TapFiliat

Thomas Vendercly built TapFiliat from hard-won experience on both sides of affiliate marketing. As both an affiliate and advertiser, he saw inefficiencies everywhere—clunky tracking, unfair commission structures, predatory network fees. He wanted to fix it. But there was another motivation too: his previous startup had left him scarred. At just 21 or 22, Thomas and his young co-founders had watched helplessly as multiple investors—a big company providing free services, financial investors pursuing their own agendas—played power games with their company as the ball. That ad-supported printing service for students generated $400k in annual revenue at its peak (with customers like Dell), but the experience taught him he never wanted to be caught in that trap again.

Thomas took a different path with TapFiliat. No investors. No pressure. No games. He built it bootstrapped from day one, recruiting a tiny team of people he genuinely wanted to work with. By his own admission, working is his hobby, and he wanted the office to be "amazing"—filled with people he actually liked. The company stayed lean: just Thomas, one strategic advisor (a minority shareholder and "wise man"), and eventually a team of five based in Amsterdam. He believes in physical proximity; everyone works in the same office because he wanted collaboration to feel natural, not forced.

Customer acquisition for TapFiliat was efficient from the start. Thomas structured their funnel carefully: trial customers cost $20-30 to acquire, with a 40% conversion rate from trial to paid. That meant roughly $100 CAC for a paying customer—healthy math when customers pay $80/month, giving them a two-month payback period. The customers themselves were wonderfully diverse: fashion e-commerce brands, food supplement companies, travel sites, crypto projects, and yes, adult entertainment companies. "Everything that is being blogged about, basically," Thomas said. That diversity meant no single customer segment dominated, which was both a strength (diversified revenue) and a weakness (hard to optimize for any one use case).

For years, TapFiliat crushed it with 100% year-over-year growth. Then in February, they launched a beautiful new website—and it killed their conversion rates. Thomas had redesigned it to realign their mission and vision, to attract a "different kind of customer," but the traffic disappeared. It took them months to debug what was wrong. "Many times gorgeous websites convert way worse than the ugliest websites you've ever seen," Thomas reflected, comparing it to eBay versus Craigslist. By the time we spoke, they'd just recovered about a month prior and were "starting to pump again." That growth stall dropped their year-over-year to a modest 20% (from 100%), though the underlying unit economics remained solid.

Their churn was higher than ideal: 7% logo churn and 5% revenue churn per month. Thomas acknowledged this partly reflected their lean team of three for much of their history—there was "only so much you can do." Expansion revenue was minimal too; they hadn't pushed hard on upsells because they were small and bandwidth was limited. The biggest pricing jump was from $69 to $150/month, driven mostly by custom domains and team member seats, but Thomas admitted they hadn't nailed a single value metric that resonated across their wildly different customer cohorts.

At the time of this interview, TapFiliat was doing approximately $80k/month in revenue (~$960k ARR) across 1,000+ customers. They'd been profitable since year two and had no urgent need for outside capital—though Thomas admitted fundraising "always lingers in the background." His dream was a strategic acquisition by a company that would let him and his team grow alongside them, learning along the way. He valued the multiple (aiming for around 5x ARR), but more than that, he valued autonomy and culture. "Everything is just going really well," he said. "So there's not really a need at this point." At 31, married with two cats, Thomas embodied the bootstrapped founder who chose happiness and sustainable growth over hypergrowth and venture capital. Not every founder's path, but a real one.