How Joran Hofman’s Reditus is Redefining B2B SaaS with Affiliate Marketing

by | May 30, 2024 | Marketing, SaaS Founders

Reditus was born out of frustration. In 2020, Joran Hofman was working in customer success, leading a team of thirty people. As a side hustle, he started a website recommending B2B marketing and sales products. The site gained traction, eventually generating 30,000 organic visitors per month, but there wasn’t a good tool for him to capitalize financially on these eyeballs. So Joran decided to take the problem into his own hands.

In 2021, Joran founded Reditus: a two-sided marketplace that plays matchmaker between B2B software and affiliate marketers. Affiliate marketing is a $17 billion dollar industry, and yet most of the market is dominated by commercial goods—leaving plenty of competitive ground for new B2B marketing partnerships and the growth of Reditus. Here’s what Joran says about the importance of affiliate marketing in B2B and his journey growing Reditus.

What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a marketing strategy where businesses reward affiliates (partners) for driving traffic or sales to their websites. A partner could be a blog, an influencer, or even another company. Affiliate marketing leverages the relationship a partner has with their audience to build trust and sell products. If successful, the affiliate is rewarded for the conversion. It’s really a win-win for brands and affiliates alike.

What are the benefits of affiliate marketing for SaaS companies?

The big benefit is, hopefully, you’ll find the right affiliates who have access to your ideal customer profile. Like, if you’re selling T-shirts, ideally you have a network of people who are interested in T-shirts, and that’s the same with SaaS. If your SaaS is targeting developers, then you find someone who has a network full of developers, whether it be a newsletter, blog, YouTube channel, etc. So, you get access to somebody’s network and you only pay them if they deliver you paid clients.

If you compare it to Google Ads, for example, you pay upfront and hope that your leads or traffic convert into paid clients. With affiliate marketing, it’s the other way around. You get paid clients and then you give them a revenue share.    

Why does affiliate marketing matter in 2024?

Customer acquisition cost is rising for any SaaS company. So, if you’re able to pay a certain percentage that’s predictable after you get a paid client, that’s what everybody wants. Companies want to become more profitable faster, so you have to find channels that are actually profitable. With affiliate marketing you know you’re not going to pay more than you’re actually earning because you only give away a percentage of what you’ve already got.

What does the typical affiliate marketer look like in the SaaS space?

Influencers, consultants, agencies. The most typical affiliate marketers will be bloggers or publishers who already have followings. Just anyone who has access to an ideal customer profile.

What problem does Reditus solve?

We solve two problems. The first is that when companies set up affiliate programs they often do so in a silo. Basically, the company has to invite all the affiliates themselves, and then log into a portal and get the link for a specific SaaS partner. The issue you run into is that your network is only as big as it is. What we do with the marketplace is we match SaaS companies with affiliates. So, we have 1,000+ B2B SaaS affiliates who can see all the programs in the marketplace, so they can apply to all the different programs from a single dashboard.

The second problem is that SaaS companies don’t know who their potential partners could be. So we’re giving companies access to a pool of profiles, like Fiverr or Upwork, where you can filter affiliates by audience, target, offerings, earnings etc. to find your perfect match.

What’s the value of affiliate marketing in the era of AI?

Trust, transparency, and a human point of view. Recommendations from real people. In affiliate marketing, you can leverage the fact that people are more likely to use a tool that’s recommended by a person than by AI. As long as people can recognize what’s written by AI and what isn’t, a human recommendation is going to be the strongest.

How do you expand your business from here?

I don’t keep my successes secret–or my own missteps. Every lesson I’ve learned I share in my podcast, Grow Your B2B SaaS podcast. I wanted to create a space that encourages creators and entrepreneurs alike to harness the potential of affiliate marketing.

Grow Your B2B SaaS serves two purposes. It’s a way for me to learn things. So, I’ll ask stupid questions, as I say. I ask about what I genuinely want to know about. It helps me grow my knowledge on everything related to B2B SaaS. And I know a lot of people want to know the exact same thing. It also helps me build awareness and trust around myself and the brand. The podcast has opened doors I didn’t even know existed.

What is some tangible advice that you’d give to founders in 2024?

Try to leverage somebody else’s network. I use the vanity metric of 15,000 followers on LinkedIn. If the guest shares on LinkedIn it helps me grow the podcast as well. So, it can be with a podcast, or affiliate marketing where if you find someone who has access to your ideal customer profile, you can ask them to start referring you. 

Don’t underestimate the power of offline networking. I’ve been working remotely for a while now and I’ve gotten to the point where I wonder, “Why do I need to do a physical meeting where I have to travel? Why don’t I just do eight back-to-back calls?” But what I’ve learned is that you can open a lot of doors if you’re actually talking to people in real life. You can open doors if you have a drink with somebody, no matter what type of drink it is–whether it’s coffee, tea, or beer. You’ll get a lot done. If you’re open with your story and your challenges, other SaaS founders can help you.

If you’re going to do affiliate marketing, use the data that’s available. Check your competitor’s backlinks. With affiliate marketing, you can see who’s linking to your competitor and see if they’re willing to link to you as well.

What advice do you have for bootstrapped founders?

The advice I can give, especially to bootstrapped founders, is that things don’t go as fast as you think they will. People told me when I first got started that things would take longer than I expected. I thought, “I have all this experience; I’ll hit benchmarks fast.” But, I ended up making mistakes and it didn’t go as fast as I expected. So, if you’re bootstrapping, keep that in mind.

Keep your eyes on the long term. Build a good product that makes your clients happy and things will fall into place. With our marketplace, it took a long time for things to get to the place where I wanted them to be. But now that we’re where I want to be, things have gotten easier. Stick to it. Once you have product/market fit, or early signs of it, you’ll be a lot more comfortable.

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