is if you're running one of these lead gen offers or you're running a nutra offer or some type of e-com offer, it's probably not going to last.
So what would happen is every few months I'd have a big win and it would maintain for a little while, and then I'd have to go back to the drawing board, rebuild the whole business, and do this over and over and over again. I've probably done it more than a hundred times on a hundred different offers.
I made a lot of money doing it, but I never really created any value for anybody else. As I got older, I realized I wanted to be more fulfilled. I wanted to create something of extreme value that I could use my expertise - all my fighting in the trenches - to help other people in the industry become successful.
I had been thinking about this for a long period of time. My business partner at the time, Harrison, and I were running a really big click arbitrage business. Then one day it just completely failed - 8-figures to zero overnight.
I walked out into my living room and I had these six giant screens in a half circle that monitored click feeds. It looked like the Matrix, just hundreds of millions of clicks a day.
Anyway, I walk out and the screens aren't moving. I'm like, "Oh, the internet's out." Then one line, one line. I was like, "Oh God, did the server die? Is Amazon out? Please be out." I was praying for Amazon to be down.
But that's not what it was. I got a phone call from Harrison and he basically just said, "It's over."
Q: What exactly happened?
They just weren't able to monetize the traffic on the click feed anymore. It was like razor thin margin, massive scale. We just got cut. Our backends laid off like 45 people the next week - we were essentially the entire business. It was just over.
So I was literally sitting on the floor in my living room, surrounded by these blank TVs, spilled my bowl of Cheerios down my pants. I stopped talking to Harrison on the phone and I just looked up. I was like, "I am so sick of having to do this over and over and over again. There has to be a better way. We have to be able to build something that's sustainable. I need to figure that out so I can help other people in the industry do that."
Then serendipitously, one of our friends came over and showed us pay-per-call. I realized this is the way, this is the future. Big businesses that aren't going anywhere, public companies - they want consumer-initiated inbound calls, they want the high quality consumer.
You can really build an incredible business in pay-per-call and do it for the long term. You're not spinning plates anymore, you can get away from the affiliate curse. That's when I knew that I didn't really want to get into the pay-per-call myself - I wanted to build the technology so that we could power this industry to create opportunities for other people in the space.
Q: What does Ringba do that you don't see with other competitors?
I think the biggest thing that we do differently is how we approach our customers in the market. We think about things as "How do we bring the most value to our customers?" Our mission is to actually help our customers grow.
What we do best is sort of the entire service package and offering. We have the most innovative technology - we invented a lot of the programmatic call trading technology that exists today. We power a lot of Fortune 500s that use that.
But we also offer the industry's leading support to go with it. Our clients get real-time support from highly trained engineers anytime they need it. Because when they have a problem, if they can't address it immediately in performance marketing, they're just lighting cash on fire.
We really view our clients as partners and collaborate with them to help them build their business. When we think about them, we think about them as partners. I know that may sound a little cliché, but we have that ingrained so far into our soul at the company. I view that as our largest competitive advantage.
Q: What advice do you have for someone new as an affiliate coming in that wants to start doing pay-per-call, or has recently started? What would you give that person specifically?
And then also someone that's more experienced, more advanced, that wants to grow to the next level. How would you communicate differently to those two people?
Great question. So someone who's new and they're an affiliate, if they're coming over from any other vertical of the performance marketing industry, one of the biggest hurdles that we see that people suffer with is the fact that in calls, you have to pay for technology, whether it's ours or someone else's.
If you don't have your own tracking, you're at a supreme disadvantage and you're likely to not be successful. So first and foremost, you have to have that. Because with calls, it's not like a click or a lead where there can just be unlimited clicks and you throw more servers at the problem. With calls, you need a real human at that moment available to answer the call.
So if you don't have technology to optimize your call flow, to make sure that those calls are going to those available humans in real-time, the calls will drop and then your CPA will go up. That's the most important thing - affiliates need to get over the fact that there's a little bit of cost associated with getting technology put in place.
The bigger companies that we work with on the publisher side, their real competitive advantage is actually how they use the technology to do their call routing, to append data in real-time to phone calls, to segment a flow of phone calls by demographic information - similar to how you would segment Facebook ads by demographic information. Because certain buyers in certain verticals will pay more money for people of a certain income level or a certain age range.
So the smarter and larger publishing companies, what they're doing is they're just using the technology at a much more advanced level to slice up their call flow and essentially sell it to the highest bidder, like in a premium auction system, kind of like LeadsPedia does on the data side.
Q: What are you most excited about today?
You know, I think the most exciting thing about this space is that it's still very new. The fact that it's still very new and already - for instance, this year we've helped people make billions of dollars, which is just mind-blowing to me, but incredible at the same time. There's an immense amount of opportunity in this space.
No one as a business wants anything more than a consumer-initiated inbound call who's ready to buy their products. It's so much more valuable, right?
And not only is it more valuable, you don't have to deal with outbound call connections, regulations on the data, you don't have to deal with the TCPA. You're not creating just a huge churn of call center agents - they're not salespeople if it's inbound, they're order takers, they like their job.
Everything about this is just a long-term sustainable opportunity for affiliates. That's what gets me most excited about it. I have clients who weren't affiliates before but came in and they're publishers now in pay-per-call. They have been doing it for years and they knew nothing of affiliate marketing before this.
They've been able from day one to build a sustainable business that has value and they're able to support their teams and their families. I'm incredibly proud about that, but I'm even more excited about the fact that these folks can come into the industry and not have to deal with the suffering that I went through.
The affiliate curse, the churn, all that - it was just heartbreaking to go through that over and over again. Now I get to watch my customers build real long-term sustainable businesses, which is awesome.
You know, a good friend and customer of ours who built his business using our technology - Anthony. He started as an affiliate, moved to calls, built a call business, and had a $50 million exit. He was able to do that using our technology.
That's just one of many hundreds or a thousand success stories that we have. That's what gets me really excited - look how we got to impact the industry and create these opportunities so that people can change their lives.
Q: Last question. You're successful already - what gets you excited to keep doing this and keep growing and moving forward?
You know, I was in my parents' basement, all I really wanted was to get out of that basement, right? I wanted a nice car, I wanted to get out of debt, I wanted to not live in my parents' basement. So money was the goal.
Then as I got better at business, I realized that money's cool, but what I need to do is I need to help my team grow and my team get better. Make sure my family's taken care of. These were the things that were important to me and I got fulfillment from that.
But as Ringba started doing really well, I realized that what gets me the most fulfillment is really our mission of helping other people grow. It's our mission that's bigger than ourselves. It's that servant leadership mission that gets me out of bed every day.
I work seven days a week, not because I have to, but this is my favorite thing to do. This is my passion. I really discovered that when I realized that I have this opportunity to help so many people and help them all build. So that's what gets me excited. There's nothing more fulfilling than seeing a guy who failed at something like I did come into the industry.
I'll give you an example - I won't use a name - but I met a guy who wasn't sure what he was gonna do. He wasn't in his parents' basement, but he had nothing, no calls. I met him at LeadsCon maybe five or six years ago and he just sat down and told me about his struggles.
I said, "Listen man, let me help you do this. Let's work together." His business did more than $100 million in revenue last year. He's still a good friend, great customer. I don't take credit for all his hard work, but I got to be part of that journey. To me, that is the most humbling experience, the most fulfilling experience that I could ever hope for.
So my goal every day is to just create more of those.
Q: That's cool, man. Thank you so much for your time. How can the audience find you or learn more about you?
Yeah, sure. You can find us at ringba.com. You can find me at adamyoung.com. It's that easy.
