Get Ambassador

Jeff Epstein was in law school when he discovered the power of affiliate marketing and referrals at scale. He took the bar to make his mom proud but never practiced law. Instead, he launched an affiliate marketing company as a side project, and eventually sold it while still in school for enough money to give him freedom. In 2009, at 28 years old, he started Z-Furl—which would become Get Ambassador—as a way to build an affiliate program for another business idea. When he realized the software itself was the better product, he pivoted entirely.

Epstein's first attempt at monetization was a disaster. "We had 600 customers that didn't pay us," he recalls. He'd launched with a freemium model inspired by Dropbox's success, but he wasn't ready to sell. "I was just totally not prepared, not asking for the sale and doing a million things wrong," he admits. First-year revenue was "tens of dollars." But he wasn't discouraged—he'd built up equity in a Detroit house after buying at post-2008 prices, giving him runway to iterate. Over the next few years, he learned that moving upmarket and charging significantly more actually reduced churn, a counterintuitive insight that transformed the business.

By 2015, Get Ambassador had landed enterprise customers like SAP and HP. The company employed mandatory onboarding for every customer—a required service line item that ensured success from day one. This approach paid off: gross churn dropped to 1.25% monthly (85% annual retention), and the company achieved net negative dollar churn, a hallmark of product-market fit in SaaS. Jeff and his team were getting 20-40 new customers per month by February 2016.

Growth came from multiple channels. The company ran its own referral program, paying $25 for a scheduled demo and $500 (or an Apple Watch) if that demo converted to a customer. Paid channels—Google Ads, Facebook, and PPC—were also significant, with one VP Marketing reporting six customers worth $250K in revenue from PPC alone. But Jeff was intentional: rather than optimizing for cost per acquisition, he focused on identifying the best customer sources and doubling down there. Spend on paid ads in February 2016 was $25K–$50K monthly, yielding demos that closed at about 5%.

By early 2016, Get Ambassador was doing roughly $3.5M in annual revenue (2015) with a run rate of $3.84M by December. The company had 43 employees, mostly in Detroit, with a new Colorado office launched that year. Total capital raised was $2.9M ($400K in an earlier round, $2.5M in a more recent one), and the company was serving over 300 paying customers at an average of $1,000–$1,500 per month. Jeff, now 35 and married with two dogs, was focused on scaling what worked—not obsessing over metrics like lifetime value, but rather doubling down on the channels and customer types that generated the best long-term retention.