Kyle Mitnick of Mosaic Digital Systems On The 5 Best Ways to Drive Product Growth

An Interview with Rachel Kline

Social proof. Unless your product has been mentioned in a notable social thread, listed on a Top 10 site, or highlighted on a blogger’s ‘service roundup,’ you still have a long way to go. A great product is necessary, but third-party validation is just as mission-critical.

In the realm of business, particularly with regard to tech products, growth is the key to success. However, navigating the journey from ideation to expansion presents its own unique set of challenges. How does one devise a strategy to ensure sustained growth of a product in a competitive marketplace? What are the best practices, strategies, and methodologies to accomplish this? In this interview series, we would like to speak to experienced professionals who have successfully driven product growth. As part of this series, we had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Kyle Mitnick.

Kyle Mitnick is the founder and president of Mosaic Digital Systems, the industry’s first do-it-yourself, SaaS partnership marketing platform that has already helped 800 e-commerce companies generate $150 million in sales. Kyle Mitnick has a history of success in ad tech. Previously, Kyle led the affiliate advertising agency Advertise Purple to become the leader in the field, with more than 4,000 brands in 23 business verticals generating $4 billion in affiliate revenue. A Forbes contributor, Kyle is a thought leader in SMB e-comm growth, customer acquisition, and ad tech.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before diving in, our readers would love to learn more about you. Can you tell us a little about yourself? What led you to this specific career path?

I started a tech-enabled affiliate management agency in 2012 called Advertise Purple. We ended up growing it to the largest in the space, serving more than 4,000 customers across 14 different countries. During my time as CEO, I became obsessed with our technology platform, which is called Purply™. Its goal was to enable our employees to manage clients efficiently and effectively, which we did.

As we grew the business, I imagined creating a performance-marketing ecosystem where similar tools were accessible to all e-commerce brands, not just those with agency representation. In theory, it would put power in the hands of SMBs for growth, which, ultimately, benefits everyone in the space. This is how the Mosaic concept was born. We developed a pilot technology under the Advertise Purple brand and served 500 clients in DIY, SaaS fashion. Once the concept was vetted, I made the decision to bring it to life under the Mosaic Digital Systems (MDS) label. This is something that will give smaller businesses more marketing power than they have ever had in the past. We expect it to be a game-changer.

Can you share the most exciting story that has happened to you since you began at your company?

Excitement is relative in the SaaS space. Some days, we define ‘excitement’ as development updates that break the entire user experience, though we pray those are few and far between. Other days ‘excitement’ verges on chaos, especially at a startup. Oddly enough, the most exciting thing to happen since Mosaic started in June was our battle for remote vs. in-office work.

I’ve always seen the value in a hybrid work experience. Don’t get me wrong, the work-from-home days are great, but the in-person days are when we’re able to come together and tackle issues collectively, think about developments collaboratively, and in general, operate as a unified team. Since our team is still growing, we’ve been working out of the same office as the Advertise Purple team, and that’s where this story begins.

So this past week at 9 a.m. on a Tuesday (we go into the office on Tuesdays and Wednesdays), as everyone’s getting settled in, I started hearing something going on downstairs. We got infested by gnats and when I say infested I mean they literally swimming in the new Nespresso pods. We tried everything to get rid of the fruit flies, every Pinterest home remedy. We tried apple cider vinegar, we tried dish soap, but nothing worked. I think I ended up eating a few trying to enjoy my Sweetgreen that day. Needless to say, we ended up evacuating. Hopefully, we’ll be able to get back at it this coming week, but that’s probably been the most eventful, chaotic, semi-exciting thing to happen recently.

What are some of the most interesting or exciting projects you are working on now? How do you think that might help people?

Hands down, the most exciting project right now is our MDS Partner Pairing™ tool. This has been a long time coming, and it’s surreal to start to see real users engaging with the feature finally.

Partner Pairing uses sophisticated algorithms to curate partnership recommendations and estimate monthly contributions an affiliate will produce for a brand’s program. It lets a brand recruit between 1 and 100 affiliates with the click of a button and watch those offers turn into partnerships as affiliates accept and start promoting their brand.

We also have a few more features in development, MDS Campaign Connect™ and Industry Insights. Campaign Connect™ is going to be huge. It will allow users to deploy optimization opportunities with recommended affiliates, effectively automating the maintenance and legwork of an affiliate program. Industry Insights is going to give users a glimpse into relevant news across 23 of the most popular e-commerce verticals as well as insight into the top-performing affiliates and products in those industries.

You’re a successful business leader. What are three traits about yourself that you feel helped fuel your success? Can you share a story or example for each?

Ability to maintain focus. In business, riding the highs and lows can take a serious emotional toll, leading to the inability to focus on priorities. Over the years, I have developed a sense of calm that allows me to avoid rollercoasters and get things done.

Ability to motivate a team. Launching and operating a successful business is something that never happens in a vacuum. It’s a team effort. But every business has ups and downs, and the morale of a team can also go up and down. I really focus on keeping the team motivated whatever is happening with the business, because this motivation is what drives success.

Ability to benefit from feedback. Most businesses can improve their product or service if they listen to the feedback from their customers, and implement changes based on this. But not every company leader is great at listening. I try to make a point of listening and tailoring our products to our customers. Launching Mosaic, my new company, came about after listening to quite a lot of feedback from customers of my previous company.

Do you have any mentors or experiences that have particularly influenced you?

I find inspiration from anyone who performs their job with full dedication and care. From the janitor at my children’s school to the chef at a local restaurant, people who are tuned in to their craft push me to be better at mine.

What have been the most effective tactics your organization has used to accelerate product growth?

Relying on data for product enhancements. It’s easy to suggest changes based on personal preference, however, those never end up improving the software. Regardless of what I or my VP of Product thinks, unless it can be verified by data patterns, we won’t move on it.

What do you see as the biggest challenge with respect to scaling a product-led business?

In some cases, scaling users can be much easier than retaining them, so the answer to this question is simple: building a quality product while focusing on scale. Many executives in product-led businesses, will focus on user acquisition as a metric for success. This makes sense, however, the hole in the boat continues to expand when LTV isn’t increasing behind the scenes, leading to an artificially inflated scale.

What, in your view, is a good litmus test to screen for a skilled and effective growth manager?

How many times have they failed in previous ventures? Assuming those failures aren’t identical, this tells me they’ve learned from their mistakes, created solutions that solve problems, and have the mental fortitude to transcend failure.

Can you describe a product growth tactic you or your team has used that was more effective than you anticipated? What was the goal, how did you execute, and what was the outcome?

This is a great question, and I’d point to our development of a new recruitment process with MDS Partner Pairing as a key example of this. Previously, we had built out recruitment messages that users would send individually to affiliates using contacts at those publishers that we provided. Although brands were seeing great results for their programs with this method, we knew from talking to clients and even just putting ourselves in their shoes that there had to be a better, more efficient way to recruit and ease the burden put on the user.

So that’s where the plan for Partner Pairing came from. We wanted to automate recruitment by enabling bulk outreach with the simple extension of an offer that an affiliate could easily accept on their end and begin promoting the brand. This new recruitment tool not only creates custom recruitment lists each week but it also lets users track affiliates through the onboarding funnel and re-engage with affiliates who drop off before signing up.

Since we have been tracking affiliate performance for over a decade, we can also recommend payment structures based on industry standards for different affiliates to help brands optimize their spending and ROAS, which has been huge in creating profitable growth for the micro brands and small SMBs we work with. We were completely prepared for a big learning curve for our current users but the rollout has actually gone extremely smoothly, which is a sign of a well-developed, intuitive feature. Recruitment efforts are already up with MDS Partner Pairing and it hasn’t even been live for a full week yet. So we’re definitely excited to see this feature continue to improve the user experience and start to scale their programs in a more expedited fashion.

Thank you for all of that. Here is the main question of our interview. Based on your experience, what are your “5 Best Ways to Drive Product Growth”?

1. Choose demand over uniqueness
   Digital is all about demand. If you don’t have traffic, good luck. The foundation for any product strategy needs to be ensuring the well is deep enough. In other words, vet your market so you’re confident the TAM (total addressable market) is large enough, the web traffic is searching for your product, and there are enough competitors. Many entrepreneurs fall victim to the notion that competition is a bad thing. They are dead wrong. If there aren’t competitors, your battle will be selling consumers why they need a product like yours. In some cases, this fight is a bit more fierce.
2. Micro-conversions are king. Of course, the ‘sale’ is your main metric for success. Wouldn’t it be nice if that was a direct path for your online traffic? Well, it’s not, nor will it ever be. It’s time you become obsessed with your traffic’s behavior, watching their every step from behind the curtain (digital curtain, of course, using professional analytics tools). Once you assign baby steps within your conversion funnel, shepherding them to the promised land (a sale) will be much easier.
3. Automation is acceptable. Why does everyone love automation? Because it frees up time to do more important things, like laundry or tanning. Automated marketing tools are a dime a dozen in today’s landscape, and it takes very little time to find a fairly well-established software that condenses your 3-day task into 3 seconds.
4. Find your forever channel. Dating is great until you find the one. Same with digital marketing. It’s important to play the field, picking up tips and tricks from all different varietals of digital advertising, but once you see consistency in your conversion rates, lock that down and focus on optimization.
5. Social proof. Unless your product has been mentioned in a notable social thread, listed on a Top 10 site, or highlighted on a blogger’s ‘service roundup,’ you still have a long way to go. A great product is necessary, but third-party validation is just as mission-critical. If you don’t have access to or funds for a traditional PR firm, consider expediting your brand exposure through affiliate marketing tools like Mosaic.

What is the number one mistake you see product marketers make that may actually be hurting their growth outcomes?

Implementing multiple marketing campaigns at the same time, but lacking discipline to make each successful.

It has been said that our mistakes can sometimes be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

Don’t have one, sorry.

We are very blessed that very prominent leaders read this column. Is there a person in the world or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them :-)

Terence Tao. He has the highest IQ in the world, and it would be fascinating to get his perspective on the world.

Thank you so much for this. This was very inspirational, and we wish you only continued success!