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37signals Launches Affiliate Program (Pays Residuals)
They'll pay 50% of the signup fee and 5% of all future recurring payments for each customer you refer for Basecamp, Highrise, and Backpack.
- stillmotion 18y agoI wonder if it would be smart to build a small product on top of Basecamp or other 37Signals products and collect small revenue from their affiliate program. Anyone got any ideas?
- jasonfried 18y agoA few people who've build products that hook up with Basecamp (http://www.basecamphq.com/extras http://www.basecamphq.com/extras) or Backpack or Highrise via our API have a referral link inside their products. I know some of them have generated a lot of affiliate credit that way under the old system.
- staunch 18y agoI'm interesting in seeing how aggressive they are at preventing spammers (and similar) from using their program. If they're not willing to turn away revenue generated by spammers that could be some pretty ugly PR.
- swombat 18y agoSpammers are one worry. They'll get people spamming their affiliate links in all sorts of dodgy places. Fraud is another! I've been running an affiliate site for some time. Expect many 37Signals blog posts about how to filter out philipinos and indonesians from accessing their apps. It seems like it's a cottage industry over there. I hope they have good anti-fraud detection systems for their credit card transactions too.
- prakash 18y agoJoel Spolsky's interview in Founders at work mentions that fogcreek spent time on building out an affiliates program that didn't amount to much. 6 to 12 months from now I would like to know what % of sales for 37 signals comes from this program, and if it was actually worth their time building it.
- jasonfried 18y agoIt only took us about a month to build so we're feeling pretty good about the investment. We've had an affiliate program for a few years now, but we only paid credit towards your own Basecamp/Backpack account, we didn't pay cash. It's been successful for us so we're bullish about this system.
- prakash 18y agoAh, thanks for the reply. Would you blog about, at the very least the % increase due to this, say 6-12 months down the line? Cheers!
- jasonfried 18y agoI can't promise that, but we usually report back on experiments down the road if we can.
- prakash 18y agosounds fair.