BUILD A FAMILY BUSINESS IN AFFILIATE MARKETING: A CROSS ON THE RELATIONSHIP OR BUILDING TRUST?

How Was Your Day Media met with the beautiful and marketing fairy Maria-Victoria for a cup of coffee to find out what kind of family business Masha and her fiancé Yura are building, and whether the couple is afraid to follow the trodden path of other ambitious predecessors whose joint business led to the collapse of their love? Read in our interview to find out what kind of business the couple is developing, whether it is profitable, and what the 7-year life of one of the most famous couples in Ukrainian affiliate marketing has been like.

Masha and Yura are equal co-founders of the agency "2B Digital- a company consisting of several units: an agency account rental service with a focus on Facebook and Google, but the couple's business also includes a large pool of accounts for other platforms (on request). In particular, 2B Creo, as a separate unit, provides arbitrage specialists with creatives for gambling, betting - generally for iGaming, can make static and dynamic creatives, design PWAs, dipfakes, lipsync, etc. The last component of the "2B" triad is "2B Mediabuying" with a focus on Facebook traffic.

HWYD: Whose idea was it to start your own family business, and how did you come to it?

Maria-Victoria: From the beginning of the full-scale invasion, Yura started pouring in traffic, he was a buyer and worked for a product company. One day, an agency specializing in agency accounts that he was working with, scammed Yura for 1.5k $. Over time, we figured it out, understood how it worked, and tried to create our own service to be independent and reduce our own risks, to provide ourselves and later other media buying teams with accounts. That's how we started, actually. It was June 2024. So in June 2025, we can congratulate ourselves on our first year.

HWYD: How did you start taking the first steps? How did you realize the idea stage into reality?

Maria-Victoria: We started on our own, managed and created everything with our own hands, and looked for interested teams among our friends. At the beginning, we were three people in the company... Although, I must admit, it still feels strange to call it a company - perhaps we haven't fully realized it and haven't gotten used to it yet. So for now, I feel more comfortable calling our business a team. We currently have 9 employees, and we keep growing. At the start, we were also helped by acquaintances - we have been in this market for a long time, so we offered our friends to take our accounts for a test, they liked it, and it allowed us to scale and gave us faith in our chosen business.

HWYD: What is the name of the agency?

Maria-Victoria: The project is called "2B DigitalWe have a website, but it is not quite up-to-date at the moment, and we also have Instagram page and several channels on Telegram: "2B Digital - general information, about the life of our company and our services, there is also a separate channel "2B Creo" - is a channel exclusively for creative design. We also have an additional service - a creative unifier - it's free, we provide it along with other services to our partners who come to us for creatives. The uniqueizer works in such a way that you can throw any creative into it, press a button, and the bot will do the rest - change small details so that the platform perceives it as different and, accordingly, blocks it less.

HWYD: Who came up with the name?

Maria-Victoria: We came up with the name together and finally narrowed it down to three options suggested by Yura. We settled on 2B, which sounds cool and short. It's a multifaceted name, deep, it can be twisted as the infinitive "to be" - to be, added to different functionalities - to be mediabuying, to be creo. And it can be used to continue the cycle of our services in case of further scaling.

HWYD: Is the business popular among customers?

Maria-Victoria: Yes, we are currently working with the largest media buying teams and within products that work as separate teams in the market, meaning that most of the top companies already cooperate with us, and these are our main clients, and we focus on them and for them. We are not yet ready to work with small teams with a small spread, because it is very energy-consuming and does not bring the desired result. So it's much more efficient for us and for our clients to focus on one large company instead of several small ones and provide it with creatives and accounts.

HWYD: Where and how do you order advertising?

Maria-Victoria: We started with word of mouth: we went to our friends, then to the friends of friends, some recommended us to their colleagues and friends - this is how we built our first customer base. We took the next steps of promotion through my TG channel "Women's View of Gambling" - I advertised there, plus, let's say, I hang out among authors and owners of other thematically similar channels - I agreed with them on publications. My own brand and trust in the Instagram community helped. And now, on the eve of Affhub: Fuck Arbitrage - Arson, we have finally created our own Instagram page, where we will also promote ourselves with high-quality and unique content based on our experience and expertise, as well as set up targeting and participate in various events of the 2B business, buy advertising from media personalities and prepare media articles for various resources so that as many people as possible can learn about us.

HWYD: What type of advertising works best for your business?

Maria-Victoria: Sarafanka. When a person you trust advises you on something that they have tried on their own, it is not even advertising - they are sharing valuable experience. You can make 25 advertising publications in the media, but it's unlikely that at least one will really touch a potential relevant client. Yes, it will increase recognition and trust, but it will work cumulatively over time. Instead, advice from a familiar pro will significantly reduce this time.

HWYD: What is the peculiarity of your business?

Maria-Victoria: We are very loyal to our existing partners: we offer big discounts, we turn a blind eye to certain nuances that may arise from the client in the course of work, we compensate for uncontrolled traffic, which no other agency does - if there is a mistake on our part, we compensate the partner for the amount, whatever it is. There was a case when the amount was 5-digit, but we compensated everything in order not to lose trust. And not only did we not lose it, but we gained it - we continued to cooperate, eventually recouping all previous costs and making it a real win-win.

HWYD: How does it feel to work with your loved one? There's a common belief that you can't work with loved ones. What about you?

Maria-Victoria: Working with your loved one is interesting, to say the least. There are both pros and cons: sometimes work goes into personal life and vice versa - unfortunately, this is impossible to avoid, no matter how hard you try. However, we try to separate work and personal life, because otherwise we will either simply part ways or stop working together, and then the family business will no longer be a family business. Among the advantages: we are very supportive of each other, we can talk about work at any time. Personally, I think that we can manage to combine, but, of course, not without difficulties. I will say that this is not the first project in which we have worked together - before the full-scale war, we had our own network of dance and fitness studios. We started that business as a couple, still young and inexperienced - we were 20 years old. It's cool that after so many years we are still moving together and in the same direction, we have the same views on life and the future - all this only strengthens us and our relationship.

HWYD: Did you and Yura have any disagreements about the business vectors? How did you resolve them?

Maria-Victoria: Of course, we have disagreements all the time, we think differently, sometimes our views are polar opposite, but over the 7 years of our relationship, we have learned to listen and hear each other, to give in to something, to talk and discuss a lot in order to find a solution that will satisfy both of us. Without being too modest, I can say that I think we are a great tandem: Yura is more adventurous and experimental - he always has a lot of ideas, he is always in favor of testing: if it works, okay, if it doesn't work, we move on. I'm a Virgo, I'm more pragmatic: I need to think things through, understand the risks and prepare for them. In this, we complement and insure each other.

HWYD: How is the business doing now? Does it generate a stable income? Do you plan to scale up?

Maria-Victoria: Currently, things are going well, we are developing by leaps and bounds. From time to time, we barely have time to realize how everything is happening so fast. Again, we will only be a year old in June, and we have already opened 3 units, at the end of April we are announcing the launch of our own PWA service for media buyers, and we are currently working on a new product - a CRM system for managing and optimizing the work of media buying teams. Our team is growing, and the main feature of the team is that it consists of family and friends. So our main value is trusted and reliable people. We have been working with each of them for many years, we can rely on them, and we trust each 100%. In return, the team knows that we will do our best and create the best conditions for the personal growth of each teammate.

HWYD: Does the family business affect your main job? In what way?

Maria-Victoria: I can tell you more - it does, but it has an extremely positive effect! Thanks to the first three months of working with buyers at the beginning of my own business as an account manager, I understand how they think, understand what is important to them for their bays, feel all their needs, know their psychology... This is a great skill when working in an affiliate program. At the moment, I work as a PR specialist for Makeberry, and the most important thing for a PR specialist and marketer is to understand your target audience well and know their needs perfectly. And I'm glad that I have the opportunity to develop both in organizing the processes of building my own business, which is focused on the bays, and at the same time grow in a completely different direction with the company I represent as a PR specialist. As for me, this is a perfect match of two opposite, but extremely necessary, sectors of our industry.

HWYD: What are your plans for the future with Yura?

Maria-Victoria: We have ambitious plans for the future. But our main plan is to strengthen our relationship, continue to develop ourselves as individuals, and at the same time become, as they say, a part of society. We are already close to this step - we are planning to get married in the summer, so this is another project of ours - creating a family. I'm sure our experience in business communication will be useful here too. ☺️