Who Is Wilco de Kreij?

Wilco de Kreij is a Dutch entrepreneur recognized for his innovative fusion of technology and marketing. His journey began at the age of 16, selling sunglasses online, where he learned a crucial lesson: the real challenge wasn’t the product; it was the marketing.

While he pursued higher education at places like Erasmus University Rotterdam, his most significant learning came from hands-on business experiments. This obsession with solving real-world problems led him to shift from e-commerce to developing the tools he wished he had, quickly establishing himself as a “marketing nerd” with a knack for untangling complex digital challenges. It’s this decades-long journey of identifying and solving the biggest bottlenecks for marketers that directly led to his latest venture, Winning Ads, which aims to solve what is arguably the hardest piece of the puzzle: creating ad creative that consistently converts.

Biography and Early Career

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In the early 2010s, Wilco made a name for himself in the internet marketing community by creating WordPress plugins and marketing solutions. A notable early venture was WP4FB (WordPress for Facebook), launched around 2011-2012. This plugin allowed businesses to create custom Facebook fan page apps and landing pages without needing to code. It introduced features like “like-gating” (revealing content only after a user liked a page) and easy email opt-in forms within Facebook, at a time when most solutions were either expensive or technically complex. Wilco’s one-time purchase model for WP4FB, with tiered licenses for power users, successfully undercut pricier subscription services and rapidly attracted thousands of business owners and marketers. This early success not only generated income but also solidified Wilco’s reputation as an innovator capable of identifying and filling gaps in the digital marketing toolkit.

Building on these early wins, Wilco transitioned from one-off plugins to the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. He explored various projects, such as a Facebook contest app called ZoSocial, and gained firsthand experience with the power of viral marketing. By the mid-2010s, he was ready to launch more scalable solutions. His early career is defined by a consistent pattern: identifying marketers’ pain points and swiftly developing products to address them – a pattern that would characterize his later ventures. According to Wilco, he realized that long-term success required moving beyond quick sales, famously noting that “selling something is easy, but getting people to actually use it and get ongoing value is way harder.” This philosophy guided his shift toward SaaS products that would be continuously improved, prioritizing user results over one-time sales.

Companies and Ventures

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Wilco de Kreij has founded and grown multiple companies, primarily in the online marketing and SaaS sectors. His consistent mission across these ventures has been to help small and medium businesses achieve “the marketing power of giants” by providing innovative tools and platforms. Below are the most significant ventures he has led:

UpViral (founded 2015)

UpViral is a referral marketing SaaS platform that enables businesses to run viral giveaways, contests, and reward programs to expand their audience and email lists. Wilco founded UpViral after observing a lack of user-friendly, email-focused giveaway tools in the market. The platform’s goal was to simplify viral marketing, making word-of-mouth referrals accessible to any business online. Launched in mid-2015 on the JVZoo platform, UpViral quickly became one of the top-selling products of that year, demonstrating significant market demand. Initially offered with a one-time purchase deal for early adopters, UpViral later transitioned to a subscription model, reflecting Wilco’s focus on delivering recurring value. Over time, he grew UpViral into the #1 referral marketing platform in its niche, serving more than 25,000 marketers worldwide and facilitating over 50 million leads generated for its clients as of the early 2020s. Wilco served as CEO, building a global team and leadership staff to manage daily operations. Under his guidance, UpViral expanded its features, including fraud detection, A/B testing, and rich analytics, and fostered a thriving community of users who regularly share success stories of exponential email list growth. UpViral’s business model has been subscription-based SaaS, supplemented by training resources like the “Viral Hacking” course to ensure customer success. In late 2023, Wilco sold UpViral to an acquirer after scaling it to a point where the platform operated largely independently of him. At the time of its acquisition, UpViral had users in over 150 countries and had become a “household name” in viral marketing for businesses.

Connectio (founded ~2015)

Connectio (Connectio.io) was Wilco’s other major venture, a SaaS company offering a suite of Facebook advertising tools. While UpViral focused on viral referral campaigns, Connectio’s mission was to automate and optimize Facebook Ads for improved results, especially for marketers and small businesses without advanced in-house ad tech. Wilco often notes that he ambitiously launched UpViral and Connectio simultaneously around 2015, effectively running two SaaS companies in parallel. Under the Connectio brand, he and his team developed a family of products – including ConnectExplore, ConnectLeads, ConnectAudience, ConnectRetarget, and ConnectAutomate – each addressing a specific pain point in Facebook marketing. Connectio’s primary target audience was Facebook advertisers and digital marketers seeking to save time, improve targeting, and increase ROI on their campaigns. The company’s growth was rapid: what began as a small “hobby project” evolved into a business with 45,000+ customers in 140+ countries and a team of 30+ employees at its peak. Connectio primarily used a subscription pricing model, with some tools offering lifetime licenses or monthly plans, and integrated with over 50 third-party marketing platforms to fit into customers’ existing workflows. Over the years, Connectio earned a strong reputation among online advertisers – notable marketing experts hailed Wilco as an “incredible, brilliant marketer” whose tools like ConnectLeads and ConnectRetarget were “amazing” for gaining an edge in Facebook advertising. Despite Connectio’s success, Wilco made the strategic decision in 2021 to let it go. He admitted that running two companies had divided his focus and that his passion had shifted more toward UpViral’s domain. In 2021, he sold Connectio to a new owner, ensuring a solid team and processes were in place to continue serving customers without his direct involvement. The Connectio brand (and its products) continue to operate under new management, but Wilco’s imprint remains in the form of the product vision and foundations he laid.

Emarky and Other Ventures

Wilco’s personal brand and holding company in recent years has been Emarky (emarky.net), through which he has incubated new ideas. Emarky serves as an umbrella for his activities after the sale of his main companies. It reflects Wilco’s ongoing mission to empower marketers: Emarky’s slogan, “Helping Small Businesses Get The Marketing Power of Giants,” encapsulates the goal behind all his projects. Under Emarky, Wilco has launched Marketing Shortcuts, an educational platform offering training and resources on online marketing best practices. Marketing Shortcuts was created to distill Wilco’s 20+ years of experience into actionable content for entrepreneurs, covering topics from paid traffic strategies to conversion optimization. Additionally, Wilco remains an active angel investor and mentor in the SaaS space (particularly after his exits, as noted in his 2023 review) – he has started to invest in other startups and share his knowledge with fellow entrepreneurs. Finally, early in his career (pre-UpViral), Wilco also founded and later sold a few smaller ventures and product launches (some via affiliate marketplaces). For example, he developed ViralOptins (a WordPress plugin for viral lead capture) and ZoSocial (a Facebook contest app) in the early 2010s. These were stepping stones – some were monetized or folded into later projects. In total, by 2023, Wilco had built and sold three startups (as he often mentions on social media) and impacted tens of thousands of customers with his software.

Business Model and Evolution

A common thread in Wilco de Kreij’s ventures is that he often bootstrapped them without significant outside funding. He relied on savvy internet marketing, such as affiliate launches, webinar promotions, and content marketing, to fuel growth. UpViral’s initial JVZoo launch, for instance, used an affiliate network to generate buzz and revenue quickly. Connectio’s products were frequently introduced via online marketing forums, email lists, and joint venture webinars, leveraging Wilco’s personal credibility in the community. Once a product gained traction, Wilco focused on converting it to a sustainable SaaS with recurring subscriptions, which provided stable growth. Both UpViral and Connectio eventually reached the point where they operated with dedicated teams and could scale internationally – at one point Wilco noted both businesses had users in 150+ countries combined. This scalability and solid customer base made them attractive acquisitions. By timing his exits well (Connectio in 2021, UpViral in 2023), Wilco demonstrated a strategic approach to the business lifecycle: build a valuable product, scale it, and exit on a high note to free up focus for the next challenge.

Key Products and Software

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Wilco de Kreij’s impact is best understood by examining the key software products he conceived and launched. These tools addressed specific needs in digital marketing – from viral contest growth to advanced Facebook ad targeting – and often broke new ground in their functionality. Below is an overview of Wilco’s major products, with details on what each does, the problems they solve, their unique features, and their market reception:

UpViral (2015)

What It Does: UpViral is a cloud-based platform for viral marketing campaigns – primarily giveaways, sweepstakes, and referral programs. It enables businesses to leverage word-of-mouth by rewarding people for referring others. For example, a company can run a contest where participants get additional entries (or prizes) for every friend they refer via a unique link. UpViral handles the tracking of referrals, the landing pages, and the email integrations needed for such campaigns.

Problem It Solves: Before UpViral, marketers struggled to create viral giveaway campaigns without custom coding or cobbling together multiple tools. Many “contest” tools focused only on social media engagement (likes/shares) and did not help build email lists. Wilco identified that gap: businesses wanted more leads and subscribers from contests, not just social followers. UpViral was built to make it easy to run campaigns that incentivize email sign-ups and referrals, thereby directly growing a mailing list and customer base.

Unique Features: UpViral’s standout features include a drag-and-drop campaign page builder, built-in fraud detection (to catch fake or duplicate entries), one-click social sharing for participants, and a robust referral tracking system. It also offers A/B split testing for campaign pages, automatic winner selection, and “custom actions,” which allow campaign owners to reward participants for tasks beyond referrals (such as posting on social media or answering a survey). UpViral integrates with popular email marketing services, allowing new leads to flow directly into the client’s email autoresponder. Another USP is the template library and training – Wilco’s team provided case studies and templates (e.g., viral contest templates that generated 100k+ leads) to help users hit the ground running. UpViral’s focus on both ease-of-use and advanced capabilities (for those who want to customize every detail) helped set it apart from earlier contest tools.

Reception and Market Impact: UpViral was met with enthusiasm in the marketing community. Upon launch in 2015, it reportedly became one of the most sold products on JVZoo, reflecting strong demand. Over the ensuing years, it grew into the leading referral marketing tool of its kind, boasting over 25,000 users worldwide and facilitating the generation of “well over 50 million leads” for businesses as of 2021. Many internet marketing influencers adopted UpViral for list-building campaigns, and it developed a vibrant Facebook user group where customers share viral campaign results and tips. UpViral’s brand became synonymous with viral giveaways – it is frequently recommended in growth hacking and digital marketing circles as a go-to solution for rapid list growth. The platform’s success also led Wilco to author a book called “The Viral Referral Method” in 2023, distilling the strategies behind UpViral campaigns into a methodology. Even after Wilco’s exit from the company in late 2023, UpViral continues to be a staple tool for marketers, which underscores the lasting market impact of the product he created.

ConnectExplore (2017)

What It Does: ConnectExplore is a Facebook interest targeting tool. It helps advertisers find hidden or niche interests on Facebook to target with ads – interests that are not easily discoverable through Facebook’s own Ads Manager suggestions. For example, instead of targeting broad interests like “fitness,” a marketer could use ConnectExplore to find specific interest keywords (e.g., names of niche fitness publications, communities, influencers) that have an audience on Facebook but face less competition from other advertisers.

Problem It Solves: Facebook’s advertising platform allows interest-based targeting, but it traditionally only suggests very obvious, high-competition interests. Many valuable interests are “hidden” – they exist in Facebook’s system but won’t show up unless searched exactly. Manually finding these requires a lot of guesswork or external research. ConnectExplore solved this by leveraging Facebook’s Ads API and Wilco’s proprietary methods to reveal a wealth of relevant interests that marketers would otherwise miss. By targeting these narrower interests, advertisers can reach highly relevant audiences with lower advertising costs, since fewer competitors are bidding for those terms.

Unique Features: The tool’s UI allows users to input a broad keyword and then returns a rich list of related interests (including many not shown in Facebook’s interface) that can be added to one’s ad targeting with one click. ConnectExplore also provides data on each interest (such as audience size) and lets users filter interests by topic or language – a feature that, for example, enables finding foreign-language interests to tap into less saturated local markets. It introduced “layering” of interests as well: an ability to find overlapping interest groups for more precise targeting. Additionally, ConnectExplore integrates directly with Facebook Ads Manager, meaning an advertiser can push a batch of selected interests into a live ad set instantly. This seamless workflow and the time saved in research are core selling points. Uniquely, ConnectExplore was offered as a one-time purchase lifetime license (uncommon for SaaS, but Wilco used this strategy to attract many users quickly) – it included a free trial of the broader Connectio suite but could function standalone. This pricing approach helped it spread fast among marketers.

Reception and Market Impact: Launched in January 2017, ConnectExplore was very well received, especially by Facebook marketers and agencies. It quickly amassed thousands of users (exact figures are proprietary, but it contributed significantly to Connectio’s 45k customer count by 2021) and became a staple recommendation for interest research. Reviews highlighted that it gave “an extremely powerful advantage” in ad targeting by uncovering interests competitors didn’t know about. By enabling advertisers to find untapped audiences, ConnectExplore often led to lower cost-per-click and higher ROI on ad campaigns – a crucial edge as Facebook ads grew more expensive. It also indirectly pushed competitors to improve; after ConnectExplore’s launch, other interest targeting tools and even Facebook’s own platform gradually expanded interest suggestions, validating the importance of what Wilco’s team had pioneered. ConnectExplore’s success solidified Connectio’s reputation and showed Wilco’s talent for spotting opportunities in the Facebook Ads ecosystem.

ConnectLeads (2015)

What It Does: ConnectLeads is a tool that integrates Facebook Lead Ads with email marketing systems. Facebook Lead Ads allow users on Facebook to fill out a lead form (e.g., to sign up for a newsletter or request a quote) directly within the Facebook app. ConnectLeads automatically sends those captured leads into the advertiser’s chosen CRM or autoresponder in real time. Essentially, it “connects” Facebook to dozens of email service providers, so marketers don’t have to manually export and import lead data.

Problem It Solves: When Facebook introduced Lead Ads around 2015, one challenge was that while it became easier to collect leads, getting those leads out of Facebook and into your own marketing funnel was cumbersome. Facebook would store new leads in a form library, and advertisers had to download CSV files and then upload them to their email system – a process that was manual and could delay follow-up to the new leads. Timely follow-up is crucial for conversion, so this gap meant lost sales opportunities. Wilco’s ConnectLeads, launched in late 2015 (soon after Lead Ads debuted), solved this by eliminating the delay and manual work. It ensured that the moment someone submits a Facebook lead form, they are automatically added to the advertiser’s email list or CRM, triggering any welcome emails or sales sequences immediately.

Unique Features: ConnectLeads offered a straightforward interface to map Facebook form fields to the fields in your email platform. It supported a wide range of email marketing services and CRMs (MailChimp, AWeber, InfusionSoft, HubSpot, etc.), reflecting Wilco’s emphasis on integration. A standout feature was the ability to auto-distribute unique coupon codes to new leads as soon as they opt in. For example, an e-commerce advertiser could promise a 10% off coupon for signing up via a Lead Ad – ConnectLeads would ensure each person immediately got their unique code via email. This drove higher conversion from lead to customer. Another selling point was that ConnectLeads made lead capture more mobile-friendly: because Facebook users’ information (like name and email) auto-populates in Lead Ad forms, it removed the friction of typing, especially on mobile devices. Wilco highlighted that many mobile users wouldn’t bother with long forms; ConnectLeads leveraged the one-tap opt-in aspect to dramatically boost sign-up rates. The software is cloud-based and doesn’t require any coding – a big advantage for small businesses. ConnectLeads was sold on a subscription (with a free 7-day trial), making it accessible to even solo marketers.

Reception and Market Impact: ConnectLeads was launched in October 2015 and was among the earliest solutions to bridge Facebook with external autoresponders. Its launch was met with excitement in the marketing community, as evidenced by many positive reviews and case studies of increased lead flow. By automating what was a tedious task, it became almost a “must-have” for anyone doing serious lead generation on Facebook. Competitors emerged (and Facebook’s API itself eventually allowed some direct integrations), but ConnectLeads maintained an edge by supporting a wide array of platforms and providing reliable syncing. Users often credit ConnectLeads with helping them maximize ROI from F