Referrals — everyone seems to love them.
Referral programs continue to grow in popularity and although there are companies that have been in this space a long time, we’ve seen a few new launches in sectors that are quickly growing.
Digital products
Social Checkout is an API for enabling customers to refer people and redeem group discounts. The idea for Social Checkout came after cofounder Benyam Ephrem implemented Stripe & PayPal payments for his business that provides technical prep for interviewees.
“In [this] niche, many people know others that would want the same product, but I had no out-of-the-box way to tap into this social capital.”
Social Checkout is in beta. The makers are currently focused first on similar customers — digital products like online courses and desktop apps.
Newsletters
If you’re a creator, there’s a pretty good chance you’ve googled referral programs as well. Being in this space ourselves, nary a week goes by that we don’t read a tweet about successful referral programs from companies like Morning Brew and the Skimm.
You may remember SparkLoop, which launched on Product Hunt last year with the tagline “the first referral tool for newsletters.” SparkLoop presented 1-click integration with email provider tools like MailChimp and Campaign Monitor, making it easy for newsletter companies to add referrals directly into their product, just like Morning Brew does.
Competitors responded. Viral Loops launched its original referral product five years ago, but recently debuted its own newsletter product, designed specifically for writers and publishers. It follows GrowSurf. Also now a mature referral program provider, GrowSurf launched its own newsletter product earlier this year.
Then yesterday, Sparkloop revealed its latest hand with Magic Links. Magic Links eliminates email sign up forms altogether for newsletters that are cross-promoting with other newsletters — another popular tactic in this space.
It’s all great news for creators — the world just can’t seem to get enough of newsletters 😉.
“My kids are gonna freak out - just tested this out and got over 100 suggestions of what we could build [with our Legos]....even shows you were in the pile the necessary pieces are located!”- Adam Kazwell
By the way: It’s okay to freak out even if for your fully adult self.
Think of the last time you imported a spreadsheet. Did it work the first time? 🙄
Chances are, you and your customers have struggled with formatting data in Excel, mapping CSV headers, or correcting invalid fields.
This process of importing B2B data is known as data onboarding. And it's been isolated from innovation.
Flatfile, the data onboarding platform, intuitively makes sense of the jumbled data your users import, and transforms it into the format you rely on.
No touchy CSV templates. No building a clunky data importer. No expensive implementation teams hired to migrate data.
Airbnb released its Flexible Destinations feature. It's pretty simple — when you're more interested in a unique stay than the specific location, search in Flexible Destinations.