In just four years, this video testimonial platform reached $1M in annual revenue, totally bootstrapped

Here's how Damon Chen used affiliates to drive more sales.

But first, a bit of Damon's backstory.

In 2020, he was working from home with his wife and 1-year-old son.
He wanted to spend more time with his child, so he decided to ask for 6 months of unpaid leave.
Not an easy decision for a Cisco engineer receiving a comfortable salary.

He built several small projects that made $0 in revenue. Hope was starting to fade.

But then he created Testimonial. And in just 4 months it generated $2k MRR.

So, he decided to take the plunge, quit his job and go all-in.

He fixed bugs and answered support tickets during his job breaks, and built new features while his kids were asleep.

He shared his story over the internet, set up many marketing strategies and, 4 years later, reached the $1M milestone.

And >$100k came from affiliates.

Four years ago, Damon launched the ​affiliate program for Testimonial.

Affiliates receive 30% of the monthly revenue. And he offers his affilliate's customers an additional 15% discount for the first year. Pretty good deal!

How does Damon attract affiliates?

He shares his program in his user onboarding: "Existing customers performed better than stranger signups, specially those customers who are influential in their industry, or have many connections (like running a marketing agency)".

Another clever strategy to get more people to join is he includes an affiliate calculator on his affiliate program landing page. That way, potential affiliates can know exactly how much they could earn.

Damon promotes the affiliate program on Twitter and LinkedIn to his almost 79k followers. He shares tips, milestones and screenshots of payments.
And he makes sure to include a CTA and link in his posts to make it easy for interested people to sign-up.