6
9 Comments

Best Affiliate Payment Platform for SaaS?

Are there any indie hackers here that have experimented with affiliate marketing? What platform did you use to onboard your affiliates and how did you integrate that into your SaaS?

posted to Icon for group Growth
Growth
on June 24, 2020
  1. 3

    What I did to start off with was simply setting up a parameter to my landing page that was tied to the affiliate (?src=their_code). I would then set a cookie that I pass to the products signup process and remember that the signup came from "their_code". The affiliate code is basically just added to the customers database entry, but I would also track it to mixpanel.
    My product has a 14 day free trial so I want to make sure affiliates would only receive payouts once their signups actually purchase the subscription. So I then just pull a monthly report of all signups that are actually subscribed to the paid product through a oneliner sql script. As I am getting more and more affiliates I will probably automate the script to automatically send out a report to me and the affiliate.

    That is the whole process so far. This obviously does not scale but it is a great start if you don't want to spend money on a service or you are not sure how many affiliates you are going to close.

  2. 3

    https://www.getrewardful.com/

    Was very easy to integrate if you use stripe.

    I recommend making sure you have the time, energy and demand for it.

    You want to have 5-10 folks who are serious about doing it, or you want to start doing outreach (ideally with a list of names, email and websites before doing it)

    1. 1

      I recommend making sure you have the time, energy and demand for it.

      What's the time/energy requirements for doing affiliate marketing? Presumably the affiliates are working so you don't have to?

      You want to have 5-10 folks who are serious about doing it, or you want to start doing outreach (ideally with a list of names, email and websites before doing it)

      Is the time and energy you're talking to try to find these affiliates?

      1. 3

        You have to push affiliates to make content, or make the content for them.

        No finding affiliates is only the first part.

        You need to nurture these relationships.

        I believe Converkit has a full time person for their affiliate program.

  3. 1

    There are SaaS specific affiliate platforms. You can find a list on my website here.

    1. 1

      Yeah, I'm already using stripe, but I need to handle paying out affiliates.

Trending on Indie Hackers
$36K in 7 days: Why distribution beats product (early on) User Avatar 112 comments I've been reading 50 indie builder posts a day for the past month. Here's the pattern nobody talks about. User Avatar 104 comments Where is your revenue quietly disappearing? User Avatar 90 comments We made Android 10x faster. Now, we’re doing it for the Web. 🚀 User Avatar 71 comments Finally reached 100 users in just 12 days 🚀 User Avatar 63 comments a16z says "these startups don't exist yet - it's your time to build." I've been building one. User Avatar 57 comments