Find the businesses that already serve your buyers and pay them to send those buyers to you.
In July 1996 Amazon.com, then an online bookseller, announced its Associates programme, with more than 300 sites already enrolled. Any website could pick books its visitors would want and link to them, Amazon took the order, the payment and the shipping, and the site earned a referral fee. Early participants included a site for chefs and a site for owners and breeders of purebred dogs (Amazon, 18 July 1996).
Enrolment doubled from 15,000 sites in September 1997 to 30,000 in February 1998 and passed 60,000 by June 1998, with fees of up to 15% of the sales they generated (Amazon, 8 June 1998). Amazon's annual report for 1998 said about 200,000 websites had enrolled, including Yahoo, AOL, Excite, Netscape, GeoCities, Microsoft and AltaVista (Amazon annual report for 1998). By August 2000 there were 500,000 Associates, and Amazon said they had played a key role in introducing new customers (Amazon, 3 August 2000). It has not published the share of sales they brought.
Any business with a clear customer: services, SaaS, e-commerce and local. The question is the same everywhere.
Somebody already has your customer's attention and trust before you do: the accountant, the agency, the gym, the software they open every day. HubSpot built a large part of its business on that. Its Solutions Partners are service providers, such as agencies, that use HubSpot themselves and refer customers to it on commission. Together with the customers they referred, they accounted for about 29% of HubSpot's customers at the end of 2024 and about 48% of its revenue that year (HubSpot annual report for the year to 31 December 2024).
The partner does not need to love your product. It needs a simple, fast reason to send buyers your way, and a reason to keep doing it.
Verified. Amazon's annual report for 1998 and HubSpot's for 2024; Edelman and Brandi (Journal of Marketing Research, 2015). Self-reported. Amazon's press releases on Associates numbers (1996 to 2000).
Cost to test. Referral fees paid only on real customers, plus a few days to recruit and brief the first five partners.
Kill it if after three months fewer than one partner in five has sent a paying customer.
Paying on sign-ups invites junk; pay on real customers. Policing many partners is hard: a study of affiliate programmes describes merchants overseeing thousands of affiliates they have never met, and found that outside specialists were better at catching clear rule-breakers and in-house staff at catching borderline cases (Edelman and Brandi, 2015). In the US, affiliates who earn a commission must disclose that connection when they endorse you (FTC, March 2011). Some sectors restrict paying for referrals: US law generally prohibits giving anything of value for referrals of real estate settlement business (RESPA section 8). Where fees are banned, trade referrals instead.
The Two-Sided Referral, The Affiliate Discord, Sponsor Who They Watch
A 30-minute call first. If it fits, two calls in one week and a written growth plan you keep.