Referral System
by Danielle SimpsonOur referral system is set up to benefit the referring teacher as well as the new subscriber.
The referring teacher receives 1 month free for every 3 referrals successfully subscribed.
The customer subscribing via referral code also receives $5 off of their subscription.
Each customer is assigned a unique referral code and link to share with colleagues. After looking into some other SaaS products for the system, we ended up building out the system ourself.
The engineering effort was fairly small as we already had all the required systems in place, both for integrating with Stripe for modifying subscriptions and tracking certain data points on our own user accounts. Most SaaS options available were too feature-rich or expensive for our rather simple referral system. Within two days, the system was built and tested.
Our customers adopted the system quickly. Since the Chinese companies already encourage the teachers to refer colleagues as new recruits, it was natural for them to add FeedbackPanda to this process.
That being said, growth was still initially slow at the beginning of the year. January and February are slow hiring months since there are few classes and few new students during the Chinese New Year celebrations.
We are now starting to see our growth climb back to 10% a month with 50% of new users coming through referrals.
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1
Very interesting, I would like to understand a little more about the referral system, and what products you looked at before deciding that none of them fit your requirement.
Thanks!
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I’ll be writing about what we did here and what we learned soon on my blog thebootstrappedfounder.com as part of a bigger series.
Quick answer: most systems were great for getting people into the system, but lacked the features for referring users to tutor and help the people they referred.
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Sounds great!
If you had that problem, it's very likely there is a demand for that as a product. Maybe I don't understand the exact use case for your business, but I am working on a somewhat alternate referral program.
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In our case, we wanted to create a referral journey that would allow people who refer someone to track how well they are doing in adopting the product (after they sign up) and be able to help them out if they got stuck (by being able to reach out and tutor them in product usage). It's crowdsourced onboarding, in a way.
I had to build that whole post-signup part myself, so I decided to build out the rest of the system as well.
I'll write a full article on that in the future, so stay tuned :)
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