SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Partnerships helped us scale to $10m+. Here's what we learned.
12 Jun 2023
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I'm very excited to share this recording with you guys, which happened at our conference, sasopen.com, with over 100 speakers, all founders of B2B SaaS companies. We have a very high bar for what speakers share on stage, so you're going to enjoy this episode where we dive deep into revenue graphs, real tactics, and real growth metrics.
You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
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Hello, friends and family. It's quite a big audience right now, but I hope I can delight you with this presentation. So what I will be showing you is next 20 minutes, I will go through the partnership types. you can have as a SaaS company. I will show you how to do the evaluation because wrong partnership can hurt you quite badly as well. And I will back up my words with some results.
So let's get it started. Does it work? Yes, it does. So this is our revenue chart. I marked two spots with these purple arrows. The first arrow is representing when we kicked off first type of partnerships, which is affiliate marketing. And the second one is the biggest integration we did so far. So let's start with these types. So we've got affiliate marketers.
You can consider it, is it really a partnership? But in fact, it is. But it is a partnership between SaaS company and a person. person has the audience, the person has a following and he is willing to monetize the following by reviewing your product and it is great to start with it at the very beginning because the setup is really easy and it doesn't cost you Anything really.
It's like 100 bucks for a software that will track commissions and that's it. The only thing you have to do is to provide them competing offer and the product that they will be proud of reviewing. And then we have the integrations that will have the high impact on your revenue. But they will require a lot of work in terms of technical marketing and stuff.
So it's really good idea to evaluate before you really get into any integration. And then I will show you the speedrun. So how we integrated the best integration we had so far within 28 hours. So affiliates. They are willing to earn money through their audience, so you need a compelling offer for them. We started with paying 30% recurring commission. It seems like a lot, isn't it?
Like from every $100 subscription, we are paying $30 every month. But... If you consider that not everyone is really following the affiliate links, you got a lot of press, you got a lot of reviews, but not every single person is using the affiliate link. So you can consider impact of affiliate marketing two times bigger than the cost it looks like. So in fact, it's 15% to 20% of revenue.
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Chapter 2: What types of partnerships can SaaS companies leverage?
So another friction with your previous plans shows up. And then on top of that, you've got some billing issues. all the money should go through our company. And you are like, okay, it's not the best solution, but maybe I can take it. And on top of that, you get the terms from potentially way bigger company that can force you to do something.
Like, I don't know, you have to take responsibility for whatever, whatever. And you are like, okay, we've done so much work in this integration that it's really a bad idea to turn it down. or we will sacrifice that work and turn it down, or we will take it on the terms that are not worth going for. So it's really a struggle. But... It doesn't have to be this way.
There is a way to get the win-win situation with SaaS partnerships if you can keep it simple. And affiliate marketing is a great help in here because you can avoid. This is actually a good tip. You can remember this one. You can leave behind all of these billing issues, bundling, pricing, and stuff. if you have the affiliate setup already done.
Because instead of selling a bundle, you can let them sell your tool, and you can sell their tool. And the only connection between it is you are invoicing them for the commission. They are invoicing you for the commission, and that's it. It's super simple, and it leaves behind all the hassle.
And I will, of course, tell you more about the same goals of the company, the same size, the same way of work. But I will leave it for a little bit later. I still have quite some time. So this is us, me, Lucian. Lucian is sitting here. And we are all excited. This is the very first moment when we are meeting another founder. It's the founder of Jasper, Dave Roggenmoser.
And we are like, OK, let's do the integration. And you know what? We skipped all the evaluation process for one reason. The reason was that our customers asked us to integrate with Jasper and Jasper customers asked them to integrate with Surfer. So we skipped the evaluation process and boom. 28 hours later, we've managed to introduce the integration to the market that was really doing great.
People were really crazy about it.
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Chapter 3: How can affiliate marketing impact SaaS revenue?
If you have a ton of emails from prospects, or if you are trying to get some partnerships and you don't know who to mail, who to contact, you need evaluation. Because without the evaluation, you'll most likely get a failure. And I've got a bunch of failures in the next slides. Well, we did like 20 integrations, and only one is really doing great. That's why the evaluation.
is a good idea and we will evaluate these potential partnerships in terms of how they work, and what's the product. So we will try to evaluate the company, and we will try to evaluate the product. And of course, you can get this thing, the SaaS Partnership Checklist. It's available. I don't have the URL, but I will tell you. It's surferseo.com slash saasopen.
And you will be able to download the PDF that consists of these questions. You don't have to take any photos. Just download the surferseo.com slash SaaS open. So the business. who they are and how they work. Who they are is basically about the size of the company, their audience, who do they serve.
Because if you have a situation when you are much smaller than the potential partner, you will have issues with negotiation. If they are much smaller, you can basically use the position of strength in the negotiation and It's not going to work really well. And how do they work is about the legal, is about dev team agility, it's about the marketing. If they are really willing to pick up
what you have to say, what you have to offer. And if they are not agile, if they are legal heavy, while you want to do it quickly, it's not going to work. But it's not about looking for specific answers, no good or bad answers. It's about finding a match. So if you do the same, if you are both legal heavy, that's OK. It will work. If you are both agile, kind of YOLO development, that's also fine.
But if there is a difference in any of these areas, you will be frustrated like crazy. And when it comes to the product, we've got two areas of evaluation of the product. First is the synergy. So if these products are within the same process, so for example, you've got email marketing process. And one part is to create the email, and the other part is to send the email.
And if one company supports Creation of the email and the other company supports sending of the emails.
We've got the perfect synergy and you can go for For that potential partnership and the other area is the cost the cost is not only about the dev team But it's it is also about marketing It's about the support and you have to really check whether there won't be too much hustle in creating landing pages in creating instructions for the support and so on and
just so you are secured and your current customers are not hurt with this integration. And the pricing. Pricing is also really important, and it can turn down the whole integration. Even though it was a perfect fit, the pricing itself can turn it down. And the most important part of this is the type of the billing model. Like if they are
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