Where SaaS affiliates actually come from, by someone who was one

By Jimi Barkway · Published 5 September 2026 · Part of the blog

Where do you find affiliates for a SaaS product?

In shortYour own customers first, then people already promoting products like yours, then the writers who cover your category. Marketplaces and directories come last. But the ranking matters less than founders expect, because most of the people you recruit will never send you anyone at all.

That last sentence is the uncomfortable part, so it goes first. Recruiting is the half everybody worries about. Keeping the people you recruited is the half that decides whether the program works, and almost nothing written on this subject covers it.

Module 4 of the manual has the five warm sources in detail, with both outreach messages written out. This page is about the thing that comes before the list: why an affiliate says yes to one program and not another, and what makes them still be there in month six.

Why does anyone promote a SaaS in the first place?

In shortRecurring commission, mostly. A physical product pays once. A subscription pays every month the customer stays, so one good recommendation keeps earning for years without any further work.

I spent years as an affiliate before I built this, and I never promoted anything except SaaS. Three reasons, and they are worth knowing because they are the reasons your good partners will have too.

The first is that recurring income compounds. For example, send ten customers who stay two years and you are still being paid for work you did in month one. Nothing else in affiliate marketing behaves like that.

The second is stickiness. Software that a business puts into its daily routine does not get cancelled on a whim, so the commission holds up. A partner who has been burned by refunds on one-off products notices this immediately.

The third is confidence. I could recommend the tools I promoted without hedging, because they were good and I used them. An affiliate is lending you their reputation, which is the only thing they own, and nobody lends that to a product they are unsure about.

So when you write to somebody, those three are what you are answering. Not "please join my program". Whether the money keeps coming, whether the customers stay, and whether they can put their name to it without worrying.

How do you find people already promoting your competitors?

In shortSearch the internet for websites carrying a competitor's tracking script. Anyone running one is already an affiliate, already in your category and already being paid, which makes them the most qualified list you can build.

Every affiliate platform puts a small file on the merchant's website. Those files have predictable names, so a site running one is announcing which platform it uses. Services that index page source let you search for that filename and hand you every site carrying it.

A tracking script is the small file an affiliate platform asks the merchant to put on their site, and it is what makes this searchable at all. That gives you merchants rather than affiliates, which looks like the wrong end. It is not, for two reasons. Each of those merchants runs a program with partners in it, and those partners promote products in your category. And the merchants themselves are a list too, which is the version this company used to build its own outreach list.

Then look at who is already ranking for "best [your category] tool" and "[a competitor] alternative". Those pages are usually written by affiliates, and the link at the bottom of them will tell you which program they are in. Someone already writing comparison posts about your competitors is a person who will write one about you.

Let's say you find thirty such sites in an afternoon. That is thirty people who already understand affiliate marketing, already sell to your buyer, and need no explaining. Compare that with thirty strangers from a directory.

Do affiliate marketplaces actually work?

In shortNobody publishes enough for you to know. I checked the public pages of two well-known ones and neither states how many programs it carries or how many affiliates browse it. A listing costs you a form, so it is worth doing. Expect nothing from it.

This is worth being precise about, because marketplaces get recommended constantly and the recommendation is never supported. One SaaS affiliate directory lists programs with no total anywhere on the page. One large partner platform, whose marketplace is a headline feature, gives no count either. Both were read on 5 September 2026, and both are linked in the sources so you can check them yourself.

There is also no independent survey anywhere of which recruitment source converts best. Not a small one, not an old one. So any article ranking these sources by conversion rate, including the table above, is ranking them by judgement. Mine is at least labelled.

List yourself anyway. It takes twenty minutes and it costs nothing. Treat it as a place people confirm you exist after hearing about you elsewhere, rather than a place they discover you.

What happens after somebody joins?

In shortMost of them do nothing. In a typical program, fifteen of every hundred approved partners ever send a single referral, and only about six bring a paying customer. That is the normal outcome, not a broken program.

Activation is the share of your approved partners who ever send you a single person, and it is the number that stops founders giving up in week three. It comes from 31.4 million referrals across 3,425 subscription programs, published in July 2026, which is the largest public dataset on this. Most programs land between 6% and 28% on that first figure.

Read that against the recruitment advice you have been given. If eighty-five in a hundred never start, then doubling how many people you recruit doubles your admin and barely moves your revenue. The lever is not the size of the list.

The timing tells you where the lever actually is. Of the partners who ever refer anybody, a quarter do it within eight hours of joining, half within seven days, and by day forty-nine three quarters of everyone who ever will already has. Your window to turn a new partner into a working one is measured in days.

What makes an affiliate keep selling for you?

In shortSomebody at the company talking to them like a person. It is the only retention lever I can point at from my own years doing this, it costs nothing, and almost no program bothers.

The programs I sold hardest for were the ones where the merchant kept in touch with me personally. Not a newsletter. An actual person who knew what I had published and said something about it.

I want to be careful here, because this is one person's experience and not a study. There is no public figure for how much personal contact lifts partner activity, and I am not going to invent one. What I can tell you is that it was the difference for me, and I was the customer you are trying to recruit.

Set that beside the timing above and it stops being a nice idea. Three quarters of your partners who will ever do anything have done it within seven weeks. A message in week one lands inside that window. A quarterly update does not.

So the practical version is small. When a partner sends their first referral, tell them. When one of their customers is still paying six months later, tell them that too, because it is the fact that proves the recurring money is real. And when somebody publishes something about you, read it and reply to them about what they actually wrote.

None of that is software. It is twenty minutes a week and it is the highest-return twenty minutes in this whole subject.

So where should you start this week?

In shortRead your own mentions and write to the people who already recommend you. Twenty names with a reason each, not two hundred without one. Then write to every one of them again in week one, whether or not they have done anything.

Start with the warm list, because it needs no tools and no budget. Search your own brand name on the platforms your customers use, and find the people who already said something nice in public. They said it for free. A commission removes the last reason to stay quiet about it.

Then spend one afternoon on the competitor search above. It is the only method here that hands you people who are already doing this for a living in your category.

Leave the marketplaces until both of those are done. Leave cold outreach until you have a partner who has actually earned something, because you will write a far better message once you have one real story to tell.

And put a recurring twenty minutes in your calendar for the messages nobody sends. The one-week guide covers the setup that has to exist before any of this, and module 4 has both outreach messages written out for you.

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