How Surfer Generated $3.5M Through Partnerships and 3,000 Affiliates (Interview with Head of Innovation & Co-founder Michał Suski)

Introduction and Overview of Partnership Types

Michał Suski

00:00Hello, 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 twenty 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.

Revenue Chart and Partnership Milestones

Michał Suski

00:36Does 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

01:10SaaS company and a person. The 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 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

01:40product 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 speedrunner. So, how we integrated the best integration we had so far within twenty eight hours. So affiliates, they are willing

Affiliate Marketing: Commission Structure and Setup

Michał Suski

02:14to 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.

Scale of the Affiliate Program: 3,000 Partners

Michał Suski

02:49You 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, so the commission gets basically lower. And this is how we scaled up the program. Compelling offer, quality product. And as you can see right now, 3,000 affiliate marketers. So we partner with 3,000 affiliate marketers. A single half time person is managing this whole process. So it's really a good ROI in here. I

03:26will show you on the chart how much money it makes. But what about the integrations as integrations have way bigger impact? So when the founders meet, you get like this first impression of, let's do it, we've got this excitement at the very beginning, but it quickly changes into more and more friction that hurts it. So then the techie meets with the other guy and they are like, okay, how are we going to do it? Are we

03:58going to create spaghetti in the code, but get it delivered quickly? Or we will do it the right way, but we will be late to the market? So the first friction shows up. Then we got this moment of product managers or like even yourself, you are like, I had the plans, but now the plans have changed. And it's always like, you got this new shiny object and you feel like, okay, let's dump everything and start pursuing

04:25this new goal. So another friction with your previous plans shows up. And then on top of that, you got some billing issues, like 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,

04:54whatever. 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

Challenges and Friction in Product Integrations

Michał Suski

05:21with 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

05:57you 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

06:24excited. This is the very first moment when we are meeting another Founder, it's the Founder of Jasper, Dave Roganmosser, and we are like, okay, 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. Twenty eight hours later, we've managed to introduce the

The Jasper Integration: 28 Hours to Launch

Michał Suski

06:59integration to the market that was really doing great. People were really crazy about it. But 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 slide.

Evaluation Framework for SaaS Partnerships

Michał Suski

07:29We've 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.comsaasopen and

08:07you will be able to download the PDF that consists of these questions. You don't have to take any photos, just download there, surferseo.com/saasopen. 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

08:43use 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.

09:07And 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, there are 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 okay, it will work. If you are both agile, kind of yellow development, that's also fine. But if there is like a difference in

Evaluating Company Fit: Size, Legal, and Agility

Michał Suski

09:33any 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 like for example, you've got, I don't know, 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

10:05company supports sending of the emails, we've got the perfect synergy and you can go for that potential partnership. And the other area is the cost. The cost is not only about the dev team, but it is also about marketing, it's about the support and you have to really check whether there won't be too much hassle in creating landing pages, in creating instructions for the support and so on, just so you are secured and your current customers

10:37are 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

10:56the billing model. Like if they are one time subscription, lifetime deal, whatever, and you are SaaS, their customers are not ready for paying monthly. If you are $100 and the company starts at $20 their customers are not prepared to spend $100 every month on a SaaS product. And even though there is a big match in all of the other questions, this itself can ruin your partnership and I got the direct example of that behavior. So let's

Evaluating Product Fit: Synergy, Cost, and Pricing

Michał Suski

11:33jump to the results because results is something that can prove I'm talking real deal or not. So I've got a few examples of the failures, I've got some key aspects of why it worked and got some revenue numbers. The first one, the first failure, I think it is also the first integration we ever did. It's a writer access, it's company that produces content, and we are an SEO tool that optimizes the content. But it turned out

12:04that their founders were really talking great. They were like speakers. They convinced us it will be a good idea, and we went for it without testing. It turned out that their audience is not willing to buy server. Well, that simple. Another one, SEMrush. Huge company. Maybe you've heard. Actually, SEMrush is one of the sponsors of this conference, has opened, I think. So SEMrush is a huge, huge company. And we didn't have aligned goals. Like, they wanted

12:39to integrate another SEO tool while we wanted to make this integration really meaningful for our users. And they were like, okay, just check another integration, and we were on opposite side. And it turned out that the legal obstacles that the terms they offered, we had everything ready, can tell you. The design was done, the product was done, everything was ready and we had to turn it down just because the terms and the legal stuff, we couldn't

13:09accept it. And the last failure is the RightSonic. RightSonic is exactly the same tool as Jasper that is crazy good for us, but we are misaligned in terms of the pricing. Writesonic is a cheap alternative, while Jasper is leading in the industry. Jasper costs similar amount as surfer, while Writesonic is a few times cheaper. And well, they bring the leads, they got the trial and no conversion. So well, it didn't work because of the pricing. So

Partnership Failures: Writer Access, SEMrush, Writesonic

Michał Suski

13:44let's take a look again at this chart. And right now, I'll explain you how the skyrocket kind of moment, the second purple arrow happens. So the key factors. The key factors of the success is that when you have the same goals as the company as you partner with. If you have a simple setup, so there's no really hassle of figuring out all the stuff besides product. The stuff besides product should be that small, really small. And

14:15of course, competing over an interested audience, these are another foundations of making this partnership work. Marketing results, ton of courses, ton of YouTube videos, people were starting to review the whole process with combination of server and Jasper all over the YouTube and the SERP domination. This is another crazy thing because out of these 3,000 affiliates, every single one created surferseo review targeting keyword surferseo review, which made us really dominate the SERPs with the message that we

14:55wanted because they are our affiliate. So they are talking our language, they are explaining surfer, so their users will buy it because they have commissions. So every single review you will find, well, obviously will be positive and we didn't do anything to make it happen. They did it. So the commission paid off. We not only didn't have to do any marketing, but it was really like a snowball effect. Every new review showed up like crazy. We

Partnership Revenue Results: $3.5M and 30% of Revenue

Michał Suski

15:25didn't have to incentivize it at all. So partnerships, revenue. I will stand here and look by myself as well because these charts are pretty inspiring. As you can see, 3,500,000 last year. It was over 30% of our revenue in total at surfer. And it was all brought only by commissions that were tracked. So not I'm not counting what I don't know, right? But quite significant amount of people skip these links. So 30% of revenue of surfer

16:02generated through partnerships. So well, it feels like it was worth it, not only from the integration with Jasper, but also with the other affiliates that gave us a huge boost. Not only with sales, but with authority. We were like new on the market, no one knows us, and then boom. One, two, three, five, 10, 500 influencers in the industry, people who are running courses and so on, they started to talk about server. They had incentive, of

Summary and Key Takeaways

Michał Suski

16:35course, percent recurring commission, but who cares? It's still much cheaper than asking them for doing promotional materials. So it's definitely a good idea for any, well, any bootstrap SaaS company at the very beginning to start tapping into someone else's authority, someone else's audience. You don't have the audience, you don't have the authority, they have both. Audience and authority to sell to that audience. So let's summarize it. I showed you the types, you start with the affiliates

17:07ideally, then move to something more serious like partnership integration with another product. Of course, the evaluation and I will recall the URL, it's surferseo.com/saasopen and you will get all of these questions. Just ask honestly, ask yourself these questions and you will find out, is it a good idea to pursue that integration or it is better to skip and use another one? And then the results, they speak for itself. So, thank you.