Monica Lent Interview — Fem Founder™

Monica Lent is a founder and software engineer with more than a decade of experience. Most recently, she spent five years as the frontend engineering lead at a high-growth fintech startup as it scaled from 80 to over 1,500 people. She has spoken at leading technical conferences on topics like software architecture and design systems. Today her focus is building and growing her affiliate analytics software company, Affilimate.

Can you tell our readers about your background?

I started coding at a really young age, so it’s no surprise I ended up working as a software engineer.

But it didn’t start out as my passion or the thing I wanted to do as a full-time job.

Instead, I majored in classical languages and philosophy. But after years of learning Latin and Ancient Greek, the idea of going to graduate school (or law school) became less and less appealing.

After graduation, my job as a student developer turned into my full-time job and I began my professional career in software development. I spent the following years working in academia and startups before leaving to start my own company, which is my main focus today.

What inspired you to start your business?

About seven years ago, I moved to Leipzig, Germany without ever having heard of the city before.

Based on my experiences, I created a travel website that eventually grew to over 100,000 monthly sessions and eclipsed the monthly salary I had at my first startup job.

The main way the website makes money is through affiliate marketing.

But as a software engineer, I found it frustrating that most of the tools available to optimize my conversion rate and revenue were tailored for eCommerce sites.

I also realized that a ton of other people was struggling with the same kinds of tracking and analytics I wanted to collect, and trying to solve the issue by hobbling together ill-suited tools and spreadsheets.

So in a way, I built Affilimate to solve that problem for myself and for others.

Where is your business based?

We’re based in Berlin, Germany.