Always Be Testing

In this episode of SaaS Class, Nancy Harnett, Guy Yalif, and Tye DeGrange dig into whether affiliate is finally getting its moment in the age of AI search. Nancy is an agency owner who previously helped build HubSpot’s AEO and affiliate engine, working across four geos and languages with a team of 12. Guy is an AI and AEO voice from outside the affiliate world who cut his teeth on “search 1.0” at...

Sandeep Menon, co-founder and CEO of Auxia and a former Google Pay marketing leader, joins Tye DeGrange, host of Always Be Testing and CEO of RoundBarnLabs, to discuss how AI and agentic marketing are reshaping performance marketing. Sandeep explains why marketers should move from campaign-centric thinking to user-centric thinking, with a “segment of one” replacing broad segments and rigid rule-ba...

Rob Pinkerton is the CMO of Seismic, an AI-powered sales enablement platform, and previously served as CMO of Morningstar and SVP at Oracle, with earlier time at Adobe. He holds a JD and an MBA, and he began his career in politics, which he credits as some of the best training for a CMO. Known as a “positive contrarian” on AI, he calls himself a proud member of Team Human and sees AI as simply sof...

In this episode of Always the Testing Podcast , host Tye DeGrange talks shop with Dave Yovanno, CEO of impact.com, a partner marketing platform serving about 6,000 brands, including Walmart, Target and 60 banks. The platform has visibility into about $1T in GMV, roughly $200B of it partner-referred. Dave grew up in a blue-collar family in Cleveland and joined the Navy to pay for college. He later...

Tye DeGrange talks with Peep Laja, CEO of Wynter (a B2B market research platform with 12 to 48 hour turnaround on real-human surveys) and a leading voice in SaaS messaging and testing. They unpack why 65% of SaaS messaging is identical across competitors, the four layers of a message that wins (clarity, relevance, value, differentiation), and why a strong offer has to come before any spend on dist...

Sunil Kaki, Founder & CEO of Clove Growth, joins Tye DeGrange to trace the career blueprint that took him from a CJ call center to Fortune 500 CMO roles. They dig into brand vs. performance marketing, why chasing every new channel kills growth, CAC/LTV discipline, optimizing the first-user experience, the affiliate marketing philosophy that actually works, building trust with your CFO, and whe...

Mike Mallazzo, GM at Alephic Media, joins Tye DeGrange to unpack the next arbitrage window: marketing to LLMs and AI search engines. They cover AEO and GEO strategy, how brands get cited by ChatGPT and other AI assistants, the emerging opportunity in AI-driven ad arbitrage, why partner and affiliate marketing are becoming core to AI search strategy, and why traditional attribution models (MMM/MTA)...

Katerine Tamargo, Head of AI at CJ (Commission Junction), joins Tye DeGrange to unpack one of the most surprising findings in generative engine optimization: more than 83% of AI citations point to third-party sources, not brand-owned content. They dig into the KPIs that actually define AI visibility — mention rate, sentiment, position, and citations — and why a rigorous test-and-learn methodology...

Michelle Eatherton, Chief Business Officer at Liminal, shares how she convinced her co-founder to build the company partner-led from the very first call, before there was even a product. She and Tye dig into why mid-market enterprises are the underserved sweet spot for AI governance tools, and what it really takes to earn a hyperscaler co-sell relationship.

Jordan Bentley, founder of Audio Hook, explains how he built a performance-based podcast advertising model where brands only pay for real outcomes, not impressions. He and Tye talk about why AI made ad production easier (not the strategy), and why geo-based incrementality testing beats promo codes for proving what's actually working.

Michael Gants, founder and CEO of Encore, breaks down how apps can turn unused "streak" and celebration screens into a new revenue stream, without a single ad or paywall. He shares how brands like Disney, Uber, and Apple are paying to reach users in their happiest moments, and why founders should be more afraid of a broken CAC/LTV ratio than of running a monetization experiment.

Brook Schaaf, co-founder of FMTC and author of the new book Affiliate Hypotheses, joins Tye to make the case that affiliate marketing might be the internet's best — and sometimes only — way to monetize the open web. They dig into why walled gardens like Google and Meta get outsized credit for conversions, and why AI search is putting the open web's survival at risk.

Vikram Chalana, CEO and founder of Pictory, joins the show to unpack how his AI video platform went from 50 customers to 5,000 in just 60 days — and why the breakthrough came from changing the market, not the product. He digs into Pictory's State of Video report (AI adoption has no Silicon Valley bias — Florida and Indiana are leading users), the design principles that keep Pictory out of the "tim...

Remy's Danielle Sakher explains how her team balances speed with observability and security as AI coding tools move from novelty to enterprise infrastructure. She shares what it's really like selling an AI builder to security-conscious industries like financial services, plus a wild stat: alpha users have already spent $300K in AI compute.

Darryl Yearwood, who leads partnerships at Apollo, makes the case that a smaller, higher-quality partner roster beats chasing volume every time. He and Tye get into what "not plug-and-play" really means in affiliate marketing and how to build partnerships that actually move revenue.

Avishag Daniely built One Layer's entire marketing and partnerships function from scratch — coming from a background in IDF cyber intelligence. She shares how her military analytical training shaped her approach to B2B GTM, what it takes to build pipeline when no one's heard of your company yet, and why she treats every marketing decision like an intelligence problem.

Affiliate fraud investigator Ben Edelman joins Tye for an emergency episode breaking down the "Phia fiasco" that's rattling the affiliate marketing industry. Edelman, who's spent over 20 years catching affiliate fraud and has collaborated with Tye on forensic cases throughout his career, walks through what makes this case different from the usual stand-down violations that have hit shopping plugin...

Logan Dunn, Head of E-commerce at Wyze, ran 100 ads at once, cut traffic, and watched conversions go up. In this episode, he breaks down the counterintuitive paid media playbook behind Wyze's D2C growth — including why narrow targeting beats broad reach, how in-house creative unlocks faster iteration, and what most brands get wrong about scaling paid spend.

Nancy Harnett (Instantly) and Guy Yalif (Webflow) break down exactly how SaaS companies can grow their partner programs from single-digit contributions to 25% of pipeline and revenue. They cover partner ICP alignment, building a best-in-class partner experience, and why most programs stall before they ever scale.

Yoray Halevy joins Tye DeGrange to dig into why brands can't rely on Vogue-style coverage to build credibility — and what they should be doing instead. Yoray shares how his company creates authentic content that speaks to specific audiences, why last-click attribution misses the full picture, and how a paid media distribution mindset unlocks the true value of content. They also explore how AI is c...

Tom Rathbone joins Tye DeGrange to break down the real challenges of measuring CTV — from probabilistic Nielsen-era methods to where the industry stands today. Tom shares how TVScientific approaches measurement, why holdout testing is still underutilized by most brands, and how to build a test media plan that actually generates signal. Plus: why single-touch attribution fails in a multi-channel wo...

For Mother's Day, Tye DeGrange hands the mic to his mom — Ginger DeGrange. Rodeo queen. Horse trainer. Summer camp founder. 36-year instructor who's taught 10,000+ students the art of horsemanship at Santa Rosa Junior College. This one's full of great stories: the OJ Simpson trail ride, a student who went on to dine with the Queen of England, competing at the Grand National, and the old reinsman w...

Adam Dewer leads partnerships at Soci.ai — an AI-powered platform helping 800+ multi-location brands manage their local presence across social, listings, and reviews. In this episode, Tye and Adam get into the "zero platform" future of local marketing, where AI agents replace dashboards entirely — handling updates, review responses, and social posts through a simple SMS conversation with the busin...

The first episode of SaaS Class tackles one of the most pressing questions in B2B marketing: how do you win when your buyers are finding answers on ChatGPT and Perplexity instead of Google? Tye sits down with Nancy Harnett (Head of Affiliate & Offsite AEO at HubSpot) and Guy Yalif (Webflow, formerly CEO of Intellimize) to break down what's actually working in the race to become the most visibl...

In this episode of Always Be Testing , host Tye DeGrange sits down with Lacie Thompson, an experienced agency leader, affiliate and partner marketing expert, and former operator at brands like Expedia and Blue Nile. After successfully scaling and exiting her agency, Lacie is now building Media Pack—an AI-powered platform designed to modernize and streamline how brands buy media. The conversation e...