One of the scariest decisions we made at StatsDrone was to carve out a budget for an app redesign. 

The reason why it was nerve wracking for us was that we didn’t have a lot of money and the investment we raised was meant to just help keep the lights on. 

Not only were we raising to keep the lights on but to grow the team and try something to move the needle.

Was engineering or product design more important?

Looking back in time, the answer was both and luckily we did both. 

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I previously wrote 2 articles on product and they are for reference:

These articles and my growing appreciation for the role of product was heavily influenced by this one company called UserActive. Big shoutout to Peter Loving, Mariana García and Amadeu Thomson for the work on StatsDrone and of course some of the other team members there.

So if they say a picture is worth 1000 words, this post is going to contain more of the designs made by UserActive. 

UserActive

What is my goal in writing this article?

If anybody gave me their affiliate site today to improve it, I would be taking that project straight to UserActive. 

I didn’t know what the value of a redesign would do for us but we were trying anything to both succeed as well as survive. 

Since StatsDrone is a SaaS company, we are always on the lookout for how we can make our app better. Thankfully I discovered one of Peter Loving’s webinars because that was the only intro we needed to give our app a redesign that was a product focused design. 

At the time our options for an app redesign looked like this:

  1. Do nothing (save time and money)
  2. Design the app myself (I designed our original app)
  3. Hire a UX designer on Upwork
  4. Hire UserActive

Now that I’ve gone through the experience of designing my first app and then having UserActive redesign our app, I’m handing the work off to them time after time.

Product as the north star, not SEO

I recently saw a post from someone that celebrated the launch of a new iGaming affiliate site.

Sure enough, I went to it and I was instantly questioning if this company knew what they were doing. Unless they are well versed in black hat SEO, I don’t have a lot of confidence this affiliate site will succeed.

There was no real product behind this site and although UserActive could do a great job giving it a new design, it wouldn’t make a difference in this case. 

The world doesn’t need another casino affiliate review site claiming it has fair and transparent reviews, honest reviews, etc… Yet when I go to the author of some of the reviews, it is clear as day they are using anonymous people. 

UserActive is a product design agency and anybody can design a website but designing a product is another process. 

What I appreciate about UserActive was that the team lead and lead designer took the time to understand everything about StatsDrone. They tested out the current app and wanted to understand what was important for our users.

Next steps? Try UserActive

If I was building affiliate sites today, I would be ONLY giving the design work to UserActive.

For all the things I see wrong in affiliate marketing today, this is one company that can not only help you build a better designed product, but they'll make you realize what building a great product is all about.

Here I'll just share some of the other pages designed by UserActive.

Above you can see the internal list of affiliate programs. 

The above is our invoice generator built by Darrell Helyar

Applying SaaS to affiliate marketing

I believe I've become a better affiliate marketer from my experience in building a SaaS app.

It all comes down to users and customer success. Something we need to see more of in affiliate marketing.