I'm familiar with this space (I've written a couple of books on scholarships and another on resumes for recent grads) and I'm also familiar with the affiliate marketing space, so I can give you a pretty good idea of the funding model.
Generally speaking, lenders pay very strong referral/affiliate fees for funded loans. $50-100 apiece is safe to assume. So SLH's business model very likely goes something like this:
a) They recognize that there are millions of students out there with more student loans than they can handle;
b) There's no central "go-to" student-loan refinancing hub out there that's well-branded as such for students;
c) They build this site/company to be the household name of student-loan refinancing, and collect thousands of dollars a day in referral fees kicked back to them by the banks they're linking to;
d) cloak the site in a handful of goodwill/free-information articles and a heroic birth-of-the-company narrative to encourage good feelings and trust among their customers.
More power to them and all, it's a good idea and may work very well, but I'd be more inclined to believe the true origin story is more like, "we could make millions in referral fees if we could get all the student-loan refinancers to go through us first" rather than "I started this thing because I wanted to HELP PEOPLE!"
joshbarsch42 karma
I'm familiar with this space (I've written a couple of books on scholarships and another on resumes for recent grads) and I'm also familiar with the affiliate marketing space, so I can give you a pretty good idea of the funding model.
Generally speaking, lenders pay very strong referral/affiliate fees for funded loans. $50-100 apiece is safe to assume. So SLH's business model very likely goes something like this:
a) They recognize that there are millions of students out there with more student loans than they can handle;
b) There's no central "go-to" student-loan refinancing hub out there that's well-branded as such for students;
c) They build this site/company to be the household name of student-loan refinancing, and collect thousands of dollars a day in referral fees kicked back to them by the banks they're linking to;
d) cloak the site in a handful of goodwill/free-information articles and a heroic birth-of-the-company narrative to encourage good feelings and trust among their customers.
More power to them and all, it's a good idea and may work very well, but I'd be more inclined to believe the true origin story is more like, "we could make millions in referral fees if we could get all the student-loan refinancers to go through us first" rather than "I started this thing because I wanted to HELP PEOPLE!"
But that's cool, whatever.
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