[Feedback] Would love some feedback on my new project idea!
Hey everyone, long time lurker finally taking the plunge. I just started working on Refermo, an affiliate network for SaaS startups, the idea is to create an easy way for SaaS startups to find qualified affiliates to promote their product. The current plan is to make the service completely free for startups and take a 10% commission on each affiliate payout (this will also cover all Stripe/PayPal fees). I'd love any feedback you guys have to give on the idea and any advice you guys have for building out two sided market place businesses like this.
Dan
Hi,
My questions might be warped a bit from my experience in the industry(worked as a developer at one of the largest affiliate networks(Azoogle/Epic Ads) back in the day and I also made money as an affiliate for a number of years before/after that) so just a heads up I'm not going to be your typical customer.
My questions when seeing that lander would primarily be how are you going to help me find good affiliates and how are you going to ensure they stay good affiliates? Affiliate marketing is a great way to get sales but there are a LOT of dodgy people in the industry looking for ways to take advantage of mistakes. Some details about your selection and monitoring process would be helpful.
Also I think your payment idea is probably not the best. If a company is cost conscious enough that they care if the 10% comes out of their side or yours you are going to run into problems with clients not paying you. This is what kills almost every affiliate network including giant ones. You still have to pay the affiliates since they are your creditors but for a business starting a new project it's very easy to sign up with you run it for a month or two while delaying payment then if it doesn't work out close up shop. Affiliates are skittish now so if you are a bit late on a payment while waiting for your clients to pay you they will flee. That means you're going to want to take a prepay and if they are already giving you a prepay you might as well just charge them. Good affiliates are not loyal people so if they think they can make more elsewhere they will bounce quickly.
Speaking of prepays make sure you ease a new offer out onto your network so the prepay covers the full month. No one wants to setup a campaign only to have it cap out 15 days later and they have to pause everything waiting for more cap.
Good luck with it. I think there is a lot of money to be made in the affiliate space and have considered going back into it myself but the risk is very high.
Hey Shawn, wow thanks this was an incredible comment thanks a lot for the feedback! The sketchy nature of the industry is definitely a big concern. There are a couple of ways that I think I can keep this network from devolve into a haven for scammers like many other affiliate networks:
a) I'm going to recruit small tech bloggers through cold emails to begin with. Courtland actually mentioned a couple days ago that he had looked into SaaS affiliate programs for Indie Hackers before he got acquired by Stripe, so I think there is some appetite for monetizing niche tech audiences that I hope this network can serve.
b) I think the nature of the offer dictates the behavior of the affiliates to some extent, if you're selling diet ebooks or snake oil tinnitus treatments, you're going to get a completely different crowd than if you're promoting an uptime monitoring service. There are already many successful SaaS startups with affiliate programs (for example almost every email marketing SaaS has an affiliate program with 30% commission). Avoiding sketchy offers (and especially lead gen type CPA offers) will hopefully go a long ways towards avoiding the kinds of affiliates that we want to stay away from.
Prepayments are a great idea, thanks for the heads up. That's definitely something I will consider, again it's pretty unclear at this early stage how much of the sketchiness is inherent to the industry and how much comes from the specific types of offers being promoted, hopefully SaaS startups will be better about paying their bills. I am actually thinking about just taking credit card payments and eating the 2.9% fee so I don't have to chase around every individual startup to pay invoices every month. At least in the beginning this will be the plan, I think maybe past a certain amount per month I will start asking for prepayments so I don't get burned badly.
Again, thanks so so much for this comment, this was really valuable insight!
My pleasure. I think you should definitely advertise the fact that you are targeting non-professional affiliates. Much less dodgyness in side income affiliates than full timers.
Cool, thanks for the tip!
Hi @danni - congrats on the (pre-) launch!
I've set up an affiliate campaign or two for SaaS products in the past, so was interested in checking out your landing page.
What was missing for me to sign up is a value proposition or problem you are solving for me. I needed a bit more detail to really engage and think 'ah, now that is something I need.'
Good luck!
Thanks for the feedback Louis! The problem I am trying to solve is not just setting up affiliate campaigns, but actually finding quality affiliates for those campaigns (which is the real hard part). I've changed the copy to make that a bit more clear!
I think that makes more sense. Good luck on the product launch! (I even signed up ;) )
Awesome, thanks :).
Oh and one more suggestion/feedback:
After signing up, you just gave me a generic "success/thanks" alert. That's the time to ask me to share with friends/on Twitter etc ;)
You can be emotive and explain it would mean a lot to you.
Haha I actually used carrd.co to build the landing page and unfortunately it doesn't seem like it has that functionality (I wanted to try it out because the creator actually did an AMA here on IH about a week ago). Thanks for the tip though, when I build out the full website I'll definitely have that be part of the sign up flow :).
@ajlkn how's that for a feature request?
We just launched an affiliate program and used http://tapfiliate.com. It was the only thing we could find that would integrate with Stripe and handle recurring commissions. Jury is still out on whether or not the program will be successful.
While you are looking for specific problems to solve... I am realizing that keeping affiliates engaged and providing them with the tools they need to be successful takes time & effort. Any tooling around that could be helpful.
That's the goal, I think most existing solutions are overly focused on the software component, whereas the challenge is really in the human component of finding, managing, and coaching affiliates. Do you have any specific tools in mind that would help your affiliates?
From experience I can tell that affiliate networks don't work for SaaS.
Real affiliates who promote B2B products require relationships and they don't stay on affiliate networks.
Hey crysper, could you expand on this a bit? Why would a B2B affiliate network not work when B2B affiliate programs run by individual startups do?
Simply because any quality affiliate doesn't look after products to promote on a network. Companies come to them, not the other way around. You'll get tons of "affiliates" signing up for the network and some SaaS companies who don't know about this, might sign up, but you'll quickly find that 99% of the affiliates don't produce any sales, or do very very little to make it worth.
Trust me, I know this market :)
Go to GrowSumo marketplace and contact every single company you find there and ask them how many sales affiliates that come soley from GrowSumo marketplace brought them. Just try this and inform us here your findings :)
Hello @crysper, thanks for the feedback, I'm actually following this thread to learn about what affiliate platform works for SaaS products. I currently have a SaaS product and also run an affiliate program for it. However, I have recorded zero sales from any of my affiliate.
The most difficult part like @wavve said is keeping them engage.
@crysper, can you provide some insight into GrowSumo platform.
Thanks
Wait, you run GrowSumo?
Lol, no.