3 ms·

Thank you for the suggestion. > "Once we hit about $20,000 MRR" Interesting. I wonder why the $20k MRR... I have $50 MRR (dollars... not thousands). But I don

by throwaway2016a 9y ago

Thank you for the suggestion. > "Once we hit about $20,000 MRR" Interesting. I wonder why the $20k MRR... I have $50 MRR (dollars... not thousands). But I don't see anything about affiliate marketing that would prohibit starting early.

albertgoeswoof 9y ago
I would postulate that it's just that they didn't think of the idea before. Affiliate marketing is nice because you are promising a share of revenue on conversion, so it just hits your margins a bit. It's not so nice because it can screw consumers over a bit (e.g. try and find a non-biased review of an affiliate marketed product such as convertkit)
shostack 9y ago
If you are really small, your struggle with an affiliate program will be convincing affiliates you are worth promoting. They want to see a strong EPC number and ideally a recognized brand.
wastedhours 9y ago
Not sure it's a case of waiting, but that they just didn't add the feature until then. If you're heads down on sales and development, guessing they just didn't have the scope/implementation to do it then.
newlyretired 9y ago
I doubt it was specific to the exact MRR number. More likely their growth stalled using the methods that were taking up all of their time (direct sales, word of mouth). For some $N MRR (magic point where you look for scalable channels), N should be large enough that you have a product that your market wants and will pay for, and the market is large enough that you were able to manually scale it to N. The heuristic is something like "if you can get big enough doing low-efficiency/manual marketing, you've likely gotten close enough to the important things* and can move on to testing scalability". * things like product/market fit, market size, clear communication, well defined value prop, etc.
jajern 9y ago
This is going to be dependent on a few factors (market, product, etc.) but I'd rather be an affiliate for a product with a proven track record of conversions unless I really love a product and just want to promote it. If I know a product already has a high conversion rate and $20k+ MRR then I feel better about the prospects of sending 20k people there and getting a hefty percentage than I would about a new product bringing in $50. Maybe my thinking is wrong though.
cabaalis 9y ago
I don't know at what MRR you set the threshold, but you would want to have an understanding of actual costs, growth cost estimates, customer retention, etc. before you start promising commissions to affiliates.

albertgoeswoof 9y ago

I would postulate that it's just that they didn't think of the idea before. Affiliate marketing is nice because you are promising a share of revenue on conversion, so it just hits your margins a bit. It's not so nice because it can screw consumers over a bit (e.g. try and find a non-biased review of an affiliate marketed product such as convertkit)

shostack 9y ago

If you are really small, your struggle with an affiliate program will be convincing affiliates you are worth promoting. They want to see a strong EPC number and ideally a recognized brand.

wastedhours 9y ago

Not sure it's a case of waiting, but that they just didn't add the feature until then. If you're heads down on sales and development, guessing they just didn't have the scope/implementation to do it then.

newlyretired 9y ago

I doubt it was specific to the exact MRR number. More likely their growth stalled using the methods that were taking up all of their time (direct sales, word of mouth). For some $N MRR (magic point where you look for scalable channels), N should be large enough that you have a product that your market wants and will pay for, and the market is large enough that you were able to manually scale it to N. The heuristic is something like "if you can get big enough doing low-efficiency/manual marketing, you've likely gotten close enough to the important things* and can move on to testing scalability". * things like product/market fit, market size, clear communication, well defined value prop, etc.

jajern 9y ago

This is going to be dependent on a few factors (market, product, etc.) but I'd rather be an affiliate for a product with a proven track record of conversions unless I really love a product and just want to promote it. If I know a product already has a high conversion rate and $20k+ MRR then I feel better about the prospects of sending 20k people there and getting a hefty percentage than I would about a new product bringing in $50. Maybe my thinking is wrong though.

cabaalis 9y ago

I don't know at what MRR you set the threshold, but you would want to have an understanding of actual costs, growth cost estimates, customer retention, etc. before you start promising commissions to affiliates.