The Biggest Mistake Companies Make with AI | David Harris and Vlad Bondarenko

Surya: Let's talk about AI for a moment. I mean, it's easy to build a product. Maybe I can build a product with Claude. I'm more excited of AI and how to use it. Try not to use this kind of buzz word because now it's in my head. AI, from all the perspective I would like to use. At the stage it's going to take over. No. Will work with AI. The iGaming industry is created by relationships with people.

So, if you're going to come in and tell them a robot, they probably won't do business with you. Surya: Affiliate management platforms as a space. Where do you think the space is going? Vlad: A system like ours is not only tracking, but more. Surya: Behind every license is a person betting on themselves. At My Gaming License, real people carry your application through. From jurisdiction to bank to launch, we do the work so you don't have to. 300 plus clients.

A perfect approval record. My Gaming License, your licensing partner. Surya: On the product discussion. Another thing comes to mind. Do you ever take features ideas from affiliate platforms from outside iGaming? Vlad: Yes. Because iGaming as we know is not the well updated industry like there are other industries. SaaS tech, from the Silicon, from other areas where they are much more advanced and up to date.

I think iGaming is like few years behind in all the sense in this right. Surya: So can you tell me something that you have taken from outside that is being used and loved by your users? Vlad: Yes. The easiest example is crypto industry. From OKX, I can call it, whatever. I don't know. It's from the crypto industry, from stock in crypto market. They have this all sub accounts. That's where the idea came from as well.

How to build, we wanted to group kind of, company level we are calling. Right now we are not using the word sub account because we have sub affiliation. So it's kind of tricky right now about the standardization how everything is called. Standardization, yes, about the standardization and jargon about the industry. In this industry is completely different topic.

But generally we are having this company level, we wanted to build something that will help us to understand that these accounts belong to one and the same company, I mean affiliate company. But at the very beginning we didn't know how it should look like, what kind of solution it should look like. Surya: All right. Vlad: And crypto industry came for help kind of.

And a lot of different, they have like sub accounts where you can open another account kind of, I guess it's stick to the line with the general master account and all the stuff. This is just one example and another note, plenty of stuff, ideas or small ideas. I have taken also from the gaming industry. There is also affiliates tracking solution and they are very advanced. From time to time I still very happy. Even I think is very. Forex as well.

But again, I like to use those industries who are more advanced, more kind of efficient or providing more up-to-date solutions. And I think these are nowadays just three of them. Financial, finance, basically, crypto and gaming. Not iGaming but games like these old shops and all the stuff. And yes, there are plenty of and I think this is the right way of building the product. Surya: Yeah. Vlad: There are three points that we should mention when you are building the product.

First of all you need to have the proper chair. So you need to know what is the main pain. We have our chairs and not only one or heads whatever. Then another, you need to get some ideas also from any other industry. It's whatever you wish. And the last, you need the team who is creating enough, who is passionate enough and who has the spark in the eyes.

I think these three things are the most important for start to build the product when it comes to the future of the product. This is another kind and three points. But at this stage, yes, these are the most. Surya: Very interesting. Yeah, I think I have a product lesson now. I can build a product myself. Vlad: Yes. Surya: Make it 52. Vlad: Yeah. 52, not affiliate platform. Seems like you've got them, you know already the good one.

And this 51 platform just affiliate tracking solution, there are kind of tools on top of it, for example like data aggregator like BI tools, I don't know, only tracking tools like which are link wrapper. Surya: This reminds me of Refy the other day I saw the announcement of Refy. So this is one for you again, and the human touch. Dave: It's another point. Why we are. No, not from financial also from crypto, yeah. Surya: What does it actually mean?

Like I know I saw the announcement I was like this is market good. Dave: Yes, this, another point. From where we have started, of the building the habit of building something in a different approach and to try to get this feeling of you are home. You open the app, you open your Chrome, you are logged in and you are feeling this kind of I'm home. Refy is awareness of the system. It's still kind of raising, growing with the system.

I'm not calling it as a mascot, I'm not calling it AI, whoever whatever. Sometimes it's overload. It's overloaded for it, you know. Just some like tenderness of the system. Surya: Awareness is nice. I like. Dave: It's awareness of the system really. We kind of want to leverage a little bit. Again, sure it was a marketing side as well, but to give a little bit of a nicer softer touch rather than I'm a robot looking at data.

Surya: But as Vlad said, there's much more what we want to build from Refy. So at this stage. Dave: So what does it do actually. Surya: Right, right now? Dave: It's simply just kind of I guess iconography at this stage. But it just kind of makes it a little bit nicer. Surya: Is it like a chat like a. Dave: No, it's not at this stage. No, now at this stage it's just iconography or just like picture on the empty state in the system.

What we are, again why I started, it's growing with the system. These systems, B2B SaaS systems in affiliate marketing are very cold. We just want to make them a little bit warmer than they are. Surya: Will we see Refy at B2B iGaming conferences maybe? Dave: Maybe, maybe I will be as a Refy in the costume of Refy, who knows.

Dave: So yeah, just to add a very short bit on what Vlad's saying, we have a lot to still to give on Refy but the idea was again to give this warmer touch, to give this kind of idea to say as you're looking around the system it's not going to blare at you and say error error error, it'll be like oh you know nothing was found. Stickers, it's nice. Highlight videos. We're going to probably do tutorials with it and it will basically just walk you through the system.

Some people compare it to almost Clippy back in the day for Microsoft Word, but it's not that. We want to be something different at this stage. It may be similar, but we are going to be leveraging that off into the future. Again, just we wanted to add the face of the system. Surya: Okay. Exactly. Vlad: All other systems are faceless. ReferOn the only one who is with a face, which is with a face, that's it. Surya: I like the passion in which you are saying things. And I think.

Vlad: Don't start with passion. Surya: I can feel it in the several years you know in the way you're saying it and I think this is really beautiful in its sense right because without passion things are just lifeless. Vlad: Fully agree, that's why when I onboard someone, Dave is always telling you are not making interview, I don't want to make interview with people. I just want to see this spark in the eyes. If it will be enough for me to see in 30 seconds, fine.

This is green light for this guy. He's responsible for like making interview like to the operations. Yeah. I just come to the interview with a guy with a girl whoever it is, with your imagination. Dave: Look in the eye. Looking in the eye. Vlad: Yeah. Dave: Hang up. Where is the passion? Surya: Done? Dave: That's nice. That's nice. Surya: It's really good to chat about product with you guys.

But I think, you know, I have some other things to go on and the first thing that comes to mind is the management buyout, right? So recently I've seen the news that there's the management buyout happened at ReferOn. So what does it actually mean in terms of how it changes things for your clients, partners and stakeholders? Dave: So we'll take that chronologically. So with our clients, there should be no changes.

We are expecting our day-to-day and our support and everything else to continue as if they've been seeing for some time. This, shall we say, announcement just makes things more official from our initial investor to now something more individual. And we then have full control now of our roadmap, our resources and how we develop further.

And we want to really carve out into the market rather than maybe they had some ideas, we had another and maybe there was some disagreements, but now we are kind of charging through with the support, the brand, the portfolio as it's growing into new green grass as they say. Stakeholders would be now our own with no one else. And yeah, and we keep going as we have been for some time.

Just we've now made it official as a separate thing where we've been trying for so long to be our own thing. Surya: Title changed. Dave: Yeah. Structure changed. Responsibilities same. Vlad: Same. And passion is the same. Surya: Suits. Suits. Dave: Yeah. Maybe next time. Surya: Cool. You know, there's some allegations as well that you may be tracking player activity and passing on to your parent company previously. What do you have to say about those? Dave: No.

I would say those insinuations don't have any backing. I had full control of all clients, all data, all access. I made sure that all access was complete and fair for those who needed it. Data, affiliate information, player information. Like I said earlier, player information doesn't spread. It's all anonymous. Vlad: It's anonymous. It's anonymous player. Even for the data comes in is just ID. You don't know the individual player.

Dave: If it's affiliate data information and it's an affiliate manager sharing with another affiliate manager because there's thousands of groups out there, that's not something I can control. But if it fell within ReferOn's gaze so to speak, I feel like I'm Sauron here, if it fell within my gaze it's not going to be shared. If it was shared between affiliate managers, that's not something I can do and that's maybe where the rumors came from.

Surya: Let's talk about AI for a moment. It's the elephant in the room. Vlad: It's your favorite topic. Surya: It's the elephant in the room in the sense, you know. Vlad, do you feel scared sometimes that. Vlad: No, I'm not. Surya: Especially, you know, with AI, I mean, it's easy to build a product, maybe I can build a product with Claude, you know.

Vlad: No, it's. You need to coordinate and to be able to coordinate you still need to sit in this proper chair and to know what to build. Surya: What is this chair that you talk about? Like in the last. Vlad: All the time, this is the like affiliate manager chair, financial, you know, you should ask proper question. You should use proper prompt to be able to build at least something.

And again, you can build sites, you can build quite nice app, you know, but to build such extraordinary huge and extraordinary products at one go, maybe in some future it will be possible but not now. There are a lot of different modules that can be built separately in some way, but to be able to get them working through one proper infrastructure layer and talking to each other, it's something that needs some coordination from people, from human, and for this we need team.

Obviously a lot of things are done already with Claude inside our system, inside our platform. Obviously we are also working on this like by default for scaling AI, some on AI stuff, you know. Right now we are building kind of more automated way of creating the tracking links. Because now again, there were a big list of tasks what we can give to AI, we would need to build each agent for each individual task.

One of the most important tasks and most frequently used cases is media item creation, tracking link creation. If we can make more efficient, I'm not even speaking right now about AI, more automated way and more easier way, more quicker way of making like tens of media items by sending some CSV file and like please create tracking links for me with deal with whatever it is and I just need to put on the site, fine, that's the task we need to accomplish. If it will be AI, fine.

If it will be a fully automated way, fine. But a lot of things are done with AI right now, a lot of things with the whole QA stuff, making the use cases for testing purposes. A lot of stuff. And I like where we are moving because I currently with our CEO Alex we have discussed a lot of things but the most frequent thing we have discussed, how not to take more people into the team headcount. How not to. More people, more complex, you know.

And now I think it's not maybe much easier but at least at some point easier than it was before when we would need like even even from my side, yes, even the big tech we see from the cutting the developers. Exactly. Even from my side now as a product, I can build interactive examples, drafts. Surya: Do you already like build those prototypes before it goes? Vlad: Of course. Of course. Prototypes, everything.

We are now working on our new website that we will build and previously I would need to use sorry napkins for this. Now I can use finally the proper way of prototyping, you know, thanks to Claude. This is only from my side and imagine we have developers who are much more advanced in using this. So yes, I'm not afraid of AI. I'm more excited of AI and how to use it. But I try not to use this kind of buzzword because now it's in my head.

AI, AI, from all the perspective, I would like to use automation, optimization and making life easier. That's it. That's what we are. Nothing changed from the very beginning when we have started ReferOn. Dave: Just to add to Vlad's point, I want to take just a couple of points. AI again is everywhere. It's useful for code. It's useful for QA. But if I just come to your root point where you said where you need a prompt or you need these in silo to work together.

This is where AI is using existing examples. For you to build a prompt, you need to have the chair or the hat so to speak to understand how everything works together. But in doing so, you need, and this is what I kind of look and take from AI, is you need the authenticity of someone you're going to do a relationship with. You can create AI, you can create AI, but if you're going to be talking to robots all the day, the iGaming industry is created by relationships with people.

Absolutely. So, if you're going to come in and tell them a robot, they probably won't do business with you. Yeah. So it is important for me to understand if AI is here to help in many cases in the business but at the stage it's going to take over. No. Will work with AI, yes, to understand and to speed up processes and stuff like that, totally.

But there is still this authenticity which people still crave to speak to a person to understand how it's built, why it's built, the mantra behind it. And that's where I come in I guess on my side to say, we still haven't, at least on my teams, we haven't embraced AI much as you have because we still have this relationship we build with the people, how we talk to them, how we support people's questions.

If any of you've gone around a conference, the questions that people have can be anything and everywhere. So to understand of how to build prompts and AI on that, that's going to be very hard to do. You can make chat bots, but again, we're here to help. We're here to be authentic and build a product that works for the people of the industry. Surya: Yeah, makes sense. And if you look at the operator side for a moment, let's say I'm a new crypto casino.

Everyone wants to, every bro wants to start a new crypto casino today, right? So let's say I started my own crypto casino. I'm an operator. What are the things that are non-negotiable for me as an operator, new operator, to make sure or to demand from an affiliate platform this year, next year, coming years? Dave: Most crypto casinos just need a basic working platform at this stage because they're startups. They don't generally come in with I need this long list of stuff.

They probably also don't know how long they're going to last either as another thing. So they just need the basic core principles at this point for most affiliate crypto casinos, which is. Surya: How do they make the decision? We have 51 platforms. So they also have to make the decision on which platform they're using from the data standpoint as well. Dave: Many of them are good with fiat, non-good with non-fiat. It's done depending on different countries.

Once they made that decision, then they have to then make decision on affiliate platforms. First and foremost, it's always cost which we are fairly. Surya: So are you saying it mostly depends on the platform they choose? Dave: No, it varies. The PAM system is part of the decision cycle. And then they have to make a decision on the affiliate platform of which we are of some description as we mentioned before.

And again, most of the cases crypto casino just needs the basics which is they need to track and need to understand affiliates, how do they get their links and how to set deals. Outside of that, just to use your example, I wouldn't say crypto casinos have a huge list of demands. Most of the platforms in the market can probably just do what they can. So it's literally a price point for them and that's it. Not I need this complex functionality, I need this.

That's more for the people who have been in the iGaming for some time, know that they work with this particular insertion order, know that like how this works. So it's actually kind of the. Surya: Okay, so let's flip it. Let's say there's a tier one operator, live in many many markets, and they have been using legacy affiliate platform for many number of years. Do you have such kind of.

Dave: Yeah, so we're actually going through, I can't say the name at the moment, but we are going through some kind of long process with larger legacy clients. Vlad: Painful. I would say. Dave: Not painful. It's to understand what they need and what they do on a daily basis. Vlad: Painful. Painful. Dave: I wouldn't say painful migration. I would start with understanding what they need. Vlad: Okay. And they need, sorry Dave, they need something that they already get used to.

We are coming to the first point when we have started. And it's very hard to convince such big kind of whales of course that some things can be done in a different way and maybe you try this new way and this new way is really hard for them to try because they have such a long list of stakeholders and decision makers.

That's why I told that it's at some point painful for me as a product because when I see some lists that they are requesting I'm like, you know, we know and we know through this already. Dave: Yeah. Yeah. We know exactly which operator they're coming, sorry, which program they're coming from by the requests that they send in because we know the market fairly well.

Vlad: And I would like to say to you Dave because thank you because you are making a huge work here by trying to convince that side. Dave: Oh yeah, that's the hard work. Vlad: That's the hard work. And I really grateful for this. Dave: It's tough. Yeah. It's because it's really tough. I'm not. Why should I listen, can be their in their mind, if not you? They are also having their own C-level. They also have their own vision, deadlines.

They are all of them are thousand of years in this industry and everyone knows that this should work like this. Vlad: And each time when I hear from someone that I'm 10 years in this industry, okay, I'm like this is a red light already. This is a small but red light. If you are always telling that you are very long in this industry, doesn't mean anything. You can get used to some workflows that will not work in the new company. Don't try to push those workflows.

Try to understand first that how things are done in a new company. I saw this several times, like many many times because I'm already also very long in this industry. Surya: So yeah. Vlad: No. Yeah. Dave: It's a case of understanding what they need, understanding as I kind of came to before, almost when we did the early stages of what's the nice to haves, what's the must haves and maybe we can persuade in a way that it's phased. To say right, I know what you really need.

Maybe this is hot priority. Let's make sure we get this in. When are you live again? Okay, let's make sure that's ready and then we'll look at the next phases and we roll out. Is that how you're doing it? Have you thought about maybe doing it this way? So, we do calls with them. We show them demos. So, yeah, that's kind of sometimes the life cycle of a sale for the larger whales as we'll use this expression is long. Surya: How long? Dave: Varies. Six months sometimes.

Vlad: Maybe years. Surya: What? Dave: I just want to touch on a point that convincing the cycle has a number of variables. You mentioned migrations. Once you've got past that convincing stage, a migration is fairly straightforward. Surya: Yeah, I think that's the hardest part because you know they might be scared of the long process and then not change their legacy system.

Dave: I would say the more pain, because we've done a number of migrations now, the biggest case is the persuasion right. Surya: Okay. Dave: Who does that? It's a mixture of people. We have Vlad, we have actually. Vlad: I with my kind of passion, you know, Dave is some operation and this more I would say democratic way. Be careful of how you say. Yeah, democratic way, British. British charm, we can say it charm.

We have sales and each co. We have our account managers also being involved. We all have our connections and how we do our business. Dave: Yeah. And how we kind of get those sales over. Again, sometimes this takes time. But what I want to focus on is the migration sector. So once you've done that persuasion technique, we know again, we've done migrations from a number of platforms. We know how they work. So we literally can just say, okay, this is what I need.

What's your timeline? Blah blah blah blah. Staging. We do demo. We do training in cases. We make sure the platform's updated. And I'm not going to say it's painless, but we try to reduce the pain points as much as we can because now we're used to a number of those things. That is still dependent on communication between them internally, us and them, them and the affiliates. So it's a big soup.

Vlad: And each time when we are sitting on some demo or some discussion panel with our clients, future clients, and they are like, when they or me or someone is trying to convince, some things can be done in different way, it can be migration whatever, yes, and they are telling just one word like hmm, I'm like nice, we get to this point that they are thinking that we are not stupid and we know what we are building, you know, and we are trying to help and we are here just to have our own vision but this vision doesn't contradict with what you wish, that's it.

And when this hmm you're like, I'm very happy. Surya: Do you focus on a couple of things in this persuasion area? Dave: This comes from the discovery, right? Yes. So first to understand exactly, it's all about application.

If you can understand if this senior, this head of affiliates, whatever, and what they're doing today, first of all, was interested in moving, what is their current problems because they're clearly looking to move, whether it's cost, whether it's functionality, whatever.

You then drill down and you go, okay, and I say this and I say this to many clients to say after the demo here or whatever stage we're in, sometimes it fluctuates, is send me your list of what you do on a daily basis. And I will show you how to do that in ReferOn or in written form differently. Not always. Not always. But in some cases, in I would say understand the application of this equals this. It may have a different name, but it's the same.

Or this flow suddenly is no longer 10 clicks, but it's three clicks. And you may not think of it doing it that way, but that's how we do. So I always say present to me your daily tasks or your monthly tasks and I will show and focus on those things because as soon as it's relevant and applied to the client they're more likely to understand. I'm not going to go to a head of affiliates and start talking about payments flow. When they're like hmm and you've lost them.

You need to showcase exactly what they are focused on because then they are more aware and more. Vlad: Hesitant, well. Surya: Yeah, he does. I'm like, huh? Dave: Can you tell it loudly? Uh, so that's what our aim is. Surya: Yeah. Cool. So, let's zoom out a little bit and we can look at the affiliate management platforms as a space. Where do you think the space is going in iGaming? Of course. Vlad: You want to go? Go. Dave: No. No.

Vlad: We will put, this is very, this is very tricky topic because I think. Dave: We will put that in the BTS. Vlad: Yeah. Yeah. Nowadays the industry is moving towards making more signals in the system, alerting, KPI prediction, more predictive, you know, in that way. So trying to build more valuable, more focusing on like cohort reports because like several years ago no one knew what does it mean like a cohort report, you know.

Now they are trying to calculate, to estimate, you know. And the system like ours is not only tracking focused anymore but more likely need to go into that direction to alerting direction, I would say. Helping people to understand what is this number about, what needs to be done. I'm not speaking about the suggestions, I'm speaking just like notification, alerting, like giving more detailed information, not like here is the data. Budgeting, yes, this is all this stuff.

Again, this is I just see the tendency, I'm not speaking that this is the exact direction where we are going to move. This from just one side from the technical point of view and from the perspective what Dave just told that this industry focused on the relationships building, exactly. But I'm sure that this relationships building is not proper one. I will explain. Surface level. They are like on the surface. They are not deep enough. Why not deep enough?

Because affiliate manager is lost in daily routines. They are lost in data, lost in not decision making but trying to get this fire down, you know.

And what I'm having in mind and we have discussed with Dave long time ago as well and all the time with our CEO, I have a dream, maybe it's a dream or direction where ReferOn should move, but to build completely autonomous system, affiliate program kind of, yes, which is working without the proper affiliate manager in our default vision. Built by agents and all the kind of routine tasks are fully automated.

And affiliates are not wasting time of telling affiliate manager oh please send me the comparison table why my click IDs are not triggered for CPA or send me the link or where is my invoice. Whether all this kind of stuff, yes, they are focused mostly on building the relationships. And the proper affiliate manager is not getting drilled by this routine task but they are moving into the new direction.

They are getting more focused on the relationships on the U level, on the more deeper level. That's what we. I'm not telling we are trying to build, yes, we are trying to get to this kind of step, you know. And I see this direction very very careful, I would say, because it's tough. The industry is not fully ready because again everything is based on relationships on the I know you, you know me. If I lost a job, I know where to go. It's completely different.

It's very careful. We need to be very careful providing this automation. Because we can get to that problem where they would not love to speak to the agents anymore. They need human and I would like to leave the human but to provide them more kind of visionary and more strategy focus rather than on just sending invoices, checking some stats or sending the affiliate tracking links to an affiliate. That's the direction I see. I would like that the industry will move.

Using AI for what it is as well as. Call it AI. Okay. Automation I would say. Surya: Cool. So let's end on that note. It's been a pleasure to have you both and talk about affiliate management platforms as well as how to build a product as well as where the industry is going, where the space is going. It's very passionate discussion. So, thank you very much for joining me. Vlad: Thank you for inviting. Dave: Thank you. Surya: Cool. So, that's it guys.

Thank you so much for watching this episode. Do share your thoughts in the comments below as well as follow Vlad and David on LinkedIn. Do check out their updates. And if you have anything else to ask, do hit me up as well. Thank you for watching.