YC-Backed Referly Raises $1M To Bring Affiliate Commerce To Everyone

Screen Shot 2012-10-15 at 6.14.09 AMReferly, a YC-backed company that makes it easy for anyone to earn a bit of money while sharing links to products they adore, just raised $1 million in seed funding.

Investors include New Enterprise Associates, Ignition Partners, 500 Startups, Jeff Lawson (CEO of Twilio), Elliot Loh, Eileen Burbidge, Ullas Naik, Michael Liou, Damien Tanner, Matt Monahan, and Carter Rabasa.

Danielle Morrill, the company’s CEO, is pretty frank about using the funding to go all out or go home. They’ll use the funding to hire a back-end engineer to scale up the service. Referly has about 10,000 users now and is growing 45 percent month-over-month.

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Referly Gets More Social, Launches API: Now Any Site Can Have A Referral Program

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Some more developments for Referly, the Y-Combinator/500 Startups company co-founded by Twilio’s ex-head of marketing, Danielle Morrill. In what may be a hat-tip to the adept use of APIs at her former employer Twilio, today Referly is launching an API program that will let any online merchant create a referrals program powered by Referly’s pay-per-action marketplace. At the same time, the company is launching a service that will drive more traffic to its own retail operation: a new shopping directory for people to browse products being recommended by users of Referly’s referral program.

Referly describes the new API scheme as “customer acquisition as a service.” Free to use while the product is in beta, it is constructed loosely around a Google AdWords-style business model: businesses decide how much they are willing to pay to get a new customer (represented by a signup, or upgrade or whatever else is chosen). The businesses “fund their account with a pre-paid deposit,” the company says. Referly subsequently takes from that account with each reward that is paid out: users get cash rewards when they generate actions like sign-ups or sales.

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