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Gold [Exclusive Interview] Mike Schwalbach - founder of Advidi

iamattila

Active Member
I’ve known Mike for YEARS and when I was looking for interesting people to interview, I knew he was the right man to ask! WARNING: You won’t be disappointed! Guaranteed! Just like my previous interview, I give you ALL the goods, from A to Z on a man that to me is a legend in our industry. PLEASE Share this interview with friends, co-workers, relatives, help spread the word and the story that is…

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Mike Schwalbach’s nontraditional “rags to riches” story will inspire you to go beyond the numbers and look at what really matters if you want to be successful.

Where does the story of Mike begin?

On one hand, I’m a self-made man who has found success through hard work. I was born in Amsterdam and raised by my mother, a German-speaking Portuguese immigrant. She left my father who was an alcoholic when I was very young. We had practically no money, living in the Bijlmer area of Amsterdam – a place which is not considered to be very nice. Everything I’ve learned about entrepreneurship comes, in a way, from her. She was a real survivor.

It was tough, honestly, but it made me who I am. I learned to work hard from a young age and found my entrepreneurial spirit early. I was independent and always made my own money because I had no other choice. My parents didn’t have to give me anything, which was good. I used that energy to build a number of successful businesses over the years.

On the other hand, I’m an entrepreneur who has been active in our industry for quite some time. I was one of the first heavy users of the internet, and I’ve always looked for opportunities, which means I’ve been a part of many projects that people know… I was involved with the company that built most of the major Dutch search engines, such as Funda (which is still the biggest real estate site in the Netherlands), Autotrack.nl (which targets audiences that need to buy a car) and AskJolene. I went to some of the first shows in our industry, InterNEXT and Phoenix Forum back in the late nineties, where I started to build relationships which have lasted to this day.

Along with my business partner Iwert, who was one of the first super affiliates, I’m also the founder of a successful network: Advidi. Creating and growing a network was really an important development for me. It was about building a sustainable company in a market that was still very fragmented. I believed that there was room for a company that would approach the business in a more professional way. We are one of the key players when it comes to handling our clients professionally, and we stay ahead by treating our staff in the best possible way and expanding our company strategically, which in turn helps us gain market share and create opportunities for our staff. It’s a big challenge to make sure you keep ahead and keep moving out of your comfort zone, but the rewards are just as great.

Even though Iwert and I aren’t involved operationally any more – which wasn’t an easy decision, but I think the right one – we have installed a management layer that we’re very happy with. We’re still present in the office and provide strategic input.

If you guys don’t manage Advidi, what are you doing now then, aside smiling all the time and flying 1st class?


In the last year we have been focused on making our management stronger. We’ve guided them ourselves by organizing various sessions to discuss the business. We are still involved as the Advisory Board for Advidi, meaning we will get involved on all decisions that affect strategy or long-term commitments. A few times a year, we go to a separate location with the management to come up with new ideas and insights.

As far as what Iwert and I do with the rest of our time, I will tell you: we are investing in various companies in this industry, mostly in companies that have shown some traction. We are also helping companies that need Private Equity for growth or are seeking an exit. At this moment we’ve invested in a few advertisers, some big affiliates, technology companies in the tracking space and banner serving. On the affiliate side, we mainly invest in partners that can help grow Advidi. We help our clients with the connections we have in our network, such as social media accounts, tracking solutions, company setup and setup targeting with existing data.

We also put a lot of effort into staying in touch with the community. Of course we visit your blog, Attila ;) but the list also includes the STM forum and other well-known influencers. It’s important for us to gather as many perspectives as possible, so we take the time to read up on what they’re doing.

In 2017 we will focus more on helping our investments grow and creating synergy between the companies. On the personal side, we want to find new challenges in life and explore ways to give back to the world.

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And how did you and Iwert meet?

We actually met through our friend Ivo Nota, who has also been in the industry for a long time. He’s now one of the partners at Advidi and the VP of Affiliate Management.

Ivo asked me if I knew Iwert, who was already well known in the industry. He was active – even buying media on AskJolene, along with some other companies I was connected with. But we didn’t know each other.

We ended up meeting for dinner and really hit it off. We talked about business and strategies all night. We had a really good connection right away. Sometimes you meet someone you like, but you’re not going to call them the next day. You have to wait a few days, you know? With Iwert, I was too enthusiastic. I called him the next morning and said “Hey dude, we had a good connection. Let’s meet up again.” He was like “I was hoping you would call already haha!”

And in two weeks, we had a company in an 80m2 office overlooking the canals of Amsterdam.

Did it really work out just like that? That was how you started Advidi?

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No – actually, our first project was different. We were planning to create a dating site… a real dating site – not something scammy with fake profiles, where you chat with someone in the Philippines. I put in all the money I gained from AskJolene, which I had just left at the time. At one point my wife was even asking me to get a normal job since “this thing with Iwert is not making any money.” She had a good job at RTL and was supporting me and the household already for a while.

Well, she was right… it wasn’t our greatest success, to be honest. We got visitors and conversions, but it was really hard to run a casual dating site with real members. 99% were male. Maybe you can guess – the females were getting spammed, creeped on. They’d get 20 unwanted pics before saying hello.

So the first project wasn’t a financial success, but something good came out of it – we learned that we would be good partners. The project also gave us lots of insight into running a product as an advertiser… we had to set up customer support and merchant accounts, install gateways, optimize user interfaces and perform fraud detection on traffic. We were still doing media buying the whole time, successfully. So we stopped the dating website after about two years and decided to focus on media buys.


Click here to continue reading the full interview at iamattila.com


This is interview #2 in a series of exclusive 1 on 1 story style interviews I am doing with interesting people in our industry this year. Previous interview was with Robert Gryn founder of Voluum, Zeropark and Codewise (you can read that here).
 
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