In this conversational interview, the founders discuss how they grew their early‑stage e‑commerce brand from $180,000 in revenue after halving ad spend to a $15,000 single‑day sales spike driven by a single wellness influencer, Melissa Wood. They outline a hands‑on affiliate strategy: a dedicated team member reaches out to 400 creators weekly on Instagram and TikTok, offering free product samples, a 15% discount code for the creator’s audience, and a 20% commission on sales. The first major partnership generated $15,000 in one day during the third month of operation. Recognizing the risk of relying on one influencer, they pivot to scaling the model by recruiting dozens or hundreds of smaller ambassadors, emphasizing genuine relationship building over automated or AI‑driven outreach. The dialogue critiques the trend of automating influencer relationships, arguing that authentic, relational engagement is essential for sustainable affiliate growth.
Chapters
So you did $180,000 after cutting ad spend in half.
Yes.
And having inventory issues. Right. What the heck is happening between February of last year and this past month?
We realized that when someone posted, they could make us a lot of money. We decided that we were going to go all in on that. So she basically sets a goal for herself to reach out to 400 people a week, and that's on Instagram and TikTok. So she's reaching out to people with a simple message, basically just saying, can we send you our product? Like no strings attached. We think you'll love it and we believe in our product. If you love it, use this link and your audience will get 15% off and you'll get 20% commission. Everyone sharing their link, anyone that tags us, we're reaching out to them saying, we'd love to have an affiliate link for you. Can you reshare that? And then once they share that link, even if it's 2 or 3 sales, it's better than no sales. So we reached out to big names, like really big names. Melissa Wood is a really big wellness influencer. She's right our demographic, like perfect. So we reached out to her and her team said like, sure, here's the ad address to send it to, but there's no guarantees. Next thing you know, she's made a reel about it, she's posted a story about it, she linked us, and the day she linked us, we did $15,000.
Wow.
Third month into our business.
3 months in and you have a $15,000 day.
Yes. And now from one person.
Now your brain is going, holy crap.
We all were like, wow, something started to get into that mindset of, is Melissa gonna post today? You know, please Melissa, post. And we didn't like that, honestly. We thought, we can't rely on one person to build our business, but what if we have 50 or 100 people that equal one Melissa? We can do that. And so that is where we started to think of how many people can we reach out to, send these samples to. We don't automate, we build like relationships with our customers.
I think way too many people are trying to automate their way into relationships, right? And it just doesn't work that way. If you're going to build a group of ambassadors, if you're going to build affiliates, if you're going to build real relationships with your customers that want to buy from you, You've actually gotta be relational.
Yes.
You can't do that with AI. No. You can't do that with automations. You actually have to build real relationships.
