Starting a small business
A history of Post Affiliate Pro
I thought it would be nice to make the very first post in our blog about the history of the product that started it all.
I was working in big consulting company, but I was not really happy with my life. I wanted to do something on my own, not working for others untill the end of my life, so I started developing a project called WysiwygPro.
It was a wysiwyg editor for HTML files, something like a file manager that allows you to view and edit all the directories and files on your web server.
I wanted to sell it over internet, so I created a website for it.
Unfortunately, nobody was interested. I sold only one or two copies per month, which was really not enough considering the price was $49 per copy.
As a part of my marketing efforts, I wanted to add an affiliate program for my website.
It was quite difficult to find an affiliate software that will suit my needs, finally I found a script called PHP-Affiliate.
Firstly I wanted just to customize it and use it, but soon I realized it is a code of poor quality. It was based on good ideas, but the code had to be rewritten from a big part.
So I improved the code, corrected major security holes and other problems. It took me 2 days to come out with the first version of Post Affiliate.
I called it Post Affiliate because it came after the PHP-Affiliate 
Unfortunately, an affiliate program didn’t help my marketing efforts.
Affiliate program will not help you, if you have product that doesn’t sell anyway.
I reached the very depths of my purse, I even had to borrow a little money from one of my friends.
I faced the problem of quitting my self business and finding a normal job to survive.
At that time, I was contacted by a guy from Taiwan, who wanted me to develop a custom affiliate system for him based on Post Affiliate.
We finally decided to make the new system from the scratch, because it was not worth building on the old PHP-Affiliate code.
Naive as I was, I started working on it without any deposit or contract, and after a month of development I finished the project.
Unfortunately, the guy from Taiwan just stopped communicating with me. After many unsuccessful attempts to contact him, I understood he doesn’t want to pay me for my work.
I had virtually no money, but almost finished product, much better than original Post Affiliate. I decided to risk it and put some more time to finish it.
After another two more weeks, the first version of Post Affiliate Pro was born.
I placed it on my page, and it suddenly started selling. I sold few copies in the very first month, and the sales just kept on increasing every month.
Now Post Affiliate Pro is successful product, running houndreds of affiliate programs all over the world.
The lesson I learned is to never give up. Persistence and a little bit of luck will make your goal come true.
August 18th, 2008 at 3:22 am
Very touching indeed this business startup story! Hopefully you will elaborate more into a more comprehensive version. I just like PAP and its story!
I am a full suporter of PAP, I use it myself
August 18th, 2008 at 5:13 am
Cool Story - well done, I always reccomend your products to anyone looking for an Affiliate program. It is so user friendly
August 20th, 2008 at 8:35 pm
Hi,
Thanks for telling the origin of post affiliate. I think there are many marketers looking for products like you are selling. It was good that Taiwan person has not bought your product which encouraged you to do more and sell your products globally.
I like the most important part i.e. you have kept your site as open source where you collect info. of customer requiremens and customize with new versions as per time requirements.
Its great to have great association with you and your company. I wish best of luck to you and coming future for both of us in win-win situation.
Thanks
Rahul Dhongadi
August 25th, 2008 at 9:59 pm
I have to say you should even more spend time on the PAP Software instead of doing software like Blogs. This is for a business perspective.
The reason for it is clear: take a look in google for similar affiliate products, there isn’t any kind of affiliate qualitty software available.
Therefore i would recomand to make pap even more powerfull to stay in a untouched area of sale for an affiliate software.
best regards
August 31st, 2008 at 9:01 am
I like the story and I like pap3. And I also like most of your software-products.
But: I would suggest you two authors: Al Ries and Jack Trout. It makes more sense to built up “one unbelievable great software” then a bundle of different “good” softwares. Imagie:
You have 100% of the power of your company. If you put this power in five products, every product gets 20% of it. If you put the power in just one software, it will get the over-burner.
There are so many things that can increase pap3 even more:
- Plug-Ins for Joomla, vBulletin, sugarcrm, vTiger xt-commerce and so on, that include the whole user-database instead of just the sales.
- Putting pap3 and pmp together that they are really “just one software”
- Including the best SEO-Strategies that you can imagine
- Integrating the ticket-system fully as a part of pap3
- Develop the (forgotten) pap alert
pap3 is great already, but it isn´t the “overburner” yet. With “overburner” I mean the pieces of software, that are “the one and only”. Think about Acrobat reader, think about Dreamweaver, think about WinZIP … if you have the positioning of this software-products then everybody, who needs an affiliate-system, will only use your software. But that for, you will need to put ALL power in the one software.
However, the software is still great. Even the others. This I guess is the difficulty of real good marketing: To say “No” to other good things.
I love the ticket-system. I like the liveAgent. But I dream about whant pap3 would be today, when you would have put all Power in just the one software.
Best wishes, Julian!
September 2nd, 2008 at 7:27 am
Hello Tom and Julian,
thanks for your opinions, we also learned the lesson that it is better to concentrate on few products.
We don’t want to extend the portfolio of our products more.
Our plan is that with the new engine we’ll make all our products integrable and modular.
We will make also new version of PAP Alert, but we simly don’t have time to do everything at once.
Making the new engine was a huge task, but it should pay off now in the speed in which we can make new versions and plugins.
September 4th, 2008 at 3:43 pm
I have a dream. A dream, that touched me. A dream, that I want to tell you.
In the middle of the dream there was a CRM. A Customer-Relationshipt-Management-Software. Like Salesforce, like vTiger, like SugarCRM. But not from them. It was from Qualityunit. It had theire Quality. It had theire style.
When I looked into the files of some of my customers, I recognized the data from SupportCenter. Beside the customer there where all theire tickets listed. How nice this is. The data from SupportCenter integrated into that CRM. I instantly saw all “new tickets” from that customer. I saw the open tickets.
But I also saw some time-sheets. They showed me, how many of my employes (I had some in that dream) spent how much time into that customer. Oh … this must be “TimeSheets”, the software, that I don´t have bought yet. But it seems much bigger, then “just” time-sheets. They where sorted in projects, the projects had deadlines and have a relationship between “project” and “sales”, how many mony each employe made hourly, daily and all together.
There was one of the employes who was really, really good, and he had a little “Online-Button” beside his name, in green colour. So I clicked on it and instantly a Chat-Window opened. Uh … there is the Live-Agent. I saw that he is chatting with two of my customers, who came from my website …. so I left him a little “thank-you”-Note and moved on.
Then I looked at an old friend of mine, who was courious about what I am doing. While in his data I see that he is having a good running website already, so I give him some information about my business. Easily and automatically I took a PDF, which is part of a viral pdf campaign in pap4, and could sent it to him. The PDF explained my concept of affiliate marketing. He directly called back and told me, that he likes the Idea and wants to start into it. I nearly would have told him “just sign in into the affilaite-program”, but then I saw the button “make new affiliate”. So I klicked this button, and so he now is an affiliate in pap, still based on the data of the crm.
He told me that now he wants to check the rest of the system, so he hang up and I looked a littel bit more in his User-Data. All the Tickets, interesting, what he did. His Photo. The comments of my employes. But what is that? It says “referer”? There is the name of an old friend of bouth of us. How nice, that was the guy who brought him into the system. The pap-concept completely integrated in the CRM. So I klick on the Referer and wach this old friend.
Beside his name about a dozend other names, some that I know and some that I don´t. Statistics about the money they “brouth in”, about what they bought themselfs, things like that. It is nice to see this “Tree of Referals”, which in this case is also a “Tree of friends”.
I know that some of the friend are really good guys, and we worked togehter a long time ago. So I ask them, if we want to work togehter again. One instantly said “yes”, so I wanted to give him the rights to check up custommers, to answer tickets and to make sales. Great … the great rights-concept from Support-Center is integrated into the whole system.
There is just one little thing in the dream, that I couldn´t find. It´s like the mystery of the dream. It´s the little thing, that I am courious about, even if it is not really important. No, it is not the publishing date. The publishing-date in my dream was “yesterday”. It also is not the question about the price. In fact … I don´t care about the price. For that … it doesn´t make a difference if it is 1.000 Dollars or 10.000 Dollars, I would buy it anyway.
The thing I couldn´t find out is … where is UnitMiner? I couldn´t find it. And I don´t know if I need it.
The rest … definitely.
This is my dream. And it is so nice … I don´t want to get out of it. Who shares that same dream?
Best wisehs, Julian!