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

We’ve officially surpassed the first MILLION in affiliate revenue generated on Rootabl! Hooray! 

WHAT I’M PROUD OF

• Continuing to develop my own capacity for being human and relating to other humans! Partnership work is no joke, and business partnerships are still made by humans coming together, and still require great communication and repair.
• Inviting people into Rootabl! I’ve only made some soft invitations so far, but it’s building up momentum and leading to sales and connections even before we have a robust marketing channel.
• Balancing fairly well. I had a moment tonight that was so peaceful and I couldn’t help but feel so proud of myself… raising my daughter as a single mama with 50% custody, taking care of my house, building a business, continuing to work with clients, showing up for friends, improving my own self care… it’s a LOT. And while it’s way too much for one person and I’m for sure calling in my village of support, I’m still showing up every day and giving myself more grace than I used to, and that feels really, really good.

WHAT WAS HARD

• Keeping up with these updates! I got a little behind and dropped the momentum big time. 
• All three of the above items! Being human relating to other humans and building something meaningful, getting out of my comfort zone to invite people to pay me money, and juggling all the things. Plenty of dropped balls. 

WHAT’S NEW/NEXT?

• I’ve joined a mastermind for SaaS founders that’s really fun and different from my usual crew! I’ve committed to them that I’ll be making two updates before our next meeting… so gotta make it happen! Here’s one :-p 
• Creating some ghost marketing partnerships to actually get some content created that’s more relevant to helping course creators grow their affiliate programs! If you’re interested in creating content about affiliates and getting paid for it… send me an email at laura@rootabl.com!
• Adding more pricing tiers and getting sign-ups back on the site! I took it down to focus on the 25 businesses we currently have. Many are already running their second or third campaigns… that’s what we like to seeeeee retention-wise! So just smoothing things out with them before opening it back up.

Have feedback or questions for Laura?

Email her here: laura@rootabl.com 

¡Hola de España y bienvenido a la Esquina de Christian™!

Since my last update I’ve been grinding away at the two last remaining chunks that need to be moved over from Firebase to Supabase: the affiliate tracking function and the sales attribution function. All while traveling through Europe with my wife and an extremely popular 7-month old.

I’m happy to report that the affiliate tracking was pretty seamlessly moved over (I’m particularly proud of realizing that the Firebase function doing the tracking didn’t have to move away from Firebase—that simplified moving cookies over). The backlog of all the old tracking data has taken several days to replay on the new system and that should be wrapped up today.

As of writing this I’ve juuuuust pulled together the core logic of the sales attribution function. Supabase is so much more powerful in flexibility of queries which made this way easier to implement. Instead of having to plan ahead I just collect a lead’s visits and emails and timestamp them all in a big ol’ table. When it’s time to find the oldest lead visit that has an affiliate tag cooresponding to an affiliate in a given business’s campaign and the lead has an email that matches a given charge’s email _and then_ return the affiliate’s ID, I can literally do all that in a single query:

“`js
const { data, error } = await supabase
  .from(“affiliates”)
  .select(
    `
    user_id, campaign_id,
    users(
      visits(
        visited_at,
        leads(
          emails(email)
        )
      )
    )
  `,
  )
  .eq(“campaign_id”, campaign_id)
  .eq(“users.visits.leads.emails.email”, email)
  .order(“visited_at”, { foreignTable: “users.visits”, ascending })
  .limit(1)
  .maybeSingle();
“`

As long as I get my indexing correct (thank you Aaron Francis’s SQL for Developers course) that query should continue to run in a fraction of a second even after our database is storing hundreds of millions of tracked visits.

This new Supabase setup isn’t just easier to query: it now supports several use cases that would’ve been extremely hard to get right in the system we’d set up on Firebase, like:

• variable affiliate rates per campaign (ex: I want a flat $100 fee if this product is purchased and a 25% affiliate fee if this other product is purchased in the month of July)
• campaign sales graphs
• calculating a dynamic affiliate rate based on the phase of the moon at the time of purchase

and cases that are now way easier to support but aren’t implemented yet:

• once you’ve hit a certain number of sales your commission rate gets bumped up
• only consider leads that have visited one of the campaign’s tagged pages

Also now the Rootabl widget will track purchases made through a Stripe checkout link on your website which is pretty neat.

See ya for next week’s Christian’s Corner™ which will be from Madeira, Portugal!

Have feedback or questions for Christian?

Email him here: christian@rootabl.com