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I looked at the other Ask HN for 100 users. Only 1 person mentioned influencers. I'm going to recommend it again, but with more detail. An influencer has a p

I looked at the other Ask HN for 100 users. Only 1 person mentioned influencers. I'm going to recommend it again, but with more detail. An influencer has a particular niche/segment in the market that they are passionate about. They may have various channels in which to communicate to their audience, these may be facebook page/groups, youtube channels, instagram. These influencers have from 100 to 100k audience members. There's nothing you need to do, apart from approach them and to find whether it's a good fit to pitch your product. However, be aware that the influencer will be looking for a % of sales. What is great about an influencer, is that in some cases they did all the hard work for you. They already created a product that the audience members consumed and are generally happy with it. So if you have an addon product, then you are simply preaching to the choir at this point. Where to find influencers? Youtube, Facebook Groups, Instagram. [1] Is a place to go, if you want to be laser targeted and have stats. [1] http://www.hyprbrands.com http://www.hyprbrands.com ------------------- Now for anecdotal experience. I'm in the affiliate marketing arena. I know many many different influencers. They either have products developed for them or they cross promote each others products. These guys regularly generate from around $10k to $100k a month. I've met few that have done $1m a month in sales. Done correctly, you can position yourself to flip a switch and have over 1m unique users read or hear about your product. I know there is a segment on HN that generally frowns upon affiliate marketing, but many companies such as Netflix, Groupon, AirBNB, Apple, Amazon used them to great effect to grow exponentially.

AznHisoka 9y ago
what industries or niches does this strategy work for? which ones do they not work as well?
- gerenuk 9y ago
  If your product is related to SEO, social media, ppc this can work really well. We recently launched a side project in SEO vertical with couple other partners and did over $200k in sales revenue over a week through our affiliate channel. If you are looking particularly where affiliates are promoting for products then check out voluum, link assistant etc. If your product is more of a tech side and starts with less than $20-$30 then chances are less people are going to promote that.
  - rkunnamp 9y ago
    "If your product is more of a tech side and starts with less than $20-$30 then chances are less people are going to promote that." Why is that ? I didn't really get it.
    - samzhao 9y ago
      Not OP, but I think it's because devs are slightly harder to sell to compared to non-devs. Also, the commission for a product less than $20 will be too low for anyone to put in any effort to promoting it. 5% of $20 is $1, meaning you won't be able to cover operation costs even if you sell 100 of it every month. If the product/course/service is $2997, and your commission is 5%, you are looking at $10k+ net profit every month if you sell 100 of that. In addition, because the author/creator/founder of the $20 doesn't have a high profit margin to begin with, the commission rate will be very low compared to premium products/services. E.g., 5% for $20 product vs. 20-30% for $2997 product.
  - sherm8n 9y ago
    Thanks for this! Would you mind diving a bit deeper on how you were able to drive $200K in sales? That is impressive and congrats!
    - gerenuk 9y ago
      Thank you, most of the sales were generated through affiliates, our profits after the launch were about 95k. If you check out jvnotifypro or jvzoo.com, you will get an idea. To drive $200k was not simple, we partnered up with a person who had a record of 6 figure launches and had a good relationship with JVs. To be honest, most of the tech savvy people would be hating jvzoo type audience but the reality is if you have good following you can generate good revenue from your side projects and feed that revenue into your main Saas startups for bootstrapping. This is something that we are doing without involving any VC for our core product. One another example is a shopping cart product is Samcart.com, the co-founder Brian also captured the top Jvs for his launch including Jeff Walker, Todd Gross etc. These Jvs I have mentioned actually have the similar type of audience like Jvzoo. Also, on the Saas side, one of my buddy Thomas from pagemodo (previous co-founder) did a similar thing while running the startup. And later he sold his venture for $114 million. And the Voluum founder Robert gryn used the same approach to scale his product.
- going_to_800 9y ago
  Influencer and affiliate marketing channel works in markets where there are many potential influencers... that's it. For advertising and marketing related tools(SEO,PPC,social media, marketing automation,etc) works better because their main clients are marketers, many have an audience and know how to market a product. However, it also works for sales tools and CRMs for ex., there are lots of influencers in this space. Works amazingly well for e-commerce, which is where influencer marketing is most used, everyone with a good following on Instagram can become an influencer. If your space doesn't have too many influencers, start a referral program.
f3r3nc 9y ago
back in the days when we were making ios games we would send out a lot of promo codes to various youtube reviewers with followers between 100-10k. it was getting popular back then so we didnt paid for nor offered money for the review although few replied back and asked for it. well more like a paid service than affiliate. a few days later we experiences a spike that originated from a reviewer we never heard back.
pryelluw 9y ago
I work on the tech side of imfluencer marketing and am available to answer most questions through email. No bs or strings. Keep in mind that no product or budget is too small for influencer marketing!
udkl 9y ago
How to get in touch with you ? I would be very interested in learning more about your approach.
rkunnamp 9y ago
How do you track and pay commissions? Any tool recommendations?
- sherm8n 9y ago
  Have you checked out GrowSumo.com? They were YC S15. Luke and Bryn are awesome guys. They got us connected with a handful of influencers that promoted my first startup – www.goodaudience.com. Then their software tracked monthly commissions and payouts.
  - bjones53 9y ago
    Thanks sherm8n. Happy to chat to anyone about best practices, but our platforms lets you set commission and make payouts.
  - going_to_800 9y ago
    You need to mention that they charge $300/month minimum. Their feature set seems pretty low for the high price...
- throwaway33t00 9y ago
  Please check http://eetti.com/influencers/ http://eetti.com/influencers/
tmaly 9y ago
How could I go about getting in that position to flip a switch and get 1m or 100K unique?

AznHisoka 9y ago

what industries or niches does this strategy work for? which ones do they not work as well?

gerenuk 9y ago
If your product is related to SEO, social media, ppc this can work really well. We recently launched a side project in SEO vertical with couple other partners and did over $200k in sales revenue over a week through our affiliate channel. If you are looking particularly where affiliates are promoting for products then check out voluum, link assistant etc. If your product is more of a tech side and starts with less than $20-$30 then chances are less people are going to promote that.
- rkunnamp 9y ago
  "If your product is more of a tech side and starts with less than $20-$30 then chances are less people are going to promote that." Why is that ? I didn't really get it.
  - samzhao 9y ago
    Not OP, but I think it's because devs are slightly harder to sell to compared to non-devs. Also, the commission for a product less than $20 will be too low for anyone to put in any effort to promoting it. 5% of $20 is $1, meaning you won't be able to cover operation costs even if you sell 100 of it every month. If the product/course/service is $2997, and your commission is 5%, you are looking at $10k+ net profit every month if you sell 100 of that. In addition, because the author/creator/founder of the $20 doesn't have a high profit margin to begin with, the commission rate will be very low compared to premium products/services. E.g., 5% for $20 product vs. 20-30% for $2997 product.
- sherm8n 9y ago
  Thanks for this! Would you mind diving a bit deeper on how you were able to drive $200K in sales? That is impressive and congrats!
  - gerenuk 9y ago
    Thank you, most of the sales were generated through affiliates, our profits after the launch were about 95k. If you check out jvnotifypro or jvzoo.com, you will get an idea. To drive $200k was not simple, we partnered up with a person who had a record of 6 figure launches and had a good relationship with JVs. To be honest, most of the tech savvy people would be hating jvzoo type audience but the reality is if you have good following you can generate good revenue from your side projects and feed that revenue into your main Saas startups for bootstrapping. This is something that we are doing without involving any VC for our core product. One another example is a shopping cart product is Samcart.com, the co-founder Brian also captured the top Jvs for his launch including Jeff Walker, Todd Gross etc. These Jvs I have mentioned actually have the similar type of audience like Jvzoo. Also, on the Saas side, one of my buddy Thomas from pagemodo (previous co-founder) did a similar thing while running the startup. And later he sold his venture for $114 million. And the Voluum founder Robert gryn used the same approach to scale his product.
going_to_800 9y ago
Influencer and affiliate marketing channel works in markets where there are many potential influencers... that's it. For advertising and marketing related tools(SEO,PPC,social media, marketing automation,etc) works better because their main clients are marketers, many have an audience and know how to market a product. However, it also works for sales tools and CRMs for ex., there are lots of influencers in this space. Works amazingly well for e-commerce, which is where influencer marketing is most used, everyone with a good following on Instagram can become an influencer. If your space doesn't have too many influencers, start a referral program.

f3r3nc 9y ago

back in the days when we were making ios games we would send out a lot of promo codes to various youtube reviewers with followers between 100-10k. it was getting popular back then so we didnt paid for nor offered money for the review although few replied back and asked for it. well more like a paid service than affiliate. a few days later we experiences a spike that originated from a reviewer we never heard back.

pryelluw 9y ago

I work on the tech side of imfluencer marketing and am available to answer most questions through email. No bs or strings. Keep in mind that no product or budget is too small for influencer marketing!

udkl 9y ago

How to get in touch with you ? I would be very interested in learning more about your approach.

rkunnamp 9y ago

How do you track and pay commissions? Any tool recommendations?

sherm8n 9y ago
Have you checked out GrowSumo.com? They were YC S15. Luke and Bryn are awesome guys. They got us connected with a handful of influencers that promoted my first startup – www.goodaudience.com. Then their software tracked monthly commissions and payouts.
- bjones53 9y ago
  Thanks sherm8n. Happy to chat to anyone about best practices, but our platforms lets you set commission and make payouts.
- going_to_800 9y ago
  You need to mention that they charge $300/month minimum. Their feature set seems pretty low for the high price...
throwaway33t00 9y ago
Please check http://eetti.com/influencers/ http://eetti.com/influencers/

tmaly 9y ago

How could I go about getting in that position to flip a switch and get 1m or 100K unique?