At The Coalface Podcast: Nisarg Shah of affable.ai Solves Influencer Conundrum

Much is happening in eCommerce, especially with influencer marketing bridging the gap between content and commerce. Nisarg Shah, CEO, and co-founder, affable.ai, talks At the Coalface Podcast - eCommerce tech and trends run by Jason Greenwood about the multiple aspects of the creator economy, such as finding the right influencers and managing and measuring their effectiveness. 

Greenwood has 20+ years of experience in the B2B, D2C, and B2C environments. He runs Greenwood Consulting and hosts a weekly podcast that brings the best in eCommerce, omnichannel, and retail SaaS tech and trends.

‍Jason: Welcome to the Coalface podcast with your host, Jason Greenwood. This podcast is all about what it's really like in the trenches of digital and E commerce. I've got a fantastic guest up for you today. I've gotten to Nisarg Shah, who's the co-founder and CEO of affable.ai today with me.‍

‍Jason: Before we get into your technology, you've got these very clear entrepreneurial tendencies - a cohort member of Entrepreneurs First; founder of VisualLive; tech analyst at Goldman Sachs  and prior to that Technion eXplore Program in Israel. So not only do you have some global experience in multiple areas but multiple regions. It definitely feels like your bent is a combination of business tech, entrepreneurship, and really customer experience. Considering where your background sits, would that be reasonably accurate?

Nisarg:  That is true. I studied engineering in college and have been a major fan of how software works and how it simplifies and automates  processes.  I got a chance to visit Israel through my university because we were working on one of our own startup ideas. We were selected by the government to visit Israel. It  was an eye-opening experience seeing the kinds of technologies working there. 

While working at Goldman Sachs, I managed a lot of the automation using software. At the same time, I was working on a few projects that I believed could streamline a lot of processes in different domains. One was with an eCommerce furniture buying using augmented reality. Another was a learning app. But I think all of that culminated in me joining Entrepreneur First in Singapore as a founder who had this vision of building something for what the world would look like in the next 10 years. And that's where I met my co-founder Swayam, with whom I started Affable in Singapore. 

Jason: You’ve been working on this influencer marketing platform for nearly five years now. Obviously, you saw a gap in the market.  But it's not your first tech rodeo. So what specifically about the influencer and creator space piqued your interest that you went to do something really cool?

Nisarg: Going back to 2017, this was the rise of influencer marketing. There was not so much social commerce. There was not so much of the whole creator economy as it has played out. And we had a hypothesis that as social media continues to evolve, people will buy more on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube than on Amazon search. We knew that brands would need a way to broadcast information and give visibility about the products to users on social media. 

Even at that time, a lot of solutions that exist today were  either marketplaces or those managed by agency providers or managed marketplaces. What that means is that for brands like H&M and other fashion or beauty cosmetics brands, they have to still do a lot of manual work either themselves or outsource this manual work to another entity.  In 2017, the process was still super manual. It was full of guesswork and was very time consuming. 

Brands did not know who was the right influencer. If their followers are real or not, if the influencer has spoken about a competitor, how effective the influencer is, what is the ROI on the program? They had no clue. And when I was in Singapore, we were talking to a lot of these brands. They  told us they have these million dollar budgets, which they were handing off to an agency without any visibility on how these agencies are shortlisting influencers or how effective these influencers are. So that's the gap we saw, but more than the gap that's the opportunity we saw in the market where we could build something in a growing industry in a growing domain.

Jason:  Just to be transparent to the audience I've never used affable.But what we've discussed previously,  your platform really is a full or at least your intent for it is to be a full spectrum, engagement analysis workflow tool to engage with influencers and manage all of the workflows between the brand and the influencer. It feels like you've tried to think of almost everything, from identifying the influencers, all the way through executing a campaign and beyond.

Nisarg:  You have pretty much described everything we do in terms of being a completely end to end influencer management platform.  My co-founder and I do not come from a marketing world or the influencer creator economy world. We relied a lot on our customers and potential customers. We asked them what their challenges are. We sat in their offices and looked at their workflow, what they do before finding influencers, what they do after a campaign and we've taken all of those notes  with the goal of streamlining the entire influencer management process.

We've built continuously in a very fluid manner, the entire funnel of search, management, and measurement. So we call it the three-step process of influencer marketing. I want to first shortlist who is the most relevant influencer for you. But not only based on what the influencer is talking about, also based on who their followers are. 

So if you are a parenting brand looking to engage with women in the US, you do not want to work with some beauty blogger where most of her followers are men in the US. So going one step ahead and shortlisting the right influencers and then having a CRM pretty much like Salesforce.  You put in 500 influencers, send them an email,  invite them to try out your products,  ship them the products and do all the logistics around the PR, gifting process. 

It is  followed by measuring who's driving sales, who's driving reach, engagement media value across your social networks.  Doing that, across all social channels is something that we strive to provide here and that's what we've been able to achieve. 

We work with more than 100 different brands and agencies right now. Some of the biggest brands use the platform and we are now finding a great adoption with eCommerce brands who are using it quite a lot for the affiliate process.  Influencer marketing is evolving and with that our platform also It's evolving.

Jason: One of the biggest pain points I've seen brands struggling with when it comes to influencer management is payments, negotiating fees, costs, etc payments.  All that stuff feels like it's messy in a way. There's so many models to engage with these influencers, particularly when you've got multiple platforms at play, and multiple media formats at play.  Does your technology help with trying to establish a reasonable expectation with a brand of what they should be paying for the type of service or the type of campaign that they're looking to execute based on the size of the influencer.  Do you act as a conduit to manage that? Or do you leave that piece of it for the influencer and the brand to execute independently of your platform?

Nisarg That's a great question. And that kind of goes into the whole nuance about what influencer marketing is. A lot of times, brands, even brands who are actually working with influencers, do not necessarily understand that every influencer is different and depending on the services the brand is asking for, the rates or the expectation from the influencers might be different.

What we have done as a facilitator of collaboration between brands and influencers is we have actually thousands of influencers in different countries each, and asked them for what they typically charge for the services, a video, a post, a story, a limited-time story, etc. And then we create an estimated model that predicts what any influencer anywhere in the world might charge the brand, depending on the followers, the country, the industry, the engagement rates, the previous brand collaborations, and the content we upload. 

We tell the brand as we provide them an estimate of what they might expect these influencers to charge. There's a caveat here that when the brand actually reaches out to these influencers, depending on the scope of work, depending on how busy the influencer is, depending on how prominent the brand is, these rates may vary.  But at least now brands have some benchmark that they can refer to. And they're not as clueless as they were before. 

We believe that influencers should be duly paid for the kind of traction they're able to generate and for the kind of exposure that these influencers are able to bring to the brands.. Five years ago, brands just wanted to give a product to the influencers and not pay but what we are seeing is a massive shift in the industry in sentiment from the brand side. They do realize that if someone is giving them 100,000 eyeballs on their product, then they do deserve to be compensated. 

Now regarding the second question on how Affable facilitates these payments. We do not currently act as an escrow as such, because we believe that the brand should completely own the relationship with the influencers.  It’s on the brands that they should provide a seamless experience of collaboration with the influencer. 

However, we provide various integrations through which brands can streamline the payout process. For example, if a brand wants to pay cross border, a fixed fee, or affiliate fee of 20% of every sale generated etc, our system allows the brand to configure everything to make those payouts and send a report on a regular basis to the influencer. So, the influencer also knows how much they can expect as a payout every week, every month, depending on their collaboration with the brand.

Jason: I think you're providing an essential service for not just the demand side, but the fulfillment side as well. Also, helping everybody have a little bit more transparency about what is a reasonable expectation. But I definitely see an opportunity there for you to take a little bit more of an ownership stake, because you're already creating the data, tracking the data, doing the analytics and even the predictive analytics. So, you're already providing a whole lot of management functionality around this and ROI data around this. So it feels like a natural fit for the next step.

Nisarg: For sure. And that's some great feedback. We've received this from clients in the past who want to streamline the payments more and more, who want to sign contracts with influencers and then put some amount in escrow and then based on the performance release those funds.

The reason why we haven't dabbled into that yet is we've tried to stay true to our nature of being a pure tech company. So far, we do not facilitate or manage campaigns for our clients as a service. We are trying to build as much software as we can to help clients streamline that process. And there is still the component of escrow, that we could build out more on an automated basis that gets unlocked.

I think there's just like a lot more opportunity with commerce, and how influencers can be paid a percentage of every sale they drive, because then the incentives are totally aligned between the brand and influencers. The brands typically hesitate to pay upfront to micro-influencers, brands want to pay based on conversions and based on performances, but micro-influencers do not know or cannot guarantee what kind of performance they can drive.  That's like the missing gap.

One of the new initiatives that we're working on is how do we bridge that gap. How can we enable brands to find nano or micro influencers and to a complete streamline of the product gifting and affiliate process? While the influencers can earn based on every conversion they drive, and then have some kind of an automated payout that has been pre-agreed between the brands and the micro-influencers. 

But just going back to one of the micro-influencers and nano influencers opens up the big opportunity for brands that don't have budgets for celebrities to go out and do word-of-mouth marketing, like it was never possible before. 

Imagine having an army of 50 micro-influencers, who all start talking about your product on a Black Friday. Compare that with how much you would have to pay Kim Kardashian to upload one story that stays on her feed for let's say 12 hours only the difference in that cost is massive. Working with micro-influencer opens up a completely new avenue to go-to-market for a lot of brands that are setting up new stores, or that are like homeowners selling products from their own house.

Jason: It feels like this is a legitimate, honest, scalable, reasonable alternative to the exploding inflation across the walled gardens of Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon in terms of paid and performance advertising and marketing. It feels like this is now becoming so streamlined and so scalable from your perspective. But there are certain verticals that don't necessarily have a tremendous amount of influencers in them.  I'm thinking mainly of B2B and there's some other areas where it may be a little more difficult to find appropriate influencers. It feels like this is now becoming and very rapidly evolving into a seriously legitimate competitor for ad spend dollars versus the major players. Would you agree with that?

Nisarg: 100%. We've seen a massive shift in ad budgets. And not only our clients but specifically in the industry moving from the walled gardens, as you correctly said, Facebook and Google ads and Amazon, and especially after the change on the whole cookie-tracing and the restrictions that Apple's iOS updates have put in. A lot more marketers, especially growth marketing folks at fast-growing e-commerce companies are who can actually measure an attribute performance back to influencers or being very data-driven about their spends.

They compare the ROAS on their Facebook budget spends, as well as the kind of returns they're getting on influencers. A lot of budgets are shifting towards influencers. Marketers are being very creative to find ways around these walled gardens and still generate more, if not as much ROI as they used to get when the customer acquisition cost used to be much lower on Facebook, or on Google ads.

And with those rising costs, and with enterprises pumping a lot more budgets on these ads, the innovative and creative marketers are finding ways to push their budgets on influencers. You must have seen a lot more influencer content going out on TikTok, just because of the massive reach that TikTok is able to generate.  

I still feel and it is my opinion that TikTokers are underpaid. But with the kind of reach and the kind of conversions that TikTok is able to generate for the brands, there is a lot more potential for marketers to work with these influencers and scale their ROI across social channels. So influencer marketing, one of the strategies that works very well for the brands that we work with is having a cross-channel approach and working with influencers who can promote across multiple channels.

Because this gives a higher share of voice for the brands, the followers are looking at the content across multiple channels. And the influencer is able to experiment with short-form, long-form image videos, and Reels, while still talking about the brands the opportunity that marketers are harnessing.  We think that this is just the start of what the creator economy and the influencers can do for the brands going ahead.

Jason: TikTok is taking over in the recreational social media space.  It's taking over from where LinkedIn is in the business, social media space. TikTok is almost the analog of LinkedIn, but in the recreational social media world, and the personal social media world. I've even noticed on the TikTok side that their organic reach has started to drop but I don't necessarily think that's because TikTok has changed the way it allows reach on their platform. It feels very much like it's just getting noisier as a platform that has grown so fast that it's actually hard now to get the organic reach that you used to on TikTok. But organic opportunities there are still massive.

Nisarg:  It is indeed the early adopters of the platform who used to do musicals and dances and like comedies and interviews with random people on the street. The audiences that they have garnered are very sticky. So as long as the creator is consistent with that TikTok content, they continue to get the reach. You are absolutely right, if someone wants to become a creator on TikTok, unless they have something which is potentially viral, it is very difficult to get organic reach just because of the competitive behavior of everyone else trying to be a TikToker. 

There's a famous survey that was done with kids in school asking them what they want to be when they grow old, 20 years later, and the majority of the kids in the US said, YouTuber, a TikToker, like a creator. And the second after that was like an astronaut, which is so funny because now these kids who have access to a mobile phone can go out and just keep creating TikTok content. 

A lot of them have million plus followers, which is very difficult to get on YouTube or Instagram.  Just because of the competitive nature of the platform, the organic reach has gone down. I don't think that TikTok is killing the organic reach yet to promote more paid content.  I think TikTok’s approach still is that they want to be able to generate as much traffic on all of the content but promote the ones that have a viral coefficient to it compared to Meta where you have to pay to promote any post and get any eyeballs on it.

So, I absolutely think that TikTok is getting super competitive. But with the caveat that a creative, potentially viral content is still able to find the eyeballs that it would have otherwise.

Jason:  And what that says to me is that if you want to get great reach on TikTok you need to be working with some of those already established influencers on the platform to increase your exposure, your brand's exposure, and effectively repurpose your content to expose your content to their audience. It feels like there's so many opportunities to leverage this thing on TikTok, that it feels like that is going to become almost the de facto approach for brands to get reach on TikTok as opposed to necessarily trying to focus on building their own direct following in this hyper-competitive environment.  I'd love to get your thoughts on the split of campaigns flowing through your platform in aggregate at a very high level helicopter view. 

Has that mix changed dramatically with the rise of TikTok where maybe a couple of years ago maybe it was primarily campaigns for Instagram, Facebook, YouTube.  Have you seen that split move dramatically from those platforms to TikTok presumably because your platform is managing target platforms those campaigns are destined for and defined for at the campaign level.  You must have seen that sort of market share, mindshare shift from those other platforms to TikTok in a dramatic way over the last couple of years.

Nisarg:  Definitely, I would add that there is a nuance of region to this, a lot of the regions and you'd be surprised there are markets in Southeast Asia, where Facebook is still big like influencer campaigns on Facebook.  I'm not talking about the Meta umbrella, but Facebook is still huge. But you don't see that in a lot of other markets. But in general, typically like back in 2017, Instagram was the clear Number 1, followed by YouTube in terms of the number of campaigns where brands are engaging influencers. But today TikTok is definitely catching up, still competing with YouTube on the second and third position in a few markets. It is the second most used channel that is used closely behind Instagram in terms of the number of influencers. 

But I would say that the pie is shrinking away from Instagram where TikTok has caught up quite a bit. YouTube with its new YouTube Shorts approach is able to drive a lot of organic traffic for those videos and the creators of these videos. So YouTube is catching up as well. And Instagram seems to be losing ground in terms of the number of campaigns where influencers are engaged. 

That's where they are pushing on Reels now. So I think all social channels have agreed in a way where the short-form video is the way to go ahead that seems to be generating a lot more eyeballs, maybe people's attention span is much lower than what it used to be before and Facebook recently announced that they're opening up real API access to developers.  

They want more of the ecosystem players to help generate more Reels as well as distribute these Reels.  But in terms of the number of campaigns TikTok is definitely catching up, the percentage of the pie that TikTok used to have five years ago has significantly increased as more people started adopting TikTok.

Jason: From the retail side or the consumer side, we're seeing the rise of TikTok. Obviously we've heard rumblings from the United States government and the Indian government has banned TikTok in India we see the rise of tensions between China, which is obviously where TikTok is headquartered we're seeing the rise of tensions between China and the rest of the world over Taiwan and many other things that are geopolitically behind the scenes. It feels almost like the only threat to TikTok at this stage is geopolitical risk. From a pure social media platform perspective, from a demand side and supply side, it feels like they're an absolute juggernaut that almost cannot be stopped. But it feels like legislative and compliance risks and geopolitical risks are the big risks to TikTok at this stage. And would you agree with that sentiment?

Nisarg: I definitely see where you're coming from and with my limited understanding of geopolitics.  Knowing that Tiktok and Bytedance are two separate, although it's the same entity, they are two separate products. I'm not sure how they're structured. But if Tiktok was able to distance itself from Bytedance, and there were initial mumblings of how Microsoft and Walmart would have acquired TikTok's business to bring it in the US, and how Oracle has some deal with TikTok to bring all the data of us users in the US market, I feel there are ways through which TikTok may not be significantly impacted, because of its partnerships with Oracle and potential partnerships with Microsoft and Walmart but that's my limited understanding. 

I do definitely agree with the fact that currently, it's very difficult to stop how fast TikTok is growing and if there was something to stop it, there would be some component of geopolitics that could come and interfere and that might be a lucky trump card for meta and other social networks.

Jason: Now, if we change gears for a moment here, how do you guys make your money? Do you make your money on the demand side, the supply side, both that you know your SaaS platform? And so presumably you have some sort of a subscription model, you've got a pricing page on your website, which sort of explains what you get at each tier. 

Nisarg:  We make money by selling subscriptions to our software and provide access to brands and sometimes the agencies who use our platform to manage the entire influencer marketing program. They currently do not engage or charge influencers for any campaigns that they receive to our platform. Also, because we are not a marketplace, we do not have influencers that we need to onboard onto the platform. 

So, for the brands to engage our revenue, our business model is currently tied to the services we provide to the brands and in the future as we enable payments and as we enable potentially escrow services, etc. There might be a component where there is a success-based fee that will campaign budget-based variable fee that we might be able to charge if the brands are seeing that value coming from the platform. But currently, typically, brands would pay a fixed annual fee to use our services and run influencer marketing campaigns.

Jason: I realize this is potentially regional regionalized pricing depending on what country you're in, and what currency etc. I'm guessing the pricing could be a little bit different, but on your pricing page, there is no specific pricing displayed there. You've got SME, Pro, and Enterprise. I'm guessing at a negotiated price, which makes sense. But to give the audience a bit of an indicative idea of how much they would expect to pay per month on a subscription basis for SME or Pro. What kind of range of prices are we looking at there in USD?

Nisarg:  There's a reason why we did not necessarily open up the pricing because we realize that a lot of the customers have very varied requirements that do not even fit into one of the tiers we provide. There are different customizations that they want to the tiers, but a lot of these brands are starting on to the influencer programs where they're still unsure what access they might need, what features they might need and a lot of brands when they start with us they eventually grow into different tiers. On an average for an average customer when someone comes in the SME tier is somewhere around $8,000 a year. The Pro tier is somewhere around $18,000 a year and other enterprises, as you said, negotiated based on the requirements, the number of seats, the number of channels, the kind of reporting that the client requires.

But these are typically fixed annual fees and then as the client grows, we grow with them. We are a very, very big believer in helping clients find value in the product. So we provide a lot of additional support and service and training and regular check-in with the clients. We recommend them influencers based on if you notice some influencer in the industry, who is garnering a lot more traction, or who's growing and was unnoticed before, some smaller key players who are up and coming with the clients could create some exclusive relationships with.  There’s  a lot of recommendations and services we provide on top of it that a lot of our clients find value in apart from just the access that they get to our software.

Jason:  Makes sense. And because you guys are not a marketplace. I'm guessing that you also automate the outreach process 99% of the time, that's why social DM on the target platforms and the influencers. So presumably, you set up a bit of a template for that specific campaign. And then your platform actually connects via API, to those platforms, and to those target influencers that have been created within the platform for that particular campaign or brand. And then you send, via your API connections, mass messages to those influencers, on behalf of the brand and behalf of their brand account on those platforms, to effectively engage with them and try to get them to click through to engage with the campaign. Is that from a technical process?

Nisarg:  Some clarification there.  First, we have API integrations using public API's with a lot of these channels, where they are able to give us high-level information of quickly available user accounts with a lot of followers. We don't scrape these channels, but use APIs as much as possible, and then augment the data with our own insights and intelligence analysis.

For example, we use profile pictures, we use names that use machine learning on these images, text, hashtags, piled with the keywords, to segment the influencers into the right buckets to identify the age, gender, location through which our clients are able to find these influencers and reach out to them. 

But additionally, we do not the outreach process is not to DMs, but it is through emails, social channels, and you know, reasonably so very protective about mass messages on an automated basis through DMs. And influencers are actually more responsive to professionally sent emails that are personalized to them that have a thoughtful approach to it, rather than DMs. They get DMs from a lot of their friends, they get spam messages across social channels, etc. So when a brand reaches out to influencers, we enable that communication through an email approach behind the scene. And the data is accurate because we get this information directly using the APIs from social media channels.

Jason: So the APIs of those platforms do supply the email of those particular users to you.

Nisarg: Yes, as long as the influencers have made it publicly available. And for those that have not, we are not able to facilitate a conversation for a small subset of those influencers.

Jason And then I guess in that situation, then they wouldn't be able to reach out to them via DM instead.

Nisarg That's right. But on a manual basis.

Jason: This has been super enlightening. It's been super fun. It's been super interesting. You clearly know this industry inside now after working in it for as long as you have since 2017. I super appreciate you sharing with us the inner workings, so to speak, of the opening of the kimono of the industry. It's not often we get to speak to someone so knowledgeable about the influencer marketing space who's building technology, specifically for that space. So, it's been awesome spending time with you today. I'll let you ask me one question, any question, and I will do my best to answer it.

Nisarg First of all, thanks a lot for feedback. Those are some amazing questions that might be very helpful for the listeners. In terms of the question I have for you. How do you think the Creator economy is evolving to enable influencer lead commerce and what do you think is the future of influencer lead commerce

‍Jason: Good question. I think there is still an absolute truckload of friction in Social Commerce today. And when we think about the vast majority of commerce that takes place on social media today, it's redirect commerce, right? Brands will put up their catalog on something like Instagram, if you want to buy it, it redirects you to the cart, or to the product page on that brand's website to execute the transaction. And that that is too much friction, it's still too much friction. 

And yes, they've come out with Instagram shops and Facebook shops and in certain regions around the world, but it is very limited and where you can actually do that as a brand and execute a shop on those platforms. So I still think that there is a tremendous amount of friction there for the buyer, because until we get into a wall-ties experience, where effectively we have social media platforms that are also marketplaces for lack of a better term where they can bring the concept of an aggregated cart, like a marketplace. 

So at the moment, if I'm on Amazon, and I want to have a cart with 10 items in it from 10, different merchants, or half those items might be from Amazon direct half those might be from third-party merchants, but it's a single payment, it's a single aggregated cart, it's a seamless, consistent experience across Amazon. That is, to me, that is the single biggest thing that's lacking in social media today. So, until social commerce is as seamless as the Amazon experience. 

But working across multiple creators, multiple brands, multiple shops, and you can have an aggregated cart with a walletized, tokenized credit card, all of your shipment details, your delivery details, etc stored in the platform as a customer. And you can execute those transactions, literally with zero friction like one-click checkout effectively, or one-click add to an aggregated cart. 

Until it is that seamless, I think it is going to be difficult or it is going to continue to be very difficult for brands and influencers and creators to monetize their relationship in a short rev-share way that is going to continue to be difficult. Once all of that transaction takes place directly within social without ever having to leave those environments, then I think it is going to be much much easier for creators to create natively in social, to engage with brands in social to work with social to generate sales directly in social that is transparent so that the revenue is very clear to the Creator. 

It's very clear to the brand, it's very clear to the social platform, and everybody can clip the ticket along the way. Once that happens, once the friction is completely removed, I think the Creator economy is going to explode like never before, because at the moment, they really only have one way to monetize their followings. There are multiple ways in terms of formats of creative, but really the way that they monetize today is by engaging with brands on a campaign-level basis and paying for the privilege. But I think there are many more ways to create micropayments as part of that engagement if the social platforms facilitate it. So I think we have to get there first. And it's really up to the platforms to make that happen. That's my cent.

Nisarg:  That definitely makes a lot of sense. And I was thinking, why don't you just share your thoughts on that. And just to add my two cents to it, I think social networks have solved the discovery problem. But they have not yet solved the checkout problem, which is exactly what you encapsulated with the example of Amazon and how seamless it is to check out a cart. And people are used to a certain way of online shopping and you can't really change user habits, especially for commerce but what I'm really impressed about is how social networks are enabling the discovery of new products through creators and through their ads and other forms of bringing it in front of the users. But you're absolutely spot on. 

I agree that unless social networks are able to streamline the checkout process, commerce will be very slow. I'm excited about the whole YouTube Shopify partnership that was just announced two weeks ago, on creators being able to set up their own stores today.  Ticketmaster announced its partnership with TikTok on how creators or artists can sell tickets to their shows through TikTok videos. So there's definitely that momentum on social networks that they want to enable the discovery of stuff that people can buy on these networks. But yeah, as long as checkout remains a hurdle, they will not see so much of a conversion.

‍Jason: Couldn't agree more, listen, that's a high note to finish on. I think the industry as a whole has a bright future ahead. I think there's still tremendous opportunity out there. I think we're in the early innings of this thing of the Creator economy. Every brand, every platform, and every technology vendor is still trying to figure it out and that prevents a present massive opportunity for Affable moving forward as you continue to build out your product,  as you continue to build out new features and functionality, as these platforms evolve and provide services to the demand and the supply side. Essentially, you're doing a great thing. Thank you very much for coming on the pod today, Nisarg, and I wish you guys over affable, all the best, and hopefully, we'll be able to get you on and another year or so, and we'll be able to see just what's happened in the space in the intervening year.

‍Nisarg Thanks a lot, Jason for having me. It was fun sharing my thoughts and learning on running about your thoughts in space. I will continue listening to super exciting insights on the E commerce and the tech space. So very excited to see how the social media world evolves, and how your pod also evolves along with it. Thanks a lot for having me again. I love the conversation and looking forward to staying in touch.

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