We’ve got some fun goals for Rootabl 2024 and want to let you in on the progress!

Here’s what we’re aiming for:

• 1,000+ Businesses using Rootabl for their affiliate programs
• 10,000+ Affiliates across all Campaigns on the platform
• $10M+ Affiliate Revenue generated on the platform
• $2.5M+ Commissions paid out to Rootabl affiliates

Looking at our numbers so far, I feel like $10M+ in affiliate revenue generated is too low, though I will not be mad about rocketing past these!

I spent most of last week on the verge of tears. It was entirely unexpected.

After finishing V1 of this website and getting the first update together, I finally hit “send” to my Laura Sprinkle email list and posted on social media. 

I did that close to 11pm last Tuesday, April 9 and was flooded with celebratory responses the next day. 

This one in particular sparked the tears in a big, beautiful way:

I just wanted to let you know that I love what I’ve seen of your platform so far. I worked in global affiliate marketing for 10+ years and am familiar with Impact, Partnerize, CJ, etc…

Every platform I tried was way over complex for what I needed and I knew my students and fellow business owners would never use it.

A few weeks ago when… I saw this software for links I was so impressed. So clean, so easy… I signed up for the waitlist right away and I think you are going to do amazing things with this.

Really excited for you. I think this is absolutely missing in the space and I wish you all the best.

Why was I crying?

Because that email from a complete stranger was EXACTLY the vision I had for Rootabl.

A simple, clean platform that gives you the information you need and makes it super easy for your affiliates to promote.

And dude.

This past year of pushing to make it happen has been HARD. Harder than I even let myself remember.

So to read that feedback right away was pretty astounding.

What I’m proud of this week:

• This website!
• Filmed a “What’s Rootabl?” video at the request of one of my favorite people in the online course space. Thanks, Billy! (When Billy gives you a piece of marketing advice… you follow it.)
• Creating a founding client onboarding process for the next few months. Our founding clients will get a mini strategy session with me during onboarding, so fun. Even though onboarding is going to be a lot of time on our end at the moment, I still wanted to make it streamlined. (We had someone buy before I could even finish the email sequence, ha!)
• These updates! I’ve added some goal stats counters and it’s fun to see how much it’s gone up even in the last 7 days!
• Working with our current clients on getting their campaigns and affiliates set up properly. There’s still a lot that we’re doing behind-the-scenes with this. Christian is working hard to make sure is not so manual asap.

Some things that were hard:

• Even with the great feedback, it’s still easy for me to get into panic mode with how hard the past year has been. Luckily I have somatic nervous system friends on speed dial. Love you, Carrie!
• Making the time to really market Rootabl in the way it needs and deserves. Our founding member pricing is only here for so long and I want to do it justice.
• Realizing that Rootabl itself couldn’t use Rootabl for affiliate tracking unless some things shifted with the code, ha! Ultimately, those shifts will make it easier for other platforms to use Rootabl, but it was kind of funny.

My next steps:

• Building out Rootabl’s affiliate program. Of course affiliates are a huge part of my plan. We’re offering 30% commissions recurring for as long as the customer sticks with us! (Sign up here. Hilariously, this form is not yet on Rootabl… it is coming soon though!)
• Continuing these updates and promoting the founding member pricing.
• Reaching out to everyone on our waitlist and who wanted updates to tell them it’s finally HERE!

If you’re interested in getting your offers on Rootabl for affiliates to promote, reach out to me at laura@rootabl.com! Would love to answer any Qs and chat about it 🙂

And if you’re interested in becoming an affiliate and earning recurring revenue from sharing, let’s make it happen! 

Have feedback or questions for Laura?

Email her here: laura@rootabl.com 

Hello welcome to the second update of Christian’s Corner™️. My updates probably won’t be this exciting two updates in a row but this was an unusually exciting week.

You may recall in last week’s update that I’d built Rootabl on Google’s Firebase serverless infrastructure, and that I’d said while there are “some annoying limitations with using Firestore” it’s part of my favorite tech stack.

Tech stack preferences, by the way, aren’t something that has changed very frequently in my life. From rough memory of my own developing journey I would’ve described my tech stacks as:

• 2007-2009: plain ol’ HTML and CSS and a lot of iframes. Probably some PHP but I didn’t know what I was doing.
• 2009-2015ish: Sinatra, then Ruby on Rails! I can finally make real websites and it’s so cool! This is when I built fileinbox.com and also finished my year-long Senior Design project meant for a team of five in three weeks by myself.
• 2015ish to 2018: kinda switched to Node and single-page apps but also still working on Rails stuff
• 2019-now: React everywhere all the time! I can build way more complicated frontends and even do single-page apps. I loosely organized projects with create-react-app and React Router until I found out about Next.js.
• 2020ish-last week: Firebase! NoSQL is so much more flexible than SQL and whoa everything is ~@~cloud scale~@~ and you get realtime updates basically for free and authentication is baked in and wow they even have built-in cloud storage buckets and serverless function triggers and I’ll never have to log into a server again!

Each change for me was marked by a state change in what the new technology was able to do that the previous one couldn’t. Going from plain HTML to Rails was mind-blowing: I can make sites that users can log into and the sites can have databases with dynamic pages! Learning React was mind-blowing: I can make pages that update instantly and feel native! Firebase felt like the perfect compliment to that: between React and Firebase I no longer need a backend!

Late last week marked another turning point: I’m switching from Firebase to Supabase. Let’s talk about that.

While Firebase has some incredible strengths there have been several things that have slowly grown from nagging annoyances to dealbreakers, particularly in building Rootabl:

• Vender lock-in: if Google ever tries to pull some shenanigans (increasing Firebase pricing, shutting it down, deactivating our account) we’re kinda hosed. Unlike how Ruby on Rails lets you switch database providers by changing a single environment variable it would be a lot of work to switch from Firebase to somewhere else.
• Closed-source: largely because Google wants you to be locked into their platform, they don’t let anybody but Google employees work on Firebase. They tried to get a best-of-both-worlds with extensions.dev but that marketplace is stale, limited, and dying.
• Querying and filtering is extremely limited: basically every page on Rootabl has a table on it that needs to be filtered, sorted, searched, and paginated. Realtime updates are a nice-to-have but in practice refreshing the page isn’t as big of an inconvenience as not being able to search or paginate your data. You can set up filters but this quickly gets ridiculous because any filter on more than two fields needs an index. Don’t even ask about full text search: you need to sync your data with a 3rd party full text search provider like Algolia!
• Firestore is actually pretty slow: Supabase outperforms Firebase by up to 4x on number of reads per second, and 3.1x on writes per second: https://supabase.com/alternatives/supabase-vs-firebase
• There’s no built-in way to limit your bill exposure: there are horror stories of developers getting hit with a five-figure bill that acrued over a weekend because of a coding bug. Firebase’s answer to what you should do to limit your exposure to a runaway bill is to set up billing alerts, but what if I’m on vacation or asleep or my phone dies? To mitigate this risk my team and I built a firebase killswitch extension based on some esoteric Google documentation but this feature not being built into the product feels malicious.
• I don’t like Google anymore: I feel like there’s been a philosophical misalignment that’s been growing for a while. In particular I don’t like how they handled content moderation with Gemini.

Because of these issues I’ve been keeping my ear out for what I would switch to if the need arose. Supabase launched in 2020 as an open-source Firebase alternative and I’ve been periodically checking in on it. Each time I checked, though, it didn’t feel quite ready for prime time.

Last week though I had a perfect storm of extra annoyances with Firebase and some pointed questions on that particular technology choice from a consulting client that led me to check out where Supabase is at.

And oh boy it sure is ready for prime time.

The last few times I’ve checked on it I got scared by the amount of Postgres I needed to know to use the product. Going from nice Javascript Firebase serverless functions to this really weird PL/SQL language that ran inside the database felt ridiculous. Setting up row-level security used an equally esoteric language that spooked me.

But this time I had a new tool that made working with esoteric languages a freakin’ breeze: large language models! Any time I got stuck I just hit my keyboard shortcut to pop open ChatGPT and hey presto there’s the answer.

Once I could get past the Postgres stuff I started getting hit with wave after wave of ways that Supabase is just head and shoulders better than Firebase:

• It’s all open source so I can self-host if I want, the community is more active because they can actually improve the product, and also there’s no vender lock-in
• Querying, full-text-search, and pagination just work because of course they do—it’s just Postgres!
• Way better pricing and they even have a way to limit your bill from each project’s dashboard!
• Way more powerful in how you set up real-time updates, row-level security, joining multiple tables, authentication—it’s just better.
• Deno functions deploy way faster than Firebase severless functions: I’m not deep enough into Deno to have run into Node compatibility problems but so far it’s been a dream. Functions deploy in about five seconds compared to Firebase’s ~60. I also prefer how Supabase shows the function logs: it’s just another Postgres table!

The key selling point for me was going back to SQL. NoSQL felt like the coolest thing ever for years because of how flexible it is but I’ve paid for that flexibility. There was a Rootabl bug we found last week where some affiliates had earned a negative commission and that just shouldn’t be possible. I could dig into it and figure out where my denormalizing logic (that I’d tested the heck out of!) had gone wrong oooooor I could just switch to a relational database.

So yeah, not only are we switching Rootabl to Supabase but I’m making a migration guide to eventually switch everything I’ve ever built on Firebase over. The past few days I’ve felt fueled with an intense flow that I’ve only ever felt a few times in my life (it’s been euophoric) recoding the backend stuff for Rootabl to work with Supabase and migrating the data over. It’s felt especially rewarding because:

• all the problems I’m solving have already been solved in Firebase so the work is conceptually straightforward
• as I’m working in Supabase I keep discovering these pockets of delight of how much better Supabase is going to be to work with
• there’s a very clear set of next steps to work on: just ask what the next thing that needs to happen to shut down Firebase is and do that thing

In the process of this transition I’ve discovered that several features that were going to be painful on Firebase will probably be pretty trivial on Supabase, like building graphs and leaderboards.

So that was this last week. We’re at the point now where users logged in with Firebase are also logged into Supabase automatically and I’m syncing all the Firebase data to Supabase so we should be able to transition the frontend over page-by-page. I’ve got Stripe syncing to both the Firebase and Supabase backend so the last big pieces of backend that needs to be moved over are:

• the affiliate tracking function, and
• the sale attribution function

Both of which took me forever the first time I wrote them and I’m actually really looking forward to rewriting them because I’ll be able to cover all the edge cases that have popped up that I’m not currently accounting for (like keeping track of precisely when a lead landed on each affiliate’s page).

That’s all for this week!

Note from Laura: Real life text he sent me about the move to Supabase. I can’t stop saying “SUPABASE” over and over. It makes me so happy. (Just because it sounds fun; I understood close to none of Christian’s update.)

Have feedback or questions for Christian? (Or want to send him audios saying “SUPABASE” on repeat?)

Email him here: christian@rootabl.com