What do you think about affiliate program?

Discussions
#1

I have talked to several SaaS owners and asked question about how they acquire new customers. Most of them give two common answers:

  • Word of mouth
  • Affiliate program

At Sendloop, we started an affiliate program where affiliates get 30% recurring commission from every paid customer they bring in. The program is new and we have around 85 affiliates right now. Therefore, I don’t have enough data to make a observation.

Just wondering if anyone out there is using affiliate method to acquire new customers? Any thoughts on this?

#2

I’ve thought about this a bit, but it seems like a lot of work to get high quality affiliates and then the general management of it, etc. How’s yours going so far?

#3

Yes, it seems to be a lot of work but in my opinion, if you can make it work, it has a huge benefit…

Our program is still new, only two weeks old and we have 58 affiliate accounts right now. It’s too early to measure and make a decision whether it works or not. But I will keep you updated.

#4

OK great, I’m interested in doing one but there’s always seemed to be a lot of littler hurdles that stopped me. Did you guys write your own code for it all or are there decent services to run it, do payouts, etc now? Several years back when I looked all the options were pretty bogus.

#5

Coming from ecommerce the only one I have really worked with is http://www.idevdirect.com/ and I have probably installed it for about 30-40 clients.

Get beyond the crappy interface it is feature rich. Code is horrible but really all your looking for here is function. Beyond initial installation and configuration I really have never followed up, but now at Cartalyst we are looking to do select affiliate programs with partners and I plan on using what I know.

I have not heard of anything new and exciting.

#6

We developed http://affiliates.sendloop.com/ from scratched and integrated it with our payment gateway FastSpring.

I searched for a simple, to-the-point affiliate service (or software) written for SaaS websites but couldn’t find a good one. The ones that I’ve found (including idevaffiliate) were complicated and over-featured.

We made our own affiliate service and I believe we did a great job. It’s simple, supports recurring commission sharing. At the end of every month, it sends us a list of payouts and we process them through PayPal. It can also be automated with the PayPal API but for now, it’s fine.

I guess there’s a good opportunity here. Maybe we should consider making our affiliate system a SaaS and offer to other SaaS companies??? :smile:

#7

Yeah, idev seemed to be the big one back in the day also.

I figured you might have built it yourself, for a saas app that seems like the best way currently. I agree, feels like an opportunity :smile:

I know you’re not in the US, I wonder what the tax implications are here. If anyone knowns that would be interesting info. Having a lot of little affiliates seems like it could be a hassle over time. I’ve considered doing it where it’s more like a partner program where we are very careful about who comes in and just work with fewer specialized partners though I’m sure that could have it’s own issues.

#8

I built an affiliate program for a SaaS app awhile back and it was a pain in the butt. I wonder if something like this could be automated into a SaaS app it self to sell to other SaaS apps. I am sure that exists, hmmm

#9

Hey Cemhurturk…
I know its been a while since you posted here. We just started an affiliate program with bookafy.com, and I am trying to figure out how to get the word out. its been about 1 week and we only have 5 affiliates so far. I suppose we have to start somewhere :slight_smile: We use Ambassador as the backend, pretty smooth… but now I am trying to sort out how to get in front of more affiliates. Any insight? Did you ever find a marketplace similar to CJ or CB that catered to SaaS companies?

C