B2B Affiliate Marketing : The Rise of an Underserved Niche with Jordan Hofman

Dustin Howes: 0:29

Hey folks, welcome to Affiliate Nerd Out. I am your narrator, dustin Howe. Sprint that good word about affiliate marketing. You're going to find me every Tuesday and Thursday here at 12.15 Pacific Time, so mark it on the calendar, smash that subscribe button and join us for some live Q&A with my guests. My guest today is Jordan Hofman, over at Reditas. He's the CEO and mastermind behind their affiliate network that specializes in the B2B affiliate marketing. Welcome to the Nerditorium, jordan Nerditorium. I like it, thank you.

Joran Hofman: 1:04

Dustin.

Dustin Howes: 1:06

Awesome, so we're going to have some live Q&A going on. Please drop questions and comments in the chat and interact with us. Today. The big question of the day here is what issues are you having with affiliate recruitment? We've got a master in the game here in Jordan, so he's going to be able to help answer those questions as well, and I'll take my best crack at fixing your problems. So drop it in the chat. What issues are you having with affiliate recruitment? Put it in there and without further ado, jordan, who are you?

Joran Hofman: 1:49

Who am I? A Dutch guy, so I'm living in the Netherlands, in Utrecht to be more precise. I found out of Reditas, so we might drop into that, I guess, really soon. I have been on both sides, I guess, so I've been on building the SaaS, plus being an affiliate myself, so I've been in SaaS I think now for between five to 10 years or something like that, and while working at SaaS I have been growing a website. It went to 25,000 organic visitors per month and then I came into affiliate marketing and that kind of shaped me. I guess who I am right now, trying out different things, and ended up building my own network. I guess that's kind of what I'm doing and who I am right now.

Dustin Howes: 2:39

Very interesting transition from trying to live that affiliate dream into building a SaaS product for yourself. What brought you to that? Was it like an industry demand that said, I need to build something that's better out there? Better frustration.

Joran Hofman: 2:58

I guess I had like 220, 250 tools on my website. So with a lot of the current tools on the market you have to log in separately in the portals to figure out how am I doing for brand basically. And there's a couple of networks who do combine them into one single dashboard. But one that I experienced myself is that I stopped logging into all these separate portals to figure out how am I doing. Because if you have like 50, 60 different logins, at one point you stop doing that. And then with the companies I had in the networks, I did not trust the data. There was something off. I could just not figure out what it was. I contact support a lot of times but you only get a response after 48 hours, 72 hours. So I had conversations in the matter of weeks, I guess, to figure out what is going on. So at one point I got so frustrated that I just said, well, why don't I just build it myself? So that's, I guess, how it all got started.

Dustin Howes: 4:00

Oh, fantastic, great story. And if you'd like to be a guest and come be on the affiliate, nerd out, get in join seat, go to dustinhoundscom, slash nerd and drop a topic that you'd like to talk about. Jordan, your profile is in this live event. You can also ask any questions you want on the chat here. Let's talk about ready toss and let's start off with the name origin. How did you come up with this name and this logo? I'm digging this Nice so let's start with the name.

Joran Hofman: 4:40

I guess Like the most obvious route would have been if we had something like affiliate partner or anything in the name. Right, that would probably help also with SEO. I looked into that, I think at the working title was something like that when we built like the early MVP, but then it didn't really sounded that great. I guess it was more for SEO purposes why we could have picked that name. So I ended up like doing a lot of Googling I have not had one Latin class or anything like that. But ready to basically means income in Latin and also means recurring income. So that's how we got the name basically. So it does have a meaning.

Joran Hofman: 5:27

Oh, interesting that's a good story, that's a lifetime company name.

Dustin Howes: 5:33

I like it. Then your logo is a money tree.

Joran Hofman: 5:38

No it is. I mean, that was the first initial sketch, like if you I mean there's probably sites who would track, like the involvement of your website, right. So if you look back, I think for a couple of years, when we just got started, we did have a tree which basically had the money coins under it. Now we do it a bit differently. Like we say we're the network, the tree is basically the SaaS, and then the branches are the affiliates and then the leaves are the referrals. So it still has a meaning. We dropped the money coins.

Dustin Howes: 6:16

All right, awesome, love it. Tell us about what you guys are doing and who you're servicing out there. Yeah, so to start with who we're servicing.

Joran Hofman: 6:25

we purely focus on B2B SaaS companies. So we help them to set up an affiliate program, to manage their affiliates and to grow it. So what we do is we have a freemium model where basically any SaaS company can come to us. Ideally, if their product that growth slash self-serve, they can set up their affiliate program and then if they start generating money they start paying us as well. So we have a freemium model that they can set it up for free and below one K monthly we can revenue. They do not pay us anything. If they hit that threshold then they start paying us.

Joran Hofman: 7:00

So it's value driven, value based pricing, like I have the CS background, so that's why I have the CS mindset like fully baked in. And then the other thing we do is we have a marketplace. So we now have 58. Companies, I think, in the marketplace are basically SaaS companies offering their affiliate program to the other side, which are the affiliates, which we're now at 7,000 B2B SaaS affiliates. So they see the affiliate programs for the SaaS companies and they can decide if they want to apply to a program or not and see the details, see what is allowed, and then basically go from there. So, and in between we show both of them the same metrics. Of course we must some things for the affiliates to GDPR, but the idea is that we kind of show them both as much insights as possible so they can both start generating money.

Dustin Howes: 7:56

Awesome. That is an incredibly refreshing Revenue model that you have like. I've never even heard of any kind of affiliate or platform for that matter. Giving a freemium model like this, like Enabling companies to dip their toes in affiliate marketing Without at least like a hundred dollar price point, seems ridiculous. How did how has this served you and and like your customers and the retention that you're getting?

Joran Hofman: 8:28

Yeah, I mean With with any freemium model, you will get a lot of people who try it out and never do anything. Right. But if they really are like interested in getting started with affiliate marketing, like it's the best way to do so, right, because at one point when we start charging them, they already earned so much more than they're going to pay us. So, retention wise, like it's gonna be, it's gonna be really good for us. But we need to get them to make sure that they actually get started, because if they're in our free plan, they have to do everything themselves. They have to invite the affiliates themselves. So they're gonna have the issue of the question of the day how to recruit affiliates, basically Mm-hmm. So that's, that's one thing, but like how does it serve us? As in we're building a network. So with the free plan, we also basically grow the network, because the SaaS companies invite their own affiliates which come into the network who see other programs again. So it's really benefiting the network. It really rapidly.

Dustin Howes: 9:29

Okay, awesome. So let's take a step back and redefine what B2B SaaS is. What is it to you, and, and when? Where are these companies coming from? It seems like there's a new one every single day that I'm getting targeted.

Joran Hofman: 9:45

Yeah, yeah, there's definitely new ones coming now really quickly. Yeah, so B2B SaaS I mean, if you go really back to the basics, it means business to business software as a service, which basically means is you pay a monthly or an annual fee to get access to a software, so it's it's not the divided software you can get access. It's basically being a subscription fee to get access to the software. If you stop paying, you lose access. Basically. So that's kind of B2B SaaS and indeed, like especially now, with there's a lot of no code tools and AI tools popping up, which basically means is you don't know need to know how to code by building it, or if you want to build a tool you don't know, you don't need to know code. Basically that's kind of like what's popping up right now. So you see a lot of software companies who are really niche, who focus on one specific thing, and they are built by no code tool. So it's a lot easier nowadays to build your own software business.

Dustin Howes: 10:49

Gotcha okay. Yeah, the. The Rise of AI has definitely made these tools come fast and furious in this industry. I think I'm subscribed through at least a dozen SaaS products to help my workflow things like you know Rispona, like Buzz, buzzsprout, jasper, like I'm I'm using a lot of tools. What is on the? The? The tools that you're utilizing in your marketing campaigns today?

Joran Hofman: 11:26

Good question. Like I, I limited the amount of tools we use quite heavily because we're still bootstrap, so we're still like looking at all the cost at the end of the month. So I mean, one thing I use heavily, of course, is jet GPT. Just I guess the, the paid version, like it's. It's a bit more work because you have to give a lot of input, right.

Joran Hofman: 11:45

But like how I do it, I train a conversation so you can have these conversations on the left side of chat GPT. I kind of give it a lot of input at the beginning, then I save that Conversation with a certain name. So if I want to, for example, do something else again, I use the chat or like the conversation I already trained on the on the topic. So it's kind of doing Somewhat better than than normal if you start like a new conversation again. But marketing wise, like I run my own podcast which is purely focused on B2B SaaS companies and we do everything inbound as well. So I jump on these kind of things. We write our own blogs, we're writing like a affiliate Glossary, so we try to do as much as we can to help affiliates and brands and then from there drives traffic from it.

Dustin Howes: 12:38

Fantastic, all right. Now, why, in your opinion? Why is this industry booming right now? Like I didn't know, b2b SaaS existed five years ago, but then I was working at WP engine and, and this industry, just with a monthly recurring revenue, just started Blowing up, and I was on the forefront of or at least I felt like, helping other businesses succeed with the products that we were selling. So where did this boom come from?

Joran Hofman: 13:14

Oh, I mean, I won't know where the boom exactly came from, I guess, but it's it's due to the nature, I guess, of the business, right? So if you're selling software like same as ourself, I Think we now have maybe like a 9,000 users in our platform. They're from everywhere, like there's no specific region we focus on. So if I look at, for example, my Google analytics, they're worldwide. Most of them are actually coming from us. If you look at it as one specific country, I haven't been to the US in the last five to eight years, for example. So I think that's definitely one thing why SaaS is booming.

Joran Hofman: 13:53

You can do business anywhere Just by by leveraging the internet, I guess same like a affiliate marketing. But the big thing regarding BTB SaaS is right it's business to business, which means is the ticket prices are often a bit higher, and it has because it's sauce, it's software as a service. You pay in a monthly fee. So the more clients you add, the more revenue you get on a monthly level. So it's eat. That gets almost compounding, right. So as as long as you build a good product and you retain the clients, you can really scale your business really quickly.

Dustin Howes: 14:26

Beautiful, all right, and what seems to be like the industry trends for B2B SaaS. Like I like to say that Retail, you need to hit a certain threshold of revenue coming in through your website on a certain month, but I put that threshold at a much lower price point for B2B SaaS products that I work with. Why do you think that is?

Joran Hofman: 14:54

Because, like I think, in SaaS the biggest challenge is to get, for example, the 10k monthly recurring revenue, and it takes a lot longer. With a website, you might just run a lot of ads and then already get Big revenue. But I think, like with subscriptions, as in as easy as to start them, it is often as easy to cancel them. So having a bare minimum is definitely a good point To make sure that they, that they have built a good product, that they have social proof, that they have case studies, that they know who their ICP is, that they ran digital ads themselves, so they know the conversion rates. So I think, like what I always say is like, often try to have at least 10K Monday with your camera view before starting an affiliate program, because otherwise you're asking somebody else to sell your product but you haven't really sold it yourself yet. So, because it's business to business, people do have to spend more money. Right, it's not a one-off purchase, but people are doing.

Dustin Howes: 15:57

That's a really good point, and that brings us to our question of the day is like what are you struggling with in recruiting affiliates? One of the biggest hurdles for affiliate recruitment is making sure you have a website that is conversion rate optimized, and good affiliates are gonna see a stinker of a page and not promote your product right, so you have to have a proven concept of sales through other media channels SEO outside of just affiliate before affiliates will start running traffic to you. Exactly, yeah.

Joran Hofman: 16:36

I mean ideally you already ran paid ads yourself, so you basically burned your own money right by trying to get them to your site and converting them into paid clients. So if you did that, then you know exactly like the conversion rates from website visit to sign up, from sign up to an actual paid client. So, like with B2B, there's a bit more steps right. Like with SaaS, often companies offer like a seven day free trial, 14 day free trial or a free-me model, like we do. So it takes longer for people to convert. So if you figured out these hurdles yourself first before asking somebody else to recommend you, it's gonna be a lot easier.

Dustin Howes: 17:18

Great points. We got a user out there unidentified. Hello, Dustin and Jordan, Hi, why don't you jump in and answer the question of the day there? What issues are you having with affiliate recruitment? Sorry your name didn't come up, but that's gonna happen every once in a while, so all right. So we know B2B SaaS is kind of in its infancy phase in the affiliate marketing realm and you guys built a tool that is helping build affiliate programs and allowing companies to dip their toes in the water of affiliates. So what do you see as the biggest differences between B2B SaaS affiliate programs and, like your traditional retail affiliate programs?

Joran Hofman: 18:07

Yeah, I mean, I think the biggest difference is the way you can get commissions. So with retail it's often one-off, right, and then the prices are. I don't know the average, I never did B2C affiliate marketing but I can imagine that it's probably between $10 and $100. Maybe like the begin value, like with B2B SaaS, is you're selling business to business software subscription, so it's recurring and the ticket prices are gonna be a lot higher. So, like we do have companies where pricing for their software starts at $10 a month, for example, but then they offer software where you pay per seat. So even though maybe somebody starts with $10 a month, they're easily able to upgrade that subscription, which means your commission is gonna go up as well.

Joran Hofman: 18:58

So a lot of SaaS companies have like land and expand, where they just wanna get a client in and then expand it with seat, upgrade their account and you're gonna benefit it from being an affiliate as well. So again, I guess, like the biggest difference is the amount of money and I guess, like the interval you can earn money is gonna be a lot different. Like it will be harder sales to do, as in you will need to educate people on the actual product, like ideally, already used it and you give them like really advice on what kind of product would they start using. But if they start using it, like, there's companies out there, even on our marketplace, which offer lifetime commissions. So as long as somebody keeps using a software and they keep paying for it, you can earn commission for that. So the potential is gonna be a lot different. So it could be like a compounding revenue channel for affiliates.

Dustin Howes: 20:27

Awesome and you bring out a good point there. Those companies that are in this space. They have a big decision when they're doing the strategy and creating an affiliate program in that B2B SaaS space. How, what's a good strategy for companies to be looking at? Hey, do I make a flat CPA for my affiliates or do I do some kind of eternal rev share? And if I do do a rev share, do I do it for a lifetime value of the customer or do I cut it off at 12 months? What's your strategy and what do you tell people that come in and build their affiliate programs?

Joran Hofman: 21:05

Yeah, I mean I would do rev share just, I guess, to avoid any kind of fraud Cause if you do CPA or of course the leader or anything like that. It's really easy to work fraud in the hand, I guess. So we don't even offer that model at the moment within our platform.

Joran Hofman: 21:25

Oh, the CPA model or rev share CPA like I mean I call it, I guess customer lead, like I often refer CPA, customer action, as in there has to be an action, so that has to be a payment being done, I refer it but I guess, like the CPA, the customer lead, the actual signup, like we do not calculate commission for that or give any fee for that. Okay, I guess the first question rev share I would go for that. And then how to look at it? You can look at it from two ways.

Joran Hofman: 21:56

Like SaaS, companies always look at customer acquisition costs. So how much does it cost me to acquire new clients? And then they run all these marketing channels and they probably would know already how much it costs with all the different marketing channels. So you can basically look at like, okay, how much does it cost right now and how much are we willing to pay against the affiliate? So we, with every marketplace style we have if you click on it, it's publicly available there's a little calculator there where you can basically enter your average revenue per account on a monthly level.

Joran Hofman: 22:30

Then you can say, okay, if I give away 20% commission for 12 months and somebody gives me 10 page clients, how much does the affiliate earn? So in that case, it's really easy to see what is the carrot for the affiliate if they start referring us and would that be worth their while, like there's? Yeah, I guess. To conclude, there's two ways. Looking from the affiliate point of view, do they actually earn enough money to be referring you? And then, on the other hand, look at your customer acquisition cost and is it in line or are you going to offer the affiliate?

Dustin Howes: 23:03

Hmm, yeah, and what's a good way to calculate that Like? First off, I think the important metric here is what's your profit margin is as a company right, like, if you're getting, if you're every sale, you're getting 60% profit margins, which is not unheard of for a B2B SaaS. How much can you give away to the affiliates and still be profitable? And creating a rev share model that is beating out your other marketing channels is important. I think that's one of the biggest benefits of having an affiliate program over spending a ton of money on paid media. But how do you help people like find that sweet spot of what their base commission rev share is going to be?

Joran Hofman: 23:55

Yeah, yeah, I think I mean at the moment we do, I think, a lot of like basically calculating how much can an affiliate earn, just because it's it's like you can do a lot of calculators because SaaS loves data, saas loves to calculate things. So if you look at SaaS like a metric, for example, is customer acquisition costs versus lifetime value, and then it also have to be like you need to earn like three times or five times more than you actually pay to acquire a new client, if you look at all that gets the SaaS metrics, then probably the affiliate is not gonna earn that much. So, like if you look at the minimum, as you asked, like I would always look at how much can an affiliate earn when they start referring you and then maybe even ask yourself would I be referring myself if I could earn this amount of money, basically by referring the SaaS company? So I would look at it from the affiliate perspective because if they, if it's not, it's not good enough, then why should they start referring you in the first place?

Dustin Howes: 24:58

Yeah, great. I mean you have to have that carrot to dangle Absolutely and it has to make sense to you financially and everybody's got their own initiative. I guess, like, maybe it's user acquisition, you're trying to build that number up and you can give away a little bit more if you're, you know, trying to sell the company for as many users as you or you have a super sticky product that that the lifetime value is going to be really long, you can give away a little bit more with with the rev share. So so those are great points. What do you, what about the differences between, like B2B sasses that are like an enterprise level that costs thousands of dollars per month, and comparison to like you know something that's a very simple tool that helps grow a business that that has like a $20 price point per month, like how do we define those, those realms and build affiliate programs accordingly there?

Joran Hofman: 26:02

Yeah, I think like what we focus on, for example, is the pricing, I guess between, let's say, like a 10 to $20 until like a thousand, because if it's a thousand plus per month, then often you go towards that enterprise. But like what that often also means is that the seal cycles are going to be different. Like you can purchase a plan without talking to somebody still for $1000 a month with some tools. But if you have to like go through the enterprise route, it often means is the entire flow changes. So instead of sign up on the website, you will have book a demo. Instead of then creating an account, you would go into the CRM system and then the salesperson will follow up on you and then, instead of closing, I guess, or like paying within 30 days, it's probably going to be like three to six or nine months, for example.

Joran Hofman: 26:54

So there's a lot more money to earn, I guess, within the enterprise realm, but then it's also taking a lot longer.

Joran Hofman: 27:02

So are you willing to wait, as an affiliate, for somebody to close after nine months? So what you typically see then if the deal sizes go up, you go more towards like the partner marketing, where they sometimes like do a little bit more work. They maybe even help with the integration and then they do get a ref share. But like the typical, I guess, affiliate marketing model, like how we build it, like I want to track everything without human intervention, so I want to do proper business for the affiliates. So we have the SaaS companies connect their payment platform. They need to install our tracking so they can't manipulate the data. If you go more enterprise, things happen in the CRM system invoices being sent, they might change emails. It's a lot more fault, error, I guess, or I already said in English, like a lot more Faults can be made, I guess, or like mistakes can be made, intention, intentional or not, and that's why we focus on like a fully automated flow.

Dustin Howes: 28:04

Gotcha. Okay, Now let's talk about Reditas, and you know what's the big differences between you guys and some of your competitors out there. There's a lot of options, and I love how you guys are focusing on B2B SaaS. What's some big differentiators of why to use your guys' platform?

Joran Hofman: 28:26

Yeah, I think. Yeah, I mean, indeed, we purely focus on B2B SaaS. So if you're in B2B SaaS, then you're lucky. Then, like, we have a really clear niche right and we purely focus on that. So you will see only B2B SaaS companies in our marketplace and all the affiliates are also B2B SaaS related.

Joran Hofman: 28:45

We kind of flipped up the pricing model, as you already mentioned. Like some of them charge really heavily right. Like we have a freemium model, which is not really typical, but it works well for us, as we really want to have companies to generate value first, which means Monday recurrent revenue, and if they do so, then we want to grow with them. The other thing is, like I come from the affiliate side, so I know, I guess, the issues affiliates are having. So that's why they have live chat support as well.

Joran Hofman: 29:17

In our app. We have a lot of help sent articles for them as well. We have like blogs for them. We kind of just give them almost the same UI as the SaaS brands, but then, of course, different metrics, where we're not giving them an ugly version of the app. Like we treat both sides the same, which I think is really going to be important, because in the end, they have to do well, and if they do well, the brands do well and in the end we do well. Like it sounds really cliche, but that's how we look at it.

Dustin Howes: 29:50

Well, that is awesome, and so few affiliate platforms out there really consider the workflow of the affiliate as much as their advertisers Advertisers are the ones making them the money right. So I love how you put your hat on as an affiliate and built this thing so that affiliates can have a good user interface that is easy to navigate and easy to use, and you guys have integrations with cool affiliate tools like we Can Track and Affilimate and things like that to where you can have a little bit more robust information on the products that you're promoting.

Joran Hofman: 30:39

Not yet. Like I think you had John from Stetrone last week on the podcast. We talk regularly, like we have been talking about an affiliate API. We purely have a SaaS API at the moment, but there hasn't been that much request, I guess, yet. So either we do, I guess, like good metrics are already within the app, or they might not be as sophisticated as the BTC side yet. So as soon as we get requests like, we will build something as in. It's pretty simple for us to send the data somewhere else if needed. Like for now we haven't received any request like this.

Dustin Howes: 31:19

Okay, gotcha. And speaking of affiliates, where can we go find B2B SaaS affiliates? Where? Are they hanging out Like is this an forum? What's the best way to get a hold of these folks?

Joran Hofman: 31:35

Yeah, that's a good question how to find B2B SaaS affiliates. I might jump to the question of the day, I guess a little bit. But for example, if I do recruitment for some of our clients, which basically means, where do I find B2B SaaS affiliates? Is I kind of look at who's already referring a competitor of our clients, for example? So basically just by looking into, like SEMrush or HREVs, what are the backlinks of the competitors of our client and which ones are using an affiliate link, and then can we recruit them as B2B SaaS affiliates for them as well. So I don't know if they really use a forum, a network or anything like that. In the end, if they're good, we want them to get them into the Redidis network and we will build something soon where you can search them and recruit them, but for now, like recruit them yourself, I guess.

Dustin Howes: 32:33

Okay, gotcha. Kristin Bigtimezeven says if you build it, they will come. Yes, it's a baseball reference. Do you understand that reference?

Joran Hofman: 32:43

No, we play soccer here, or we call it football, but I have to call it soccer. I guess today yeah, absolutely.

Dustin Howes: 32:54

That's an old movie reference from the 80s called Field of Dreams. It's a classic here. All right, so where do we find affiliates? Still hunting them. But you guys are building out a platform for to make that easier on affiliate managers to go and recruit through the platform, which is great to hear, because I feel that's super necessary for every network to have that component of it to make the life of the affiliate manager a little bit easier.

Joran Hofman: 33:24

Yeah, and especially like using the data which the network has right. So as a program manager, you kind of wanna know okay, well, I see that they're this person, they have this website, but do they have the traffic they say they have? So really have them connect Google and Lytics and what did they already do for the other programs in the network? Did they already generate a page referrals? How much money was related to that? So if you're able to show those kind of metrics, then you know as well if this is gonna be a good affiliate or not.

Dustin Howes: 33:54

Gotcha, and one place that you should be tracking with all of these affiliates that you're bringing into the program is one of our sponsors of the day. It is Buzzstream. Every affiliate manager needs a good CRM and tools to help them recruit partners. Buzzstream is one of those complete tools that I personally loved using through the years. Their partner management and recruitment platform is end-to-end solution enabling you to discover partners, vet them, discover metrics that you're looking for, find contact info, send the outreach and manage those campaigns efficiently. The teams that use Buzzstream save huge amounts of time and mental bandwidth. With Buzzstream's advanced CRM capabilities, growing relationships and managing your team is never a chore. So go check out Buzzstream. They offer a free trial, onboarding assistance and customer support for all their plans. Go to dustinhowes. com slash Buzzstream and find out more. That is dustinhowes. com slash Buzzstream. All right. So switching gears into affiliate marketing trends here. Tell me, what are you seeing out there as one of those biggest trends that's happening right now?

Joran Hofman: 35:14

I think I mean biggest trends, especially to B2B SaaS, I guess, is that a lot more companies embrace affiliate marketing. As you mentioned, it's pretty newish and it's a really cost-effective way for SaaS companies to grow it basically because you only pay something when you already received the money right and especially within SaaS, if you pay 20 or 12 months or 24 months but your lifetime value is a lot higher. It's a really cost-effective way. So I think people look at it more as a growth opportunity, where I think in B2B SaaS it was always something as in, there's a lot of fraud happening in affiliate marketing.

Joran Hofman: 35:53

This is not working for B2B SaaS. I think now people are really understanding hey, it does actually work and we can leverage somebody else's network. And I think also you see a lot more affiliates or people leveraging their network to get into affiliate marketing, like how easy it is nowadays to start a SaaS letter, for example, towards product managers. I've seen cases where one guy has like 100,000 subscribers on his newsletter. He's still working full-time in a normal job, but he basically recommends software companies in his newsletter and he's making a side hustle by doing so and by sharing his knowledge. So I think both sides are really picking up and seeing the potential of this, pretty relatively I guess, within B2B SaaS.

Dustin Howes: 36:49

Oh, great points. And I think the concept of B2B SaaS companies having a lot of fraud with lead generation is this kind of move into that rev share where you're releasing some of that tension of fraud capabilities out there and tracking is getting better, more dynamic for affiliate managers to dig into, making it easier for you not to run into those fraud problems and as long as you set up your program in the right sense, in the right way, you can avoid most of those problems. But a great point on like lead generation is kind of making its way out and not as popular as rev share today.

Joran Hofman: 37:39

Yeah, I mean we do have some deals we close for clients where we do CPL, but then we always do like a hybrid deal so we do a smaller CPL fee but then they also get commissioned, for example, so we might give away in total more. But like we do it because we want to do a partnership, stem for them and ideally, publisher at one point drops like CPL fee and they go fully for commission based. But if you want to get somebody in, you kind of have to give them something, right, if they already have the traffic you're looking for 100%, and and that just goes with experience in negotiating and figuring out which levers and carrots to to dangle Levers to pull carrots to dangle.

Dustin Howes: 38:25

All right. What about the future of affiliate? What's next? What do you see coming coming up next?

Joran Hofman: 38:32

Um, like what's coming. I think I mean it all comes down with with, I think, a quality and a lot more insights. I think you covered it last week as well, where I, as you mentioned, both of the sides want to have a lot more insight in what is working. So it's not just sharing an affiliate link anymore on your blog, like right, but it's actually which, which one is doing Well, which one is driving the traffic, but which one is actually converting paid clients in the end and make money. So I think that's Become, at least on the b2b side, and especially sausage becoming more sophisticated, I guess, even though sure see has it like really Well laid out.

Joran Hofman: 39:12

Like I, I looked at platforms on the b2c side and it's like, oh yeah, this is really nice, it goes really in depth. Where b2b was still like pretty I guess, like the baby in a way, or like the child, where we're just playing around, and I think that's really nice, where now, because the stakes are higher in a way, subscriptions are higher, it's rough share, it's it's it's longer period. So I think that's really nice to see and Like I think also, yeah, Absolutely, absolutely All right and you're an entrepreneur out there.

Dustin Howes: 39:44

You moved from being an affiliate and and now you're like building your own sass products. What any lessons or tips you want to share with those young entrepreneurs out there in that Sass space that might need some help and guidance?

Joran Hofman: 39:59

Yeah, I mean, if you're in in sass, I always thought like I mean, I worked in the sauce before building my own own sauce. I think I worked in a the sauce startups, like three, and then like for five years, six years, I thought I would know like, okay, well, I'm just gonna do this. And I have this newer mindset where I just like think I'll, I'll build it in the end. All the people told me like it's gonna take longer thing. You think and it's like, oh, that's not for me, I'm gonna make it happen in the end. It's for me as well. Exactly so.

Joran Hofman: 40:31

If I tell you it's gonna take longer, then you think and you're gonna think to yourself well, not me, then probably also you as well. So I think that's the the one piece of advice like stick in there, because if you believe in your idea like it took us a really long Period to get where we are, but now we're seeing the traction we're getting so Keep your eye on the vision, keep your eye on already or wanting to move, but also Celebrate the moments in between. So don't go towards that end goal and if it doesn't happen, then be really sad about it, but if you celebrate the moments in between. It's gonna be a fun ride, so why not go always as fun, but at least you enjoy the ride as well.

Dustin Howes: 41:15

Oh Well, sad that's. That's gonna be my lesson of the day. I love that sentiment. If you are a business owner and and you're trying to grow this thing, strap in and be prepared for the long haul because Likely you will not be that outlier, you will not be that unicorn that is. Everything just comes easy to you. It's going to be hard work. Get ready for it. I'm fighting that every day myself.

Joran Hofman: 41:49

Nice, yeah, I run my own podcast as well, so I interview a lot of SaaS founders and, even though they look successful on on on the forefront right, they all say the exact same thing, like it's. If I knew this from the beginning, I wouldn't have started, probably in the first place.

Dustin Howes: 42:01

So I've known quite a few sass owners myself that have said, like don't, don't start this. If you want to bang your head against the wall for four years. Like have fun, but like this is not for the. The week of heart, awesome, all right. As we wind down here, how do we connect with you?

Joran Hofman: 42:28

Yeah, so I think there's only one. You're an apartment on LinkedIn, so that's probably the best way to do so. So just type that in on LinkedIn. Connect with me, tell me that you came from this Podcast, because I do have, I think, like 300 open requests Already right now. So just let me know that you come from Dustin, and then you will get accepted.

Dustin Howes: 42:48

Awesome, great to know. All right, and for those folks that are gonna be here on Thursday at 12 15, we're gonna have Sean Hall come in and hang out with this. If you want my ultimate checklist, go to Dustin howes. com Slash checklist and grab that. I have a QR code. It's around here somewhere. There it is. Jump up here, slap that in. I should have had that all day. All right, and Jordan, I really appreciate your time Today and giving us the the goods on B2B sass, educating us up here, and I will see you on Thursday at Well, at our our next event here. What are you talking about there?

Joran Hofman: 43:41

No surprise, beat me sass. Affiliate marketing. We'll cover a bit more the basics I guess, like how to get started you, but I'm doing it with which I'm having the affiliate hat on and he has the the brand hat on. So I think it's gonna be fun conversation.

Dustin Howes: 44:02

Beautiful. I'm gonna drop a link to that event that you're speaking at and I am gonna be emcee over there. I'll put that in the chat so that folks can go and get educated more on this, jordan. Appreciate your time. Thanks for being here, man Cheers. Thanks for having me, dustin. All right, we'll see you out there, folks, take care.