My Vision Board in 3 years (12)
I am new in this forum and I probably can share a bit of myself if you care to read.
Back in 2000, I graduated from UCLA and attempted to become a doctor so I got into USC medical research LAB to boost up my resume for my med school application. However, I came across the Internet Boom and everything changed since then. I picked up a coding book out of curiosity and started loving it. Since then, I quitted my job, got another degree in computer science, joined a startup and later had my own venture. I still remember my first venture. It was a self-serve online wedding website company. Although it didn't take off, the exciting experience I got from it was beyond anything money could buy. I still remember I were checking my sign up list every minutes since I soft launched the service. To my dismay, I didn't see any sign up the first day. So, I went out to the Net and started doing some forum postings. Days after, I got few signups. I were jumping ups and downs. It was funny when I talked about it. Since then, I got 10+ sign up a day and my active user count reached thousands in few months. Because I were green and couldn't quit my full time job by then, I hadn't put enough attention to support, iterate and scale my side hustle.
Since then, I attempted to raise some money so I could go full time for the next venture. But after marriage with 2 adorable kids, I got more burden and responsibilities over my shoulder. My dream seemed like moving away from me farther and farther. But my passion on it never goes away. I joined some early stage startups as founding engineer and few of them exited in tens if not hundreds of millions. But, to my dismay, I didn't get much out of them as most of my equity were diluted thru various of financial tricks. I hate to say that I were too much driven by my passion and less in paying attention over the term sheet. Eventually I landed on a young marketing company and able to grow myself in different areas outside of my comfort zone. Yes. I haven't given up my dream. I became an intrapreneur instead. I founded a search company on top of my parent company. If you are interested, check out searchIQ.co. It is now in used by many top tier websites like mywedding.com, more.com, life.com, parenting.com, thepennyhoarder.com, dogtime.com, simplyrecipes.com and more. I remember the day I took my kids to Vancouver Aquarium and watched the show about preserving the ocean powered by ocean.org. They went home and searched more info about in. Guess what? ocean.org is using my service too!! 
When I see them showing my work to their friends, I know my passion is not yet gone.
OK. below is my vision for 3 years.
1)What are your career goals?
Have my next venture in 3 years. (My current company is about to exit, I hope I can raise some funds for this!)
2)What are your relationship goals?
I wish I can spend more time with my wife and children as I am always busy at my work. I hope I can somehow involve them in my next venture so we can all enjoy it. Yeah. My kids both know how to code 
3)What are your health goals?
I want to go gym more often and sleep earlier. I am so used to sleep late that hurts. I cannot change it in ease as I am working 2 shifts b/c I am running teams outside US. Probably I need to learn how to delegate and hire the right person to offload my work.
4)What do you SEE yourself doing on a day to day basis?
I can imagine myself running a business that I can tell a story to many. Serve more in church and travel a lot more.
5)If you had an unlimited amount of money, what kinds of material things would you buy?
I live quite frugal and I don't even have a watch like others. But if i have good amount of money, I wish to get myself a house with a big backyard so I can have more family gatherings at my house. It is not an easy thing to do in LA now
Very cool stuff man! I'm very familiar with some of those sites using your product!
Excited to see what you do with affiliate marketing!
Thanks! Love to network with more people here!
Glad to know.
Thank you @rayhon for participating in this very worthwhile exercise! Your story is motivating!
Suggestion: Do print out what you wrote and out it in a place where you'll see it regularly (mirror? Fridge?) so you can quickly read over it and visualize your goals from time to time.
Also: It would be beneficial to get a cork board and find images that represent your dream to pin on it. This is an activity you can do with your family as well - could be fun!
Amy
Sent from my iPhone using STM Forums
@vortex, thanks for your encouragement! I am not even sure my story is motivating as I never truly run my startup full time. In the past, I cannot do it due to financial hardship. Now, I haven't yet done it due to my paycheck is too big for me to give up. However, I love building stuffs that makes life easier and this passion will not be gone in a foreseeable future. If I do have a chance to create something cool, I certainly would love to hook up super affiliates like you to test and market it out for me. BTW, if I want to have searchIQ.co opened up for affiliates, what is the best way to do it?
Originally Posted by rayhon
As for looking for affiliates: Do you have a system set up where you can allow affiliates to sign up to get tracking links, and track conversions and commissions?
If you don't, you'd need to get that set up first.
Alternatively, you can talk to some affiliate networks to see if they can include your offers on their network.
Once you have everything set up, you can make a post here to see if affiliates would be interested:
https://stmforum.com/forum/forumdisp...-Opportunities
Do you have any idea what commission amount you can afford to pay per free trial subscriber? Also, have you bought traffic for your websites before? If so what types of traffic and what were the conversion rates?
Amy
The only thing I have done is over appsumo (https://appsumo.com/searchiq/). We customize a much cheaper package to them for our pro package at a loss. I did that to test out the reaction of the community and up-sell them at the backend. The reaction is pretty good. I got 100 paid sign up in few days. However, we never optimize our landing page and set up any affiliate program. I am about to do that but I want to do it right. Any affiliate SaaS service or networks you recommend?
Originally Posted by rayhon
I don't personally have experience running an affiliate program so don't have a SaaS to recommend, but if you'd start a new thread you may get some recommendations.
You could just speak with a few affiliate networks to see if they'd be interested. You can find many networks listed here:
https://stmforum.com/affiliate-directory/
I don't have personal network recommendations, but one tip is to google "[network name] reviews" to see whether there are lots of negative reviews. Good reviews may be posted by employees of those networks, so I'd assign less weight to those and more weight to negative reviews. Another tip would be to check how long the network's been around - networks that have been in business for more than a couple of years are likely to be more trustworthy.
However - it can be beneficial for your company to drive some paid traffic first (by hiring a media buyer to do this if you're not wanting to learn how to do this yourself), to establish some benchmark stats, e.g. cost per signup. That way you'd have a much better idea on what % commission to offer, and chances of your offers getting accepted by affiliate networks would be greater.
Also: By running your own traffic, you can do A/B testing on landing pages to increase performance. Google "landing page A/B test" and you'll find a ton of ways you can potentially improve your landing pages. If you've never done this type of testing, it means there's probably lots of room for improvement.
All the best!
Amy
@vortex thanks for your help. We certainly can drive paid traffic to our own properties as we are one of the major keyword intent ad networks other than google and bing.
Originally Posted by rayhon
And - affiliates or not - with the traffic you have access to, there's absolutely no excuse NOT to do more split-testing to improve conversion rate.
The improvements can potentially offset some of the commissions you'll be paying out to affiliates.Amy
Awesome stuff!
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