Introduction

OK, so you are a start-up on a shoestring.
How do you get your great product to spread to your target audience and to new regions?

Well, you can try to promote it by your own online efforts if you know what you are doing. But maybe you don't and you don't have enough people / time to do this. Your time is probably best utilized DEVELOPING your product anyway, right? You are great at developing, but maybe you wouldn't even know where to begin promoting it. You could pay an agency to do it for you. The cost would likely be pretty high. And you don't have the budget for it. You need to start selling your product first to be able to afford traditional advertising.

You could also hire some people in the regions you are targeting to make the sales. But here you'd also have to have money ready ahead of time to pay these people. And how do you find them anyway!?

So here we are, with the age old chicken and egg problem. You don't have the necessary financial backing and nor you have people to work on this. But your product won't take off without any promotion!

There IS another way!
If you are happy to share a significant percentage of any profits from customers referred to you by third parties, you can do just that: Offer large rewards for delivering customers to you and it will not cost you a cent until profit from actual sales is in your account. Then you just give a pre-agreed share of it to the promoters of your great product.

Right, that's part of the problem solved, but how do I find such commission-based promoters you ask? This only solves the first part of the problem - money. How do I find these people to start with and how do I manage the referred customers, pay the referrers and prove to them that I'm standing behind my word and paying them what I promised so that they have the necessary trust to even start working for me? That's where ProfitShare.ninja comes in!

How ProfitShare.ninja solves your problem

ProfitShare.ninja has all the necessary tooling for you to manage, keep statistics, distribute payments and prove to your potential associates that you indeed are keeping your word. Furthermore, it solves the second problem by already having many potential promoters looking for the next big thing they want to sink their marketing teeth into. These users are periodically checking the list of newly available projects available for promotion and profit sharing and they also get notifications of new arrivals right into their mailboxes. Then they utilize any or all of the many available advertising avenues they have access to and hopefully, if your product is really as good as you think it is, they WILL BRING YOU THE CUSTOMERS you so desperately need.

And how much is all this going to cost you? Nothing. Really, nada, zilch, zero! You list your project on ProfitShare.ninja and just set the percentage of the profits from customers delivered by your project's promoters. That's it! What you offered to pay them is what you pay, no more. We then take a small percentage from their profits. That's how this works. Simple! The main thing is that you do not ever pay a single cent unless real profits are flowing into your coffers.

Do you want to know more about how the whole process works?
Then visit our About page.

What you have to do

To utilize our system you will need to do the following:

• Agree with your terms and conditions.
• Implement a simple one-call API.
• Store coupon tokens issued by us and link them to referred customers.
• Store reported potential customers' emails if they are passed onto you and report any future transactions of this customer after he or she creates an account with you at any point of time in the future.
• Every 14 days pay invoices that we issue for the total value of profit share you offered to your promoters from referred customers that made a purchase in the two past weeks or make sure that the credit card you registered with us has sufficient funds on it.
• Refund test purchases immediately. For more on test purchases go here.

For more details on implementation read the "Implementing the API page.

Setting up your project

Setting up your project is pretty straight forward and self-explanatory. We just may need to explain couple of concepts:

Setting profit share percentages

You are, at the minimum, required to set the default share percentage. This percentage will be used if you do not define any specific transaction types, do not report a specific transaction type when reporting a transaction or you report a transaction type that does not match any of those you defined.

You can define specific transaction types and different profit share percentages in the "Transaction types" section. For each transaction type in description you should briefly explain what is the usual percentage of your actual profit from that particular type of transaction and how it is calculated. In order for that to be clear, the calculation should only include direct costs like cost of payment processing, NOT your variable business costs. You have to consider your variable costs BEFORE setting the profit share percentage that you offer to your promoters. Anyone should be able to easily calculate the dolar value of profit from your explanation and the resulting profit share value.

So for example:

If the product you are selling for $100 costs you $90 and the payment processing is 3% you should write something like this: "The profit from these sales is (around) 7% as our mark-up is 10% and payment processing costs 3%."

Or if you are offering a platform for 3-rd parties and only charging a percentage from transactions yourself, you could say something like: "We charge 5% from these types of transactions. 2% out of this is payment processing cost so the profit is 3% from the total amount of the transaction."

Project page URLs

In this section you simply define the URL of the landing page where you want your new potential customers redirected. No rocket science.

But your project's focus may be wide and different sections of your application may be interesting to different groups of people. In such cases you can define any number of additional landing URLs that the promoters can use to direct the right potential customers to the most suitable landing pages. In that case do use the "URL Description field" to help your promoters to choose the right landing page.

Linked images

If you want your promoters to be able to attract potential customers with suitable well-designed graphical ads, in this section you have the opportunity to list links to all the image files you want available for graphical ads. You can link these images to any number of project URLs defined in the section above by selecting a URL and then checking the boxes next to images you want the selected URL to have available as a choice.

Owning organization

Each project is linked to an owning organization - either a default one or one you define. If you have more than one project listed on ProfitShare.ninja you can use the "owning organization" to group them. Invoices are generated not per project, but per owning organization and credit cards are also linked to owning entities, not projects. This for example allows you to manage your own personal projects separately from your company's projects and in reverse it allows several users linked to a single project or group of listed projects.

Being truthful

In your project definition and descriptions of transaction types be truthful. The system will show the true actual percentages as an average on the first few transactions and stating widely different numbers from the actual numbers you will be reporting may result in a promoter test with an unfavourable result, which would lower your project's rating and therefore it would lower the project's chances of attracting eager promoters.

Making sure that your API implementation works

Please use the "Visibility: Hidden" checkbox when listing a new project to keep it hidden from the public until you have successfully tested the implementation of our simple API. If the API is not yet implemented when you register your project and you leave it visible on the site, an user may decide to promote it and test it, which would end up in a negative result, lowering your product's rating even before it had any chance.

Ratings

Your project's ratings are determined from your projects truthfulness, not directly from users rating it.

The rating is calculated from two different sources:

• The owning organization may incur rating penalty points as the percentage difference between actually paid profit shares versus total of invoices due. A 3% a day are subtracted from all organization's projects ratings for every day an invoice (or several of them) is/are not paid after due date. When finally paid, the percentage returns to the simple calculation above without the subtraction for days but a year-lasting rating negative points will be subtracted from the total every time this will happen. These will be 1% for between 5 and 10 days overdue, 3% for up to 15 days overdue, 6% for over 15 days overdue and so forth. You can remove these negative points sooner than in a year time only by paying the referrers 10, 20 or 30% "sorry" bonus on top of the amount you owed them.
  Since this is an organization penalty, it will apply to all projects that organization owns.
• The project incurs substantial rating penalty points for failed tests and smaller penalties for successful tests which were not rated well. This can happen when your description of a transaction type's actual average profit margin is to far from the tested result. Test rating 3 results in 5% decrease of the project's overall rating, rating 2 results in 10% and rating 1 in 15% penalty.

If you feel that a test result rating is low due to exceptional circumstances you can explain (like the product purchased during the test was on special and therefore its profit margin was significantly lower than normal etc.) you have the opportunity on the "Tests" page for that project. The user may then adjust the rating to a more favourable one. If this does not work and you are sure you can explain this as a one-off thing, you can contact us to resolve this problem and cancel those rating penalty points.

Featuring your listings on ProfitShare.ninja

By default, when an user opens the project list page, the listed projects are sorted first by their "featured" status, then by whether they are new or not and them by the percentage share offered. That means that the first listed projects are always those whose owners decided to feature them on ProfitShare.ninja. As opposed to the second sorting criteria which is either YES (the project is new = 30 days old or younger) or NO, the featured projects are sorted by the actual number of paid so called promo-points. You have total freedom as to how long you want your project promoted, when and with how many points.

Apart from being sorted at the top, the promoted listings are also prominently highlighted within the list as well as on their detail own page.

You can set up any number of future promotions for each of your projects. Promotions can overlap, in which case they add up promo-points together to determine the project's exact position at or near the top of the default sort order.

To set up a promotion, log in and open the project edit page of the project you wish to promote. You can do so either from your "My Account" page or from the search results page where you check the "My own projects only" checkbox in the "Filter" section. On the project edit page, in the right-side section called "Scheduled promotions" click the "click here" link. On the page that opens you are required to set the start and finish dates and the promotion amount you wish to invest. You can start with investing as little as just $10. From the combination of the selected length of the promotion period, the number of countries your project is available in and the invested amount a number or promo-points per day is calculated. The calculation itself is explained on the promotion setup page. The only requirement is that a minimum number of daily points need to be reached. This minimum varies based on the number of countries for which the project is available.

As an example, for a project available in the whole world (251 countries) this minimum is 250 points. That means that for the minimum of 10 dollars such project can be promoted for up to 15 days. Another project that is available in only a single country has to reach at the minimum 5000 points which means that for the same 10 dollars it can be promoted for up to 6 and a half months! You can clearly see that this pricing structure makes featuring projects available to virtually everybody.

Since you can schedule as many promotion periods as you like, you can start with a small point value and keep an eye on the type of searches you want your project to return at the very top. If someone surpasses you you can easily set up another promotion for the remaining period of the current promotion to get to the top again.

This system makes it much easier for smaller local-only businesses to compete for good positions in the list for searches filtered on only the country their product is available for. Odds are that such projects will also be most interesting for promoters from that same country searching for the next great project to help to promote.