Show HN: Review my startup: shrtn.co - Affiliate based URL shortener • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Review my startup: shrtn.co - Affiliate based URL shortener

#11

Post by tommizzle » Wed, Oct 27, 2010, 4:49 PM UTC

dot wrote: post #9

Nice idea. Tip: I'd stay away from calling it a shortener. That market is very saturated and a lot of people will leave right away. Play on the fact that your users can get commissions for millions of products across hundreds of merchants without even signing up. "Just give us your email and we'll let you know when you made a sale." Bonus idea: credit your users with a few small sales in the first few days. Funny, se…

Thanks for the feedback! Interesting idea about not calling it a shortener. I'll have a think about possible alternatives :)

Re: Show HN: Review my startup: shrtn.co - Affiliate based URL shortener

#12

Post by ultrasaurus » Wed, Oct 27, 2010, 5:27 PM UTC

I doubt I'd ever earn enough to be worth cutting a check to, but if we could pick from a (short) list of charities, there might be enough to be worthwhile.

Re: Show HN: Review my startup: shrtn.co - Affiliate based URL shortener

#13

Post by notahacker » Wed, Oct 27, 2010, 6:43 PM UTC

dkokelley wrote: post #8

tommizzle wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my eyes the value proposition is that people can replace their usual URL shortener with shrtn, and potentially earn money without having to sign up to multiple affiliate schemes etc.

Ok, so you provide convenience. This only works for people who don't already have an affiliate link though. If I am BigTimeBlogger and I want to share things that could earn me some money, it would probably make sense for me to create an affiliate account for the products I recommend, just so I can earn more (you take a cut of the commissions, right?). On the flip side, if I'm JoeNobody sharing a link to the camera I…

With sufficiently large scale you can negotiate better rates with affiliate programs to the point where you can return similar amounts to marketers as they'd earn signing up to the programs directly - at least that's what Skimlinks claim to offer in their advertising pitch.

Services that automatically generated shortners for user-submitted links (e.g. twitter clients and discussion forums) are also logical targets for such a service.