Pass the readiness gate before you spend a day on this
After this lesson you can
Check your SaaS against the three conditions affiliates test in the first minute: product-market fit, a funnel that converts, and a site an affiliate can send traffic to.
Pass the readiness gate before you spend a day on this
An experienced affiliate lands on your site and decides within a minute whether to send you traffic. They are not being harsh. They only get paid when your visitor becomes a paying customer, so they read your site the way you would read a landing page you were about to spend money on. The gate below is that minute, written down.
The three questions
Do you have product-market fit? Not a feeling: paying customers who came through your website, signed up and bought a recurring plan, a defined ideal customer, and social proof on the page that says so. If you do not have paying customers yet, stop here. An affiliate cannot earn from a product nobody is paying for, and the rest of this track will not change that.
Does your funnel convert, and do you know the numbers? Visit to signup, signup to paid. You should know both rates because you have already paid to learn them, with your own ads or your own outbound. If you have never spent your own money to send traffic to your site, you do not yet know whether traffic converts, and you are about to ask someone else to find out at their expense.
Does the whole signup happen on one domain? The tracking script lives on the domain your marketing site uses. If signup, demo booking or checkout happens somewhere else, on a second domain from a rebrand, a form hosted by your CRM, a third-party scheduler or a payment provider's page, the visit and the conversion cannot be connected. Subdomains are fine. A second domain is not. This is the objection that ends the most sales conversations, and it has to be fixed before anything is installed.
Why the gate is the gate
You're just asking people who've never eaten in your restaurant to start recommending you, but you wouldn't bother asking the people who've already eaten there.
A restaurant with no regulars has nobody to recommend it. A restaurant with regulars has people who know the food, the service and the price, and recommending it costs them nothing. Your first affiliates are the people who have already eaten: your users, the consultants and agencies who implement your product for their clients, the partners who already send you customers. If those people are not recommending you, a network of strangers will not either.
The rough bar we use is about $10K in monthly recurring revenue. Below that, people are usually not recommending you yet, and the program has nothing to amplify.
What passing looks like
Three written answers, all yes. Your conversion rates on paper. (Terms you do not recognise are in the glossary.) Your signup and checkout on the domain your marketing site sits on. That is the whole gate. It takes an afternoon to check and it saves you six months.
What to expect
Ballpark figures for this stage. Not promises: your trial length and how you recruit move them in both directions.
Want the band for your own program? Run the timeline calculator. Two minutes, no signup.
Key takeaways
- Affiliates decide in a minute whether your site converts, because they are only paid when it does.
- The gate has three questions: product-market fit with paying customers, a funnel whose conversion rates you already know, and signup on one domain.
- The people who recommend you first are the ones who already use you. If they are not recommending you, a network will not either.
- Below roughly $10K MRR, start with the in-app referral program for your own users and come back later.
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.
- When Should a SaaS Launch an Affiliate Program?The full "when" answer, including what too early looks like.Help centre · Strategy & Basics
- Common Mistakes to Avoid in SaaS Affiliate MarketingThe long mistakes list. This lesson only takes the three that kill programs before launch.Help centre · Strategy & Basics
- What is a B2B SaaS Affiliate Program?If you need the definition first, it lives here, not in the Academy.Help centre · Strategy & Basics
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
We are sales-led, not product-led. Are we a candidate?
Partly, and the reason is reporting rather than tracking. The tracking script and the signup capture work on a book-a-demo funnel as long as the booking happens on your own domain. The difficulty starts after the demo: if the deal is closed in your CRM and invoiced by hand, the person who booked is often not the person who pays, and someone has to tell the platform what happened. That works, and it stays manual. If your entire funnel is off-domain forms and manual invoices, an affiliate program is the wrong tool.
Our product is distributed through a marketplace, so signup happens on someone else's domain.
Then that product cannot be tracked, and we say so up front. What can work is your own web app flow, where you own the signup form. Run the program on that, not on the marketplace listing.
Can we run the affiliate program to get our first customers?
No. Affiliates only earn when a customer pays, so a product with no paying customers gives them nothing to earn from and nothing to point at as proof. Use your own users and the in-app referral program first.
Finished this lesson?
Saved in this browser only. No account, no certificate, nothing sent anywhere.