#55 - Build A Successful Shopify App - Affiliation System 🚀

We did it! $45,000 MRR!

Only 2 weeks after reaching $44,000 MRR. What a growth! 🚀

It happens sometimes, you don’t grow for some weeks, or you even lose some MRR. And then suddenly you grow more than ever!

This is because building a SaaS business is a rollercoaster. The most important is to look at your growth each year and you’ll see how you improved.

What’s even more incredible is that WideReview, my 2nd app, contributed to that growth.

Even if we’re not doing any marketing on that app (because we’re focused on WideBundle). But I won’t complain; this is a good problem, right?

WideReview was at $1700 MRR at the beginning of May.

2 months later we’re at $2200. That’s a 30% increase! 🔥

I can’t imagine what would be the growth if I was actually focused on it.

But let’s talk about WideBundle for now.

I finally finished the technical documentation for WideBundle:

• I created the documentation about the new code of the app

• I updated all the technical processes we had for the new code

So we started working on new settings for WideBundle! One thing our users wanted was more customization. So we’re working on it cause you know it: Users know what they need.

But we also have important things we’re working on:

• Native bundles

• Built for Shopify badge

And we’re very excited about those!

Something you ask me a lot is: how do I handle affiliation?

You know if you’ve been following me for a long time, that we work with influencers.

People with Youtube channels, communities, etc. And it’s a good part of our growth strategy as it’s a way to get trust from merchants.

Our system is simple:

• We create a specific link for the influencers

• Whenever someone installs WideBundle through that link they get commissions

Let’s see how we created that!

How did I create my affiliation system?

When I started there were no solutions like Shoffi. So we had to build our own internal tool.

I recommend using existing solutions if possible because it saves time. You want to be focused on building your product and doing marketing. Not being focused on building the things that help you do marketing 😵‍💫

But it’s still interesting. Here we go:

1/ The affiliate area

When we have a new influencer working with us we set up manually an account for that influencer and give them a password.

They can log into their area and they will find:

• Their specific link (this is a link to the app store with their ID as a parameter

• The number of paying users they had each month

• The number of trial users

• The money they generated

• If the money was sent or not

You already know me, the design is pretty basic and we create their system, etc manually. We need to be focused on marketing first!

2/ The tracking system

When someone opens the affiliate link, we add a cookie to the browser with the affiliate ID.

So when someone installs our app, we check if a cookie exists. If yes (and if it belongs to an influencer) then we will attach that affiliate ID to the user.

And we’ll also write it somewhere in Mixpanel to track it for our internal metrics.

3/ The association system

Since it can be hard to figure out who’s currently paying on Shopify we use a cron job. For those who don’t know, a cron job is a function that will run automatically whenever we want.

We chose to run that function every day. And that function will check every user on the app.

• Are the users paying?

• When did they start paying?

• Are they on trial?

• Did they uninstall it?

• Do they have an affiliate ID attached?

And then we’re able to determine if we have to give money to the influencer

4/ The payment system

We didn’t need to automate this. He can send us a message each month (or when the influencer wants) asking us for the payments.

We’ll then review how much we owe him. We ask for an invoice and send the money.

Then we’ll write in our database that the money was sent.

That’s our system!

That’s it for today’s email!

I hope you enjoyed it! Feel free to share my newsletter with someone else: https://news.matdesousa.com/

See you next week,

Mat 😁