We kept our affiliate program fairly simple at the start. The first thing we focused on was tracking. For SaaS, it’s not enough to know who clicked a link once. You need to know which partner brought in the trial or signup, whether that customer upgraded, whether they stayed subscribed, whether they churned, and what commission is actually owed. And we also wanted coupon code tracking because a lot of partners don’t always send people through a clean affiliate link. We used Rewardful for this, mainly because it connected with Stripe and made it easy to run both affiliate and customer referral tracking in one place. So, I can share a couple of practical pieces of advice from experience. Give each partner their own link and promo code. With decent affiliate management software, this should be quick enough, and you can recruit consistently. (We got to around 40 active affiliates in the first couple of months, which probably wouldn't have happened if every setup needed manual work.) And the second one: fix attribution before you focus too much on recruitment. Now, in stronger months, affiliates account for roughly 15–20% of new MRR. Okay, customer referrals are smaller in volume, but the leads are warmer and usually easier to close. All in all, I'm happy with how things are developing and would love to sort of compare notes here on metrics to track, set up advice, growth you achieved...
I'm in a different industry, but I can confirm about the coupon code tracking - very important. And congrats, nice numbers, hope they go even higher.
Rewardful + Stripe is a solid call for early-stage SaaS. The bigger trap most programs don't catch early is attribution drift once partners start running their own redirects. UTMs get stripped through short-link services, cookies get clobbered when affiliates send traffic through tag-blocking domains, and the dashboard quietly under- or over-counts depending on the chain. Worth pressure-testing the chain end to end before you scale partner count. Where I'd push back on the typical SaaS playbook: don't trust the headline CVR your tool reports. I run small affiliate funnels in the AI/SaaS adjacent niche and the dashboard CVR routinely overstates paid CVR by 15-25x because free signups count as conversions. Nectar showed me 26.2% conversion in their UI, the paid conversion on the same cohort after CSV export was 1.37%. Crushon: 17.59% headline vs 0.71% paid. Reconcile against the paying-customer export monthly or you'll over-fund the wrong partners. The number almost nobody tracks but should: off-tracker click volume. Clicks that hit your affiliate cloak from places GA doesn't see, Reddit comments, forum signatures, direct cloak shares. For one of my programs I clocked 215 GA-attributed clicks against 572 Tapfiliate-counted clicks over the same 7-day window. That 62% gap is real traffic the affiliate is generating that you can't optimize against if you're only looking at GA4. Where you find that gap is also usually where your best partners are quietly building you free distribution.