Most products are bought on someone's recommendation: an accountant, a coach, a community owner, a colleague. Referral programs exist to pay those people. Yet most of them fail for a simple reason: the people best placed to recommend the product never hear the program exists.
I've just published a white paper on a different design: a two-level partner program.
The idea in one line: pay for finding the people who find the customers.
- A partner earns a commission on each approved customer they bring.
- A recruiter earns an override, paid on top, on the approved sales of the partners they brought in.
- Nobody is paid for signing anyone up, and there are only ever two levels, so it isn't multi-level marketing.
- The brand only pays when a sale is approved, and every amount can be traced from the click to the payout.
Take a company selling tax software to small businesses. Its best partner isn't a deal site; it's an accounting firm that puts every client on the software. Whoever introduces the software to that firm has done more for the brand than any single referral, but under a normal program they earn nothing. A second paid level turns finding these gatekeepers into paid work, on approved sales only.
The paper covers the model, how the money moves through an add-only ledger, attribution rules, fees, fraud controls, compliance, and existing tools (15 of the 23 programs we documented already pay a recruiter, but only as a line in the terms).
Most importantly, it says what would prove the idea wrong. The claim is narrow: for the same brand and the same commission, adding a paid recruiter level brings more approved customers per month than a single level. We'll test that in a pilot against a single-level control and publish the result either way. Nothing here is a result yet.
Read the full white paper (free, no sign-up): https://viralpayouts.com/white-paper
PDF: https://viralpayouts.com/viralpayouts-white-paper.pdf
Maxime Yao, Software Automated Ltd
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