u/FutureMindAI

It’s Friday. This week feels like it’s been a month long. I think we’ve all earned a break. I hope all you busy SaaS founders are going to give yourselves a break. When you do what will you be doing? I’ll start. I’m going to;

Make the world’s biggest bowl of spaghetti.
Watch the finale of The Boys (NO SPOILERS!)
Sit in the sunshine with a nice cold beer.
Walk the Doodle.

Over to you.

A few months ago I was trying to find YouTube creators to promote one of my SaaS products. I assumed it would be straightforward.
It wasn’t.
Every approach had the same problems — hours of manual searching, no way to tell quickly if a creator was open to affiliate deals, and no signal for whether they’d actually convert. I was burning time on channels that were either too big, completely irrelevant, or had never done a sponsored post in their lives.
So I built a tool to solve it.
Here’s what two weeks of actual usage has taught me:

1. Affiliate signals are hiding in plain sight
   Creators who are open to partnerships almost always leave signals — affiliate links in descriptions, FTC disclosures, platform mentions. The data is there, it just needs to be read at scale.
2. Subscriber count is a terrible primary filter
   A 50k channel can be completely unresponsive. A 7k channel with high engagement and multiple affiliate links is worth ten of them.
3. The outreach email is where most people fail
   Generic emails get ignored. Personalisation based on actual video content gets replies. Night and day difference.
4. Building the tool you need is faster than finding it
   I spent weeks looking for something that did what I needed. I should have started building on day one.
   Still early days but the signal so far is positive. Happy to answer questions about the build or the approach.

Hi,

As a SaaS founder the most painful thing about building a SaaS wasn’t the build (that was the fun part) it was and still is distribution.

I’m a builder. I like to build things. Marketing? Nooope not my thing. So I thought to myself what if I can find someone to do the marketing for me? Yeah the only problem with that is I had zero budget for marketing. Long story short I’d heard of affiliate marketing,who hasn’t these days,so the goal became to find some affiliates to market the SaaS I’d built. Looked at some platforms and the usual suspects came up like PartnerStack etc but those guys are not cheap. So anyway I went and found some kind of SaaS related affiliate marketing forums and posted there. Quite a bit of interest. Actually handed out quite a few affiliate links.Yay!

Er no. Of the 30 something links that I handed out 2 actually bothered to do anything. Not a single sale. They both disappeared within a couple of months.

What did I do wrong?

Glad you asked. Here’s exactly what I did wrong.

1. Recruited the wrong affiliates from the start.
2. They actually had zero connection to my niche.
3. The two who did promote me briefly had completely the wrong audience for my product.
4. This one is my fault - my onboarding process was terrible and all over the place.

You get the drift it was a total sh1t show and more importantly swallowed a whole bunch of time that could have been better spent elsewhere.

So back to the drawing board.

Part of the problem was that I was looking in the wrong places for the wrong people. Turns out the answer was literally in front of me practically every day.

YouTube.

Yep good old YouTube. Full of creators making tons of content about lots of stuff. But how to weed out the good from the bad?

Here’s the criteria I used:

1. Was their content a good fit for my niche and product?
2. How many subs did they have? Enough to move the needle without demanding upfront payment? (Turns out the sweet spot is 5K - 20K)
3. Do they already have affiliate links to other products in their Bio or video descriptions? If so chances are they’ll promote your product too.
4. How often do they post? No point contacting a near dead channel.
5. What’s their engagement like? How many views per video compared to number of subs? Too low and there’s no point, too high and it’s probably artificially inflated.

Not going to lie it was time consuming hard work but in the end it paid off. Doing it manually,spending roughly 30 mins per day, resulted in me finding my first 10 affiliates in a month. And they’re still with me today.

There’s several takeaways here.

Good affiliates willing to promote your SaaS product do exist but unless you have the money to join an affiliate network you’ll have to ACTIVELY look for them. They won’t fall into your lap. Do your homework using the criteria I gave you earlier.

Anyway hope that helps.

Who knows I might even build something to automate the whole process but that’s for a different thread.

Bon Soir.

I’ve just launched Affilitube — an AI-powered tool that helps brands find YouTube affiliates and influencers.

I’m looking for founding affiliates before we scale marketing.

Why it’s a solid passive income opportunity:
• 30% recurring commission for 12 months on every referral
• 90 day cookie window
• Top performers move to 40% lifetime commission
• Growing market — influencer and affiliate marketing is expanding fast
• Free plan available so you can try it before you promote it

The tool solves a real problem — finding YouTube creators and influencers open to affiliate deals is genuinely painful without it. That makes it an easier sell to the right audience.

If you have an audience of marketers, SaaS founders, course creators or brands — this fits naturally.

Sign up for the free plan at affilitube.com and reply here if you’re interested in the affiliate program — happy to share full details in the comments.

affilitube.com