One Affiliate Now Brings In Half My Sales

Who: Philipp Keller
What: backl.io – a curated database of the best backlinks, helping SaaS founders get enough links to start ranking on Google
Format: Software & digital product · Worldwide, English
Started: January 2024
Audience: around 1,000 monthly visitors at peak
Payers: around 1,000 buyers (total since launch)
Promotion budget: $0
Income: side income – alongside a full-time job
Status: Active but stalled
Channels: Text social media, offline & word of mouth, collabs & shoutouts

What worked: A single well-matched affiliate – SEO creator Edward Sturm, who found the product after its Product Hunt launch – now drives almost all affiliate sales, on a 40% commission.
The result: 166 customers in the first launch week alone; today the business runs on roughly 5–7 sales a week between periodic spikes from affiliates or shoutouts.
The catch: His first version of the product tried to automate the whole backlink outreach process for customers – but it had too many moving parts, and most customers got overwhelmed rather than helped.

I'm a software engineer by training who accidentally became a product manager. I still work full-time, so this startup is built the old-fashioned way: evenings, weekends, and far too much coffee.

The funny part is that I only had time to start building things because my two kids became teenagers. Suddenly, hanging out with Dad dropped somewhere below friends and phones. It made me a little sad – but it also gave me back my weekends.

One of those weekends became Weegee.ch, a Swiss flatshare search engine. The product was free, which meant buying traffic wasn't an option. So I taught myself SEO out of necessity. After countless experiments, I discovered that backlinks moved the needle more than anything else.

When I started talking to other founders, I realized they all had the same problem: everyone knew backlinks mattered, almost nobody knew how to get them. That's when it clicked. Maybe the thing I built for myself could solve a much bigger problem.

Twitter: I grew my account to 10K and built a personal brand, and then the launch post and a few follow-up posts (e.g. the Product Hunt launch) got me the attention.

The first launch was by far the biggest. In January 2024, I got 166 customers, mostly from the launch tweet and the Stripe screenshots I posted afterward. I basically kept riding the Twitter wave as long as I could.

A month later, I launched on Product Hunt and got another 64 customers. But Product Hunt never featured me, so I believe most of those sales actually came from the Twitter buzz around the launch. I posted updates every few hours, including some drama about not getting featured, and friends helped amplify it.

By the time I turned to backlinks I already grew my Twitter profile to a few thousand followers. So what helped was me learning in public. I was not afraid to ask the stupid questions, then met other founders which knew way more about SEO than I did.

Then I created the tool for myself first. I didn't even intend to sell it to others. Posted a screenshot on Twitter and asked who would be interested. There were more than 10 people. I thought they were just replying out of kindness but then a few started to DM me to ask when the tool would be available. That's when I started to take it seriously. I then launched with the easiest possible prototype (a nocode tool at that point) and offered it to only 10 customers, so I could see how they would use it.

The first real affiliate was Ilias Ism, an SEO expert on Twitter. He also convinced me that if I wanted affiliates to care, the commission had to be attractive, so I settled on 40%. It sounded high at first, but I realized that distribution is a huge part of the value.

The real breakthrough came after my Product Hunt launch, when the buzz around the product led Edward Sturm, another SEO creator, to discover it. He has a large audience on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok – exactly the channels where I have little presence – and he became by far my biggest affiliate. Today, almost all affiliate sales come from him.

Since the launch, I've had two other noticeable spikes: Marc Lou randomly recommended the product on Twitter about a year later, which brought 47 sales, and a popular Instagram video from Edward Sturm brought another 23. Outside these spikes, the business is much steadier – typically around 5–7 sales a week, with some quieter weeks, especially during summer.

Affiliates now account for roughly 50% of my sales, but I never really planned to build an affiliate channel. I initially set up Tolt.io simply because I wanted to understand how affiliate marketing worked. I advertised the program on my website and to customers, but almost nothing came from that.

My attempt to turn regular customers into affiliates never really worked.

The tool itself was a SaaS solution which helped with outreach to other websites to ask for a backlink. This worked for me for Weegee.ch, but I saw that it didn't work for my customers. They were overwhelmed by what websites to write to, what their message should be, how to warm up their email, and so on. There were just too many variables for them to get right. My product was too complicated.

This almost never became a product.

While building my SaaS, I realized that some of the best backlinks are actually very easy to get. You don't need to email anyone or negotiate a guest post – you simply register on the right websites and get a backlink.

At first, I just wanted to create a short list for my SaaS customers. There were already plenty of “200 backlinks” lists out there, but I thought they were overwhelming. I wanted to create a curated list of only the best opportunities. But then I thought: why don't I launch this as a standalone product? It could be an entry product for my SaaS solution. Maybe I get 10, maybe 50 customers. Let's just try this.

Then I spent way too long researching it. Instead of a quick side project, it turned into three months of work. By then, I was running out of energy and started doubting whether I should even launch it. I asked a few customers what they thought, and several told me, “I don't think anyone would pay for this.”

Still, I decided to give it one proper shot. I spent an entire weekend writing a launch script and recording a launch video because I knew I needed some momentum.

On Monday morning, as I left for work, I told my wife, “I finally launched it. I've spent three months on it, but I don't think anyone will buy it. At least I can move on and get back to my SaaS.”

I launched it at $29 because I couldn't imagine anyone paying more. Then during work I watched my Twitter notifications and they started to blow up. The first customers immediately told me it was underpriced, so I raised it to $49 on the very first day. People started sharing it on Twitter because it solved a problem every founder has. Even though there were free backlink guides everywhere, people wanted a curated, actionable list. I posted a screenshot of the Stripe notifications on my phone, that post went even more viral, and within a few days I'd made around $3,000–4,000.

That was the moment I realized this wasn't just a side project. There was a real market for it.

My audience is deliberately narrow: first-time SaaS founders.

If you've just launched a software product, chances are you have exactly zero backlinks. That means Google has very little reason to trust your website, so even great content often struggles to rank. Before worrying about advanced SEO strategies, you first need to build that initial foundation. That's exactly who this guide is for.

It's not for SEO experts. If you've spent months learning SEO, you probably already know many of these opportunities or have your own link-building strategies. And it's not for agencies, ecommerce stores, or service businesses either. I regularly tell people that the product simply isn't built for them.

I'd rather solve one very specific problem for a very specific audience than create a generic SEO product that tries to help everyone and ends up helping no one particularly well.

The launch was almost two and a half years ago.

The first few months went really well. Then I realized that if I wanted this to become a real product, I needed a much better version. Version 1 was literally just a Notion page. I had spent three months researching the content, but I didn't want to spend even more time building software before validating the idea. So I simply sold access to a Notion URL.

After the launch, I quickly ran into the limitations of that approach. I couldn't ship updates properly, organizing the content became harder and harder, and I had no good way of seeing which backlinks customers actually built or collecting structured feedback. I needed a real application that would let me keep the content fresh, organize everything properly, and continuously improve it.

Building that took much longer than I expected – more than a year. I kept adding features and delaying the launch, and eventually I ran into burnout because I simply didn't ship soon enough.

During that time, AI arrived. Like many people, I wondered whether SEO was about to become irrelevant. I seriously considered not even finishing Version 2 because I thought, “If Google is in decline, who is going to buy an SEO product?”

But something interesting happened: the sales never stopped. Without doing much marketing, I was still getting three to five sales a week, around $500–1,000 every month. That gave me confidence that the problem was still very real.

Over time, I also realized that AI didn't replace Google the way many people predicted. In many cases, AI first searches the web and then summarizes the results. Ranking well on Google increasingly means being visible in AI-generated answers as well. That completely changed my perspective.

Looking ahead, I think video will be my biggest growth channel. One of my affiliates has built an audience by giving away practical SEO advice on YouTube and naturally recommending my product. I want to do the same. Building Version 2 taught me far more about SEO than I ever expected, and I'd like to share those lessons and correct some common misconceptions.

There are still plenty of growth opportunities I haven't explored. I've thought about email campaigns, although I'm not convinced they're as effective as they used to be. I've also never really experimented with paid ads.

The biggest challenge isn't a lack of ideas – it's time. My role at my full-time job has become much more demanding over the last two years, so growing this business is still something I do in the evenings and on weekends.

A curated database of the best backlinks for SaaS founders – helping new startups get their first Google rankings without needing SEO expertise.

Website: backl.io
X (Twitter): philkellr

Found your own audience or customers without a serious ad budget?

Email Alex at [email protected] if you'd like to share yours – he'll send over a short questionnaire, and your answers become a story just like this one, free. Past respondents have picked up real, tracked signups and sales just from being featured.

Subscribe for more like this – full stories and digest roundups land in your inbox about once a week, each one showing how someone found their customers while spending next to nothing on ads.

– Alex, tinyfound