I Was a SaaS Affiliate Before I Built Reditus — Here's What the Industry Gets Wrong

It Started With a Question I Got Tired of Answering

I was working at a SaaS startup, doing about 40 demos a week. The product was genuinely ahead of its time — we had automated a lot of processes that our prospects were still doing manually. So after almost every demo, the same question came up: "That is great, but what other tools do you guys use?"

I got so tired of answering that question that I decided to build a website to answer it at scale. I called it SalesLovesMarketing.co — a site listing the best sales and marketing tools with reviews, comparisons, and honest takes on what worked and what did not.

The site started ranking well in Google. We were writing all the content ourselves — this was before AI content was a thing — and within a few months we had over 20,000 organic visitors per month. The question became: how do I monetize this?

Display ads were an option, but the traffic was not high enough for meaningful ad revenue, and it would not be recurring. Then I discovered affiliate marketing. Because SalesLovesMarketing focused exclusively on B2B SaaS tools with recurring subscriptions, I could earn recurring commissions for the tools I was already recommending. That changed everything.

50 Bookmarks and Zero Trust

Here is where things got frustrating.

Every SaaS affiliate program I joined had its own portal. Separate login, separate dashboard, separate link format. Some used ?ref= as the parameter, others used ?fpr=, others used ?via=. The slug — the unique identifier tied to me — was different everywhere because my preferred one was often already taken.

I ended up with roughly 50 bookmarks. Fifty separate portals to check if I wanted to understand which programs were generating revenue and which were not. The dashboards were basic. Support was worse — if I had a question, I might get a response in 24 to 48 hours, and if they asked a follow-up question, that was another 24 to 48 hours. A simple conversation could span two weeks.

But the worst part was tracking. I joined a couple of the larger affiliate networks, and I did not trust the numbers. I was generating meaningful traffic to certain SaaS tools — I could see it in my own analytics — but the network dashboards showed barely any clicks and zero conversions. When every other tool on my site was converting at a normal rate and one specific network showed nothing, something was clearly wrong.

I went as far as generating test signups myself to validate whether tracking was working. In some cases, it was not.

The Moment I Decided to Build

The final validation came from an unexpected place. At the startup where I was doing those 40 demos a week, we were implementing one of the major affiliate networks as a customer. Our developer was not happy. He flagged several foundational tracking issues — things like unique identifier handling that should have been table stakes but were missing entirely.

That confirmed what I had already suspected from the affiliate side. The tracking infrastructure at some of the biggest names in the space had gaps. And if a developer at a SaaS company was complaining about it during implementation, affiliates on the other end were definitely losing money without knowing it.

That was the moment: this has to be better.

Building for Both Sides

I wanted to combine two things that did not exist together at the time. The siloed approach tools — Rewardful, FirstPromoter, Tapfiliate — had decent tracking because they were focused on a single program. But they had no network. You were stuck recruiting from your own contacts.

The networks — PartnerStack, Impact — had the scale, but the experience for affiliates was poor and the pricing for SaaS companies was prohibitive. Annual contracts, no public pricing, no freemium option.

Reditus was built to combine reliable tracking with network scale, wrapped in a freemium model that lets companies start for free and grow into paid plans only when the channel is actually working.

We are a bootstrapped company. That matters because it means we can take the long-term approach. We do not need to close every deal this quarter. If a company is not generating revenue from affiliates yet, they should not be paying us a lot of money — and our pricing reflects that. We genuinely want to grow with our customers.

That also means we say no a lot. We have stayed focused on B2B SaaS from day one. People have tried to make Reditus work for e-commerce, for marketplaces, for non-SaaS products. We always say no. That discipline cost us deals early on, but it is why the platform works so well for the companies it is designed for.

What Most Platforms Still Get Wrong

Having been on both sides — as an affiliate and as a platform builder — I see the same problems persisting across the industry.

Affiliates are still treated as an afterthought. Most platforms are built for the SaaS company, and the affiliate experience is bolted on. That is backwards. If affiliates do not trust your tracking, do not find your dashboard useful, and cannot get support when something breaks, they will stop promoting. It does not matter how good your features look on a comparison page.

The other thing most platforms get wrong is treating affiliate and referral as separate products. Your existing users who love your product and external affiliates who write about your category are both doing the same thing — leveraging their network to send you customers. Why would you need two separate tools for that?

That is why Reditus combines an in-app referral program, an affiliate program, and an affiliate network in one platform. Because from the company's perspective, it is all one channel. And from the affiliate's perspective, it should be one dashboard, one link format, one place to manage everything.

The Bottom Line

I did not build Reditus because I saw a gap in a market report. I built it because I was an affiliate who could not trust the tools I was using, and then I saw the same problems from the SaaS company side. The platform exists because both sides of the equation deserve better — and after years of building, I still believe that is the biggest differentiator we have.