Recognise the bad-fit signals, including the ones where we tell you not to start
After this lesson you can
Spot the six signals that make a program fail regardless of platform: checkout off your own domain, a domain mismatch, an active AppSumo deal, sub-$10 pricing, no product-market fit, and a commission that earns an affiliate under $10 per customer payment.
Recognise the bad-fit signals, including the ones where we tell you not to start
Some signals mean an affiliate program will fail regardless of platform, effort or commission. We would rather tell you now than have you find out in month six. Here they are, and what each one actually means.
The six signals
Signup, demo booking or checkout on a different domain than your marketing site. The tracking script cannot follow a visitor from one domain to another, so the click and the conversion never meet. Move the form onto your own domain. It converts better there anyway, because your social proof is on the same page.
A marketing site and an app on mismatched domains. Same problem, different cause: often a rebrand that left the app on the old name. Until the domains line up, nothing can be attributed.
An active AppSumo deal. A lifetime deal running in parallel with a recurring plan gives affiliates a worse offer to promote than the one your own deal page shows. Wait until it is over.
Plans priced under about $10 a month. Even a generous percentage of a small number is a small number. The arithmetic below explains why affiliates walk past these programs.
No paying customers yet. Covered in lesson 1, and worth repeating because it is the one we flinch at most: if nobody is paying, there is nothing for an affiliate to earn and nothing to point at as proof that the product works.
A commission that earns the affiliate under $10 per customer payment. This is the line professional affiliates use, whether or not they say it out loud. Below it, promoting you is not worth their time, whatever the percentage.
The arithmetic from the affiliate's side
Take your monthly revenue per account and multiply it by the commission you have in mind. That is what an affiliate earns each time one referred customer pays.
- A $29 plan at 20% earns the affiliate $5.80 per payment. Below the line.
- A $99 plan at 20% earns $19.80. Comfortably above it.
- A $500 plan at 10% earns $50, which looks excellent until you remember that a $500 plan usually comes with a sales cycle affiliates do not like waiting through.
The percentage on its own says nothing. The price it is a percentage of, and the sales cycle behind it, decide whether anyone applies.
What is not a bad-fit signal
Being niche is not one. Niche programs take longer to get from zero to one, because fewer affiliates already have your audience, but they run. Being outside the US or Europe is not one; where your affiliate's traffic is matters, where the affiliate lives does not. Not using Stripe is not one either: payment tracking runs through the API for every other processor.
Key takeaways
- Six signals mean not yet: off-domain signup, mismatched domains, an active AppSumo deal, plans under about $10, no paying customers, and a commission under $10 per customer payment.
- Do the arithmetic from the affiliate's side: monthly revenue per account times the rate. Under $10 per payment, nobody applies.
- A high-ticket plan with a small percentage can look fine and still fail on sales-cycle length.
- Niche, non-US and non-Stripe are not bad-fit signals.
The detail lives in the help centre
This lesson tells you the order and the judgement. The clicks are in the articles below. Open one, do the step, and you will find a way back to this lesson at the top of the article.
Reference: read if you need the detail
Background you can skip on a first pass.
Do this before the next lesson
Each step says how much counts as done. Doing a third of it and moving on is how programs stall.
Questions we hear at this point
The marketplace sits behind the higher plan. Why should we pay for that before the channel is proven?
You should not, and the plans are built that way on purpose. Growth carries the full affiliate program and the in-app referral program so you can validate the channel privately with your own network, without a marketplace listing. Scale Up is where you buy access to the network once you have proven that people recommend you. The listing sits there because affiliates in the network only earn when a listed company converts, and a marketplace full of programs that do not convert is worthless to them.
Do you actually have affiliates in our category, in our country?
The network is B2B SaaS only. Big, horizontal categories such as sales, marketing and productivity tools recruit fastest; niche verticals take longer. Country matters less than you think: what matters is where an affiliate's audience is, which is why affiliates connect their analytics so you can vet on traffic rather than on a profile field. And the honest answer on any network: it is an extension of your own recruiting, never a replacement for it. Of roughly 2,000 affiliates who completed a full profile, about 650 were accepted into the vetted database, because we would rather show you fewer real ones.
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