Issue#106: Building $1K-$10K MRR Micro SaaS Products around Affiliate Marketing
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No fluffy content. If your goal is to build a $100m ARR business, this is not the right post. Here I am NOT going to talk about building the next Facebook or Twitter. If your goal is to make a $1K to $10K MRR, continue reading.
This post will cover one SaaS area and talk about multiple niches in this space. This post also explains how to do tech implementation, do market analysis, how the current players are doing, and ends with a cost analysis to understand the overall cost for 100 users.
Let’s see some of the players around affiliate marketing related tools.
⛳ ⛳ Current players
Rewardful: A simple way for SaaS companies to set up affiliate and referral programs with Stripe & Paddle. Reached $190.7K revenue in 2023.
SparkLoop: Newsletter growth platform with visual builder to add referral section, automated reward fulfilment and referral giveaways. Acquired by ConvertKit in 2023.
Gumaffiliates: Makes it easy for Gumroad creators and affiliates to find each other.
InviteReferrals: A powerful and yet simple to integrate referral software that helps users acquire new customers through Referral Marketing. InviteReferrals's estimated annual revenue is $630K
Tolt.io: Helps SaaS startups build and run their affiliate and referral programs. Works with Stripe, Paddle, and Chargebee.
AffJet: Streamlined affiliate income reporting with one mega-dashboard combining all the the affiliate networks.
Evolup: Lets users create affiliate stores automatically with AI.
FirstPromoter: An all-in-one platform that allows SaaS companies to track, manage and optimize any type of referral based marketing programs. Estimated annual revenue is $5.5M.
Affiliate Corner: Powerful data-driven insights to grow affiliate income. Made $6k in two months after launching in 2022
Trackier: Platform to track, measure and optimize partner performance. Trackier's estimated annual revenue is $12M.
Partnero: Partnership management platform that enables SaaS and e-commerce businesses to set up and manage fully-customized affiliate, loyalty and referral programs
Pretty Links: a WordPress plugin that allows users to create, manage, and track custom URLs or "pretty links" for their website.
Affilimate: Affilimate helps users generate 2–10x revenue growth per article with optimization tools & content insights tailored for commerce content.
ReferralCandy: Helps ecommerce stores stores attract customers, increase sales and grow using the power of referral, affiliate marketing and rewards. ReferralCandy's estimated annual revenue is $5M.
FriendBuy: Referral Marketing for Growth Marketers
Affise: Affiliate Marketing Software to manage, track, analyze and optimize online advertising campaigns in real-time. Raised $9M in funding.
SaaSQuatch: Loyalty, Referrals and Rewards Launch promotions in minutes, not weeks. Create, manage and track intelligent special-offer, referral and loyalty programs all from one place. Crossed $100K MRR.
Tapfiliate: Affiliate tracking software for online services, eCommerce and SaaS that integrates seamlessly with your website in just minutes. Reached $960K in annual revenue.
LeadDyno: Everything to launch & grow your affiliate program. Increase the revenue of your e-Commerce store or SaaS business. Quickly and easily set up our all in one affiliate tracking solution. Estimated monthly revenue $100K/month.
Affiliatly: An easy to use affiliate marketing program management that lets users track their affiliates by email, link, coupon, QR.
Reditus: Affiliate management platform and marketplace for B2B SaaS. Reached $3.7K per month in revenue.
ThirstyAffiliates: Affiliate link cloaking plugin for WordPress. Provides alternate destinations for international clicks via country targeting.
Goaffpro: Affiliate marketing app for ecommerce store with 50,000+ merchants using Goaffpro Affiliate Marketing program.
Squaredance: A partnership marketplace, helping DTC brands attract new customers and grow sales in every channel.
🙅♀️🙅 Pessimists
Negative Nancy says - “Most people don’t like to advertise products to friends/strangers to make money. So, the Affiliate marketing and referral systems never works”
Me - Well, users don’t have to force a product on their friends or on the internet. If a user likes it, the user can just endorse it as a referrer. Affiliate marketing and referral systems makes millions of dollars in profits enabling companies to get more paid users.
Negative Nancy says - “It is tough to integrate Affiliate/Referral programs into existing SaaS/company and most existing companies may not use my Affiliate/Referral software”
Me - It was tough to integrate affiliate and referral programs into existing saas/company a few years before. But not anymore with the news SaaS referral tools. There are a lot of referral tools that just warp up everything in a simple widget and or as a hosted site automating the affiliation and referral process. All the customer has to do is to place the widget on their page or start using the hosted affiliate page.
🤿🤿 Deep-dive &&💡💡 Some niches
Affiliate marketing, with its wide-reaching network, provides individuals like influencers, website owners, and newsletter authors, as well as business founders with substantial followings, a substantial income-generating opportunity.
Let’s see some niches around this.
Simple Platform for SaaS startups to Manage Affiliate Programs:
Managing affiliates at scale is a challenge for SaaS businesses. As the number of affiliates increases, so does the need for better analytics and reporting tools to assess the effectiveness of different marketing strategies and affiliates. With a growing network of marketers, tracking their performance and commissions becomes complex and time-consuming. Administrative tasks associated with onboarding, communication, and commission payments also become complex to operate. SaaS businesses often turn to specialized Affiliate Management Software to streamline these processes and efficiently manage their affiliate programs at scale. It simplifies the process of setting up and managing affiliate programs, allowing SaaS companies to expand their reach through a network of marketers who promote their software. These SaaS products helps track affiliate performance, ensuring that affiliates are fairly compensated for their efforts. These SaaS solutions also provides analytics and reporting tools, offering insights into which affiliates and marketing strategies are driving results. Below are a few products in this space.
Rewardful: Reached $190K revenue in 2023.
Tolt.io: Received funding. Also, a Stripe partner.
FirstPromoter: Estimated annual revenue is $5.5M
No-code or AI-powered Store Builder for Affiliates
Affiliates, especially those aiming to market a variety of products, often try to improve efficiency in their promotional efforts. To streamline their affiliate marketing endeavors, they rely on tools like WordPress and website builders, which allow them to showcase multiple affiliate products and even create entire websites to promote these products. Their goal is to have a central hub where they can list all their affiliate offerings and promote their entire affiliate marketing website from one place. Create a Micro SaaS that helps build stores for affiliate marketers without writing any code. Affiliates should be able choose from templates, add their affiliate products, and customise the look and feel of their site to align with their brand and audience. The product should also offer features for tracking and optimising their marketing efforts, including analytics, SEO tools, and integration with affiliate networks. For example, checkout Evolup that helps build stores for Affiliate marketers. Evolup also uses AI to write product descriptions, helps find inspiration to write blog articles for Affiliate products.
Unified Dashboard for Affiliate Marketers with Analytics
Bloggers/Affiliate marketers write content for mainly two reasons other than building the audience. They write content either to charge for the content or to make money by adding affiliate links/sponsorship links. Sponsorship links are slightly different compared to affiliate links. Sponsorship links are primarily one-time payments from an advertiser where affiliate links are links that could generate some revenue (sometimes recurring revenue based on products) when someone clicks on the link and stats using/paying for the product. Most bloggers write about a lot of affiliate products and get money. Create a Micro SaaS tool that helps bloggers track these affiliate links and revenue coming from each of these links. This tool would helphelp bloggers and affiliate marketers effectively track the performance of their affiliate links and the revenue generated from each link. By providing detailed analytics and reporting, this tool should help bloggers to gain insights into which affiliate products are performing best and generating the most revenue. With this information, affiliate marketers can make informed decisions about where to focus their advertising efforts, optimize their content strategy, and potentially increase their income by promoting the most profitable affiliate products. The SaaS tool should simplify the process of tracking and managing numerous affiliate links, enabling content creators to fine-tune their marketing strategies and make the most of their affiliate partnerships. See Affilimate for inspiration that is used by hundreds of business and affiliate marketers.
Rewards Management Tool for Referral Marketing:
Many SaaS providers want to incentivise their existing users to spread the word about their product, which differs from traditional affiliate marketing. This user-driven promotion relies on the enthusiasm and firsthand experience of individuals who have found value in the SaaS solution. They become advocates, sharing their positive experiences with their networks. In contrast to affiliate marketing, where external marketers are involved for compensation, user-driven promotion helps with the authentic endorsements of satisfied customers. These users may receive rewards, discounts, or other incentives for their advocacy, and loyalty around the SaaS product. It's a more organic and genuine form of marketing that capitalizes on the power of word-of-mouth recommendations and user-generated content to expand the customer base. For example, check out SaaSQuatch that helps with referrals, rewards and launch promotions in minutes. SaaSQuatch crossed $100K MRR. InviteReferrals is another product in this niche with an estimated annual revenue of $600K. You can also create a white label referral SaaS that can be used by B2B companies in their products. Most of the B2B products don’t like to lose the brand name and would be more interested in a white label solution that just works straight out of the box. See Voucherify white label for inspiration.
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💻 💻 Technical chops
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📢 📢 Marketing chops
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💳 💳 Cost Analysis for 100 customers
Learn how much it costs to build a product in this niche and cater to 100 customers.
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