Start with your own network: users to the referral program, partners to the affiliate program

Would you recommend a restaurant you have never eaten in? Neither will an affiliate who has never used your product. The people who recommend you first are the ones who already know the food, the service and the price: your users, and the agencies, consultants and partners who put your product in front of their own clients. Start there, before the network, because with strangers you first have to sell them on selling you, and that is the slow part.

Two programs, two audiences

Your own network splits in two, and each half goes to a different program.

Users go to the in-app referral program. They do not need to be told who you are. They need a reason to share and something to give: the referral program is double-sided, so the person who refers gets something and the friend gets something, and the giving side is usually what makes people act. Tie the reward to the thing you want new users to do in their first two weeks, and ask at value moments, right after a renewal or a first success, rather than at random.

Agencies, consultants and partners who already use your platform for their clients go to the affiliate program. For them the referral program is a one-off benefit and the economics are wrong. They implement your product on behalf of clients, they recommend it as part of their stack, and those clients tend to convert faster and churn less, because someone who knows the product is doing the setup. One agency that brings ten clients is worth more than a hundred bloggers who might mention you once.

If they have never heard of affiliate marketing

Most of the people in your own network have never had an affiliate link, and the word "commission" means nothing to them. So do not send them the email you would send a professional affiliate. Say the deal in one plain sentence, in money, and give them one thing to do.

Invite the whole list

Write down every agency, consultancy, community and partner who touches your customers, then invite all of them by link. Not a shortlist. Fewer will say yes than you expect and fewer still will act, so a list of ten leaves you with two. The invitation itself is a sales conversation: you are asking them to sell you, so lead with the arithmetic from Track 1, what ten referred clients earn them, not with the percentage.

Whenever you give, ask

Partners who get more than the public offer should agree to do something specific: list you on their site, write the article, bring the first client within 30 to 60 days, or let you join their client calls so the questions get answered without a middleman. The more you give, the more explicitly you ask.

If the people who already use your product will not recommend it, a network of strangers will not either. That is why this lesson comes before the network, and why it is the proof test for the whole channel.