How Foxit scaled its affiliate program 5x in 18 months — and turned it into a top digital revenue driver — with PartnerStack

At its core, Foxit is a software company that helps knowledge workers do more with documents. Trusted by over 700 million users worldwide, its AI-powered PDF editing and eSigning products make document workflows faster, smarter and more secure.

To fuel its next phase of growth, Foxit looked to expand into new customer channels. PartnerStack — with its powerful partner network and automation capabilities — enabled Foxit to launch and scale a high-performing affiliate program that quickly expanded its reach.

This presented a clear, untapped opportunity to establish and scale an affiliate program.

Director of Digital Marketing Lauren Menichella and Demand Generation Manager TJ Chen built and scaled Foxit’s affiliate program in just 18 months. With PartnerStack’s features and B2B Network support, the program has expanded from under 100 to 500 partners and turned it into a high-performing digital revenue channel that now drives consistent new-customer growth with minimal effort.

As Menichella says, “This program drives a lot of incremental revenue for us, with very little lift on our team’s side. We don’t have to spend a lot of time, and we’re still generating a large ROI, which makes it easy for my team — and the business loves it.”

Building a high-performing affiliate program

In early 2024, Foxit didn’t have a meaningful affiliate program. While the marketing team had access to PartnerStack, the platform was underutilized, and the opportunity to drive incremental digital revenue remained unrealized — until the team decided to take action.

“We kind of reverse-engineered it,” says Menichella. “We had the PartnerStack tool, but the platform was underutilized and so we needed to figure out how to actually drive revenue for it — because we were paying for this tool that no one was using.”

So, the team asked Chen to take control. With a previous professional background focused more on demand generation and performance marketing, he turned to PartnerStack for guidance and tools — quickly growing the program, efficiently onboarding new partners and steadily increasing revenue with minimal effort from the team.

“I didn’t have much experience in partnerships or affiliates in general,” he says. “But I was able to really learn the ropes through PartnerStack: understanding what’s a good playbook for us to activate new partners, how to get them on board and be able to figure out a commission structure and educate in a way that makes sense to empower them to drive growth.”

The impact has been swift and significant. 

As Menichella notes, “We now see it as a big revenue driver for digital. It is one of our consistently highest driving revenue channels, and so it has become an important part of our program.”

Since the affiliate program’s launch and maturation, Foxit has seen 250–300% year-over-year revenue growth from 2024 to 2025, a clear sign of the program’s accelerating momentum.

Learning the playbook: onboarding and activating partners

Taking ownership of the affiliate program, Chen focused on recruiting, activating and engaging affiliate partners. Here, PartnerStack’s support was critical in building the program efficiently.

“PartnerStack provides end-to-end support — from partner recruitment to enablement, to help with troubleshooting tech stacks and commissions,” he explains.

Foxit’s PartnerStack account managers helped Chen acclimate to the affiliate space — providing guidance on identifying top-performing partners across the networks and outreach strategies to drive applications from the partners they want to work with.

Scaling the system

Specifically, Foxit leverages PartnerStack’s B2B Partner Network and the Discovery Tool to scale and optimize recruitment.

“We’re able to have a very robust platform where we can filter what type of partners we want to engage with. What’s their business size? What’s their region, to support our internal business growth goals? That has been really helpful from a peer outreach perspective,” Chen says.

Menichella highlights the value of account manager introductions:

“The partners from the network that the PartnerStack team introduced us to are the ones who have driven the most revenue for us. The PartnerStack team has been great at providing us with all of the necessary information on different partners — what they specialize in, the commission structure — so we can pick and choose what makes the most sense for us.”

PartnerStack’s centralized reporting also provides actionable insights.

“Having a centralized hub where we can communicate with partners, view their performance and access robust reporting helps us spot trends in revenue and activity,” says Chen. “It lets us pinpoint which top-performing partners to engage more with — and which ones might be dropping off and need more education or one-on-one support. Having that data available, and being able to slice and dice it, has been incredibly helpful.”

Together, these factors have been key in scaling Foxit’s affiliate program — both in partners and revenue.

“It’s the vast array of partners that PartnerStack has in the platform — everything from the coupon sites, the influencers, the content, the credit card reward programs,” Menichella says. “We can really drive incremental revenue.”

She adds, “There were a lot of places where we just weren’t active before — whether it was coupon sites, YouTube influencers or content creators. It’s the places that we weren’t reaching previously that we’ve now been able to drive the incremental revenue.”

Driving efficiency into automation and AI

PartnerStack’s automation and AI tools have further improved program efficiency and time savings. In fact, Chen estimates the platform saves the team 20–30 hours per month by automating tasks like partner outreach emails and recruitment.

For example, he uses PartnerStack’s AI Matches feature to prioritize partners aligned with the program’s ideal customer profile:

“We can just go through those and prioritize those partners for outreach purposes,” he says. “That has saved us a lot of time in outreach and recruitment.”

For Menichella, the time savings related to recruitment are key. 

“It would take us so much more time to research all these partners and try to go and find them, whereas with PartnerStack, it’s all in a centralized hub. It just makes it so much easier for my team.”

Making measurable impact — without major lift

Foxit’s strategic approach to its affiliate program has delivered measurable results: strong partner engagement, meaningful digital revenue and consistent new-customer growth — all with minimal marketing effort.

“PartnerStack has really helped us to drive incremental revenue and make sure that we are covering all our bases,” Menichella says. 

The platform has become one of Foxit’s top session-driving channels for the website. “Month over month, we just see it continue to grow,” Menichella notes. “It’s the same thing with revenue: it grows month over month. It’s kind of incredible.”

Chen echoes the steady growth. “A lot of business metrics are coming from PartnerStack — we’re seeing revenue growth, more trials across our different product lines and business leads. It’s impacted us in many different ways.”

As he puts it, “It’s low lift, low friction. By building efficient workflows, we’ve achieved exponential outputs without expanding workload. That’s something we love about partnerships and PartnerStack.”

Looking ahead: Scaling smarter, not harder

With a strong foundation in place, Foxit’s affiliate program is positioned for continued growth, strengthened by PartnerStack’s ongoing support.

“PartnerStack has been such a good partner for us, really understanding what our strategy is, what’s important to us and introducing us to those partners,” Menichella says.

Chen and Menichella plan to deepen engagement with top-performing partners, expand the program’s reach and create more educational content — while exploring new ways to leverage AI and automation to optimize partner engagement.

Their success with Foxit’s affiliate program reflects a focus on scalable systems and smart partnerships like PartnerStack, which drive sustainable growth over time.

“The program itself is in a good place right now,” Chen says. “I’m super happy about that, and for the future I really want to drive consistent growth — partnering with top affiliates in the space that continue to spur our branding and our message.”