Episode #37 – The Performance Marketing Spotlight with Noah Tucker

Marshall Nyman [00:00:03]:
Hello and welcome to the Performance Marketing Spotlight. I’m your host, Marshall nyman, founder and CEO of Nymo & Company. Each episode I will be bringing you someone with deep experience in the performance marketing space where they highlight their experiences within the industry. Today I have Noah Tucker, founder and CEO of Social Snowball. Welcome to the podcast, Noah.

Noah Tucker [00:00:25]:
Thanks for having me.

Marshall Nyman [00:00:27]:
Of course. Excited to have you on today and learn a bit more. Let’s jump right into it. Can you introduce yourself to the audience?

Noah Tucker [00:00:35]:
Yeah. My name is Noah. I live in Los Angeles, California. I am the founder of a company called Social Snowball, which is an affiliate platform for brands to partner with creators.

Marshall Nyman [00:00:46]:
Amazing. How did you get your start in marketing?

Noah Tucker [00:00:50]:
So it goes honestly way back to when I was graduating high school. I had some friends who were running dropshipping stores and I thought it was the coolest thing ever because at the time I was working on a fishing boat to make money. And the fact that my friend was, you know, running a Shopify store and posting pictures on Instagram to try to get sales to make money was just way more exciting for me. And, you know, from there I kind of just got sucked into the world.

Marshall Nyman [00:01:17]:
And then five years ago, you decided to start snoshul Snowball. What was that?

Noah Tucker [00:01:23]:
Yeah, so five years ago I was doing a lot of. So from, you know, that point where I started dropshipping got sucked into the that whole world, I, you know, started getting more into the marketing side of things for brands. So I was doing a lot of media buying work and consulting and eventually building a lot of affiliate programs as well. So five years ago is, you know, when we first started Social Snowball. And it was really because I was trying to build these affiliate programs and I was using the existing tech in the Shopify ecosystem that existed to power these programs. And everything just felt super clunky and confusing and difficult to use. And at the time I was just like, wow, these softwares really suck. Like, I can’t find anything that does what I needed to do.

Noah Tucker [00:02:10]:
In hindsight, I realized that it’s not that they all sucks, it’s just that affiliate platforms from five, 10 years ago, they were built for a totally different type of affiliate than what I was trying to partner with. They were built for what I like to call legacy affiliates. People will call them traditional affiliates. These are like PR publisher, listicle review site affiliates. And I was trying to partner with just like Instagram creators as affiliates. That’s the affiliate I was trying to partner with. And so what I realized is the, you know, the user experience and the functionality that a brand needs to facilitate successful partnerships with creators as affiliates is very different than publishers as affiliates. And so that’s kind of how the idea for Social Snowball started to really be the first affiliate platform for D2C that’s laser focused on enabling partnerships with what we call the modern affiliate, meaning creators, influencers, ambassadors, etc.

Noah Tucker [00:02:59]:
Instead of the more traditional affiliate.

Marshall Nyman [00:03:02]:
What makes Social Snowball so powerful?

Noah Tucker [00:03:06]:
I mean, so it’s really the whole, you know, management workflow of partnering with creators where the goal of the partnership is attributable revenue. Before Social Snowball, besides just those more traditional affiliate platforms, there were creator management CRMs, right? There’s still lots of those tools that exist today, but they have a huge focus on content deliverables. That’s like really what those platforms specialize in. So what I mean by that is they, those, those softwares, they make it easy to create campaigns where you could pay creators a flat fee for a deliverable, which could be a post on Instagram or film a video where you talk about this or whatever the deliverables are, you pay them and then you get content or a post or whatever. But obviously, you know, there’s no performance aspect to that. There’s no tracking attributable revenue, there’s no incentivizing attributable revenue with that type of partnership. And so, you know, what makes Social Snowball so powerful is we’re really, you know, the only affiliate or the only platform for creative partnerships that fully revolves around attributable revenue and creating an incentive structure for your creator partners that makes them want to drive attributable revenue and rewards them for doing so and makes it really easy to manage a ton of creators at scale where the goal of those partnerships is just, you know, driving affiliate revenue. So that’s kind of what makes us unique.

Marshall Nyman [00:04:24]:
How can brands get started with Social Snowball?

Noah Tucker [00:04:27]:
Yeah, I mean, if we definitely don’t make that hard, you could just go to Social Snowball IO where you could find us in the Shopify app store. You could book a demo on our website, you could reach out to me on LinkedIn, you know, if anyone wants to see a demo or chat, always happy to.

Marshall Nyman [00:04:43]:
What should brands take into consideration for a successful launch on Social Snowball?

Noah Tucker [00:04:50]:
So I think, you know, our product really helps brands do two different things at a high level. One is an ambassador program for their customers. So like turning customers into affiliates post purchase and equipping them with links or codes for them to share with their Friends. And then the second part is more influencer partnerships. So not their customers like bigger creators and influencers. For an influencer and creator partnership program to be successful, it requires some manual work like there needs to be someone. These are all one to one relationships at scale. So there needs to be someone communicating with the creators and inviting them and welcoming them.

Noah Tucker [00:05:24]:
And obviously our software can automate a lot of it, but it still requires some manual work that. So one thing to consider, you know, to be successful on the platform is if you are trying to launch a creator program, you need to either have an in house team or not. When I say team I mean one person, it’s nothing more than that, but someone who could at least put some of their bandwidth towards it or hire a freelancer or an agency. But I wouldn’t go into it thinking that you could just turn it on and never log into the software and that it’ll fully run itself. But for our customer use case for turning customers into affiliates, post purchase and creating an ambassador program for your customers, that actually is very set and forget it software could basically automate all of that. So creating affiliate links for customers post purchase, giving it to them on the thank you page, giving it to them, the post purchase email flow through Klaviyo or whatever email tool the brand’s using, automating the payouts like that’s actually very doable with software. So I would say like to be successful with social snowball, if you want to launch like a big influencer creator program, you probably need at least some bandwidth from your team or an external freelancer or agency. But for a customer affiliate program you could do that even if you’re just a one man show.

Noah Tucker [00:06:33]:
You know, it’s just very set it and forget it.

Marshall Nyman [00:06:37]:
What do you focus on in your role?

Noah Tucker [00:06:40]:
Honestly now? You know the team has grown, you know, we’re not huge, but we’re I think 21 full time. My role now is very focused on at least where the majority of the value I provide is because my time kind of gets pulled in different directions. But where I provide the most value to the business, I would say is product decisions. I’m very, very hands on with what our team is building, why we’re building it, how we’re building it, what it’s going to look like, how users are going to use it. I’m very, very hands on with that. So I work super closely with our CTO and even some of the engineering team I’m talking to on a daily basis where we’re just building you know, really cool and exciting stuff for the platform. I love, I love that kind of work. It’s my favorite.

Noah Tucker [00:07:26]:
I think I’m, you know, better at it than anything else like sales or marketing. Even though I still do some sales and some marketing stuff, I think that’s stuff that eventually as the company continues to grow, I’ll probably remove myself even further from. But the product stuff that I’m doing now, I think I don’t see myself giving that up anytime soon.

Marshall Nyman [00:07:47]:
What was the biggest challenge when you started out with Social Snowball?

Noah Tucker [00:07:50]:
So I mean by far the biggest is I’m a non technical solo founder of a software company and with that came a lot of hurdles and learning experiences because, you know, I was on the E. Com side as an operator and I thought I could just launch a software product easily, like hire a developer to build something and then basically I thought I could just run ads to it and grow it and you know, make a ton of money and that was going to be the extent of it. I didn’t realize how much work goes into building and maintaining a product and that really growth comes from the product and maintaining and fixing stuff and adding new features, etc. That was just a completely new concept to me. So in the beginning, I mean, just even getting a working software product launch took over a year and it took multiple agencies and freelancers that I thought could just be, you know, could just handle it and they didn’t. And then even once we launched, I’ve, you know, went through so many different freelancers and you know, agencies and just different independent contractor developers that were going to, you know, do work for Social Snowball that ended up not working out at all because I had no idea what I was doing and no idea how to hire engineering talent. It took over two years until we got our first legit real W2 full time engineering hire who’s still with us today. And now we have an incredible engineering team.

Noah Tucker [00:09:22]:
Our CTO was the VP of engineering at Grin, which is like the biggest legacy player in our space. And like we have a killer, killer team. They’re all based in California or mostly based in California, but to get to this point took five years really of me failing over and over and over again to like learn and to honestly deserve the engineering team we have today. Because at the time when I was just some kid with an idea and you know, a few thousand dollars of mrr, like I couldn’t, not only could I not afford the engineering team we have today, like, you know, we’re bootstrapped We’ve always been bootstrapped. But they wouldn’t want to work at Social Snowball because it wasn’t exciting or cool enough yet. So I think, you know, it was like, a really painful, painful, slow grind to get the engineering talent that we needed. And that was like, the. Up until recently, with this new engineering team and our new cto.

Noah Tucker [00:10:13]:
You know, he’s been here only, like, six to eight months maybe. Um, before that, it was just like, a painful grind. And that was, like, our biggest weakness as a business. And thankfully, that’s the past now.

Marshall Nyman [00:10:24]:
You just released an integration with TikTok shops. Tell us about it.

Noah Tucker [00:10:28]:
Yes. Yeah. So this is really exciting. Um, you know, so obviously our platform is very aligned with TikTok shop and what they do. So our platform is an affiliate platform for creator and influencer partnerships. Right. TikTok shop is very similar. It’s also all affiliate partnerships with creators.

Noah Tucker [00:10:47]:
Right? TikTok is all creators. There’s no publishers on there. So, you know, TikTok shop has always been super aligned with what Social Snowball does. And Social Snowball has been with TikTok as well. And up until recently, like, there was no real way for us to do anything with that information. It just, if anything, helped Social Snowball a little bit because more brands wanted to partner with creators as affiliates on TikTok, and so they would be more open to doing that on other platforms like Instagram or YouTube or wherever. And then they would need Social Snowball to help manage those types of programs. But now they invited us to partner with them on a more, you know, on a much closer level by integrating.

Noah Tucker [00:11:22]:
And they released this new affiliate API that they gave us early access to that essentially allowed us to build a lot of the same experiences that we built for our current platform into TikTok shop and beyond that. It allows us to help brands unify their D2C affiliate programs with their TikTok Shop affiliate programs. Because before this integration existed, if a brand was partnering with a creator who had a following on Instagram and TikTok, let’s say, which is super common, the that creator would have to Sign up through TikTok Shop to promote their products on TikTok and then sign up through a separate affiliate program to promote their products on Instagram or YouTube or wherever else, all of the data of the revenue they drive through TikTok shop is completely separate from the data that they drive to the brand Shopify. Everything is unified. The gift samples are. Excuse me, distributed, not unified. The gift samples are distributed. Nothing’s communicating with each each other.

Noah Tucker [00:12:12]:
And so, you know, one creator that wants to part manage one partnership with one brand has to log into two separate platforms and all the data is distributed. So our integration essentially allows brands to unify both their D2C and TikTok shop programs so that, you know, one example is when they onboard a new creator, it’ll not only like our software will not only create them an affiliate link to share on Instagram, let’s say, but it could also enroll them into a collaboration on TikTok Shop through one workflow. So through one platform they’re in now both the D2C and TikTok shop program. On top of that, when the creator drives $10,000 of revenue through TikTok and $10,000 of revenue through the brand Shopify, we have both of those data points and we can show that that’s $20,000 of referred revenue from this one creator’s profile that has data across both channels. So it’s essentially allowing brands to kind of like create a smoother user experience for creators, have better data at their fingertips by unifying both platforms as well as just have new channels to onboard more TikTok creators. So you could create, you know, a lot of the experiences that Social Snowball has to onboard creators to your D2C program. Now, that could also add them to your TikTok shop program. If you have a big TikTok shop program and want those creators to repurpose content on Instagram and YouTube and be able to track those sales through an affiliate link so that you could drive some affiliate revenue through D2C and those creators can earn more.

Noah Tucker [00:13:27]:
Social Snowball can let you do that as well. And again, all the data is unified across all platforms. So, yeah, it’s super new, but it’s super exciting. We’ve onboarded, I mean, it’s literally only like a month old, but we’ve onboarded about 100 brands to it, and the results so far have been promising. So, yeah, very, very excited about that.

Marshall Nyman [00:13:43]:
Anything else exciting on the roadmap for Social Snowball?

Noah Tucker [00:13:47]:
Yeah, I mean, you know, we just also released our Instagram integration, so that’s. That was really exciting. So now Social Snowball is able to save the content that your creators tag you in on social media. They tag you in a poster story. It saves that content, gives you reporting on it, lets you download it, all that good stuff. So that’s another really exciting one. And there’s a lot more with the TikTok and Instagram integrations that are coming Soon. So, you know, very excited about those.

Marshall Nyman [00:14:13]:
What has been your favorite part of running Social snowball?

Noah Tucker [00:14:17]:
Man, it’s just been the craziest five years of my life, honestly. It’s been so much fun to learn everything I’ve learned. When I think about who I was five years ago versus now, I couldn’t even recognize myself with how much I’ve learned. And it’s been a ton of fun. I think recently things have really started to pick up and so it’s just been really exciting to just be at the forefront of social commerce and creator marketing, which is just such a hot new exploding topic. And to think that, like, social snowball was kind of building in this area before it was really a thing and now the market kind of caught up to where we were hoping it would is just a ton of fun. So every day is just a new challenge and it’s a new win, a new loss. It’s always exciting and fun and I’m just loving every second of it, honestly.

Marshall Nyman [00:15:04]:
Any upcoming conferences you’re planning on attending?

Noah Tucker [00:15:07]:
Yeah, so we are actually throwing our own online conference called the TikTok Shop Growth Summit. And that’s. That is November 4th. So. Yeah, so basically what we realized is there’s a huge lack of education in TikTok shop and it’s changing super fast. So there’s no like one course or resource that just can exist forever that is like the holy, you know, bible of all TikTok shop stuff. So because of that, like where we’ve got a bunch of TikTok shop experts and, you know, some of the top brands and partners into a webinar that we’re doing on the fourth so that they could just kind of share what’s working right now and all the strategies that they’re using for, you know, their brand or their clients. So that’s one I’m really excited about.

Noah Tucker [00:15:50]:
I’ll be speaking at that. And then as far as in person stuff, we have one more for the year before it turns into like Black Friday lockdown time. And then I don’t think anyone’s really going to conferences, but next week we have grow LA, so that’ll be great. That’s on the 23rd of October, and I believe that is the last one for the year. I know we’re lining up some stuff for the next year, but I think Grow is probably the last, like, big conference we’re doing for the year.

Marshall Nyman [00:16:16]:
Any predictions on the future of influencer and performance marketing?

Noah Tucker [00:16:21]:
Yeah, I mean, you know, I think the trend that I’VE been watching with Influencer since we started Social Snowball five years ago is that who can be an influencer and really who can be an affiliate is becoming more and more democratized. An affiliate used to be like a company that was like a PR firm or publishers or whatever, and then it became like bigger, you know, celebrities and influencers. And now it could be as simple as a customer referring a friend that could be an affiliate. You know, like that’s, that’s the direction things are moving. So I think, you know, as paid ads becomes more expensive and harder to track, more and more brands are going to, are going to lean towards micro influencers and customer ambassadors to be a true acquisition channel for them, not just like a loyalty program or refer a friend like a real affiliate performance channel. And that’s something that we’ve started to see happen. And obviously Social Snowball is helping make that happen. But I think that’s a trend that’s going to skyrocket over the next few years.

Marshall Nyman [00:17:20]:
What has been your favorite part of working in the performance and influencer marketing industry?

Noah Tucker [00:17:25]:
Well, I always, you know, think something that really makes my job easy at Social Snowball is that the ROI is undeniable of the product. Like it either is generating affiliate revenue and making you money, or it’s not. It’s, you know, performance marketing is great because there’s no smoke and mirrors. It’s very straightforward. You open the dashboard and this is how much money came from your affiliates. And that’s either a good number or a bad number. And so I think, you know, what I love about the performance industry is that it’s just so black and white. It’s attributable revenue.

Noah Tucker [00:17:54]:
We’re talking customer acquisition. This is like very clear business value. And it’s either working for you or, you know, for some reason it’s not. But there’s no when it’s working, there’s no denying that it’s working. And I think that’s just like something that helps me sleep at night knowing that, like, if anyone ever doubted if Social Snowball is a good fit for them, they could just log into their dashboard and see how much, you know, ROI and revenue it’s made in the past few weeks and that should hopefully clear up their concerns.

Marshall Nyman [00:18:20]:
A big thank you to Noah Tucker for joining the podcast this week. Some great insights into his background and how you can leverage Social Snowball. What’s the best way for listeners to connect with you?

Noah Tucker [00:18:31]:
LinkedIn’s great. If you search Noah Tucker, you’ll find me on Twitter. I’m pretty active too. N o a t U C K Noah Tuck. That’s my Twitter. Or if you want to check out Social Noble, you could go to our website and book a demo. But yeah, any of those places would be good.

Marshall Nyman [00:18:47]:
Amazing. Again, thank you to our guest Noah Tucker and to our producer Leon Sonkin. If you’ve enjoyed this content, please give us a like and a follow. Thank you for listening in. I am Marshall Nyman, host of the Performance Marketing Spotlight and founder and CEO of NYMO and Company, signing off. Thank you and have a great day.