Lead Dino

Brett Owens co-founded Lead Dino in 2012 after recognizing a frustrating gap in the affiliate marketing software market. Existing solutions like ShareASale were comprehensive but bloated with 20 years of accumulated features, locked behind sales gatekeeping, and difficult for small business owners to use. Brett saw an opportunity: the rise of micro-influencers and social media meant small business owners needed a simple way to turn their existing customers into affiliate promoters. The insight was that "stuff has to be really easy for them to share."

The team moved fast. They launched the product in April 2013, just a year after starting the company. That first year was brutal—they closed 2013 with only $3,000 in recurring monthly revenue (roughly $1,000 each for the three co-founders). "We worked for free for a few years," Brett recalled. The bootstrap approach meant no external pressure, but also no safety net. They built integrations early, making Lead Dino a plug-and-play solution for popular e-commerce platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, WordPress, and Google Commerce—a strategic bet that paid off.

Instead of hiding behind a sales team like their competitors, Lead Dino took the opposite approach. They posted product demos publicly on their website, blog, and newsletter (which featured affiliate programs daily). They were "real active" with content and made themselves visible. Nathan noted the strategy was bold: "competitors can also view them, but we just kind of get that stuff out there." This transparency and content-driven approach became their growth engine. Customers also discovered them through app marketplaces and integrations, creating multiple discovery paths.

The company discovered that pricing and acquisition worked best when kept simple and low-friction. They tested a freemium model early on and abandoned it—free customers weren't serious enough. Instead, they settled on a $29 monthly floor, positioning themselves as a product for "serious" small businesses. Pricing ranged from $29 to $349 per month, with most customers paying under $100. Their CAC payback was excellent: they were happy if CAC was $300 or less (about 6 months of revenue), though actual numbers were likely better due to organic channels dominating growth.

Churn was their persistent challenge. Monthly logo churn ran at approximately 8%, which Brett acknowledged was high but partly endemic to e-commerce—many customers simply shut down their online stores. Rather than panic, they launched an affiliate network to serve customers beyond just their SaaS product, diversifying revenue and reducing dependency on churn.

By the time of this interview, Lead Dino had grown to 10 full-time employees (5 in Sacramento, the rest distributed globally from Bangladesh to NYC). They served 2,400+ direct customers and 1,800 merchants on their affiliate network. Most critically, they'd crossed $1M in ARR—growing 30% year-over-year and doing roughly $60,000 in monthly revenue. Brett remained philosophically opposed to raising capital: "I think we're pretty against raising... we like not having real jobs." The plan was to continue grinding organically, one foot in front of the other, for the next two decades.