My name is Ori Manor Zuckerman and I’ve been a tech entrepreneur for over a decade. I’m 39 years old, married (expecting a baby) and live in Tel Aviv, Israel.
I started my “career” in 2005 as a fresh affiliate marketer in the field of Personal-Development after taking a short after-school course at it. eCommerce was just starting back then and there was a lot of excitement all around. It felt new. It felt bold. It felt mine: very few people dealt with online commerce / marketing back then.
I was just a University student in those days, working out of my tiny rented apartment in the southern city of Be’er Sheva. I wasn’t exceptionally great at it , but fortunately, thanks to some “student-allowance” from dear old mom & dad, I didn’t have to find a student-job to support my very basic needs (rent + junk food) and that gave me the time I needed to figure things out.
Soon enough, that little “between-classes” experiment grew and evolved and got me to a “super-affiliate” status (it was “a thing” back then: Amazon-Associates, ClickBank, Commission Junction, ShareASale, LinkShare, Copeac, NeverBlue filled a gap of internet-fearing old-school vendors).
Through 2006 to 2009 I grew that little business further — becoming a full-fledged digital product producer: I remotely hired shadow writers to write self-help eBooks, designers to design the digital covers, and developers to build “nest websites” for each digital product. I found myself designing and building massive “funnels” to add related third-party products (cross-selling) and aggressively marketed these micro-businesses online using a variety of channels and techniques — including: Google Adwords, SEO, direct partnerships, recruiting affiliate marketers, promoting my offers inside the leading affiliate networks, etc.
From 2006 to 2010 I’ve built my basic entrepreneurial skillset and became relatively proficient at managing a remote workforce (my favorite hub was “Elance” but I’ve used them all).
After graduating I moved to Tel Aviv and started a bunch of initiatives: some failed miserably, some became solid startups and some got acquired — Tierx, Dadaviz (acq. by vocativ), DiscoverCloud and Unomy (acq by wework). Not trying to be poetic about it but I’ve been through things — and learned a lot.
However, to me, everything was just a preface.. an intro to my new and exciting adventure called substrata — a new startup that I’m leading together with my two brilliant co-founders Eran Yessodi & Baruchi Har-Lev.
More on SubStrata and the SSP revolution we’re leading in the next posts.
