This may come as a surprise to you, but I’m a pretty big fan of partnerships. Affiliate partnerships, specifically.

I created Siren because I wasn’t happy with the way people talk about affiliate marketing, and I sure as hell wasn’t happy with the product offerings on the market.

Everything just…feels like a copy of the original idea, which has long…long since passed its prime. (I don’t even really think it ever worked as people claimed). Log into pretty much any affiliate solution and you’ll feel like you jumped into a time machine. It’s crazy.

That being said, I do believe in partnerships. In collaborations. Heck, when you install and use Siren, we don’t even call the people you bring into the system “affiliates”. They’re called “collaborators”.

That was a very intentional decision. To me, it completely re-frames how you look at these people. Instead of it being a passive relationship, it implies that there’s a much more active involvement.

So, is it really any surprise that when Siren launched, it was born from a conversation with a potential collaborator?

Step one of my process, before I even knew what I was creating, started with a conversation with someone in my network. This person had an audience, a successful product, and the will to talk candidly about what their customers needed.

And from a couple of conversations, A LOT of manic note-taking, one entire PHP framework, and about a year, I created Siren.

Siren was born from learning, and understanding that customer’s avatar deeply, and then expanding the product so that it could not only solve those problems, but also potentially solve problems for other avatars.

Once Siren was made, and launched, I knew exactly who my first affiliate partner was going to be. And the best part? It’s now a repeatable process that I can do with other use-cases for Siren.

Find a use-case, integrate with software for that use-case, partner-up, launch, repeat.

Based on my experience with this, I’ll never launch a product without an affiliate partnership lined up again. It completely transforms how you approach the product. You’ll get key insights, a built-in audience to sell to, and an opportunity to invest in a relationship with someone.

The best part? It all happens while enriching the lives of people directly impacting your life, instead of some technocrat hocking ads on a social media site.

It’s a good setup, I think. Hardly anything new, but I think it’s easier than ever to do this really well.