At the international iGaming & Affiliate Conference MAC in Yerevan, Idea Clan co-founders Rohit Ajmani and Sahil Walia spoke about scaling performance marketing operations to more than $10 million a month on Meta Ads. After the conference, they reflected on something broader: what actually makes an industry event commercially valuable, why MAC felt different from larger international shows, and how it opened new doors for Idea Clan in iGaming.

Idea Clan is a technology-enabled performance marketing company operating across lead generation, pay-per-call, search arbitrage, Nutra, e-commerce, media buying and emerging iGaming opportunities. The company is led by co-founders Rohit Ajmani, CEO, and Sahil Walia.

At MAC, the two founders shared their experience of building and scaling high-volume media-buying operations, including the internal architecture required to manage more than $10 million in monthly Meta spend.

But for Idea Clan, the conference itself became an opportunity to look beyond existing operations.

The company has not historically been focused on casino or iGaming. MAC gave the team direct access to operators, affiliate programmes, technology providers, media-buying teams and companies already operating at scale in the vertical.

For Ajmani, that is exactly what makes a conference worth attending.

A Conference Has to Produce More Than Contacts

As CEO, Rohit Ajmani evaluates conferences through a relatively simple commercial framework.

For an event to justify the investment, it should generate three things:

relationships that can become business, insights that influence strategy, and access to technologies or partners that improve operations.

MAC, he says, delivered all three.

“Idea Clan has not historically been focused on casino or iGaming, but we are beginning to explore the space. MAC gave us a much clearer understanding of the market.”

The conference helped the team better understand how social casino and iGaming companies acquire users, structure partnerships and scale campaigns.

It also introduced Idea Clan to potential partners, new operational approaches and technology that could strengthen its own automation and campaign infrastructure.

Not every conference introduction becomes a transaction immediately.

Ajmani does not think it needs to.

The more important question is whether the event creates enough relevant relationships and follow-up opportunities to influence what happens afterwards.

In that sense, he says, MAC was commercially worthwhile.

From a First Conversation to a Real Project

For Sahil Walia, another important metric is speed.

Not simply how fast a campaign can be launched, but how quickly two companies can understand whether there is a genuine reason to work together.

That happened relatively naturally at MAC.

“The environment was informal and people were approachable. The conversations did not feel overly structured or transactional.”

Instead of exchanging rehearsed pitches, participants had enough time to understand what another company was building, what problems it was trying to solve and whether there was an actual fit.

That changes the meaning of speed in business.

“Speed is not simply about launching quickly. It is also about identifying the right partner quickly and reaching an honest yes or no without months of formal discussion.”

At MAC, several conversations moved directly from introductions into practical discussions around traffic, technology, offers and potential tests.

For Walia, that makes it much easier to return to the team after a conference and turn a conversation into a pilot rather than another contact sitting in a CRM.

What Breaks When Performance Marketing Reaches Real Scale?

The discussion around MAC also reflected one of the core themes of Idea Clan’s work: what happens when a performance business becomes genuinely large.

According to Ajmani and Walia, creative production is usually the first obvious bottleneck.

Digital platforms consume creative at enormous speed. Winning concepts fatigue. Competitors replicate successful ads. A team may have capital and experienced buyers, but if it cannot continuously produce, test and refresh creative, growth eventually stalls.

At a much larger scale, however, the problem changes.

When Idea Clan crossed approximately $10 million per month in Meta spend, its infrastructure had to support more than 1,000 ad accounts, thousands of pages, multiple platforms and teams working across Indian and US time zones.

Technology began reaching capacity limits.

People faced burnout.

Coordination became more difficult.

The deeper challenge, the founders argue, is therefore not simply finding more winning ads.

It is building technology, systems and leadership at the same speed as revenue.

Great Media Buyers Are No Longer Enough

That scale has also changed what Idea Clan believes creates a competitive performance-marketing company.

Strong media buyers remain essential.

But they cannot be the entire operating model.

When hundreds or thousands of ads are being launched across multiple platforms and decisions need to be made across large numbers of accounts, manual management stops being realistic.

Technology becomes necessary for creative production, launching, tracking, optimisation, account health and real-time visibility.

Processes become equally important because a winning decision needs to be reproducible across the company rather than remaining inside the head of one talented buyer.

Idea Clan describes the real advantage as a combination:

strong buyers, proprietary technology, reliable data, AI-assisted creative production and disciplined internal processes.

Talent finds the opportunity.

Systems make it repeatable.

Smaller Teams Can Still Be Extremely Dangerous

One of the things that stood out to Idea Clan at MAC was the composition of the audience.

There were large organisations, but also many mid-sized companies and specialised media-buying teams.

That did not make the business conversations less valuable.

Quite the opposite.

“Company size did not always reflect the quality of the business.”

The team met comparatively lean organisations producing strong margins and demonstrating deep expertise in individual GEOs, traffic sources and verticals.

Idea Clan may have had greater organisational scale than many of the teams in the room, but the founders still found significant value in learning from companies that were smaller in headcount and highly efficient in execution.

This is one of the more important observations about modern performance marketing.

Scale matters.

But efficiency, specialist knowledge and speed can make a smaller team disproportionately competitive.

The Best Meetings Were the Ones They Had Not Scheduled

Idea Clan arrived at MAC with planned meetings.

But when asked which conversations ultimately proved most valuable, the answer was clear:

the unexpected ones.

“Scheduled meetings helped us use our time efficiently, but the most useful discussions developed naturally.”

Some began after presentations.

Others happened at social events or through introductions from people the founders already trusted.

Because the conversations were less scripted, participants spoke more openly about what was working, what was breaking and where they actually needed help.

The conference talks also played a role.

Rather than functioning only as standalone presentations, they often created a reason to approach a speaker afterwards and continue the conversation at a much more practical level.

From a MAC Conversation to Testing New Technology

One of the clearest examples involved Ashish Gaba, another MAC speaker.

Idea Clan connected with Gaba during the conference and held detailed discussions about his approach to scaling Google campaigns.

The conversation did not end in Yerevan.

The team subsequently began testing his technology.

For Idea Clan, this is close to an ideal conference outcome:

meet a practitioner, exchange real operational knowledge, evaluate the technology and move from conversation into actual use.

The company also met several businesses across automation, affiliate infrastructure and iGaming with which it could realistically explore pilot projects.

Idea Clan’s preferred model is straightforward: start with a controlled test, validate the economics and the working relationship, and only then scale.

Why MAC Could Shorten the Route Into iGaming

If Idea Clan could send only one major international partner to the next MAC, the founders say they would choose one of their Brazilian partners that has already built substantial scale in Nutra through platforms such as ClickBank and BuyGoods.

The company already understands direct-response funnels, performance marketing, creative testing and high-volume operations.

What it is now looking for is diversification — particularly into iGaming.

MAC, Idea Clan argues, could significantly shorten that transition.

Rather than entering a new vertical through trial and error, the company could meet operators, affiliate programmes, technology providers and experienced media-buying teams directly.

In other words, the learning curve is compressed through relationships.

The same logic applies to other international businesses.

Idea Clan believes the companies most likely to benefit from MAC are those that already have capital, an offer and operating experience, but are entering a new vertical or GEO and need credible regional partners, traffic expertise or infrastructure.

The conference puts operators, affiliate networks, technology providers and media-buying teams in the same environment.

That reduces the time required to understand a market — and makes it easier to distinguish companies with genuine operating capability from those with polished presentations.

A Different Kind of Openness

Perhaps the most distinctive part of MAC for the Idea Clan founders was not company size or even geography.

It was how openly people spoke.

At many large international conferences, business conversations become highly polished.

Everyone knows how to explain what they sell.

Far fewer people are willing to discuss what is going wrong.

MAC felt different.

“People were more comfortable discussing experiments, mistakes, operational problems, and what was genuinely working.”

The team heard conversations around campaign economics, traffic quality, account stability, creative fatigue, team structure and the difficulties of entering new GEOs.

Nobody was expected to disclose every confidential detail.

But conversations regularly moved beyond surface-level introductions.

That honesty made it easier to determine whether two companies could genuinely help each other.

“Business Is Built Through Hospitality and Openness”

Asked to summarise the business culture at MAC in one observation, Idea Clan offered a phrase that captures much of the conference:

“Business is built through hospitality and openness.”

The event had a strong Eastern European and CIS presence, and the founders found the culture noticeably relationship-driven.

People spent time together.

They hosted one another, exchanged experiences and built trust before trying to force a transaction.

The parties and social programme were part of that atmosphere, but underneath them was something commercially serious: a willingness to share knowledge and help other businesses grow.

What MAC Does Differently From the Largest Global Conferences

Idea Clan has experience across international markets, and the founders are clear about what separates MAC from the biggest events in Asia, Europe and the Middle East.

The largest global conferences provide enormous reach.

But enormous reach comes with a cost.

Conversations can become brief, polished and transactional.

MAC’s strongest advantage, in their view, is concentration.

It offers access to a community that is difficult to reach with the same density elsewhere: Eastern European and CIS performance marketers, iGaming specialists and highly entrepreneurial media-buying teams.

At MAC, people had time to talk.

They shared operational details.

And discussions continued outside the formal conference environment.

The founders also highlight the role of the organising team.

Vadim, Alex, Tanya and the wider MAC team supported Idea Clan throughout its participation, from preparation for the stage to hosting the team in Yerevan.

For them, that combination — a distinctive audience, openness, hospitality and commercially relevant conversations — is what separates MAC from many larger international shows.

A Conference as a Shortcut to the Right Market

For Idea Clan, the value of MAC ultimately comes down to compression.

Compressing the time required to understand a new vertical.

Compressing the distance between a first introduction and a pilot project.

Compressing the process of finding credible partners.

And compressing access to a part of the global performance-marketing ecosystem that can otherwise be difficult for international companies to reach.

As Idea Clan begins exploring iGaming more seriously, this is precisely where the conference becomes strategically useful.

Not because every conversation becomes a deal.

But because the right conversation can turn months of research, introductions and trial and error into a much shorter path toward the right partner.

And in performance marketing, speed has always had value.

The difference is that at MAC, speed begins with people.