AffiliateSqueeze: Validate and Launch Lightweight Affiliate Tests for Early SaaS

I went down this rabbit hole around $2–3k MRR and learned the hard way that “I’ll use it if you add affiliates” is often just talk. I’d push back and ask that person how many sales they realistically expect to drive and what their audience looks like. If they can’t answer clearly, I wouldn’t build a whole program around them. What worked for me was starting super scrappy: manual tracking with coupon codes and Stripe metadata for 2–3 partners I already knew had reach. I did recurring commission for as long as the account stayed active, capped at, say, 12–18 months, so we were aligned on long-term retention. Once that showed real revenue, we switched to something like Rewardful and later played with PartnerStack when we wanted more structure. I tried a few different channels for finding affiliates too; Hypefury and Twitter DMs were decent, but Pulse for Reddit caught threads where people were already asking for tools like mine so I could build relationships first instead of throwing out random affiliate links.

I went down this rabbit hole around $2–3k MRR and learned the hard way that “I’ll use it if you add affiliates” is often just talk. I’d push back and ask that person how many sales they realistically expect to drive and what their audience looks like. If they can’t answer clearly, I wouldn’t build a whole program around them. What worked for me was starting super scrappy: manual tracking with coupon codes and Stripe metadata for 2–3 partners I already knew had reach. I did recurring commission for as long as the account stayed active, capped at, say, 12–18 months, so we were aligned on long-term retention. Once that showed real revenue, we switched to something like Rewardful and later played with PartnerStack when we wanted more structure. I tried a few different channels for finding affiliates too; Hypefury and Twitter DMs were decent, but Pulse for Reddit caught threads where people were already asking for tools like mine so I could build relationships first instead of throwing out random affiliate links.

https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1t8b8r9/ideas_for_referral_systems/ The payout amount and tiering is trivially easy. Figure out what you're willing to pay for a new customer. We do lifetime referrals and a percentage of what their referrals spend with us. The actually complicated part is preventing fraud and dealing with taxes. For dealing with fraud you will need to be able to determine if the person who signed up as an affiliate is also the account they referred. We've spent a significant amount of time on handling this. The other issue is taxes. You may need to gather personal info like SSN for US people and send out 1099s. For that you'll want to consult with a CPA to see.