A year ago I was building the first version of the affiliates feature in WinWinKit. It was super simple and lacked a lot of what are now basic capabilities. It took several months to get it into an actually usable state. Fast forward to now and it is by far our most important feature.
In this post I want to share our vision for the future of the platform.
Rising Industry Trend
If you look at how apps are marketed today, one trend is impossible to ignore: user-generated content. Not polished ads, but someone filming with their phone, showing an app on their screen, talking about it the way they would to a friend. It often outperforms ads that cost much more.
Why does it work? Because people trust people more than they trust ads. We all scroll past ads without thinking. But when a real person shows how they actually use something, we stop and watch. It does not feel like marketing — it feels like a recommendation. And recommendations are what make people download an app.
For app developers, this changes the playbook. The apps that figure out early how to get creators talking about them have a real advantage.
A Thought on CPM
An interesting part of this trend is how creators get paid. Many campaigns now pay per view, usually as CPM — a fixed amount per thousand views. Instead of negotiating a flat fee upfront, creators earn based on how their content actually performs. The brand pays for reach, and creators are motivated to make content that spreads.
But views are not revenue. A video can get a million views and bring no paying users. The app pays for attention, not for results.
This is why revenue-share is even better. With revenue-share, the creator earns a commission from the actual revenue they bring. If the app makes money, the creator makes money. Nobody pays for empty views, and nobody promotes an app they do not believe in. And for subscription apps it gets even more interesting: one good video can bring subscribers that keep paying for months, and the creator keeps earning from them the whole time. It turns a one-time post into long-term income.
Where WinWinKit Goes Next
More than ever I believe that affiliate marketing for apps is underrated. Quite obviously it is underserved too. The plan for us is straightforward — make WinWinKit into the go-to platform for working with affiliates at scale.
We’ve built and battle-tested a solid foundation — tracking and payouts. What comes next builds on top of it: content, community, and a marketplace.
Content
Today, when a creator posts about your app, that post disappears into the feed. You do not know it exists, how many views it got, or whether it brought you any users. You are running a program half blind. That changes with our content feature.
WinWinKit already pulls posts from social media automatically, so all the content your affiliates create is known to the platform. Next, we’re building an entire analytics suite around it. Views, likes, comments, engagement over time. You will finally see the full picture: who is posting, how often, and what kind of content resonates with people. That makes it easy to spot your most active creators, learn which formats and messages work best, and share those learnings with the rest of your affiliates.
Community
Running an affiliate program is not only about tracking. It is about relationships. The best programs are the ones where affiliates feel like partners. But today that communication happens somewhere else — email and DMs — scattered and easy to lose.
The vision is to bring it inside WinWinKit: a place to talk to your affiliates, share updates and new assets, celebrate wins, and keep everyone motivated. When affiliates feel connected to the app they promote, they promote it better. Community is what turns a list of affiliates into a team.
Marketplace
The biggest one. Right now the hardest part of affiliate marketing is finding each other. App developers do not know where to find creators, and creators do not know which apps offer good programs. Both sides waste time on outreach that mostly goes nowhere.
The vision is a marketplace inside WinWinKit where apps and creators meet. Apps post their programs with clear terms, creators browse and pick apps they actually want to promote. Content and Community make this possible: content shows what a creator can do, community keeps the partnership alive after the match. Less cold outreach, more matches that make sense — win-win for both sides.
I started building WinWinKit with only what I believed should exist. There was no data at hand, no big competitor, no list of apps to work with. A year in, affiliates went from a prototype feature to the one our customers care about most. That sets a clear direction for the future of the platform. I’m happy and excited about it.