How Reditus Affiliate Software Increase Revenue for 8000 B2B SaaS: Q/A with CEO Joran Hofman

Setting up an affiliate program is one of the best ways for B2B SaaS to grow their reach quickly, but it is not that easy:

• You have to sign up and login to many different portals
• Find the right affiliates
• Figure out if these affiliates are not frauds (it’s more common than you think)

… And then pay hundreds of dollars upfront for all that work!

What if there was an affiliate marketplace where you can see what affiliates are really doing, and pay only after you make money?

Fortunately there is! It’s called Reditus, and it has already helped 8000+ B2B SaaS companies set up, manage and grow their affiliate program in a fairer, safer, and  more scalable way.

In this interview for Website Planet, Joran Hofman, CEO of Reditus, explained to me why people are actually losing money with most affiliate marketing tools, and how Reditus helped B2B SaaS companies like Expandi get 70+ new affiliates and earn over $25,000 within 6 months.

What problems are you solving for your customers and audience?

I started the company out of pure frustration. I’ve been an affiliate marketer myself where I recommended B2B selling SaaS companies to others. I created this website which was called sales.marketing.co and at one point had like 25,000 organic visitors per month.

The idea of affiliate marketing is to monetize all these listings on the site by adding affiliate links… But it didn’t really work out that way. I had to log into all these portals separately, figure out how each affiliate program works, and then for the bigger networks It just didn’t work as it should.

I started Reditus to help B2B SaaS companies set up, manage and grow an affiliate program. We help them to set up the affiliate program, list it on our marketplace to increase its reach immediately, and manage their affiliates to they know exactly what they’re doing.

On the other side of the business, affiliate marketers will see exactly what each B2B SaaS affiliate program has to offer:

• The percentage (how much they pay)
• Average revenue per account
• Attribution period
• When you get paid
• Etc.

Many tools out there charge you right away to set up an affiliate program. With Reditus you can set up an affiliate program for free, and we charge you only when you start generating MRR. So it’s a freemium model where B2B SaaS companies can set up an affiliate program completely for free (no hidden cost), and we charge them only when they start making money. They will have to move over to a paid plan only when they hit the $1000 threshold or if they want to get listed in the marketplace.

After setting up an affiliate program (which is easy on most platforms), finding affiliates is the biggest challenge for a lot of SaaS companies, and then verifying if their claims are true about the traffic they make and other metrics. Unfortunately, there’s still a lot of fraud in both B2B and B2C affiliate marketing.

Do they have the traffic the SaaS is looking for?

Are they on the platforms they want to be marketed on?

Are they who they say they are?

We enable SaaS companies to see the affiliate marketers within Reditus network and what they have been doing – what numbers they REALLY have (total sold, referrals generated, etc. ), which platforms they use to market, where they put the affiliate links etc. Then we’re going to connect the companies listed with their Google and social profiles to help you verify if they have the traffic they say they have.

By paying commissions only after a sale is completed and making all the info about our affiliates metrics accessible, we avoid frauds and allow SaaS companies to search, filter and contact affiliates that are truly relevant to them.

So that’s how Reditus is more cost-effective to set up, as you don’t have any upfront cost, and reliable, because you can trust the data.

Which types of companies benefit the most from what you offer?

On our marketplace we list B2B SaaS companies that have a product led growth approach.

Let’s take the example from Expandi – They have the subscriptions often within Stripe and then from there we’re able to automate the entire funnel which also means there can’t be any fraud because the process is fully automated and we are able to check if they are doing any weird things.

We list B2B SaaS companies that are already generating revenue in the marketing and sales space, just because that is my background and because it’s the best way to benefit both our affiliates and to our users referring them.

Here’s why:

• The tools in our marketplace can be often recommended to a lot of companies (higher revenue potential for those promoting them)
• Having a lot of platforms with a similar use case allows our affiliates to help each other. For example, when a user applies to the CallPage program, they will see Algomo, which also helps sales teams but in a different way than a meeting scheduler, so they can actually start recommending both.

What makes them eventually choose you over your competitors?

The biggest difference between us and our competitors is the marketplace, which makes us a more scalable option. Our competitors work all in a silo, so they help you set up an affiliate program, but you have to pay right from the beginning and then you have to invite all the affiliates yourself, who oftentimes don’t have enough money, a network, or anything else which actually helps them grow.

That approach might work at the beginning when you can invite your own clients, which are always the best investors, but if you want to really start growing the program that’s not ideal because you have to do all the work yourself and there’s nothing within the program or the platform you’re using that is really helping them and you scale up.

We have the most competitive prices and we’re the only one offering a freemium model where we charge based on the value you’re getting – if you’re just starting out, you can do everything yourself using our free plan, and after that you can get listed on Reditus for as low as $59/month (when you pay annually). Other companies with a network usually start at around $750.

Our UI and support are a lot better than most of the competitors and then especially on the affiliate side where our competitors focus on mostly the SaaS side and disregard the affiliate side. I come from the affiliate side and I know how important it is to get the right insights and support, so I made sure that we provided chat support (and we are the only ones doing that).

In the end, if the affiliates do well and generate money, then the SaaS company makes money, and their pricing increases – So it’s in our best interest to help the affiliates make money because that will make us more money too. So that’s why our pricing works that way and why we value feedback from our affiliates a lot.

Since you started, what helped you grow and retain your audience?

At the moment we have not run any paid ads so far to attract new SaaS companies, and we did try it with affiliates but didn’t really work. What we purely do is organic channels.

A lot of content – When you look at our resources you can already see we have a blog with customer stories, a podcast, videos, we have a help center, a glossary, and more, to really help our affiliates and users become successful with affiliate marketing in a scalable way. It’s in our best interest, and here’s why:

The more helpful content we provide > the more we help them be successful > the higher their pricing increases > the less support we have to provide.

We run a podcast which is now ranked Top 10% worldwide, where since a year we started interviewing industry experts like Sean Ellis (the author of Growth Hacking), Kevin Dorsey (115,000 followers on LinkedIn), Emorek who bootstrapped his SaaS to 20 million, West Bush (who wrote the book Product-led Growth), and a lot of famous guests within SaaS which is helping us to get eyeballs.

We are targeting B2B SaaS companies, so we’re looking for influencers in the industry to come out onto our podcast and thanks to that we can leverage their network. It works like this:

• They come on a podcast
• They tag me and the podcast, and add the video
• That gets us eyeballs from his audience

This way the podcast is giving us a really nice boost and is definitely helping us stand out.

So our strategy is mostly organic with some content distribution on LinkedIn, content creation via the podcast and distribution via LinkedIn, but also we have now started to add everything to YouTube, where we post summary episodes which provide high-value insights from 20 experts on one specific topic. It’s 10 minutes packed with value.

What perspective do you have about where your industry is headed?

I think the SaaS industry is changing from the booming days where you could just get millions of funding and not worry about becoming profitable. Now, you have to be profitable, or VCs won’t invest in your company until it gets good traction (paying clients and a sustainable business).

VC money was always the the shiny thing, but now people look up to bootstrap founders a lot more if they’re able to profit without taking any external funding. By all means this is better because the people are willing to pay for your SaaS when they get real value out of it.

What’s in the roadmap for your future?

In the short term, our affiliate marketplace will launch in February, and then from there B2B SaaS companies can search, filter, and contact relevant affiliates within our platform. We are not going to switch industries, we are not going to switch niches, we will focus on B2B SaaS

There’s enough market for us to focus on, and the biggest thing we’re going to focus on is bigger clients because we already have smaller B2B size companies so now we are going to focus on that $50k MRR because they already have social proof, they already have case studies, they already know their conversion rates, so it’s going to be easier for affiliates to recommend them and earn money.

We want to become the indirect marketing channel for B2B SaaS companies. At the moment we purely offer affiliate management setting up in an affiliate program, but we will go to in-app referral programs, which means you refer to company X and get in-app benefits.

Take Dropbox, for example. I invite you to Dropbox and, if you start using Dropbox, we both get 10 gigabytes for free. No money is involved. That’s a referral program.

Were also going to go more towards the partner programs, where, for example, you need to have more connections with CRM systems and things like that to accommodate agencies that want to set up accounts for their clients but they’re not going to use an affiliate link.

We’re going to look at AI of course, but I would only use it when it’s really going to be beneficial to make the life of affiliates and B2B SaaS companies easier.