In the dynamic world of iGaming affiliate marketing, data is king, but turning raw numbers into actionable insights remains a significant challenge. Enter StatsDrone, an award-winning SaaS solution that is fundamentally changing how affiliates interact with their crucial performance data. Having recently been crowned ‘Innovator of the Year’ at the iGB Affiliate Awards 2025 for their groundbreaking Changelog product, StatsDrone is making waves by empowering affiliates to identify revenue leaks, automate workflows, and gain unparalleled transparency.

To delve deeper into their success and product vision, iGaming Times sat down with Joe Hatch, Head of Product at StatsDrone, a seasoned professional with a decade of experience in the affiliate space.

iGaming Times: Joe, StatsDrone was founded to address the “pain in revenue leak” experienced by iGaming affiliates. As Head of Product, how do you translate these historical affiliate pain points, particularly “shaving” and data opacity, into tangible product features that deliver real solutions?

Joe Hatch: Revenue leak is a broad issue, and shaving is just a small fraction of it. Having spent over a decade in the affiliate space, I deeply understand the day-to-day challenges of running an affiliate business - whether it’s dealing with broken tracking links, closed programmes, changing terms and conditions, fraud, or indeed, shaving. These experiences drive many of our product decisions. We focus on solving problems directly from our own experiences and by keenly listening to our customers’ feedback on what is truly useful to them.

At its core, our solution comes down to two main aspects: optimising and enhancing existing revenue, and identifying and preventing loss of earnings. Affiliates often face unreliable, siloed data, inconsistent reporting, and a pervasive lack of transparency across different programmes. StatsDrone was built specifically to fix these issues, ensuring affiliates can fully trust their data, optimise performance, and effectively prevent revenue leakage.

iGaming Times: Speaking of innovation, StatsDrone recently won the prestigious ‘Innovator of the Year’ award at the iGB Affiliate Awards 2025, specifically for your Changelog product. What was the core innovation behind Changelog that led to this recognition, and how does it fundamentally empower affiliates to protect their revenue and gain deeper insights into their data?

Joe Hatch: We were absolutely thrilled to have been nominated, and winning the Innovator of the Year award is a true validation of everything the whole team has been working towards behind the scenes.

The core innovation behind Changelog was a natural progression of our product. If you’re using StatsDrone, you’re getting an auditable trail of your data based exactly on what the programme was presenting at the time of data collection. I’ve often felt that platforms owned and controlled by operators can leave affiliates fighting to justify why they need access to certain data. Affiliate marketing is about building relationships, and without transparency, there’s no trust.

Often, StatsDrone holds the only copy of this historical data, and it’s incredibly hard to prove changes when platforms can disappear without notification. That’s why we take this historical data and compare it against what the platform is currently telling us, to identify any changes. Not all of these changes are illegitimate, but at least they’re often not communicated, and affiliates absolutely deserve to know when something shifts. By providing this transparency, Changelog helps affiliates protect their revenue and gain deeper insights into the integrity of their data.

iGaming Times: StatsDrone’s mission is to automate and optimise affiliate marketing. From a product perspective, walk us through a typical day for an iGaming affiliate using StatsDrone - how does the platform specifically streamline their daily workflow, from data collection to analysis, and what are the most significant time-saving benefits users experience?

Joe Hatch: I’ve spoken to many customers who have StatsDrone as a core part of their daily routine, usually with their morning coffee as they check their performance. With our scheduled sync, users can decide when they want the system to collect new data - whether it’s before they get to the office or at the end of the day to check a performance breakdown. We even have a mobile version of the app, allowing customers to check on the go.

The sheer ability to aggregate data from nearly 1,900 programmes saves a significant amount of time. What used to take teams hours of manual work each day - logging in, exporting, and compiling spreadsheets across dozens of platforms - now takes mere seconds. For affiliates managing multiple brands or large portfolios, this translates to thousands of hours saved every year. That time has a cost, and the return on investment is immediate. Instead of chasing reports, teams can focus on optimising performance and making faster, more informed decisions.

We even offer a data API and connectors to data warehouses and visualisation tools for business analysts, ensuring that no matter the role, everyone has access to the data they need. StatsDrone isn’t just part of a workflow; it’s integral to the ecosystem of operating an affiliate business at all levels. This eliminates the need for time-consuming manual processes and allows affiliates to focus on growing their business rather than getting lost in data management.

iGaming Times: Beyond simple data aggregation, StatsDrone aims to provide affiliates with “the power of analytics, BI, and AI.” How are you leveraging these technologies to offer actionable insights and predictive capabilities that truly empower affiliates?

Joe Hatch: Ultimately, the foundation for any BI capabilities at StatsDrone is data coverage and accuracy. That’s the starting point for everything we do, as we believe that good data is the bedrock of all meaningful insights. Once we ensure we have reliable, comprehensive data, we focus on enhancing its usability and providing actionable insights.

We aim to equip affiliates with intuitive, easily accessible analytics that allow them to make informed decisions. Whether it’s forecasting trends, identifying areas of improvement, or streamlining data definitions, we ensure that the insights we provide help our users craft a narrative from their data. We want affiliates to understand the “why” behind their performance, not just the “what.”

Our focus is on continuously improving how we present data, so affiliates can easily track and analyse their results, empowering them to optimise their strategies and focus on what works. StatsDrone moves beyond simple data aggregation by turning data into a tool for smarter decision-making.

iGaming Times: Your broader mission is to “automate and optimise affiliate marketing” so affiliates “spend less effort on the tech side and more on the revenue generating side.” What is your strategic product roadmap for achieving this, and what upcoming features are you most excited about?

Joe Hatch: Our roadmap is constantly evolving and changing based on real users and their feedback. We adapt to current market conditions and challenges and try to stay agile. Some of the features we released in the past 12 months were not originally planned but were added as a direct response to changes in the landscape.

In the last 12 months, we’ve added Dynamic Variables, Global BI Alerts, On-Premise and Changelog, User Seats, and Postback support. Our philosophy of being product-led and customer-first is paying dividends when it comes to this level of flexibility, allowing us to deliver these features rapidly and at scale.

Personally, I’m super excited to see where the next 12 months of product development takes us. We’re looking to add player engagement reporting as well as focusing on affiliates owning their own data (first-party data), attribution, and evolving into more affiliate CRM functionality, similar to Player Account Management (PAM) for affiliates.

iGaming Times: As a “technical product owner,” your deep technical understanding, including experience with APIs and databases, is a significant asset. How does this directly influence the development of StatsDrone’s product, particularly in enabling advanced data export and integration for users?

Joe Hatch: Having both technical and product backgrounds is critical in my role, especially in a team that’s almost entirely made up of developers. It allows me to operate on multiple levels - supporting customers directly on setup, architecture, and scalability, while also managing internal priorities with a clear view of short, mid, and long-term product vision.

This dual capability means we’re not bottlenecked when it comes to solving technical problems or scoping features. Whether it’s debugging a customer’s API integration or helping shape how we manage data pipelines internally, I’m able to contribute without overloading the engineering team. It keeps us agile, focused, and avoids accumulating unnecessary technical debt.

From a product standpoint, this has led to the release of native connectors for Tableau, Looker Studio, Power BI, and Metabase, as well as open-source plugins for platforms like WordPress to extend tracking functionality with tools like Pretty Links and ThirstyAffiliates. The result is that integrations and exports are not just surface-level features - they’re built with real use cases in mind from the ground up.

iGaming Times: In a world of sensitive financial data, how do you, as Head of Product, ensure the highest levels of data protection and build trust with affiliates, especially when dealing with potentially sensitive commission data?

Joe Hatch: Trust is earned, especially when dealing with financial and commission data. From day one, StatsDrone was built with privacy by design. We’ve deliberately architected the platform so that we don’t have access to customer performance data. The only visibility we have is which programmes are connected and their sync status - strictly for support and diagnostics. This principle is foundational and non-negotiable for us.

For customers with higher compliance or security requirements, we offer full self-hosting and even an on-premise version of our scraper and API library called DIDO (Data In, Data Out). It’s designed to slot directly into existing infrastructure, whether you’re a public company or just taking data security seriously.

We treat data security as a core product fundamental. That means no silent data access, no hidden collection, and clear control handed to the customer at all times. It’s how we’ve built trust and how we intend to maintain it.

iGaming Times: StatsDrone supports over 1,700 affiliate programmes. What challenges and considerations arise in product development when integrating with such a vast and continuously evolving ecosystem of affiliate platforms? How do you ensure ease of use for a wide range of technical proficiencies?

Joe Hatch: Integrating with nearly 1,900 affiliate programmes isn’t something that happens overnight. It’s the result of over seven years of iteration, persistence, and a team that understands affiliate programmes at a granular level. A huge amount of credit goes to our dev team and to Darrell Helyar, our Co-Founder and COO, who manages the complexity of these integrations day-to-day.

The real challenge isn’t just building the integration; it’s mapping the data, handling edge cases, adapting to silent platform changes, and maintaining reliability at scale. Many teams that try to build this in-house quickly realise it’s not a one-time project but an ongoing operational burden.

We also try to maintain close relationships with affiliate programme software providers. When platforms are open to collaboration and offer clean APIs or data transparency, we champion them. It’s a long-tail ecosystem, and we invest heavily in making the experience seamless for users across all technical levels. Making it easy to use at scale is the product challenge we focus on every day.

Alongside the technology, our team is a major part of what makes this work. We take support seriously, and our developers are directly involved in maintaining integrations, monitoring changes, and helping customers when issues arise. We do not see support as a separate function. It is a core part of how we build and maintain the product.

iGaming Times: Your CEO, John Wright, speaks about operators impacting player value and how this affects affiliates. How does StatsDrone’s product help affiliates monitor and understand these dynamics, and are there ways the platform could encourage better transparency from operators?

Joe Hatch: This is core to why StatsDrone exists. John co-founded the company because affiliates were operating with limited visibility while carrying the majority of acquisition risk. Our goal is to level that imbalance by making data accessible and actionable.

We’ve started aggregating metadata across affiliate programmes; tracking things like update frequency, API availability, and whether revenue is broken down by commission type. Over time, this gives affiliates a clearer picture of which programmes are transparent and reliable, and which ones aren’t.

By surfacing these signals inside our platform, we help affiliates make more informed choices about where to invest their traffic and partnerships.

iGaming Times: Looking forward, what are the most significant trends or shifts you foresee in the iGaming affiliate marketing landscape, particularly concerning data, automation, and AI? How is StatsDrone preparing to innovate and lead in these future developments?

Joe Hatch: We’re already seeing the shift. Affiliates want to own their data, own their players, and move beyond just top-line reporting. With acquisition costs rising and competition increasing, every click needs to deliver maximum value. First-party data, advanced tracking, and player-level engagement are becoming standard expectations, not advanced features.

Affiliates no longer just want to know that something converted. They want to know what converted, who converted, and why. This is where attribution, segmentation, and intent-based analytics come into play.

We’re actively building toward that future. Affiliate CRMs, support for deal distribution networks, and integrations with next-generation tracking tools are all areas we’re investing in. Our focus is on making this level of intelligence accessible, not just for the top one percent, but for affiliates at every level. StatsDrone is evolving to be the infrastructure layer for affiliate operations.