Affiliate & referral tracking tool for Saas - looking for feedback and growth ideas

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#1

Hey,

I recently launched a tool to help subscription based companies that use Stripe to launch and run affiliate and referral programs. I built the tool because I encountered the issue on all my past SaaS products I had, where I couldn’t find a reliable and relatively cheap tool to track my affiliate commissions and manage my promoters.

I’m looking for some feedback on the website copy and maybe on the UI(you can create a free account).

This is my first time targeting SaaS companies and I found it to not be as easy as I expected to get new users. Unlike other customer types I worked with, SaaS founders/marketers seem rely a lot on trust and recommendations to make decisions about a product, especially if it needs to be integrated into their own SaaS and the real value is seen in months, not days(the opposite of Baremetrics type of tools for ex). @SteveMcLeod maybe can help with some suggestions here.

For you guys who are targeting SaaS companies, can you give some ideas for acquiring new users?

Here are some ideas I have:

  • build some kind of side-project and drive sign-ups from there
  • cold contacting SaaS companies(tried with very low success rate, is hard to find companies exactly when they are looking to start an affiliate program)
  • build a facebook group
  • facebooks ads(budget is limited though)
  • post on (very few) SaaS groups on Facebook(already done that)
  • contact SaaS consultants and build partnerships(starting doing that, works, but very slow)
  • start a blog with topics for SaaS companies(this will be a problem because I hate writing articles so I need to outsource)

Posting on HN,Reddit, etc doesn’t work, lots of hits, no leads or very poor lead quality.

I know that when I get past a number of users, word of mouth will kick in and I will have it easier to get new users, but until then is quite a struggle and a lot of patience is needed.

Here’s the website https://firstpromoter.com

Thanks

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#2

Problem 1: it seems to me you are asking three questions:
a) is the website copy good?
b) how is your UI for trial users?
c) how do you acquire users?

I suspect c) is really the problem you are facing.

My answers:
a) yes, but like all website copy there is room for improvement
b) this is irrelevant if your target audience is not yet finding your site and being convinced to click on the “Get early access” button
c) By coincidence, I recently wrote a long article about this: How to get your first 10 paying customers.

Problem 2: Someone from your target audience arrives at your landing page. They ask themselves within the first second, “Am I in the right place? Is this product for me?”. And you don’t answer that question until below the fold. You need to state clearly above the fold these words in some combination, in an order that makes sense: “SaaS subscription affiliate referral management.”

“Pricing”: add a link to pricing to the top of your website. People generally want to know very quickly if this is something suitable for them, and pricing is one strong clue. A $49/month cheapest plan tells small companies that, yes, this is for them. When pricing is hidden, many people assume it could be enterprise level “Ask Us!” pricing.

“Easiest setup ever”: get rid of this entire section. “easiest” and “simple” are words that don’t sell. No-one is deciding not to sign up because they’re thinking it will be too hard to set up.

Problem 3: "I hate writing articles"
So don’t run a blog. But you do need some pages on your site aimed for keywords such as: “SaaS affiliate program” and “how do I add an affiliate program to my SaaS?” and “affiliate tool that works with Stripe subscriptions”. Write them (or outsource the writing) and SEO the heck out of those pages.

An SEO success story: A friend of mine had a site that was in the TOP 2 Hacker News spots for several hours. It dominated several subreddits, and was shared and shared and shared. After the initial spike, his site traffic went permanently up to a level much higher than before the Hacker News madness. It did nothing for sales. Then he taught himself some basic SEO skills. And sales started almost immediately.

(BTW: You don’t seem to have Google Analytics (GA) on your site. If not, you should really get install GA and also Google Search Console. Unless you are using an alternative.)

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#3

This might be something I would use. Do you have a help section where I can look at integration steps?

I’m in the process of moving and selling a house, but I’ll look into it in a few weeks.

#4

Thanks @SteveMcLeod .Yes, the main problem is getting people to the website, the second main problem are getting them to integrate it. Even though the integration is easy, that’s the biggest friction point after sign up since they need to get a developer spend 10-20 minutes on it. For some companies, that’s a big deal, this is one of the things that surprised me negatively.

Do you get all your users from featureupvote from Google and Quora?

Btw, I changed the headline to make it more clear.

#5

After signup you’ll get to a getting started wizard-like setup. You’ll get all the details there and the tracking scripts generated for your website with instructions, including testing to make sure everything works.

If you are looking for a simple affiliate program to share a percentage of revenue to affiliates, that integration is pretty simple. If you want to offer credits or free months as rewards(referral program), you’ll need to listen to the webhooks and update the user accounts on your side(I will help you here).

#6

Even though the integration is easy, that’s the biggest friction point after sign up since they need to get a developer spend 10-20 minutes on it. For some companies, that’s a big deal, this is one of the things that surprised me negatively.

That’s a tough one. I don’t know a solution to that. Really good docs with example code might help.

@Virgil This screams out at me: “Create a page in your user guide that details the integration steps!”. It could be a big asset for SEO.

(Fun fact: one random page in the user guide for Poker Copilot (my other product, the one that currently pays the bills) gets 8% of all our organic traffic, even though we have 200+ pages on our site. When I realised via Google Search Console that the page was accidentally ranking well, I improved the existing content, added more content, and put in some screenshots.)

Do you get all your users from featureupvote from Google and Quora?

Feature Upvote is very new and doesn’t have much traffic yet. I wouldn’t want you to draw any conclusions from it. My recommendations come from Poker Copilot. By focusing on SEO and content we doubled Poker Copilot traffic last year, even though it is a mature product in a mature market.

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#7

Virgil:

We recently started looking for something like this and we do use Stripe. You can email me at tom at l4mail . com.

As for growth ideas…

  1. Is there a category in G2Crowd? We get good leads from them as we have good reviews. If you just get a few reviews I think that would really help.
  2. You are right on the timing part. Sales is timing. You want to target companies that are in buying cycles. Any company that is growing really fast, just got funded, just added a new marketing decision maker, etc. On a side note you can download this list here that will give you the fastest growing saas companies - Search SaaS 1000 in Google. I can’t post links yet. This is self promotion, but I also think it is relevant to you. And its free.
  3. What is your LTV? If you think that you could get $10K LTV then I would continue the outbound efforts, but do campaigns every few months so that you can time it right. And continue to contact them during growth spurts.
  4. Account Based Marketing. I would get super targeted on specific companies. Then run ads on Adroll/twitter/fb targeting those people who work at the companies you are targeting. After you run the ads to just those specific users/companies then do your outbound email campaigns. They will be much more receptive.
  5. Make the content on your site be more focused on the “Referral Marketing for SaaS Only.” - Make it super obvious. Be super targeted and be great at that first. then you can move into other markets.

I hope this helps. Please email me. I am not sure if we will use you or not, but we are definitely going to be building a referral program and if your solution has what we need it could work.

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#8

You really need to make a help page with this. I think most people will not sign up without knowing how hard is the setup. Why would I go through the trouble of signing up just to find out this is impossible for me to deploy this.

You are targeting developers, not just marketers; you need the docs so developers can say, ok this would take 4 hours to do. Otherwise, even with the marketer on board, your sale will be sabotaged by the developers saying some like “Looking at the website, sounds like we need a week to deploy this.” Now you have a manager that goes: “Ok, let use that week to improve our product instead.”

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#9

Your 1000 SaaS website is awesome. It will be pretty easy for me to get the email address of CEO or CMO once I have the domain, saves me a lot of time, thanks.

  1. Yes, will post on review websites once I have enough users to get a few reviews going.
  2. Awesome.
  3. My LTV is low, I’m targeting small-medium SaaS since this is where there is a gap in the market. There were a few products targeting the same segment which failed, probably because of the same struggles I’m facing, but I’m willing to take it slow since I’m bootstrapping it.
  4. Maybe this will work on bigger, enterprise SaaS?
  5. Yea, I’m thinking about this, even though eCommerce is very attractive, from market size to ease of integration(no developer required). I see that my competitors target both ecommerce and Saas, the majority of their sales come from eCommerce.

For sure I will email you.

#10

You are right. I just removed the section where it said that the integration takes max 30 minutes, even 10 for an experienced developer and requires mostly just pasting some JS scripts to integrate the affiliate program.

#11

hey Virgil,

I’m in the market for a solution like yours and just signed up. Will take a closer look today.

Positive things so far:

  • very well designed tool and seems really feature complete, there’s a lot in this already, much more than your landing page made me assume you had
  • setup is actually simple, I like the workflow you guide the user through
  • wizard UI suggests interesting options for rewards, even some I didn’t think about before (HINT: I’d love to find more content about this!)
  • pricing is clear and affordable - almost too affordable I’d say, at 10k additional MRR from your platform I think you should charge me much more.

Suggestions:

  • if you’re focusing on Stripe for now, it could be helpful to have this very clear from your headline (e.g. “Easy Affiliate and Referral management for Stripe”)
  • when I read “Get early access” as your main CTA, I assume you haven’t launched and will ask me for an email (something I might skip as I want a solution now). Something like “Start a free trial” might give me a better idea of what’s to come and increase CTR.
  • managing recurring commissions for an affiliate program is what I’m looking for, and I think one of the most important features, but I can’t find that feature easily on your sales page
  • the landing page is lacking any form of proof and validation, no testimonials, but also nothing about you and the company/team
  • you do affiliates, influencers, referrals - but people will likely come with one need in their mind, perhaps separate sales pages all linked from the header and main page would be helpful in selling the benefits and ideas you offer in each

Hope this helps!

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#12

Awesome feedback, thanks a lot. For some reason I forgot/couldn’t see the “get early access” button text, I think I saw the page so many times that I got blinded :slight_smile: that’s why a fresh look is always better.

About social proof, I know it’s important and I’m going to fix that soon. I just think that’s a bit early to ask for testimonials, that’s all.

Since you signed up, please contact me on live-chat in case you need help or have questions.

1 Like