"Do something today to bring you closer to your goal" with Monica Lent

Monica Lent is a founder and software engineer with more than a decade of experience. Most recently, she spent five years as the frontend engineering lead at a high-growth fintech startup as it scaled from 80 to over 1,500 people. She has spoken at leading technical conferences on topics like software architecture and design systems. Today her focus is building and growing her affiliate analytics software company, Affilimate. 

Can you tell our readers about your background?

I started coding at a really young age, so it’s no surprise I ended up working as a software engineer.

But it didn’t start out as my passion or the thing I wanted to do as a full-time job. 

Instead, I majored in classical languages and philosophy. But after years of learning Latin and Ancient Greek, the idea of going to graduate school (or law school) became less and less appealing.

After graduation, my job as a student developer turned into my full-time job and I began my professional career in software development. I spent the following years working in academia and startups before leaving to start my own company, which is my main focus today.

What inspired you to start your business? 

About seven years ago, I moved to Leipzig, Germany without ever having heard of the city before. 

Based on my experiences, I created a travel website that eventually grew to over 100,000 monthly sessions and eclipsed the monthly salary I had at my first startup job.

The main way the website makes money is through affiliate marketing.

But as a software engineer, I found it frustrating that most of the tools available to optimize my conversion rate and revenue were tailored for eCommerce sites.

I also realized that a ton of other people was struggling with the same kinds of tracking and analytics I wanted to collect, and trying to solve the issue by hobbling together ill-suited tools and spreadsheets.

So in a way, I built Affilimate to solve that problem for myself and for others.

Where is your business based?

We’re based in Berlin, Germany.

How did you start your business? What were the first steps you took?

The first steps were doing customer development interviews and building a prototype. Luckily, since I had my own website, it was easy to test and iterate on early versions of the software before getting outside users on board. The first users of our product discovered us through a waitlist on Facebook.

What has been the most effective way of raising awareness for your business?

Definitely finding people who are passionate about the problem our product is solving who also love sharing recommendations with other people.

Our word-of-mouth is particularly strong in certain communities, and most people who sign up came through a personal recommendation.

What have been your biggest challenges and how did you overcome them?

Easily the biggest challenge is starting without an existing audience in our target market.

As a tech speaker and someone who blogs about tech, I have a decent network within the software development community. It would’ve been a lot easier to build a product for developers, but that just wasn’t a space I felt passionate about.

I’ve solved this primarily through cold outreach and trying to offer people some kind of value before asking them for anything. Our goal is really to help people earn more money as website owners themselves, so people are pretty receptive to getting help with that.

How do you stay focused?

I use a combination of a color-coded Google Calendar and the app Focus Keeper to break my work into chunks. The calendar helps me visualize how much time I spend on different projects during the week, and the app helps me set a goal for how many “focus sessions” I can complete in a day. 

That said, I still struggle sometimes! For example, I recently blocked Twitter on my computer and removed it from my phone so I wouldn’t be tempted to waste time on it. It is really important for me to balance my consumption vs. creation ratio.

How do you differentiate your business from the competition?

Our most direct competition is targeting enterprise-level media companies, whereas Affilimate is designed to be used by individual affiliate marketers and agencies. We make features accessible to individual website owners that would otherwise cost hundreds of dollars per month and require a business intelligence analyst to operate.

Today there is no 1:1 competitor for both our feature set and target market, but that could certainly change.

What has been your most effective marketing strategy to grow your business?

As I mentioned earlier, our best channel is really word-of-mouth which tends to happen in Facebook Groups.

People come to Facebook Groups, ask a question, and someone who uses our product is able to recommend how our product would solve that problem.

It’s more effective than direct advertising because a recommendation from a happy customer is more credible than us talking about how great we are.

What's your best piece of advice for aspiring and new entrepreneurs?

Do something today to bring you closer to your goal. 

What I’ve realized is that so much of what I’m able to do is the result of a massive accumulation of a small amount of past effort. Those individual efforts all culminate in momentum for something bigger. 

As long as you do something today, and then again tomorrow, to begin and continue growing your business, you will see success. The most important thing is being consistent and persistent.

What's your favorite app, blog, and book? Why? 

App: Honestly I try to stay away from my phone most of the day, so the app I use the most is Focus Keeper! I like it because it’s a quantitative way to see how much productive time I’ve actually spent during the week.

Blog: It’s more of a newsletter/case study combo, but one of the few places where I look forward to reading new content is Marketing Examples. What I love is that there’s zero fluff. The presentation of the content is as interesting as the content itself.

Book: These days I read mostly non-fiction books on product development and marketing, so my favorite recent book was probably Obviously Awesome by April Dunford. It’s a really practical step-by-step process for thinking about how to position your product.

What's your favorite business tool or resource? Why?

If I’m not writing, coding, or answering emails, I probably spend most of my time in Ahrefs. It’s an SEO tool that helps me do the research I need to grow organic traffic to my businesses. I love it because it strikes a good balance between providing access to a ton of data and being easy to navigate.

Who is your business role model? Why?

I’m not sure I’d use the word “role model” per se, but one book that influenced my thinking on managing both myself, teams, and an organization is High Output Management by Andy Grove. He did incredible things as the CEO at Intel and made the company the world’s leading producer of microprocessors and the 7th largest company. While he was leading Intel, the company’s market cap grew from $4 to $197 billion. 

I like his management style because he gives his team credit for success and accepts responsibility for failure. Very few people work that way.

How do you balance work and life?

The main thing I try to do is stop working at a reasonable time. If I’ve put in enough focus sessions during the day, I can feel good about stopping work and not try to cram more in over the course of the evening. I do work pretty much every day, including weekends, but I have enough ongoing projects that I can switch things up when I’m struggling with motivation. The key for me is working sane hours.

What’s your favorite way to decompress?

I like to do it the German way: meeting friends in a beer garden and enjoying the Summer weather. Berlin spends about half the year in a state of partial Winter so you have to make the most out of the sunshine.

Besides that, I love doing pilates. Or, I should say, I like the feeling I have after doing pilates. Doing it is actually quite miserable but I get a lot of mental clarity after the fact.

What do you have planned for the next six months? 

For Affilimate, we are evolving our understanding of our “ideal customer” and building and refining our features for them. This involves more customer development interviews, design, and UX changes, and continuing to connect with people who are passionate about the problem we’re solving (and want to tell their friends about us).

I’m also committing to publishing one article on our company blog every week, so I’m hoping to look back and be proud of creating a ton of quality content for our customers.

How can our readers connect with you?

If you’re a blogger or affiliate marketer, the best way to connect is contacting me through Affilimate. I talk with people running websites all the time about how to improve the revenue of their sites, regardless of whether they’re current customers.

If you’re in the tech industry or a fellow founder, either get in touch through my personal website (https://monicalent.com) or on Twitter (https://twitter.com/monicalent).

Lastly, I also run a weekly newsletter that teaches developers about blogging and SEO called Blogging for Devs. Replying to one of those emails is a direct line to my inbox.