In the last few weeks, PayPal-owned Honey, which claims to find you the best coupon codes for a deal, has been at the center of controversy. Allegedly, the tool sneakily earned affiliate money by changing attributes of product links creators posted on their videos. At the center of it, the problem was how affiliate links work and how the money goes to whoever has the last link when the user makes the purchase.
Former Vercel employee Steven Tey thinks his open-source URL shortener and link-tracking service Dub.co can solve this problem by removing the need to use coupon codes and embedding them in the link.
The company is building an attribution and affiliate product that creators can use to create their own links. And users will only get a discount if they use that specific link.
“We want to make attribution much more transparent to creators as well as businesses to avoid situations like the Honey scandal, where anyone can steal the attribution,” Tey said on a call with TechCrunch.
Tey started Dub.co while working at Vercel as an open source URL shortener. He added link tracking along the way. He built this project to better understand products Vercel was shipping. Over time, Dub.co became a full-fledged SaaS service. Tey left Vercel in late in 2023 and started the company around the same time.
“There was a big problem with attribution tracking to understand where our revenue was coming from. At Vercel, at that time, we didn’t know how our developer advocacy work like creating articles and tutorials translated into revenue. So this planted the seeds for Dub,” Tey said.
He added that after launching Dub.co, he realized that the affiliate space was antiquated and messy with not many tools for customization. That is when he understood that there is more to the link tracking space than just URL shortening services.
While the company’s primary revenue source is businesses and enterprises, it also offers a free plan for people to shorten their links and track them. Notably, the startup is working with the Malaysian government to utilize the open source side of the project to build out a link shortener and tracker for authorities. Plus, companies like Twilio use the SaaS hosted version of Dub.co and customize it according to their needs to track their links, campaigns, and events. What’s more, YouTube channels like Huberman Lab is using Dub’s solution to track affiliates.
Dub.co launched a new product called Conversions this week, which can track real-time marketing clicks converting to signups or sales. The startup said this will help companies track granular metrics like customer acquisition costs, retention rates, and lifetime value to better understand marketing returns. Dub.co can also integrate with tools like Shopify and Stripe to better track conversions.
Tey noted that while Dub.co offers AI features, it doesn’t want them to take over core products. Currently, users can use AI to create custom reports or get suggestions for titles and descriptions for different links. The startup is also using AI for auto-tagging links to existing categories.
Joseph Jacks, founder of OSS Capital, said that Dub.co has an advantage over the competition with its open source nature, better user experience, and design.
The company has raised $2 million from investors including OSS Capital; Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch; Balaji Srinivasan; design service Framer’s founders Jorn van Dijk and Koen Bok; former Facebook designer Soleio, who has been an early backer of Vercel, Perplexity, and Figma; and Cal.com CEO Peer Richelsen.
“Links are the foundation of the web — pair that with attribution and the addressable market is massive, tens of billions minimum,” Jacks told TechCrunch over email.
“By turning short links into attribution engines, Dub can help marketers answer the age-old question of ‘What’s my ROI on my marketing spend?’ — backed by real-world conversion data.”
