(Yes, it’s clickbait,but true! 😉)
OnlyFans is one of the fastest-growing businesses in the world:
So what can businesses, especially from other sectors learn from it ?
In a world where po*** is available for free, how did this app which charges users proliferate?
The trick in business today is not to just learn from best practices in your space but across sectors.
And one key factor that fueled OnlyFans’ early growth was its referral program.
Many SAAS companies have referral and affiliate programs but are pretty lousy. Either:
1. From an insight-incentive perspective
2. From a social share-distribution perspective
3. From an LTV of the referrer’s perspective (recruiting referrers in a scalable way is also an effort)
👉 They offered a 5% lifetime revenue share to referrers, translating to 5% of the total revenue (or 20% of OnlyFans’ portion).
Let’s break it down: If you refer someone who earns $1 million annually on OnlyFans and stays for 5 years, you’d pocket a cool $250,000 just for making that referral! 💰
What would I do today for a SAAS company only for referral marketing:
1. Use some AI tools for referral
2. Use a stagewise referral program
3. Focus a lot on social sharing & CRM for referral . Interestingly NGO’s do the latter well.
Where else can you get an example from onlyfans –> NGOs in one sentence :-p
4. Use PLG to enable referral. OkCredit does it well –Harsh Pokharna has spoken about it.
5. Build something like ‘fanscope’ -an acquisition product which OnlyFans built to get users from Twitter. Think of getting users to pay for a feature of SAAS that they would already be comfortable paying for without really going through signup. (google ‘fanscope’ -outside work and you will get it)
SAAS companies take note!
A strong referral program could be your ticket to explosive growth. 📈
written by –saurabh
Note from me: Startups complain that experienced Fractional CMOs charge a lot and often it's not possible for bootstrapped startups to afford CMOs with experience. Thus in the initial stages when startups really need people who understand both strategy and tactics,they have to go without that talent and end up paying a much higher cost then (in terms of unnecessary media spend,focussing on the right things etc) and then more down the line when the mistakes have possibly scaled. It's a real problem and because of that I am trying a new model which costs 300$, and to start off less than 100$ (sharing a review below) . However before I go into details of this I would want to hear from startup founders and VCs what is the real,tangible problems they face which hiring fractional marketing or strat talent. Ping me or comment below.
This is the lowest review I got in the last year. Others from startups pre-seed to series A are here.
Un-edited and Un-incentivized with founder and company name mentioned.
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