This essay was written by Matthew Guay,Capiches founding editor and former senior writer at Zapier.
With its promise to stock everything, from A to Z, Amazon carries most products Wirecutter recommends.
It helped Amazon become one of the largest global retailers.
Affiliate programs were one of the most popular original ways to incentivize free coverage of early SaaS.
Today those programs are more scarce, replaced by partner programs that incentivize experts to sell more mature software.
Goodbye affiliates, hello sales.
Without the internet, there were few ways to discover new software from your desk.
Thus publishers, retailers, and distributors, the App Stores of their day.
The best to find software was magazines like Byte and The Whole Earth Software Catalog.
And suddenly, discovery became the problem all over again.
They were the perfect fit for the burgeoning blog scene in the early 2000s.
What is an affiliate program?
Its nearly free marketing for software vendors.
Except, not quite.
Affiliate links encourageanyoneto link to your productfans and foes and forgettable alike.
Theres no product loyalty.
From our survey of 100 popular business SaaS products, today only 21% offer affiliate programs.
But what if theres a better way to spread your product than paying people who talk about it?
Dropbox was perhaps the perfect business tool to spread by word of mouth.
Then youd fill up your Dropbox storage and would either need to pay or stop using Dropbox.
Thus the Dropbox credit program offering more storage for free.
What is a credit program?
For Dropbox, credit came in the form of extra storage.
And if you performed onboarding taskssuch as installing Dropbox on your computeryoud get another storage bonus.
That incentivizes you to try Dropbox features and get your friends to install it.
Notion today offers a similar program linked to in-app cash.
Dropbox credit gave you something extra today.
Notion credit pushes you towards taking an action in the future.
And while they maylive on in Dropbox, theyre most common in the early years of a products life.
Credit programs are so often talked about, they seem more common than they actually are.
Theyre often capped, tooDropbox only gives credit for the first 32 people you invite.
Then there are variants.
Dropbox turned casual users into people who started saving everything to Dropbox.
Notion got friends to tell friends about it to save on their subscription.
What if you had people doing that full-time, for free?
And the world of SaaS has followed suit.
Say someone builds eCommerce sites or sets up CRMs for customers.
Its the perfect fit, a pure win/win if you believe the marketing.
Google Clouds partnership page claims the best solutions are born from collaboration.
Salesforce says their Salesforce Partner Program enables partners to build and grow successful businesses while delivering customer success.
HubSpot promises You dont have to do everything for your clients if you could enable anything.
What are software partnership programs?
The value software companies offer their partners vary too.
Stripe and Zapier, for instance, list partners in a partner directory, but dont offer revenue share.
Others, including Salesforce and HubSpot, share revenue and offer priority support.
When partnership programs drive that much revenue, theres a mutually beneficial relationship thats incentivized for the long haul.
Quality versus quantity
Heres the confusing thing: Many software promotion programs are named incorrectly.
Dropbox calls their credit program a referral program; ClickUp calls their affiliate program a partner program.
