Clint delves into how Apidae’s journey came to be, its highs and lows, and where the bees are swarming in the near future.
How did Apidae’s journey come about?
Apidae’s journey started off around two years ago. I’ve always had a drive for business and a passion for marketing so I met up with Eliza (Growth Marketer at Apidae) and Matthew (Optimisation Guru at Apidae) and spoke to them about my vision and started to gather their views to understand if we could align on a common vision. We did! Together, I felt we had all the pieces of the puzzle to make a go at it. Eliza brought a wealth of knowledge across various paid media & app channels with a growth hacker’s mindset, Matthew brought an analytical and meticulous approach to optimisations and performance marketing, and as for myself, my focus was on the business, analytical and martech side of things.
Why did you want to set up a community?
We wanted to build a welcoming & professional place for digital nomads and freelancers alike to come together and share ideas and projects to collaborate on. We wanted to shift the mindset of a standard 9 – 5 job and provide autonomy and flexibility to the way we work. Luckily, I was privileged enough to work with some of the most talented people when it comes to organisational situations and agile operational efficiency. For example, Jimmy Jalen opened my eyes to different ways to organise teams and align them to a common goal.
What was your journey like before setting up Apidae and the community?
Performance marketing has always been at the heart of the journey be it at NetRefer where I learnt the ropes around how best to structure an affiliate platform, Mr Green where analytics and tracking where the key areas of focus, and finally at Casumo where I was granted the responsibility to build and lead an international team of talented individuals across multiple geos.
What are the community values of Apidae?
Whilst building a community has been deemed to be more challenging than initially anticipated, our community values were always top of mind. Our values are focused on building a community which we would want to be part of. Collaborative, accountable and self-care are our three core values that we aim to achieve on a daily basis.
From a collaboration standpoint, we invested in the right tools to ensure we are able to provide a place for asynchronous communication, transparency and automation of mundane tasks.
With such tools in place we expect each member to be responsible and accountable to any deliverables they may have for the week without the need for supervision or monitoring since we believe each member should manage their own time to deliver on their respective actions.
Last but not least, our community members’ wellbeing is key to us and we want to ensure that when joining Apidae, members feel comfortable and supported throughout their journey with Apidae Digital.
What is Apidae’s current roadmap?
If I’m being honest, Apidae’s roadmap was more about bringing people together first, and then focus on profits second. Maybe this was not the ideal initial route in light of Covid and other speed bumps along the way, however persistence prevailed and we are slowly but surely growing the community whilst learning along the way.
What does success look like for Apidae?
Success for Apidae ultimately starts and ends with us as a community; a group of like-minded individuals coming together from their own respective areas of expertise and helping to build Apidae into a successful community, backed by the mutual trust from our partners who we support in achieving anything performance driven.
What makes Apidae different from any other agency?
We’re a bit unlike agencies, who tend to be more creative and a one stop shop for any marketing activity from branding to your website or e-shop. We firstly identify the partners goals and challenges from which we build out a tailored solution specific to that brand with a focus on the performance & data side through paid media, martech and data & analytics. For projects which require a more 360 approach, we work with our strategic partners to support us on the branding and tech side of things with the Authentic Brief focusing on branding and Root Codex as our tech partner.
What are Apidae’s short-term and long-term goals?
Apidae’s short term goal is to establish ourselves as a reliable knowledgeable player within the market, anything which revolves around web analytics and performance-based marketing. Our long-term goal is to be seen as a leading performance marketing partner within the iGaming, Fintech and eSports Space. That is where we can feel a long term success to achieve these goals.
Where do you see Apidae as a community within five years?
In five years’ time, the dream is to have the Apidae community be autonomously driven and self-regulating, with about 20 🐝🐝 fluttering about collaborating, sharing projects, and ideas – all working towards a common goal.
What’s your advice to anyone who wants to run their own thing?
Go into it with a plan – however be open and willing to pivot as things change. The first two years are truly a rollercoaster but do remember to pause and appreciate and enjoy the journey.
And get very comfortable with the 3Ps – Patience, Persistence, Perseverance. I believe any entrepreneur looking to take the plunge needs to strengthen these qualities if they ever wish to succeed. You will have good days and bad days but eventually, it will pay off!
