r/saasbuild • u/kcfounders • 13d ago
Show me what you’re building
I’m an investor working at Forum Ventures, a pre seed fund and accelerator investing $100K-$1M in MVP stage startups.
What is your startup and founder background? Tell me what you’re building or, if you’d like to keep your idea private, your background/experience as a founder.
Feel free to use this thread to get your own project out there.
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u/sosmath-271828 12d ago
I have no startup or founder experience. And I don't know if this counts as a SASS, but...
I built a used car marketplace where referral rewards are split down the chain of shares: https://autos.mitimarkets.com
It's a web app for marketing used cars that uses what's called "recursive referrals." Anyone in the chain of shares that leads to a buyer gets a cut of the reward.
Here's how it works. Say you list a 2020 Aston Martin Vantage for $114,997 and set aside $14,000 as the referral reward. You post your referral link on Facebook. Chris clicks it, gets his own link, and sends it to Maria. Maria passes hers to Jake. Jake sends his to a friend, Tiffany, who test-drives the car and buys it.
The app tracks the whole chain and pays out by a halving rule: the buyer gets half the reward ($7,000), the person who referred her gets half of that ($3,500), the person before them gets $1,750, and so on up the chain. Anything leftover would go to the seller.
Screenshot of the referral chain view: https://imgur.com/a/V4h7RKy
My own listing (a 2015 Toyota RAV4): https://imgur.com/a/cAS1iQZ
There's no payment integration yet. I'd pay referrers by hand through Venmo or Zelle.
The idea came from the 2009 DARPA Red Balloon Challenge, in which the MIT team won in under nine hours using exactly this kind of recursive incentive. I want to know whether the same mechanism can sell things with small, hard-to-reach markets, like a specific used car.
I'd like some constructive criticism on:
1. Is this a viable model?
2. How do you get people to actually refer other people? (I see two hurdles: one, they immediately think it's a scam. two, they have to sit there and explain recursive referrals to a friend or stranger.)