Post your startup and I'll share growth tips & feedback to grow it - UPDATED

Copywriting
I love what you’re building. Affiliate marketing platforms for SaaS is a big space.

I think you need to improve copywriting to have better marketing results.

As a founder of a SaaS platform, and potential customer, I had no idea what PartnerWith was AFTER your description on this comment and AFTER reading the landing page.

Your description didn’t help me understand what you’re actually selling: “an affiliate platform to source, manage, and pay affiliates”.

I understood perfectly by zooming in to the screenshot you have on your hero banner.

Landing page

I understand that you’re doing things a little bit differently than LeadDyno, Refersion, and Tapfiliate, but I don’t understand why.

I’d suggest not only to improve your copywriting and messaging with the above feedback, but also to state clearly what’s different. You need to have these sections on your LP:

• Hero
  “An affiliate platform for SaaS businesses to source, manage, and pay affiliates."

• Your insight on affiliate marketing:
  Affiliate marketing in 2021 is done differently - The SaaS industry has evolved a lot, and so has affiliate marketing.
  [insert here your insights on affiliate marketing for SaaS]

• Why SaaS businesses are switching to PartnerWith:
  The picture you currently have with your testimonial is cropped and looks too fake/salesy.
  I want to see your platform being used by others to gain confidence. Make sure to link to the partner program of your customers so I can see the experience + see that others are using it.

• Join our Parner program:
  Have an audience of SaaS operators? Promote PartnerWith.

Tap here to sign up to the partner program, powered by PartnerWith.

I went to https://partnerwith.io/partner-program to see the what the affiliate experience was like and it was broken. This was a huge red flag!

Growth strategy

Short term:

• The B2B playbook, start selling with personalized cold messages and emails until you get enough SaaS platforms that prospect customers can see that your platform is being used by others.

Long term

• SEO: You need to have a link for every SaaS with traction: PartnerWith/Webflow, and that page should have a meta tag title with something like “Webflow affiliate program”.
• Product design: Every sign up page in the partner program should have a “powered by PartnerWith”. Just like Rewardful does.

Growth hack 1 - Fake it till your make it

Create a sign up page for an affiliate program of every SaaS with reputation (Webflow, ConvertKit, etc). It should enable anyone to earn money promoting these platforms, EVEN IF THEY’RE NOT YOUR CUSTOMERS.

Sign up to the affiliate program of those companies. Create a campaigns for anyone signing up to your page, and redirect your link and track accordingly.

• You won’t be lying, just giving the perceived idea that those companies are using PartnerWith.
• Other SaaS won’t get mad at you for helping them earn revenue.
• You’ll be able to also get your platform used by affiliates that land on your page instead of the original.

Growth hack 2 - Go viral with databases & lists

It’s pretty easy to get a lot of traction and go viral if you offer something valuable & free. You should request to people to comment on the post/tweet and you’ll dm that resource.

What’s something valuable you can give that your target customers may want?

• A database of affiliates who have an audience that converts really well (this is goldmine for SaaS biz)
• A database of “the best affiliates programs” for those who want to earn money promoting to their audience (I’m sure you did this research and have tons of examples)

Hi Hugo!

I think this project is really cool, and only someone super smart would be able to develop it, train the models accordingly, and scoring results right.

That being said, I don’t think this has a lot of potential to earn enough revenue to have a decent marketing budget.

That doesn’t mean I don’t think it doesn’t have any potential! Just that:

• Domain search is not something users do on a recurrent/daily basis, so if you’re monetizing with affiliates your ARPU will be low due to lack of recurrence.
• All your marketing efforts and campaigns should be organic
• SEO should only be your main acquisition channel.
• There are already too many domain names generators.

I’d suggest tweaking all your knowledge and skillset and pivot into something more profitable!

Some ideas:

• Weekly and automated newsletter with AI generated domains for your industry to increase recurrence.
• AI generated titles for SEO. This is like Copy.ai, but specifically for titles, with url and metatags.

SEO tips

SEO should be your main acquisition channel, so make sure to master this skillset! Once you learn this you’ll be able to train the models accordingly too!

I also think your own domain isn’t good for SEO purposes! I found one available that isn’t taken! Next time it’ll be with your tool, but it’s not sowing .ai results yet:

DomainGenerator.ai

This is based on the search intent:

SEO is a key factor when choosing a domain. There’s always a tradeoff between Brand and SEO.

Growth hack

Given that you’ll focus your efforts on SEO, a good way to get backlinks from sites that do exactly what you do is buying and redirecting them to your site (with a 301, not a 302 code).

Here’s an example of a domain (and really good tool!) that got some backlinks and the owner left it expire:

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/domainhack-me

It also got the #2 place on product hunt!

Many tools like this launched on product hunt and did well, so make sure to reverse engineer what they did! Example:

https://deepnamer.com/

Good luck!

Dear Kevin, I'd love to know what you think about Hum School, a small academy where you can take online seminars in philosophy, literature, and history with college professors. Our website is https://hum.school. We're an early-stage, bootstrapped startup, in beta mode. I'd be deeply grateful for any advice you have.

Insight: There’s 3 reasons why students attend university/courses/classes. Whether that’s online or offline:

• Certification: They need an authority to certify their skillset.
• Network: Bonds are created when a group of people get together with one purpose in common.
• Learning: Actually acquiring that skillset.

Certification is something that you may not be the biggest driver for your students given your focus on humanities studies.

HOWEVER: Creating a beautiful diploma that could be shared online has proven to help many online courses and schools.

When people share their “certificate of completion” on social, especially on LinkedIn, word of mouth happens.

This same concept could be applied to other types of key learning that could be encouraged to be shared online.

LinkedIn should be your main acquisition channel, so make sure your social presence there is really good and active.

Make sure students add your course to their “education” section too. This will make every student an ambassador of your school.

Love the hustle! Prioritize getting some help with the design before expecting anyone to pay.

Design for growth
If you're on the stage were you're just building the product, you might consider these features to fuel growth and word of mouth:

• Retail investors love bragging about their stock performance, so consider creating a ready to share video or gif (could be an image first) of their performance (or a specific trade).
• Copy porftolio is the feature that made eToro viral. Then that was copied by Public.com. Consider creating a link to showcase "My picks" or something like public: https://public.com/brianne

If you're trying to find your first users, then the best way to do that is cold emailing and messaging those doing small events online! No growth hack for that. You can then find ways to scale that, but the first ones need to be like that!

Loved it! Has a ton of potential. It's a little bit buggy or glitchy, as I tap on then a few seconds later there's feedback.

Best way to grow this is through Twitter bot!

Similar to Whale alert:

Then use crypto influencers to get the ball rolling.

Love it! A few ideas to grow:

• Partner with crypto companies and exchanges, they NEED content. Many ways to collaborate (send them affiliates, sponsorship, etc).

• Focus on long tail keywords for SEO, don't even try for the "what is bitcoin" SERP.

• Buy expired crypto domains and redirect them. The 2018 crash made many crypto startups go out of business and they didn't even renew their domain. They have many backlinks tho!

AN IDEA I'M BULLISH ABOUT
Create a Twitter bot named "@BTCPRICETODAY" and each day automatically tweet the price of BTC. NOTHING ELSE.

This is inspired on this account:

Ask a few ppl to retweet it and you'll start getting follows and retweets every day the price is high or low.

Add the newsletter on your bio.

Improve design of marketing assets
I believe in always doing marketing regardless of the state of the product, but I think you should focus more efforts on design, you’ll have 10x more results from any marketing effort.

1. Create new screenshots.
2. Create a new landing page from scratch.

Choose one of the two paths:

• Hire a designer on upwork
• Use templates and tools like:

Screenshot builders:
https://theapplaunchpad.com/
https://apptoolkit.io/screenshots/
https://previewed.app/ => my choice because of 3D screenshots.

Website builders like Webflow have really awesome mobile app landing page templates.

Improve product design
If your customers are retail investors,

Based on the state of the app I doubt you’re getting enough revenue to advertise with positive (or near positive ROI).

As a result, I’d advice also working on product design to make it more valuable to users.

If you’re targeting retail investors, make sure to have a HUGE AND GREEN (OR RED) INDICATOR for each of the tickers. Retail investors only want to know one thing: SHOULD I INVEST OR NOT?

Growth strategy

Don't have marketing budget?

The initial channel I’d focus is TikTok.

• It’s much easier to get more eyeballs fast.
• People are already on their mobile device looking for entertaining things while looking at tiktok
• The algorithm will show content to the right people (i.e. robinhood screenshots type of content)

One big warning while doing TikTok: EDUCATE USERS! Don’t foster or encourage this type of users:

Pay to 10-15 creators that will post about your video. Working with TikTok creators is super cheap right now, as many have acquired a super large audience going viral with a few tiktoks and don’t have any interest in making it a full time gig.

Have some marketing budget?

After you see that customers are paying you’ll be able to invest in App Store Ads.

App Store ads are the best form of advertising for mobile apps, as users are already on the mindset of downloading a mobile app. Also, targeting could also be to “all users who already have Robinhood installed”. Acquiring that user will cost super high, that’s why you need to make sure to do the above before.

During this stage of the app you need to iterate with customers, App Store Ads won’t give you the ability to talk to them, that’s why you need a marketing channel and campaigns that enable you to iterate based on feedback from your users.

Copywriting
It was difficult for me to understand what Community Validated was until actually reading the "about us" (many don’t go that far). Make sure to have a super clear tagline that is consistent across all the pages and communications (including meta tags!). The tagline should share the value prop for the reader, not what it actually is. I wrote an article about this:

https://blog.beta.uy/mario-bros-in-marketing-17e4a6aa51a4

My suggested tagline: “Community validated - Discover business ideas and trends, validated.” You can also add, validated by __”

Specific places to plug your newsletter

• The MFMPod.com is growing super fast, you should consider sending the research to the team. They discuss business ideas and they’ll find this helpful. Make sure to either try to get a shoutout here or just comment and add value to them on Twitter.

• Hackathons and startup contests like the maker festival by PH are a good fit for those looking for problems.

• Be the reply guy on Twitter (always adding value). Make sure to reply to a tweet that’s going to have traction in the niche you’re currently covering. I saw the last one was Yoga. Look for influencers in the wellness + startup ecosystem. e.g. founder of Mindspace.

The growth playbook
Check out these two and combine them:

• Harry from marketing examples: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/115-quick-chat-with-harry-dry => Basically focusing on twitter threads and a CTA to subscribe after each thread.

• what worked for your competitors, such as trends.vc

DISCLAIMER: Feedback may be too direct. Just want to help and genuinely propose things that may help. Also, it’s just my POV. The internet is a crazy place and you may find many customers for this!

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I believe the current version of the product isn’t good, so there isn’t any magic trick or growth hack that’s gonna help it grow.

I know the state is super early, but based on what you’ve built I’d like to propose a pivot, giving feedback about the foundations of what you’re building, more than growth tips.

Product feedback

-Focus: ONE widget at a time. After you’ve got a good amount of users who found that widget useful, you can continue with others. As of now, everything is still a WIP. Adding a feedback widget has different requirements than adding a contact form.

• There are many alternatives for pre-built code for forms so you may have a hard time marketing it.

Proposed pivot: I believe you should focus on making embeddable forms only.

Target audience

Who are you targeting? Who (title of the person) is experiencing the problem?

• Currently:
  Non-experienced developers who need to code a form => you’re gonna have a hard time selling to beginners.
  Experienced? Developers will always default to: I can build that myself, regardless of how many error cases they'll have to handle.

I encourage you to read a few minutes Hacker news from YC. There’s an infamous one from the time when Dropbox launched on HN and most of the replies were “I can build that myself, who will pay for that”.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

• Proposed:
  Marketers, founders, and anyone in charge of collecting leads at companies and startups. => They have a marketing budget.

The problem

• What problem are you solving?

Currently: Coding forms requires time. It’s not hard, but still there are many little things to take into account.

Proposed: Add a (branded) form to a website or landing page without technical knowledge.

This is a BIG problem. The best solution right now is typeform, and I can spend hours on how it’s not the best for this. Typeform is the best UI for a conversational form, but there’s a lot to improve on making something simple to embed on a website and pass on the data. As an example: Adding a form on a webflow website for a ConvertKit newsletter is a super hard experience.

The solution

Currently:
You’re helping developers implement the feature faster with some pre-built code. But that pre-built code needs to be reviewed by developers who spend some time understanding it. How to customize with CSS? How can I match the design to the page?

Proposed:
Add contact forms on a website or landing page without technical knowledge. Customize it with our easy-to-use UI, and link the data to anywhere they want.

Branding - Name

Current: Particle.systems doesn’t explain a lot what you do. It’s nice, but I’d recommend branding it with things that either reflect more the solution you’re selling or that may be good for SEO.

Proposed: NoCodeForms.com

Even Dan.com thinks it’s part of the no-code trend:

https://dan.com/buy-domain/nocodeforms.com?redirected=true&tld=com

Growth strategy

Even though I should’ve expanded more on this, all the above is key to establish this.

Growth for the current product:

The dev tool playbook.

Growth for the proposed product:

• Short term: Engaging with the community of each platform you integrate (Webflow, convertkit, etc). Remember you’re building to make their users’ life easier, so they should also want to retweet stuff like “how to create a beautiful form on your webflow/ for your Airtable”.
• Long term: SEO. Try to find long tail keywords associated to “embed form to website” or “add form to webflow”. Make sure to have a url with domaincontainingwordform.com/add/webflow and create a backing strategy for each of those landing pages.

Make sure to improve and clearly explain this issue, so you can sell to bigger teams (not even saying enterprise):

“We don't save any data. The data that comes from the widgets is directly passed to the cloud services. We just maintain a count of the data captures to determine usage”

After you get some companies using it, you need to have testimonials to improve trust, especially for the “we don’t handle any of your data anytime”. Those customers won’t even allow you to count. They’ll want everything to load securely.