Founder lessons from 25 years in affiliate, with Hello Partner's Matthew Wood

Matthew Wood has founded or co-founded affiliate businesses since the early 2000s, including Voucher Cloud, an events company and the news site Hello Partner. In this live Lessons from Losing episode, recorded at Awin's ThinkTank UK, an Awin host asks him about early successes, missed opportunities, last-click attribution and how his idea of winning has changed.

In this episode

• Wood describes his start: 60p lead-generation offers promoted to university friends, and a consultancy charging £200 a day plus £20 per affiliate sale introduced (2:30, 3:02, 6:02).

• He and a developer pushed 30 million pages into search from a million-keyword list; after weeks of nothing, he says they held top-three positions for thousands of keywords when he checked from Fiji (7:32, 9:31).

• His Free Fivers cashback site passed a million members in under 12 months; he says he flitted between projects and regrets having no co-founder (11:31, 12:00).

• He criticises last-click models, saying cashback and voucher sites produce 60 to 70% of network revenue, and wants fairer attribution as the creator economy grows (13:30, 14:00, 14:30).

• At Voucher Cloud the team grew from 20 to over 100 across 20 countries with Vodafone investment; he stayed four years, but says corporate life hurt his mental health and he chose to leave (17:01, 17:31, 18:00).

• His events business nearly went into liquidation until Voucher Cloud proceeds saved it; a consultant saved him six figures, and he urges founders to seek mentors who have done it (19:00, 20:02, 20:31).

Interview from Lessons from Losing by Awin, published on YouTube.