VALENTYN GALCHUK. An amazing story of the importance of choosing a guy from the harsh 90s, which led to HEAD OF BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT MAKEBERRY AFFILIATES
Valentyn and I were introduced by Maria-Victoria at Sempro in Kyiv. He immediately struck me as a deep and sincere person at the same time - he made very subtle jokes and spoke so expertly about work, but not in clichéd phrases, but by sharing his own experience, and such a diverse one that it would be a crime not to share it in How Was Your Day.
If there were no etiquette, I would most likely interview Valentyn with my jaw open - there was so much in his life: dubious companies, the harsh 90s, and communication with which could have had a sad ending, and her majesty Fate, who gave him the person who helped him turn off the fragile path... And then - working as a security guard, a loader, and, in contrast, his own steps in affiliate marketing in solo, bringing 700$/day, which disappeared at the moment
And finally, the founding of MAKEBERRY AFFILIATES... I definitely recommend this interview for reading! There is a lot to learn here.
Childhood.
HWYD: Tell us about your childhood: where, in what family were you born?
Valentin: I was born in Konotop into an ordinary family. My mother is a nurse, and we had our own house there - even half of it - we shared it with a pensioner. At some point, she forgot to turn off the gas, and our house exploded. After this event, my mother went to the mayor for six months, trying to get us compensation in the form of an apartment, and eventually she succeeded - we were given an apartment, which, in fact, is where I lived before moving to Kyiv.
My mother divorced my father, and he later sued us for half of this apartment, barricaded it and locked the door. All this time, we did not communicate with him until I bought the apartment.
I had a stepfather. He worked as a driver all his life until he died. Now my mom lives in Ireland - she left the shelling after a year of war. Now she's almost married there, she's adjusted, she's doing well - she's finally traveling and seeing different European countries step by step.
HWYD: Describe your most vivid childhood memory
Valentin: If I think back to the earliest memories, perhaps my first memory is of Muscovy, the circus, bears riding a unicycle, and me in a scratchy sweater. And this memory is the most vivid because when I returned home later, I burned that sweater - you can imagine how much I hated it 🙂.
Youth
HWYD: Tell us about your youthful days. How did you spend your time in Konotop in the 90s?
Valentin: In the 90s, we had what we called a "brawler city. I grew up in dubious companies, mostly hanging out with wrestlers. It was my cover from the gypsies and from representatives of other neighborhoods, with whom I was constantly going to the mahacha. I can say right away that I am a completely different person now.
Much of the credit for my choosing the right path, and not ending up somewhere in "remote places" with rings on my fingers, goes to my now godfather, and then just a friend. I was 14, he was 16 - he was a nice, well-traveled guy with tattoos at the time, and I had a choice: either endless fights and arguments with the company, or hang out with my cousin in the company of girls, talk about something other than "neighborhood to neighborhood" topics and have fun, not aggressive. Of course, I chose the second option.
HWYD: And what about your studies - did you manage to attend school in such conditions?
Valentin: I did not study regularly, but I managed.) I studied on average, and I adhered to the position that I communicate normally with everyone, both outsiders and school coolies. This allowed me to feel comfortable at school, which also had its own laws among children of that time. But, let me remind you, I still had friends who were wrestlers, so I wasn't picked on 🙂.
In terms of subjects, I was good at everything except law, history and math. I didn't turn out to be a great mathematician, but my teacher saw potential in me, and I tried. I finished school with C's and went to college.
Students
HWYD: Tell us about your admission to the institute.
Valentin: I came to apply to KI Sumy State University (Konotop Institute of Sumy State University). I looked next to the guy who was filling out the application forms and saw that it said "Electronic Devices and Instruments". Okay, I'll have that too 🙂 And then, in fact, it turned out that there were 4 mathematicians, 2 physicists... And I realized that I was definitely in the wrong place, so a year later I left this direction and changed it to "Management of Organizations".
This story suited me better - to be honest, I didn't study anything, I didn't bring money to anyone, I could pass everything with logical thinking (well, except philosophy, ethics - everything that required terminology, of course) - I just described what processes should take place, what needed to be done, and, in principle, I passed my exams.
HWYD: Did you combine your studies with work?
Valentin: After the first year of studying, I found a job in Kyiv, so I quit full-time and came to the institute only to pass the exams. At first, I worked as a security guard on a two-in-two-out basis at construction sites. But I didn't stay in that job for long, because the 2/2 schedule simply doesn't give you a chance for a personal life - you get enough sleep the day after your shift, get ready for your next shift the next day, and I lived in Konotop and had to allow time to get to Kyiv and back by train.
Then there was the store - a sales assistant, and then there was setting up office equipment, installing Windows, flashing, changing the matrix, etc.
A little later, I opened my own service with an acquaintance. Everything was fine until my partner decided that it was his service and I was his subordinate. It's an "interesting" story, but the site was on my hosting, so I took it back. Most of the orders came from the site, and I consider this moment to be the first step of a kind of affiliate marketing. I had an acquaintance with his own service, and I gave him the leads that came to me from his own service via RevShare. This way, I earned several thousand hryvnias a month just on a liability. But back then, I didn't know what affiliate management was.
HWYD: Do you remember where you spent your first paycheck and what emotions you felt at the time?
Valentin: If I take the first one directly, it was actually when I was 13 years old. I got a job at a wholesale building materials base unloading trucks, where I worked for a week. I spent it on some kind of party, I don't even remember exactly what it was.
Career in arbitration
HWYD: How did you first learn about affiliate marketing and realize that this is the area you want to develop and build a career in?
Valentin: After Kyiv, I decided to temporarily move back home - let's just say I went through a black patch in my life that lasted almost a year. I broke up with my girlfriend, my business went under, my stepfather died of cancer, and I was completely overwhelmed. I came to Konotop, studied Manual QA to distract myself from my thoughts, and went to the gym to gain weight - I treated not only my soul but also my body. It paid off - in a year, my mental state recovered, so I returned to the capital and got a job as a PPC specialist at Svitsoft, where I was engaged in advertising in various areas. I gained previous experience on my own - I had an online sportswear store, and my partner at the time worked as an Inbound Calls specialist - receiving calls, communicating with customers, and handling logistics. So I knew how the mechanisms of working with PPC work and had practical experience.
HWYD: What was your first position and what were your responsibilities?
Valentin: I was engaged in Kyivmiskbud, in all the areas that were available, including the sale of parking lots, commercial premises, and, in fact, apartments. This gave me an understanding that there was a lot of money in marketing, because a lot of money was going through this Google Ads account, I was managing it myself, doing something unique every month, and I realized that I was starting to do a lot of work, but the company could no longer pay me for it. By the way, it was at this job that I met my future wife.
MAKEBERRY AFFILIATES
HWYD: How did you end up at MAKEBERRY AFFILIATES?
Valentin: When I decided to enter a stable story, I first went to buy into the Offer Leader FB team - my first steps in iGaming. But after six months, I realized that I was treading water, not growing or developing. And then I met the company that later opened Makeberry to the world as one of its manifestations, which we worked on creating side by side.
HWYD: How has your career developed at the company, and what are your current responsibilities?
Valentin: I have been with the company for more than 4 years now, I came to the position of Affiliate manager for my own products and was engaged in attracting partners to work with PPC and themes. I bought traffic and showed results. In fact, I was lucky that my then manager was promoted to the position of Head of Acquisition, so they saw the potential in me due to proactivity and efficiency, and made me a team leader.
At that time, I was buying more traffic than our in-house buying was buying! And now I'm paying attention - ten times more! Now in-house buying has grown by 30-40 times, so it makes me very happy, and I can afford to share the story of how it was in the beginning.
And then a full-scale war broke out. We were forced to reduce the volume of external purchases somewhat, we quickly sold the CIS products, and with the proceeds we created the RocketPlay project, which is currently ranked, as far as I know, in 2nd place behind the SoftSwiss platform in Australia. That's when we became big and definitely recognizable throughout the market.
HWYD: How did you decide to sell traffic?
Valentin: During the first months of the war, in between alarms and shelling, I worked as a canner - we made this decision to keep the company from sinking. And I must say, I was quite good at it. That's when we thought, why shouldn't we sell traffic if we can generate it...
I was offered to develop this area - even then it was unclear in what position and with what title. The budgets were floating, but "go for it, man! It took us about a year to get used to it, to get established, to sell traffic, and then the logical decision was to formalize the whole thing and create a brand. That's how MAKEBERRY came about!
HWYD: How many regular advertisers does MAKEBERRY AFFILIATES have now?
Valentin: We have about 30, maybe 40. These are the ones we work with adequately, who understand the value of our traffic. Sometimes things happen: sometimes products stop converting, sometimes our traffic doesn't match the products, sometimes there are seasonal drops, but the main point is that we don't have enough traffic to meet all the needs of all the advertisers we work with. Roughly speaking, we can easily sell 5 times more traffic with a team of business development and advertisers - we literally have a queue of ads for which we need to firstly fill their caps, and secondly, test them. That's why there is most likely not enough traffic to cover all the ankups (for example, we put 200-300 deposits on an ad, and he says "Let's have 1500"), and we could take them from someone, but they also want 1500, and we have to say "No, sorry, we will pour one and a half, but we are focused on the capacity that we can really pour on you". So I try to maneuver between all the factors: from payback to risks. It would seem logical to give everything to one advertiser, but at the same time, it could happen that the ad agency will simply collapse or close the geo - no one is safe from this. That's why diversification is extremely important in my work. Something converts better, something converts less, but we don't completely merge everything into one ad.
Currently, we specialize exclusively in tier-1, but we are forming a team for tier-3. Hopefully, we will gain a foothold there. We understand how to scale up there, we already understand some products that can handle these players properly (payments that do not drop every half hour). So we plan to expand to Africa and Asia.
On the innovative side, we will soon launch a system of pre-executions - analytical calculations based on various metrics of how much money we can bring to the partner. And based on these pre-decisions, we plan to negotiate based on specific numbers and expectations from both our side and the advertiser.
HWYD: MAKEBERRY AFFILIATES can often be found with various manifestations at conferences - stands, sponsorship, participation, raffles, etc. What is the main purpose of such activity, what do you personally invest in it as a brand?
Valentin: I'll draw an analogy with Coca-Cola - everyone knows about it, everyone drinks it, but this drink is constantly advertised around the world! In marketing, you should always be visible, because as fast as brands grow, they are forgotten if they fall out of the information field.
We also spread the message through PR that we have the best FB traffic on the market. We confirm and argue this in live conversations at events and conferences. And another 20 percent of our partners come to conferences because of recommendations, because the turnover rate in the market is high, we could drive traffic to a company from which employees left for other companies, and now representatives of their new employers are coming to us because they were recommended us as a quality assurer with whom they had previously dealt.
HWYD: What distinguishes MAKEBERRY AFFILIATES from other companies in the same field?
Valentin: We are always working on a win-win story, our FB traffic is 40 percent more expensive than the market average, but our players come and play for the long haul. This is not a story where you pay off in the first 2 weeks and then don't play anymore - no. We are talking about players who come for the sensations, deliberately to lose money. We are a direct advertiser of WinSpirit and RocketPlay casinos, we know how to work with them, what kind of traffic to drive there. As a conclusion, we don't buy bullshit for ourselves and neither do external advertisers.
In addition, we have our own analytics. At the beginning, we immediately stipulate with the advertiser that if we start cooperation not on the test cap, we will connect you to our analytics, where we see the activity of players, how traffic pays off, how it performs kpi, and how it lives on. This is in order to stop buyers, funnels, reconfigure something in time, etc.
HWYD: What are your future plans for MAKEBERRY AFFILIATES?
Valentin: I want to close my own gestalt - build a system that will work autonomously. Integrate all the new features - AI, make all the databases, and develop buying to the volumes we have planned with several large advertisers who want 10 million monthly traffic from us. And on the basis of 40-50 million/month turnover, we scaled up additional departments. That's how we eventually got our own YouTube production and SEO department. We would like to launch Tik-Tok, Twitter, Tg, but we don't have these tools yet, we're going for the classic tools: Google, FB, In-app, a little bit of SEO. So here, too, we would like to capture a little more markets and eventually make MAKEBERRY-2, MAKEBERRY-3... 🙂
Важливо
HWYD: And finally, what would you recommend to people who are just entering the field, as a person who once mastered affiliate marketing on their own?
Valentin: The most important thing is to fully understand what you are selling! Because if you don't understand all the subtleties, don't have a base of buying functionality, it will be difficult for you to sell this traffic. At the very least, you should know the acquisition cost of traffic, how it is generated, and what expectations products have - that is, what products want to get from it. This traffic has to play, and not for a month or two or three, but for six months to a year, so that investors of the products to which you sell this traffic receive their dividends.
The easiest way to get started in the industry without any experience is to become an affiliate of an affiliate program, join the industry, understand how teams and products work, and then choose something that resonates with you. No one took me by the hand at the time, I gained all the experience on my own, because one of the most important factors is to be sincerely interested. I used to watch courses after work, and now there are a lot of them, so choose, try, and don't be afraid.