Creating, launching and marketing a SAAS product for affiliates (57)
Creating, launching and marketing a SAAS product for affiliates
As my first follow along is so hugely popular, I decided to take you with me on this exciting journey once more - and deliver first hand insights into the "next big thing" I've been working on for the last couple months: a SAAS product.
It's a completely different beast than the mobile affiliate offers I've been writing about promoting in my other follow along.
And you'll learn a lot about "creating your own product" along the way!
Being here in New York right now is hugely inspirational, the city is buzzing with energy! Amazing. I'd love to be able to bottle up this feeling and sell it 
I felt very different late one night in Chiang Mai, a couple months ago...
Even though I was just running my biggest campaign ever and made XXXX in profit every day for weeks, I was getting ripped at an insane speed.
On volume my landing pages kept popping up on spy tools, even though I had setup rules in
I tried some quick fixes but they did not work properly, and once the landing page was out it spread instantly. At the end of the week it was being run by several affiliates all using the same traffic sources... I felt like smashing my laptop through the window. Instead I just punched the wall and hurt my hand
Once the dust settled and the campaign had died, I set out to solve this issue once and for all! I want to protect my landing pages from my competition, and keep my landers a secret for months, not days. There were a lot of issues to solve, here some early thoughts:
- It has to be easy, I do not want to manually upload and edit php files for every single campaign. My VAs should be able to use it without much instruction.
- It has to be super fast, no additional redirects, and there should be as little click loss as possible.
- It should also be bulletproof, and a perfect fit for the kinds of mobile campaigns I and many others are running
- It needs to be a smart but very effective solution. Stuff like creating 1000000 lines of spaces in my source code is no game I'd like to play..
- And for those spies I detect, I want to use their laziness to secretly steal their traffic to make my campaigns even more profitable
- The very tech savy competitor will be hard to block, but they are the <5% .. I want a bulletproof way to block all spy tools as well as the average copy-paste affiliate
With enough budget at hand I hired two developers, one for Javascript and a second for PHP and database related stuff. Even though it's not the highest value activity I did all the design stuff myself instead of hiring someone, just love doing it
We had a very raw version ready soon, then weeks of testing and tweaking followed. I ran everything on my own landing pages, then we adjusted, added features. I got great feedback from my fellow affiliate friends in Chiang Mai (thanks!) as well as other affiliates who had issues with getting their landing pages ripped.
Now in the beginning of August we're very close to a finished product. I'm starting this follow along and will post all the details along the way:
- How much were the development costs and time (where to get developers, how to structure working together, lessons from the development, issues encountered and solutions for them)
- How am I marketing the product? (hint: this follow along is obviously also part of it )
- Costs, pricing, revenue , profit overall ... long-term strategy
- How to make the product itself kick-ass, general product development lessons and approaches
- How am I doing the launch and how will it perform (detailed insights, stats)
- Which software am I using for the user management / subscription / billing / marketing
- and much more ... ask away
I believe many of the more successful affiliates here are interested developing some kind of own product, and even though this product is specifically targeted at affiliates, many of the lessons can certainly be applied to any kind of digital product.
PS. Of course I'll keep running mobile offers as well
I've been dividing my time 50/50 between this project and my campaigns. The latter does not take as much time as in the beginning as my VAs take over a big part of the work, and they are getting better and better at it. Obviously I'm not making as much as I would if I put 100% focus on just launching mobile campaigns..PPS. The product we're talking about is http://lpdefense.com/. If you're interested you can sign up for the waiting list on this page.
Great! very nice to see how simple idea blossom
Nice one Kevin, I think there will be a great demand among affiliate marketers.
Haven't been to New York yet, but Brian in Bulgaria said if you want to achieve more, move to New York or LA, and avoid Thailand... makes sense imo, also with what I've read at WSPB, and experienced first hand moving from the countryside to a city.
I psyched about the details of your product development and launch.
Cheers
Very cool idea. I'll definitely be following this one closely!
SaaS can be much harder than it looks, but it's also an amazing way to generate a stable asset.
Have you read Patrick McKenzie's many, many posts on running a SaaS business? http://www.kalzumeus.com - the man's a master.
Thanks for the link.In the last post I got ahead of myself a bit. When the dust had settled and the campaign died, I knew getting my landing pages ripped was an issue I wanted to solve before the next big campaign came. I want to innovate, but I also want to make the innovation more worthwhile by making the benefits last much longer.
I knew many others must have the same issue. The fact that I am the perfect customer makes it a lot easier to develop the whole thing. But of course I also researched for hours and came up with the following:
First of all I'd like to clear this up: Obviously you should develop a competitive advantage besides just your landing pages. STILL it does make a lot of sense to properly protect your landers on top of that. And if you do not have a big competitive advantage, like many guys hitting XXX and XXXX a day for their first time, this is even more important.
1. Do others have the same issue / Is there a lot of demand for a solution? Yes!
- There are many threads on it, and they are always very active with many requests for such a solution
- The people I spoke to personally would be interested as well
3. Are there existing solutions?
Yes! However not one of them was the right fit I'd want to use/purchase to solve my issue.
- There are several smaller free solutions with different approaches, however none actively developed anymore, and all very basic
- Cloaking solutions are great, but primarily developed to cloak traffic sources and not for landing page anti theft, and they are usually expensive
- Many successful affiliates have developed their own private solutions
- Tracking software offers basic solutions to create rules and hide your lander in some cases
4. What exactly do affiliates want?
- The main goal should be to completely hide your page. Make it invisible. Nobody should see it or be able to even take a screenshot in the first place.
- If that does not work protect the page from being stolen somehow.
- Also commonly asked for is a solution to steal traffic from the thieves if they rip your page.
- A big part of the market wants a solution that works on a CDN
- Personally I also wanted a solution to deal specifically with the issue of spy tools (these seem to be popping up left and right lately). Others got the issue as well.
- Personally it really bothered me that if spy tools indexed my landing page url using
5. Would people pay for something like this? Yes!
- They already are, for similar / more basic solutions
- Those who got their own solutions coded paid for it, most likely quite a bit if it's developed beyond basic functionality
- I know in my situation I'd definitely pay a nice amount for a working solution and not having to worry about it again
- There were requests in the forum looking for a coder to get this done in exchange for $$
6. Common objections to similar solutions we'd have to solve (quotes)
- Nothing can stop a tech savy competitor putting work into ripping you!
- This will produce a lot of clickloss.
- In Adult it's pretty much impossible to hide your stuff!
- Is this going to work with my CDN?
- "I am a coding noob, how do I implement this?"
- Client side protection is nearly always useless.
- You are only going to catch really lazy people with it. Then again I suppose their is no shortage of those.
- Can this be used without a lot of extra work / with my XYZ tracking system?
- Others have tried this and failed!
- taking a screenshot and chopping it up in Photoshop would bypass all of this.
Now we had a much better overview already, as well as a lot of objections to solve during the brainstorming and development phase! The next post will be about the specific product brainstorming and idea on how to create the best possible solution out of the above research.
PS. Feel free to chime in if you got something I overlooked during my research!
I personally dont think its possible to create something like this.
Theres really no way on protecting your landing pages, especially once you get a lot of traffic and eyes on it. Sure spy tools you can grab their IP's and bot info and try to block them out, but they aren't stupid either and come up with new ones to act more natural. Second, affiliates doing manual spying you cant really stop at all as theres really no difference between them a normal user. As for ripping pages, all they need to do is screenshot it and have someone else create something similiar, heck they can even sketch it on paper to replicate later on even if you were somehow magically disable their screenshot button on their keyboard lol.
You can make the page dissapear if you open it up in a new browser, or even refresh it, but ive noticed a drop in conversions when this is done so its not really worth it in my opinion unless its something shady and your hiding from the gov.
As much as I wish you all the best in this journey I wouldn't start a project like this myself.
It's not this is not a valuable tool (it is) and not that it is based on scarcity and fear mentality (antiviruses are similar).
SaaS is an expensive endeavour and if I were to go this route, I'd need to see a clear path of how it can be ramped up to the large market up to the enterprise.
All successful SaaS are starting in smallbiz market and growing rapidly to eventually jump to the mass market or the enterprise. This is where hundred million dollars plus company valuations are made.
Starting up a software project targeting niche market is almost the same as starting up a software project (eventually) targeting Fortune 500 so I'd plan accordingly.
Do try it man, it will be a nice experience either way. You have a lot to learn about it. Start with SaaS blogs, podcasts, etc
I know a bit about SaaS, I had a few projects myself. After years of working on, reading, researching etc about this type of business I came to a conclusion that for bootstrapped SaaS to work needs:
- Business: Purchased by businesses as opposed to consumers
- Aspirin: More like aspirin (takes an existing pain away) than a vitamin (nice to have)
- Valuable: Immediately saves >$100/month by using it
- 50x500: Market to quickly sell 500 subscriptions at $50/month
- Paid: Paid from day one as opposed to Freemium
- Recurring: Continues providing value every month, not just one time or occasionally
- Immediate: Useful straight away by user #1
- Supportable: Low instance of customer support. Few emails asking for help
- Fun: Interesting enough to keep working on
- Buildable: Not to huge in scope. Can be built as MVP, then iterated
You are not the first trying a saas for this. I think a few years ago another affiliate tried the same thing but a few months later gave up. The problem with this kind of tool is that you need to price it cheap, you'll have a high churn rate(unless you are a tracker) because affiliates are not businesses(something between consumer and businesses) and if they don't see value right away they will cancel since many know that spy tools can look and act like a real user and IPs are hard to spot. You need to make them trust you and give a sense of security which is hard to sell in this space, heck, even with my tool LPOptimizer, some people are afraid to use because it's web based.....fucked up mentality...but that's the market we are in.
However you can still try it, personally I won't start this myself but a few years ago I might.
Really good stuff in this thread. As a SaaS guy myself I can vouch for everything crysper said.
Also I'm interested to see how somebody can prevent me from capturing HTML/JS executed and pixels rendered by my browser.
My initial thought is that the market you are addressing is quite small.
Affiliate marketing is still a very small industry. In fact, if we are being honest, it is really an industry segment ... or even more accurately, a sub sub sub segment of the marketing and advertising industry.
If you are going to spend considerable time and effort on developing your product, why not tackle much bigger markets and problems?
Love your ambition! Go for it! The replies show that people are passionate. If you get it right you can create an entire platform. The naysayers say it can't be done. I don't know about you but when someone tells me I can't do something I go even harder and then prove them wrong. I remember when people in silicone valley said snapchat won't last and that it was like a toy app. Just don't be afraid to pivot. You may start with an lplockdown type product lol but end up with something entirely different. If I were you id pick Crysper's brain. He is a brilliant product developer and owner with real customers. Either way Godspeed and I wish you much success.
Wow thanks for the feedback! Shows once again how valuable it is to set up a follow along here.
Quick summary of your input:
- What is your plan to get a wider audience? / Do not only target a niche market, effort is similar ...
- Go for it! / research further and learn about SaaS / ask the experts ...
- Questioning if it is technically possible / especially without too much click loss ...
I've been reading and watching / listening a lot about SaaS projects but there is definitely a lot more to learn. I'll post the best resources I've found soon.
Also special thanks to crysper for the insights. Working the list here for Landing Page Defense:
- Business: Purchased by businesses as opposed to consumers >> as you said affiliates are somewhere in between
- Aspirin: More like aspirin (takes an existing pain away) than a vitamin (nice to have) >> Getting ripped is a big pain and can be very "emotional" in the moment
- Valuable: Immediately saves >$100/month by using it >> It does , but it might not be directly obvious in the first weeks
- 50x500: Market to quickly sell 500 subscriptions at $50/month >> I believe mid XXX subscriptions within the first year are possible , price is still open
- Paid: Paid from day one as opposed to Freemium >> Affiliates are not afraid to spend money on trying a new promising software
- Recurring: Continues providing value every month, not just one time or occasionally >> Yes, and we're building something in to make this more obvious
- Immediate: Useful straight away by user #1 >> Some features are, others will take some weeks - months to really become effective
- Supportable: Low instance of customer support. Few emails asking for help >> From what I've seen affiliates are usually pretty tech savy
- Fun: Interesting enough to keep working on >> Yes
- Buildable: Not to huge in scope. Can be built as MVP, then iterated >> Yes
/////
But on average, those are significantly less than 5% of the people stealing your pages. The goal is to block the 95% and stop your page from spreading all over the place within days , so that innovating pays off for weeks - months instead of days. (adult is a different game, we're mainly looking at mobile for the beginning).
Concerning the choice - I know the affiliate space and what exactly is needed. In comparison I know the overall marketing and advertising industry much less (currently). Getting up to around 1000 users should be possible within the affiliate space, and that's probably 1-2 years into the future.
A certain part of what we're developing will be helpful for any online marketer using a landing page and being concerned about getting it stolen.
Right now I'm focusing 100% on the affiliate marketing space though, with specific features only useful for us.
There's nothing wrong with creating a tool that serves a smaller market - and it's a lot easier than trying to scale up to "unicorn" size.
For every $100m valued SaaS company, there are fifty successful lifestyle businesses doing SaaS or equivalent generating $100k plus a year in profits. Niches are good!
Of course, if what you really want to do is scale up to the $100m mark or beyond, and you won't be happy with anything less - which is also fine - then you need a different approach. Even in that case, though, it's not a bad idea to develop something for a smaller market first, to learn how the software-building business works.
In either case, just make sure you remember what your "why" is!
good luck kepe! great thread.
This is going to be client (js) or server (like a cloaker) side protection?
You have to 2 major concerns here:
-client: what prevents me to subscribe only for a month, steal your JS code and use it for free?
-server: since it's saas how will you deal with bandwith and page loading speeds? my concern here is that server costs may wipe your profits (depends on your product price). What about bleed rate?
On volume my landing pages kept popping up on spy tools
I run lots of shit over the years and let's be honest dude, not every one of your LPs will appear in spy tools. Even if they do, it's not that competitor will steal it and instantly take over your profits. There is still lots of placement tweaking to do. Also at some traffic sources, aff networks and even offer owners there is some dirty game going on. Did you even wonder why they have internal media buying teams? :PI think you should sit down and think about everything.
Chances are you are suffering from affiliate over-confidence. Affiliates start making money and then they think they are next Bill Gates, but unfortunately entrepreneurship is a different game.
I was same when I was around 16 and was banking like crazy with old good email submits
well that was quick
Good Luck Kevin! Keep us posted on your progress
I do believe it can work on %95 of newbies ripping your landers, mostly campaigns die because of other reasons though and on the marketing sides you'll have to address that.
Explain the reason why every affiliate will see BIG impact on his campaigns with this tool, that worth for him more money.
It is about that concept of everyone rips everyone, and also the additional clickloss vs the stability of protected campaign.
Good luck buddy!
First of all congrats to the guys from MobileAdMonitor , their spy tool sold out 100 paid beta spots in just a few hours! Wow.
http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...obile-Spy-Tool
What's your counter-plan when spy tools get better and better, and at the same time much more affordable?
here it is --> Landing Page Defense will take care of it for you 
Today I'd like to share some great resources on SaaS development / marketing with you!
- https://www.groovehq.com/blog#timeline
- https://blog.intercom.io/
- https://blog.kissmetrics.com/
- http://www.saastr.com/
- http://www.coelevate.com/
- http://tomtunguz.com/
It is obviously impossible to block 100% of spies if you run on volume. But we can block the overwhelming majority, which makes it well worth it.
Kepe thanks for the congratulations! Good luck with your software. It sounds like a great idea.
Originally Posted by kepe95
http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...obile-Spy-Tool
What's your counter-plan when spy tools get better and better, and at the same time much more affordable?
here it is --> Landing Page Defense will take care of it for you
Today I'd like to share some great resources on SaaS development / marketing with you!
- https://www.groovehq.com/blog#timeline
- https://blog.intercom.io/
- https://blog.kissmetrics.com/
- http://www.saastr.com/
- http://www.coelevate.com/
- http://tomtunguz.com/
We will offer both. You can flexibly choose case by case if you want to use client -or- server side protection, or both.
The testing is still going on, so I can not say anything specific or make any promises. The "I want a bulletproof way to ...." is just the expression of what I felt in the moment my campaign went downhill because of being ripped so much ...
It is obviously impossible to block 100% of spies if you run on volume. But we can block the overwhelming majority, which makes it well worth it.
Dispite all the concerns I do see some value in this - you may be able to ride the wave a bit longer before it comes crashing down.
One point that hasn't been mentioned yet is the question of who you are really addressing with this tool. Consider how many affiliates are actually producing genuine content/design/coding in our space. Consider how many affiliates have other competitive advantages (e.g. direct offers, exclusive offers, placements, you name it) where they don't care about people ripping their page/angle.
Now, back to topic and how you could make this work. I'd suggest sitting down with someone who has extensive cloaking knowledge. e.g. @atom64 (you met him at the German dinner at STM London)
What you have in mind I believe would be an easier sale if combined with a cloaking service, because at the end of the day an extensive service cloaker is not much different from what you intend on building.
Viel Erfolg!
Seems you are highly motivated which is good. When starting up a project motivation is very high because of excitement, novelty etc(something similar to a new gf) and it will die out over time, but the idea is, the more motivated you are at the beginning, the less will die out(which is extremely important, you'll see this in about a year).
Anyway, your plan looks ok. I still think the market is a bit small but this is your first project and many entrepreneurs advise to start with smaller niched projects than go big. I think you can reach a 100k/year business with this if everything is executed correctly.
About growth and getting traction, I can mention 2 tactics that will help you:
1) Partnership with affiliate networks/forums
2) Integrating into another tool
Strategic partnerships are the fastest, easiest way to grow.
1) Make partnerships with affiliate networks to give to their users a free version with their branding on the tool dashboard and login integration(to be as smooth as possible, maybe even iframing the tool to keep the domain). Offer a premium version to everyone who wants more(maybe with a little discount).
If you position and sell yourself the right way, affiliate networks will look after you to give this tool for free to their user base. Sell it like if an affiliate network doesn't have your tool, his competitors(which have it) has an advantage. If you make partnerships with 10-15 aff networks you don't have to make any promotion.
2)Find a tool in this space with a good user base. I'm thinking of a tracker. Your tool might be an additional feature which they can sell highly to their user base.
One idea to remind the user that your tool is valuable:
-Function that shows the number of provided stealing attempts. Maybe a report once a week.
One idea to add additional value:
-Ripped landing page should send tweaks/improvements home, at least the new server ip for manual counter spying/ripping.
Quite some time passed, if you start of reading here, a quick summary of what this follow along is about:
First of all congratulations to the developers and founders, even though we're only halfway through, I can gasp how much work you put into it. We'll soon be "opponents" though
Landing Page Defense development updates / lessons learnt:
- I sent out a survey to our waiting list to get a better understanding of our potential customers, the results were positive and are now the guidelines for the development. We're using mailchimp for email btw, and used survey monkey (free version) for the survey.
- Several very cool features will be medium difficult to develop, everything going well here. For working with outsourcers, even though it's a little more expensive, I'd now always go with the Upwork work tracking and automatic billing features. Going off these platforms just produces unnecessary hassle. I'd only go off if you'll really work together closely, a lot, and long-term.
- The core product which works similar to a cloaker will be technically difficult to develop. In fact it's pretty much impossible with outsourced programmers from upwork and co. Therefore I decided to join forces with two experts on the subject. Both have in-depth previous experience in developing an affiliate spy tool as well as a cloaker.
We're going to found Landing Page Defense together and will share the work according to our individual skillsets. We're going to work together locally in the same office as a 3 person founding team starting a week from now. This will go on for as long as it takes to develop a high quality product that delivers what it promises.
Some additional features will still be taken care of by outsourced programmers, for example part of the UI elements.
- Personally I've also spent a lot of time reading all articles at http://www.ycombinator.com/resources/ (highly recommended), which also strengthened my belief that if this is going to work out well, there needs to be someone beside me who also has skin in the game and is an expert on the subject.
- For initial project setup I re-discovered this great one page "cheat sheet" to come up with all proper points for starting a new company. Got it from a startup event in Sydney last year, Feel free to copy it from https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...it?usp=sharing
I'll be keeping this follow along more up to date from now on
Originally Posted by kepe95
Whoa, in the six weeks that passed since my last post, one completely new spy tool appeared, and one went from beta to being fully released.
First of all congratulations to the developers and founders, even though we're only halfway through, I can gasp how much work you put into it. We'll soon be "opponents" though
I worked the last year with outsourced programmers, it's a good solution for simple tasks. It has severe limitations that all the outsourcing advocates are never mentioning.
1. Once it gets even slightly complex, it doesn't work
2. If your programmer needs to think for himself, it doesn't work
3. If you're not a tech savvy-person yourself, it doesn't work. You're the bottleneck of the operation.
4. If it's time sensitive, it doesn't work.
5. If further developments are necessary (new modules and functions) it doesn't work. An outsourced programmer does not take further developments into consideration. How could he, when he has no idea about the industry?
Your decision to partner up with industry experts is a very good one. Couldn't imagine the pain of running a saas product, experiencing technical problems, and trying to get outsourced programmers to fix it asap...
Need somebody who can analyse and fix problems 24/7. Need somebody who takes further developments into consideration while doing the ground work.
Originally Posted by sebastian_r
I've worked with several developers already from Upwork and some are truly amazing (and better than the guys I have sitting in the office). The biggest tip I can give is to NOT go cheap on developers. The guys you want, who are smart, who think for themselves and who will be available and professional are not the guys who you're going to hire for $15 per hour. The guys you want, they are smart enough to know that they're worth their money. Start looking in the range of $25 / hour (assuming you want a full stack developer) and up and do GOOD interviews and give them test projects.
Hiring on it's own is almost like a craft. You need to be good at it if you want to work with good people. Invest some time into finding out how to overcome this and you'll be amazed. It's just unfair to make statements like this.
/offtopic
Really liking this follow along kepe95, can't wait for more updates on your progress. Best of luck!
Originally Posted by kepe95
It's no secret that the top 1% of affiliates are the ones that are generating 90+% of the volume. If I were to rely on spying and I saw your page, like many other people mentioned here: even if I just had an idea of the concept behind what's making it work well, I have the resources and team to get a competing/better LP built in a fraction of the time that other smaller affiliates would spend ripping and then launching the campaign.
In other words, it's not your $100/day affiliates that are killing your campaign, it's the fact that the whales who are buying up all the media and monetizing on an optimal offer that are. Who do you think has more an influence on your DSP prices: Mr. 100/day affiliate who ripped and is running your campaign? Or BBDO who is dumping a $15 million dollar mobile media budget on behalf of Coca Cola because Q3 was coming to an end and they have no goal besides branding in mind?
That being said, I think it's a fun project to try out and get some experience in for actually starting a business outside of affiliate marketing. As others have said, entrepreneurial pursuits are not equal to affiliate marketing, even though even a cursory look at shows like ASW will let you see that plenty of AM's believe and act like they are superhumans who have solved the equation of time travel because they ripped and ran some things early off in the maturity scale to make enough profits to not work a normal office job.
Originally Posted by timtetra
Very interesting insights here, thanks for taking the time to contribute!
Everybody has mixed opinions about it, so it's interesting to dig deeper. For me it's not about who is "wrong or right" in the end, but trying our best and then seeing what the outcome is. I'm obviously a firm believer in the fact that it is possible to have landing page protection software that's going to be very beneficial for any affiliate using is.
If I would not believe this, I would not invest a lot of money, time and effort into it Imo it also has way more potential than being a "fun project" ... well time will show, all of us working on it will do our best to show it's potential and help affiliates to protect their landers better
We've got some inputs on the following two topics, so I'd like to share my opinion on them related to this project:
1. Outsourced developers vs. working together locally
Sebastian_r and Scitox have pretty different view on this. My personal experience is somewhere in between the two comments.
- There are more average and incompetent outsourced workers than good ones, especially when going for cheaper hourly wages. Around two third of people I interviewed were just horrible. Yet the ones who are horrible from the start are not the issue. It's those who are good in the first weeks, and after they contributed a lot suddenly turn out unreliable, or somehow managed to code what you wanted - but it's all amateurish and full of little bugs.
- Common warning signs I encountered: "Saying yes to everything without actually knowing enough" , "radio silence" , "deadlines not met" , "obvious bullshit excuses" , "not able to answer detailed technical questions regarding their expertise and work properly"
- It is not easy and takes time to figure out if a developer is good or not. Especially when you don't have development experience and are in touch over the internet, it's very hard. Don't rush into things just to get started fast. It will haunt you later.
- A project CAN work if it is a little complex, thinking is involved, and it is somewhat time sensitive. I pay my main developer $28 an hour an he knows what he's doing. We can brainstorm together and also tackle more serious issue. Still there is a barrier when you're not in the same room.
- For a project that's tough to solve technically, that's going to take several months of planning and execution while figuring out things along the way -that's a horror scenario with an outsourced developer imo, especially if he's not full time and you don't have months of previous work experience and trust.
- But I'd always hire a good outsourced developer for doing a separate coding project that's limited in scope (if necessary). For example a new easy/medium to develop feature that's not dependent on the previous features of the product.
- You won't have the same kind of hustle mentality and team feeling as when you're working in the same room. I believe that's very important for an ambitious startup project. It happened often that I was working 12 hour days, and I had to wait on my remote developers who've been taking the weekend off or would just work way less overall. I can't blame them too much as they have no real skin in the game, they're not even real employees.
- It just lacks the environment which make this kind of startup entrepreneurial thing so great. For a serious bigger full-time project I'd never go fully 100% with remote workers again. Anybody who has been around young enthusiastic startup teams knows what I'm talking about. I was in this environment during my time in Sydney with several startups in the same office, and I love it.
I'll share some more insights when we get to work closer together as a 3 person founder team. Right now my experiences are mainly from working a lot with outsourced developers. Also feel free to share your own personal experiences Everything is appreciated.
2. Affiliate marketing vs. "entrepreneurial pursuits" like building a SaaS product
- The hustle is the same, I'm working just as hard as when I started learning AM.
- There is a lot of pressure in both, but it's a different kind of pressure. AM was more intense highs and lows, and more instant feedback. Building this I'm now 4 months into the development, and there is no big up and down day to day. It's a huge time, money and effort investment - without every really knowing if it's going to turn out well for you. Do everything you can, talk to future customers, surveys and so on, there will still be doubt. We're all human, and especially when you have not done this before, it'll be a new kind of pressure you'll have to deal with. Less intense than AM, but it builds up. The worst is not failing, it's "waiting" and not knowing how it will turn out.
- Overall AM is very fast, creating this product is much slower. A product also takes higher upfront investment, without any of revenue for quite some time.
- The most common reason why AM newbies fail is lack of action , then they just stop running campaigns and resume with the rest of their life, forgetting about ever having attempted to master AM. The risk of drifting off is much higher here. The only reason why I feel like these kinds of pursuits are more successful than newbie AMs, is that the people attempting them usually have more experience / previous success experiences. Yes you are more committed and have invested a lot, so you want to keep going. But as months go by, the launch feels still so far away, it's easy to just let it slowly die off. Especially if you have distractions like money making AM campaigns or a second job on the side. That's why I went all in with this project, making it my full time job. Just like I did when I started learning AM. Right now there is nothing else my attention could possibly drift off to.
- On that note, something I do similar and also I believe a key for what I did so far in AM - making a decision and then committing to it no matter what. When I learned AM, during every low, I felt like giving up, like all of this was a stupid idea. I'm sure everyone here knows what I'm talking about But after the initial commitment it was just decided. I'd make this AM thing work no matter what I felt from day to day. It's the same with this project now. On some days there is very encouraging feedback and progress. Other days there is negative feedback and the development does not go as planned. No matter what I just disregard my feeling and keep working on it.
- AM is way more short-term and "radical". With this project I very much enjoy building something that the customers are going to love, something that feels cool and makes you grin when using it. And something that I can show friends and family, something that I can openly be proud of without having that little bit of bad consciousness in the back of my mind.
- Building a long-term relationship with the customer. Creating a brand. Instead of what we usually do as affiliates, making a quick buck no matter how
- Learning to delegate and work together with others way more. In AM you can be successful on your own - not here. I could not code everything myself, and even though I thought I could do it, being a single founder for something like this is not a position you want to be in. Managing this properly is a big beast I still have to learn a lot about.
- What's similar is the approach in the beginning - Learning properly. Finding high quality resources and learning from them (I posted several very high quality resources a couple posts above, my favorite ended up being https://www.groovehq.com/blog#timeline). Signing up to all top SaaS products and going through their whole product, their emails, their software, their funnels. I found tons of very useful things I would have never thought off before. Getting inspired by others doing the same as you want to do works very well No need to try everything from scratch. Here it's also much less harmful to those you copy ideas from, because they're usually not your competitors, and it's not a 1:1 copy.
- The risk for big long-term potential lethal mistakes creeping in is higher than in AM. For example developing something the customers end up not wanting at all. Or hiring a shitty developer and only realizing months later that the code he wrote is basically flawed for the long-term. Choosing some wrong underlying system that takes weeks and thousands of $$ to shift to something else later on. In AM you have a clear idea by spying and knowing what works. Here you are often pioneering, you have to figure things out for the first time and on your own.
- If there is a lot to know and watch out for in AM , there is even more in building a SaaS product. There are so many areas you have to cover, and on each there are tons of resources. The way I'm going is getting all the basics right, and figuring the rest out along the way. You have to start somewhere.
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Personally it just feels good moving in the direction you want to move in , no matter if you maybe could make more money elsewhere or if there is resistance and doubt about it. Just do it, even if it's ambitious and there is doubt from yourself and others Following what you believe in.
The decision to put all of this effort, time and money into this project was not an easy one, running campaigns and making good money would have been much more comfortable. But I knew that if I would not pursue this project, it would have been for all the wrong reasons. I'd be cheating myself out of fear, doubt, and being too comfortable. I think we all face these kinds of situations, and I can only encourage you to make the right choice - and deep down we all already know which one that is (the bold one)
I will add more points as soon as new experiences are adding up. We're just getting started
This thread is gold. I'm so on the same page with kepe95. I love creating products because I have learned that I get the most satisfaction from helping others via solving a problem with my own products instead of marketing other people's solutions. Many people look at the idea of their own product as a next step from aff marketing but it's not. It's a totally different game like kepe95 illustrated and it requires a certain type of person. It's rare that successful product entrepreneurs are also successful marketers, or at least I've met only very few in my life. So the point is that know thyself before deciding to invest your aff monies into your own product development. There's nothing wrong with staying in the marketing side of things.
How do you plan to overcome the fact multiple competitors have beat you to the market?
We don't view them as direct competition, as we'll go far deeper into protection against spies and spy tools as well as counter-measures, not cloaking specific traffic sources. There are a lot of important details that are different between those two.
I'd maybe draw a line what you'd call a product. There are certainly very simple products that take very little time to create, and the main game is selling them. That's probably a great product for someone who knows he's a born marketer , but still wants to reap the benefits of having an own product.
To be honest, the only way for this product to succeed relatively speaking(like earning a consistent income to pay for you and the team) is to take advantage of people's fear. If you know how to market it and respond to that fear of getting campaign stolen combined with a low, monthly price, I think it will work.
Your market won't be the top affiliates, it will be the middle-stage to beginner affiliates, who are also not very techie. The most experienced ones know that it's impossible to stop the campaigns getting stolen by pros and they know that a successful campaign it's more than a landing page and an offer id.
If you sell it as a preventive measure, like antivirus/spyware in the early days, it will have a chance....you need to be careful on that.
Ah just found this one as well. Now I know why you stopped updating your other thread. This is quite cool to follow, I do agree however with the people saying this project makes sense as a "heart" or "learning" project mostly, not from an EV standpoint. Either way, you are young and have a lot of energy, it's just gonna be a question of when you have the next big breakthrough. I will probably try your product once it's finished, looking forward to it! It will certainly improve things at least a little if well done.
Thanks for the feedback and advice!
Progress Update
The question of "Is this going to work from a technical / business perspective" is past us, we're now on to the execution, and time will show who was right with their view on this project. It'll be interesting! (And to be honest I'd absolutely love to show some smart people here that their doubt in this project was wrong haha. It's a great motivation.)
As a disclaimer it’s important to say that the vision is NOT “having a kind of cloaker just for spies and spy tools”. The vision is to solve affiliates problems around the issue of being ripped and spied on. The cloaking kind of product I've mostly talked about so far is just one possible way to accomplish this
To be fully honest I started this follow along earlier than it should have been started from a "marketing perspective". If it would be only an instrument to get the word out about this product, the kind of "back and forth discussions" as well as the "content quality" of my posts on the first page is clearly not the best way to promote something.
But thinking about it, having this follow along as a marketing tool is the smaller aspect. It's really about having a TRUE and HONEST view into how such a project looks like, especially when someone with no prior experience starts it. It is messy. There are big mistakes. There is doubt and resistance. A lot.
But as long as you keep going and do not give up, it'll be fine. If you get one thing out of this whole follow along and my last one, that's it. And if sharing the lows and mistakes here with future customers makes the product look less professional, so be it. Below some of the big mistakes I made over the last couple months:
Big mistakes you can avoid when developing your 1st software product:
1. Getting started right away with minimal planning. This works in AM to some extent, but it's fatal for a software development project that's going to take many months. Especially when several developers are involved.
2. As a direct result of mistake No. 1 , building the software upon the wrong foundation. For example I decided to go with "amember" for membership/billing/plans , but now we realized that their billing system integration would be too inflexible for the volume based billing we'd need in the long run. A lot of time sunk into it is wasted, but it's a valuable lesson.
3. Don't get too excited and rush ahead on details / fancy expensive stuff. I ordered a cloud server with DNS routing for $200 a month, to test everything for our IP database. It has been costing me $600 until now, we didn't need this advanced solution for testing so early, and in the end we decided to go with a different solution. Ouch.
4. Not screening and briefing outsourced developers properly. This was also due to not knowing how big the project would actually become. Explain the long-term vision to them, ask why they want to do it besides money, if they can commit long-term, then test and see if they actually live up to their words. In case they don't, rather cut the losses than go on with someone who is not properly committed.
5. Not integrating version control and not having different environments (development, staging, production). One part was once working well but with minimal features. Now the developer working on it added a feature, but produced a bunch of bugs. There is no more access to the working earlier version ... This happens all the time, and with the project growing it's a mess. It also becomes a mess when two people need to work on the same files.
6. Spending too much time on details, especially design. I did the whole design into detail, and this time I was convinced it would be the design we'd launch with. Well things came differently, and dozens of hours were for nothing. Instead I should have built the very basics, and anything that could be spared for basic functionality as the very last step.
New updates will be coming regularly every week from now on
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PS. Ask us anything Everyone in the team is looking forward to answer incoming questions.
I love this raw, open and honest approach to documenting the start up process.
I have nothing but the utmost respect for entrepreneurs, since I know from experience that it is one of the hardest jobs in the world.
I hope this works well for you. I do believe that you have enormous talent. I must admit that I also believe the market you are targeting is really too small, and that with your skills, you can and should be targeting much more attractive markets than this one.
I would love to be proven wrong, however ... indeed nothing would make me happier.
Best of luck to you!
Lately, every time I see one of cmdeal's posts it feels like reading through the perfectly summarized, well worded version of my exact thoughts on the matter in question. Can't tell you how often that happened in the past few days and weeks, it's incredible. Keep it up, thanks to you I don't need to type myself anymore but can simply press the "Thanks" button
Really enjoying this follow-along, and I have two questions:
1) How many developers are helping you with this full time?
2) You do seem to have experience with coding yourself. When you started this project did you have the key features and their implementation in mind already, or did you simply believe it must be possible to prevent (most) spying and you will find out what exactly can be done together with the dev team while working on it?
I maybe would not call it talent, because talent sounds like something you are either born with or not. But I believe this is nothing "special" , just based on decisions and following through on something you want to do. Everyone can do it, for some it will be harder, for others easier ... but it's within everyone's reach if you take continuous action - towards your goals and vision of who you want to be, and what you want to do in your life.
Concerning the small market, this most likely is true, depending on what you define as "small". It's too far down the road already to stop and change plans, so we'll find out how small the market really is. I'm already looking forward to see the real results and compare them to the suggestions and advice.
It's hard to measure how many potential customers we could get. I think it's definitely big enough to provide a stable nice salary for every founder. I try to keep the main focus on solving affiliates problems though, less on what we want out of it. I trust that our "selfish wishes" will come true if we focus enough on solving real problems for our customers
The "Out of your Reality" Challenge
I think the following will really resonate with everyone starting out in AM. When you start out in AM and never did it before, the idea to make $50k a month and more sounds ridiculous - too good to be true.
It's not within your reality. And you've likely never done something like this before. This kind of feeling is hard to describe. But then you decide to just go for it. Head first you dive in and don't even know what you're doing, because a voice in your head is telling you all the time that this is not gonna work, this is stupid, get back to your safe average life.
Then you reach $50k a month, and it's amazing. But after some time there is a new challenge. You want to grow. In my case, it is having everything I have now, but by doing something which I consider morally clean, and that's more stable and an asset.
It is absolutely within my reality to make $50k a month through campaigns now, but it feels out of my reality to create a stable business that's an asset and is something I can openly be proud of in front of my family. Also learning more of a skill-set that's applicable to "startups", I've always been fascinated with Silicon Valley and guys like Elon Musk, and want to head into this direction
And because doing this feels out of my reality, I know that it is the choice I have to go for. And hopefully it'll be the new normal a year from now
If this resonated with you and you're at similar crossroad, go for the one which you deep down know is the right choice - even though it rationally might not be the safe route, or the one making the most money.
Since the beginning of October - 1 full time developers who is a founder , and still the 2 part-time developers. All of us 3 founders have some coding experience though.
Then I did several days of brainstorming - what issues are there, and how could they be fixed from different angles. I had several ideas that sounded solid in theory, otherwise I would not have pursued it further.
But it was also clear we'd discover more options when trying to implement the ideas. As expected the initial idea changed a lot over the coming months. What we have now is different than the first "strategy of implementation" I worked on around July. Probably around 70% new ideas, and 30% still like in the original plan.
Progress Update
- We've got a new brand name - AffArmory (which will allow us to offer a broader range of tools in the long run, beyond just specific Landing Page Defense)
- Our new website is online at http://affarmory.com/
- We'll be giving unique insights into the journey of our young SaaS startup on our new blog, for the first article click here
Content Marketing Strategy and Execution
Having two experienced co-founders allows me to focus much more on getting the word out there - marketing our upcoming product.
So I asked myself: What am I going to do? What would be the best strategy?
Here is what I decided to do: Content Marketing - even though the word marketing is maybe not even the right wording. It's basically handing out a huge amount of value for free. This will happen right here in this follow along, but also a lot at http://affarmory.com/blog/ , including sharing our live revenue every week.
My job is to spend dozens of hours every week writing articles to provide to most value possible for you and the AM community.
Not to pitch our product, but simply to have a detailed, live documentation of a young SaaS startup - literally starting from zero revenue, right from the start. With every milestone we overcome every past article will become more valuable, as the whole journey stays available online for free, as an exact documentation of our LIVE thought process, decisions, lessons, setbacks and successes.
This kind of approach conveys way more about what we at AffArmory are all about than any marketing pitch could ever hope to get across.
Exclusive insights for STM
Through this follow along you'll continue to get a lot of extra insights we would not publish in this form on our website.
Ask away if you have any questions for us
What a great read this is, provides an interesting insight into the finer details of what it takes to get something like this off the ground.
It'll be especially interesting once we actually get past the development phase and really get going Right now we've been working together as a 3 person team for a little over three weeks. So far it has been going great.
Of course there is some pressure and also uncertainty - as long as we have not launched, as long as there is nobody actually paying something for our service, there is no 100% certainty ... and it's hard to estimate how many potential customers are out there.
What I did to get a rough idea is quick calculations based on "Worst Case" , "Average Case" , "Best Case". Based on those numbers we can also make rough guesses on how the pricing would turn out, and so on ..
Mostly for me it's waiting for the launch to get more clarity. Doing a survey was a very good idea though, because it at least validated that there is interest for the specific solution.
We're looking forward to the launch, and it's definitely going to be in 2015
PS. New spy tools seem to be popping up every other week now haha. I definitely have tremendous respect for every one of them, because I get the effort it took. It would be interesting to have a similar follow along like this one from a spy tool owner
PPS. New post on our blog series "Six big mistakes I made as a first time SaaS founder" just released here (new post once a week, every Monday)
Definitely accelerate toward the launch as soon as possible! Feedback from real customers beats everything else, and gets rid of that nagging "what if no-one wants this?" feeling
Originally Posted by kepe95
It'll be especially interesting once we actually get past the development phase and really get going Right now we've been working together as a 3 person team for a little over three weeks. So far it has been going great.
Of course there is some pressure and also uncertainty - as long as we have not launched, as long as there is nobody actually paying something for our service, there is no 100% certainty ... and it's hard to estimate how many potential customers are out there.
What I did to get a rough idea is quick calculations based on "Worst Case" , "Average Case" , "Best Case". Based on those numbers we can also make rough guesses on how the pricing would turn out, and so on ..
Mostly for me it's waiting for the launch to get more clarity. Doing a survey was a very good idea though, because it at least validated that there is interest for the specific solution.
We're looking forward to the launch, and it's definitely going to be in 2015
PS. New spy tools seem to be popping up every other week now haha. I definitely have tremendous respect for every one of them, because I get the effort it took. It would be interesting to have a similar follow along like this one from a spy tool owner
PPS. New post on our blog series "Six big mistakes I made as a first time SaaS founder" just released here (new post once a week, every Monday)
Will you be having beta testers early on for your product? Someone gave some good advice to me today for mine around getting 25 or so people involved early on to help design the product with user feedback from an early stage.
Originally Posted by kepe95
But they will die doing so because it’s a calorie negative endeavor.
So instead they hunt antelopes.
Like a lion, you shouldn't waste your valuable time trying to catch small mice.
You are a talented entrepreneur.
You have all the skills, talent and perseverance to go hunting for antelopes instead.
But I can see how if you're not constantly focused on building the minimum product and solving the core problem, you're going to end up with tons of features people may not even want .. and it delays the launch.
You are a talented entrepreneur.
You have all the skills, talent and perseverance to go hunting for antelopes instead.
Right now it's way to advanced to stop, and I considered the potential target audience and so on much earlier and decided to go for it. So now it's just about executing until it succeeds or crashes. We're going to know soon.Which is exciting because we're going to find out how good or bad this whole idea and the execution is, which will be super valuable for everyone reading it from the beginning later on.
If it does not succeed I won't have any hard feelings about it, luckily for me it's not about living on the street or having to feed a family .. it will be a growth experience either way.
Another little update:
The development is still going strong,
unfortunately I can't share much details because it would obviously allow the spy tools to understand how we're planning to make them much less effective.
What I can do is share some great insights from a seminar I attended this weekend.
It was held by Peter Sage, a serial entrepreneur who resonates extremely well with me.
Skillets like team and time management are getting much more important now than they were when I was an affiliate.
Getting the right strategy down is a big challenge as well.
What is your WHY?
You might have defined it some time ago, or you are vaguely aware of it. But if you can't tell me what your WHY is right now without thinking, then there is work to do. The WHY behind what you're doing is the foundation for everything that follows. Without having one the chances to succeed are slim.
Personally I thought I knew my WHY, but then realized it was the WHY I defined a year ago - which was not 100% true anymore. Something like "building an asset" or "having financial freedom" was not it. So I re-defined it towards being able to help my family and loved ones from a position of financial independence and power if they are in need. And more .. so what's your why for doing what you're doing, and if you're not sure take the time to define it.
3 ways to grow your business
- Increasing the number of customers
- Increasing the amount each customer spends
- Increasing the frequency of repurchase
Just do it
It's funny how much of the advice sounds like something you've already heard 10 times in the past. Yawn!
The thing is that we rarely execute on it properly - that's the one huge thing we do get wrong.
There are no super fancy tricks to be successful, it simply comes down to taking the well known basics and executing on them with laser focus and persistence.
For more I've written an article here , but to be honest , the best choice is probably to stop reading and to start taking action right now. Most likely you already know what you need to do.
PS.
Last week I wrote about the biggest advantages I noticed since having co-founders.
I've never worked with co-founders before, and after now six weeks of doing so, I am starting to realize that I should have done so much earlier.
The whole article can be found here http://affarmory.com/4-why-having-a-...-awesome-tips/
Development Update:
Things are getting more exciting, we're very close to starting our private beta.
We've also decided on a price for our first offering, and I'm going to post an update with more details soon.
Today I'd like to share something that in my eyes is a very important decision we made early on:
- Affiliates are generally cautious with sharing any kind of "private data"
- My initially planned service, landing page cloaking against thieves, would require affiliates to put some kind of code from us into their landing pages
That's a huge barrier especially since we have not made a name for ourselves, and did not have the time to show that we're trustworthy,
and that's in our best interest when our customers are successful. I also found out that a similar product failed because of this issue in the past.
So we decided to start of a less drastically, to create a very useful product that's cheaper and less controversial than a full "anti thieves landing page cloaker".
I'm going to reveal what this first product we're offering does exactly very soon.
What I can say right now is that we've got a major discount exclusively for our early access beta subscribers,
so if you're not signed up yet you can do it here right now.
Sounds sensible.
One of the trickiest parts to get right in SaaS businesses is pricing.
In most SaaS businesses, raising prices becomes very difficult and unleashes significant customer backlash, especially in products where there exists very little customer lock in, which may or may not be the case in your service, depending on how many or few composites you may have.
How are you thinking through pricing?
Right now we only have one initial product offering, which will be a monthly subscription for a fixed price.
It is something useful for affiliates that helps to protect your landing pages better,
not too expensive, and does NOT require affiliates to have the risk of revealing their data to us by embedding some code.
In the long run we're going to have several product offerings that could theoretically all be standalone products,
but also work together very well in achieving the purpose to better protect your landing pages and campaigns against thieves and spy tools.
After the initial Signup customers will be able to subscribe or unsubscribe to any offering with the click of a button.
So we've got no plans to increase the price on this first offering, because we'll launch another offering that's different from this first product, which has a separate price tag.
It's kind of like Intercom https://www.intercom.io/pricing who've got 4 different packages, and you can subscribe or unsubscribe depending on your current needs.
I think that's the fairest and most transparent choice, you pay exactly for what you want to use.
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Regarding the specific price for this first product, and the "kind of pricing model" there is no "formula" to determine which would be the best. Just like you can't say which landing page will covert best. So what we did is making the best possible guess based on the information we've got.
I've been reading a a lot about SaaS and pricing, three articles I can recommend are:
- https://blog.kissmetrics.com/saasy-pricing-strategies/
- http://sixteenventures.com/saas-pricing-strategy
- https://www.groovehq.com/blog/pricing-that-worked
We had some feedback from the survey we did, and looking at other products for affiliates gave us something to go from.
What would be the perceived value this product provides for an affiliate. And what kind of affiliate is our customer.
And it's always a little easier because I'm myself an ideal customer and know how much I'd personally pay for this product.
Then of course looking at our costs, and doing some calculations on how many potential customers we could get + how that would reflect in total revenue / estimated profit.
Regarding costs, a landing page cloaking product will have significantly more costs for us if someone runs a lot of volume. So there'll be some kind of volume based pricing involved.
Update:
AWA was great, met awesome people , thanks to everyone who organized it! Lots of inspiration and we got some good feedback.
You can count on seeing us at our own booth next year
And exciting news..
We're opening up a couple private beta spots, send me a pm if you're interested
It's a small scale early test at 50% off the regular price, I'll be in touch with you the whole time.
So what exactly did you pivot the product into?
You've got pricing, but no product.
IMHO, you don't have enough experience as an affiliate to build this product. IF it's still a landing page protector, aka cloak.
The long-term goal is still a "cloaker" , the product that's coming out now is not a "cloaker" though. We figured that developing a "landing page protection cloaker" from scratch is not the best way to go. Instead we decided to release simpler but still very useful products first, also oriented at protecting your landers and campaigns better.
Knowing where you're deficient and how to compensate for that is huge, so you're def. on the right track.
I'll be following this thread!
Hey kepe95, first of all congratulations on the progress so far... I used to work in the M&A side of a 9 figure SaaS business so I know it is definitely an industry with huge potential. As others have said, this particular project might not be your 9 figure homerun but you will learn a huge amount of invaluable lessons.
Quite note and why I'm posting this: I recommend you change your sender name to your real name instead of AffArmory... I almost marked the mail as spam because I didn't recognize it. In general mails from individuals get read more than mails from companies, and it's usually recommended for email marketing.
Good luck with the launch, keep us posted!
John Galt
Hello Kepe, I was searching for that stuff :-) great I found your project, last stuff I wanted to down was affkit but it s from 2013 , if you have still private beta slot I am up for it .
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