Today I have someone who is extremely focused, motivated, independent blockchain, Fintech and data-driven trading professional with 18 years experience in the field, former c-suite exec of publicly traded processing company.
Alexander Randarevich who is having over 20 years of experience in FinTech, Trade Finance and cryptography, while being a CTO of a publicly traded company, he know first hand how important it is to build and continuously perfect technologies to combat ever evolving fraud, provide our clients with powerful risk mitigation tools, and constantly improving our industry-leading intelligent traffic delivery system based on reinforced machine learning.
So lets start with the questions on how he started Ucliq and why he got into entrepreneurial space.
First of all thanks a lot Alex for accepting my interview proposal. I and my readers are very pretty glad to have you . Please tell us about yourself and your educational background.
Hello, Jitendra. I am glad to have this interview as an opportunity to to introduce your readers to important aspects of being involved in the performance marketing industry, risk, challenges and solutions.
My name is Alex Rand, I am 43 years old. I have a masters degree in Computer Systems Engineering and also studied Business Administration. I have over 20 years of experience in fields of Financial Technology and Payment Processing, Security, Trade Finance, Big Data. Before joining Ucliq I have been an entrepreneur for many years, launched several startups, and been a director of an American publicly-traded company. I took my knowledge and experience into the Performance Marketing field to build a most advanced cloud service for affiliate networks, advertisers, arbitrage teams solving common industry problems with the next generation of Fraud detection and prevention, Data analysis, AI-based traffic routing.
What are your favorite social media tools ? Which tools do you prefer to use to increase user engagement?
While we are not focusing directly on the end-user engagement as a product of our activity, we are working closely with our business customers, who are interacting with the users of social networks, platforms, and thus we have a good understanding of what really works in performance marketing from the social media point of view. The main social media platforms are:
Email marketing - still a very strong media to reach many people with your offer, despite multiple setbacks over last few year and increasing technical challenges, which accidentally Ucliq also offers to help
Social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube are becoming increasingly more difficult to work with, requiring constant strategy adoption in a face of constant ban threat, but still provide with ample traffic acquisition opportunity, through quick campaigning
Attribution and Tracking tools - while we also use external tools like Google Analytics for our own websites, for performance marketing we utilize a very rich toolset offered by Ucliq, allowing to set up different campaigns, attribute hits and conversions to multiple traffic sources and referrer sites, analyze wide variety of statistical parameters and build predictive models.
Can you tell me about Ucliq and top features about your product?
We focused on building UCLIQ as an integrated Software-as-a-Service cloud platform offering a full set of solutions to our keys customers, who are Partner and Affiliate networks, CPA networks and Traffic Arbitrage teams, Advertisers and Offer marketplaces.
The key problems we are solving are:
- High levels of fraudulent traffic, including botnet traffic, motivated traffic
- Significant loss of traffic sent to offers with already filled caps
- Inefficient performance analysis and optimization tools, including lack of availability of detailed historical data and drill-down investigation tools
- Lack of efficient traffic delivery systems with algorithmic optimization, leading to a lot of manual market funnels and routing optimization and high costs related to large staff employment
UCLIQ.com solves it with its integrated Software-as-a-Service solution that incorporates:
Efficient tracking and attribution system
Fraud detection and prevention toolkit
AI-driven smartlinks based on machine learning for optimal delivery
Granular historical data storage and analytics tools for KPI analysis
Data drill-down and investigation tools for every impression, click and conversion
White-label solutions enabling to kick-start your affiliate marketing business in a short period of time
The keys features we are offering are:
- AI-based traffic routing and delivery
- Outstanding fraud detection and prevention
- High performance and availability
- Business intelligence and kpi analytics suite
- Role-based security and complete audit trail
- Unlimited historical data access
- Complete crm and email marketing suite
- Integrated multi-domain proxy management suite
- Integration api
How the idea of entrepreneurship came into your mind. Did your family support you for this?
I have been involved with startups and early growth companies most of my professional career and founded several startups myself, so it came very naturally to me. While I have been working in a corporate environment as a C-suite executive for many years, I am more at home with the hustle and bustle environment of a startup and early company rather than board meetings and endless bureaucracy of large corporations. I am not even talking about the speed of innovation, you will never get to build what you believe is a next stage thing at a big company.
What kind of tools do you use for competitor analysis ?
Well, we believe that competition is a great thing. When you have one or two dominant players that captured most of the market share you get lack of innovation, stagnation of technology, uncompetitive pricing. So we welcome competition. Thus said, we strive to be always aware of trends in our industry and solutions other market players are offering. It is achieved through industry events participation, consulting our partners and of course being subscribed to all our competitors' newsletters 🙂
Do You Have Any Experience With Media Buying?
Yes, absolutely. Media buying is, in essence, a traffic arbitration. You are buying a bulk of impressions and clicks and try to convert them into leads and sales. It can be a very risky business if you are buying low quality traffic while having no adequate analytic tools to detect bot traffic, low quality traffic, traffic from unsuitable geos, etc. We help our customers to maximize their monetization of purchased traffic and make timely decisions about its profitability.
What email management tool should you use?
We are big believers in email marketing, but we understand challenges that arise every year. Having big experience with email marketing ourselves we came to the conclusion that the best email mass-marketing solution is the solution that we need to manage. Therefore we use our own email marketing platform to deliver email campaigns for our customers and ourselves. Remember, we are talking about overcoming challenges like IP blacklisting and greylisting, deliverability issues, routing and attribution issues. Few if any commercial email marketing companies will effectively help you with that. But we do.
What Are Some Good Business Books to Read?
I personally read a lot of books every year, mostly technical or educational in the areas of my professional interest. For someone who is only considering starting a side hustle alongside their daily job, going with a classic like R.Kiyosaki "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" will do no harm. If you are curious to learn how many everyday things work in our economy you won't be wrong with "Undercover Economist" by Tim Harford. Also, "Freakonomics" by Levitt and Dubner will be educational and entertaining.
What was your first affiliate marketing success?
While I haven't been much of a professional marketer myself, instead being focused on building technology and business, I had various successful experiences in early 2010-ties with ClickBank and similar platforms. My partners and colleagues in Ucliq have vast experience and success with email marketing, social media marketing, and arbitration.
Favorite and Least Favorite Thing About Affiliate Marketing?
I like the opportunity Affiliate marketing brings, it's challenges and opportunities to innovate and improve. It's a dynamic, living industry, constantly evolving and rapidly growing. I like people in the industry, mostly young, energetic, and often non-conventional. This differs from very stale industries like Banking or Trade Finance.
The least favorite thing is probably a bit of social stigma this industry has in the eyes of people not educated well about the subject. They may tend to compare it to different financial schemes, despite the fact that even the largest brands are starting to use Affiliate marketing more and more in their promotions and marketing. And Amazon, the biggest retailer on the planet, is powered by affiliate marketing. This is ironic, isn't it?
What blogs do you read in Affiliates? Tell me about an article you recently read that stuck out to you.
I tend to be subscribed to numerous sources and hashtags in Twitter and scroll for the interesting content there from time to time. The latest article I can recall that made a big impression on me was one about Taboola going public via the Spac reverse merger. Amazing technology and its application. Huge market valuation. I am a big believer in the content marketing industry.
What are the Secrets of Affiliate Marketing and are you associated with any kind of affiliate?
I think the secret there is like in any other business - you need to know what you are doing, once you know what you are doing - do more of it, make less mistakes. And to get there you mostly need experience. Affiliate marketing can be a very lucrative business, there are many examples. Industry is growing rapidly and will soon be a dominant way of marketing and selling on the internet. You need to be aware of ever changing trends, have an adequate technological platform, be capable of delivering, analyzing, evaluating your campaigns, traffic and offers or smartlinks you are using. We at UCLIQ stand by to help aspiring entrepreneurs to become successful performance marketers and existing businesses - to improve their KPI, bottom line, reduce costs, and gain advantage over incumbent competitors.
Thank you for a chance to address your reader, wish them much success. Let the force be with you.
Quick Links:
