Behind The Tool: Yash From SARAL & SATHI

What was the moment you realized this was a massive problem you needed to solve?

"We'd run SARAL for a few years and helped 500+ ecom brands generate $59M+ in influencer revenue. And in nearly every check-in with a serious operator, the same complaint surfaced: 'I know this is working. I can feel it. But I can't prove it to my CFO.' We'd dig in and find the same thing every time — a truth problem on both sides of the same coin.

On one side, brands were systematically under-crediting the influencers actually building their business. Five creators would post about a brand. One person would Google the brand on the weekend and check out with a code. Last-click attribution would hand that one creator 100% of the credit. The other four would see zero on their dashboard, get demotivated, and stop posting. The program would slowly die — not because it wasn't working, but because the measurement was lying.

On the other side, brands were systematically over-crediting people who weren't doing the work. Coupon codes leaking on Reddit and Honey. Self-referrals where the affiliate buys their own product. Click farms. Affiliates running Google ads on the brand's own keywords and cannibalizing paid spend. We ran fraud scans on early SATHI customers and found 10-20% of commissions were fraudulent. For a brand doing $100K/month in affiliate, that's $10-20K of margin walking out the door every month. The breaking point was realizing the platforms themselves had no incentive to fix this. Their dashboards looked better when the numbers were bigger — even if the numbers were lies. Catching fraud would mean showing brands less attributed revenue. Better attribution would mean admitting most platforms had been running on a measurement model from the early 2000s — built for blogs and email lists, not for a world where 100 influencers post about your brand every week.

That's when it clicked. The problem wasn't going to be solved by incumbents. It needed someone willing to build a platform that tells brands the truth — even when the truth is uncomfortable. So we built SATHI."

[inline-cta title="Learn more about SATHI" link="https://www.getsaral.com/"]

What's one thing most brands get wrong about this problem?

"When affiliate isn't working, the instinct is to fix the strategy. Recruit more affiliates. Raise the commission. Try a new platform. Run more campaigns. The recruitment treadmill becomes the whole job — constantly onboarding new people to replace the ones who churned. But the program didn't die because the strategy was wrong. It died because the measurement was wrong. The creators who were actually building the brand never got credit, so they stopped posting. The fraudsters who were gaming the system kept getting paid, so they stuck around. Over time, the program filters for the wrong people and filters out the right ones. The strategy looks broken because the data was lying about who was performing.

The brands that fix this don't recruit harder. They measure better. They figure out which creators actually drove discovery vs. who just caught the last click. They catch the fraud that was siphoning 10-20% of their commissions. And then — only then — does the strategy start working, because for the first time they're paying the right people for the right work.

Your affiliate program probably isn't broken. Your visibility is."

What's the feature customers fall in love with first?

"A few!

• Inner Circle let's them turn their high value customers to affiliates automatically post-checkout.

• The fraud scan instantly shows them any fraudulent affiliates from their previous platform, some brands have saved more money with this in week one than they would pay for the tool in the full year!

• Our built-in AI sidekick helps affiliate managers build programs, manage reporting, handle operations all on auto-pilot. They love it too!"

What makes SATHI different from other solutions out there?

"Every other affiliate platform optimizes for activity. We optimize for truth. That sounds abstract until you look at the incentives. An affiliate platform makes more money when your dashboard shows bigger numbers — even if the numbers are wrong. So they have no reason to flag the 15% of your commissions going to fraud. No reason to tell you that last-click attribution is crediting the wrong creator. No reason to question whether the revenue is actually incremental. Their dashboards are designed to look good, not to be accurate.

SATHI does the opposite. Cookieless multi-touch attribution that shows you which creators actually drove the sale, not just the last person to drop a code. A proactive AI fraud engine that catches self-referrals, code leaks, paid-ad cannibalization, and newer stuff like ChatGPT-scraped codes, and reports them, even when reporting them makes the dashboard look smaller. Lowest payout fees in the category because we don't think you should be taxed on paying your affiliates.

The deeper difference is the kind of program each tool helps you build. Other platforms optimize for affiliate count — 1,000 affiliates sounds impressive. We optimize for revenue per ambassador. We'd rather you have 100 creators who post about you every week for years than 1,000 who post once and disappear. Different math. Different incentives.

Different kind of program.

Plus it integrates with our main platform SARAL, so any brands running influencer / seeding programs can turn their influencers to affiliates seamlessly!"

What's a big shift happening in your industry that brands aren't talking about enough?

"Affiliate isn't a separate side-channel anymore. It's becoming the compensation layer on top of every creator partnership, micro-influencer to megastar. Most brands still treat it as a side program with separate tooling and a separate manager. Within two years that won't make sense. "

What's one lesson you learned the hard way while building your company?

"Hire good leaders across the team. I tried to do everything on my own initially and failed. You need great people!

Now we have them."

If you could go back to Day 1, what's one thing you'd do differently?

"Kinda same as above, hire better and faster instead of taking it all on myself. "

What's the best piece of advice you've ever received?

"Always bet on yourself. Die on your own sword!"

Interested in SATHI? Book a demo here or get 20% off + done-for-you migration from your existing affiliate platform with code 1800 at signup.

• Read More from Yash: The DTC Affiliate Playbook and Fixing Your Attribution‍