

37signals Launches Affiliate Program (Pays Residuals) - superchink
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1063-launch-announcing-the-new-37signals-affiliate-program-with-recurring-income
They'll pay 50% of the signup fee and 5% of all future recurring payments for each customer you refer for Basecamp, Highrise, and Backpack.
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prakash
Joel Spolsky's interview in Founders at work mentions that fogcreek spent time
on building out an affiliates program that didn't amount to much.

6 to 12 months from now I would like to know what % of sales for 37 signals
comes from this program, and if it was actually worth their time building it.

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jasonfried
It only took us about a month to build so we're feeling pretty good about the
investment.

We've had an affiliate program for a few years now, but we only paid credit
towards your own Basecamp/Backpack account, we didn't pay cash. It's been
successful for us so we're bullish about this system.

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prakash
Ah, thanks for the reply. Would you blog about, at the very least the %
increase due to this, say 6-12 months down the line?

Cheers!

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jasonfried
I can't promise that, but we usually report back on experiments down the road
if we can.

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prakash
sounds fair.

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staunch
I'm interesting in seeing how aggressive they are at preventing spammers (and
similar) from using their program. If they're not willing to turn away revenue
generated by spammers that could be some pretty ugly PR.

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swombat
Spammers are one worry. They'll get people spamming their affiliate links in
all sorts of dodgy places.

Fraud is another! I've been running an affiliate site for some time. Expect
many 37Signals blog posts about how to filter out philipinos and indonesians
from accessing their apps. It seems like it's a cottage industry over there.

I hope they have good anti-fraud detection systems for their credit card
transactions too.

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stillmotion
I wonder if it would be smart to build a small product on top of Basecamp or
other 37Signals products and collect small revenue from their affiliate
program.

Anyone got any ideas?

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jasonfried
A few people who've build products that hook up with Basecamp
(<http://www.basecamphq.com/extras>) or Backpack or Highrise via our API have
a referral link inside their products. I know some of them have generated a
lot of affiliate credit that way under the old system.

