4 ms·

You have a great point. However, we are NOT using affiliate links, and we are NOT collecting any commission at all. Every deal on FoundersKit is a unique partn

You have a great point. However, we are NOT using affiliate links, and we are NOT collecting any commission at all. Every deal on FoundersKit is a unique partnership between us and the specific company. It took us about 4 months to establish all of the existing relationships. We are even still working on more partnerships to add more value to the bundle (as Fred mentioned). A lot of the companies on our bundle do have an affiliate program but our coupons are not associated with that, and offer a higher discount (or longer trial). Great example would be Grasshopper - $125 credits are not handed out to affiliates. Affiliates get $100 kick back, we do not take any kick back. Please do comment back if you have an example from our site where our discounts offer the same value as an affiliate program. We would love to address it. Thanks for taking the time to leave feedback :) Best, Dylan

shostack 11y ago
In your example of Grasshopper then, they are basically giving you a steep discount with no commission in the hope that the LTV of those customers (and total new customer volume) will be worth it? Assuming that is the case, I've seen this in a few industries with mega deal bundles. The deal company charges for the bundle with the hope that companies will offer them competitive deals for free (and potentially cut them in on a % of total deal sales if they co-promote it). TBH, I haven't seen much success from testing these sorts of things myself (not yours necessarily, just generally speaking). The issue is always that they don't get enough volume to be really worth it for brands of a certain scale. There's also the concern that people are buying discounts, not product, so I imagine there are a bunch of people that buy this for discounts off of a couple products, and ignore the rest. Depending on what a given brand would need to contribute to get listed in this, that directly determines whether it is worth it or not to get you all the assets, help with co-promotion, etc.
pki 11y ago
My apologies on the affiliate link thing then, all of your "Visit Site" links on each deal append `?ref=founderskit.co` to the end of the url. Some of them, like crazyegg, hand out the same discount to everyone without paying for it - see https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Acrazyegg.com+"Egg+is+happy+to+provide+you+an+exclusive+FREE+trial+of+90+days"&filter=0 https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Acrazyegg.com+"Egg+is+... Platejoy, another on your list, offers coupon code TRYPJ (I used this a while ago) for the same discount without paying for it, publicly. There's a lot more, but those are the two that stood out because I recently used the trial/coupons. For quite a large number of your offers in the bundle, you can get the same offer at no cost just by googling sitename + coupon. Maybe not offered by the copmany directly, but still freely claimable via another deal site. Personally, I don't mean any offense, but I would likely pass on this. I would be more interested in say, a $99 bundle that provided services for a bunch of these SaaS for a year or longer, not "first month free" or "$10 off first purchase" or anything like that. A lot of your discounts aren't lifetime, but a small amount off the first month - which is really just not very "deal like" to me.

shostack 11y ago

In your example of Grasshopper then, they are basically giving you a steep discount with no commission in the hope that the LTV of those customers (and total new customer volume) will be worth it? Assuming that is the case, I've seen this in a few industries with mega deal bundles. The deal company charges for the bundle with the hope that companies will offer them competitive deals for free (and potentially cut them in on a % of total deal sales if they co-promote it). TBH, I haven't seen much success from testing these sorts of things myself (not yours necessarily, just generally speaking). The issue is always that they don't get enough volume to be really worth it for brands of a certain scale. There's also the concern that people are buying discounts, not product, so I imagine there are a bunch of people that buy this for discounts off of a couple products, and ignore the rest. Depending on what a given brand would need to contribute to get listed in this, that directly determines whether it is worth it or not to get you all the assets, help with co-promotion, etc.

pki 11y ago

My apologies on the affiliate link thing then, all of your "Visit Site" links on each deal append `?ref=founderskit.co` to the end of the url. Some of them, like crazyegg, hand out the same discount to everyone without paying for it - see https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Acrazyegg.com+"Egg+is+happy+to+provide+you+an+exclusive+FREE+trial+of+90+days"&filter=0 https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Acrazyegg.com+"Egg+is+... Platejoy, another on your list, offers coupon code TRYPJ (I used this a while ago) for the same discount without paying for it, publicly. There's a lot more, but those are the two that stood out because I recently used the trial/coupons. For quite a large number of your offers in the bundle, you can get the same offer at no cost just by googling sitename + coupon. Maybe not offered by the copmany directly, but still freely claimable via another deal site. Personally, I don't mean any offense, but I would likely pass on this. I would be more interested in say, a $99 bundle that provided services for a bunch of these SaaS for a year or longer, not "first month free" or "$10 off first purchase" or anything like that. A lot of your discounts aren't lifetime, but a small amount off the first month - which is really just not very "deal like" to me.