By Jimi Barkway · Published 1 September 2026 · Part of the honest manual
The short version
An affiliate program multiplies something that already works. If nobody's recommending your product unpaid, if your margin can't carry a commission, or if you can't name ten people who reach your buyers, a program won't fix that. It'll cost you the months you could've spent fixing it. Sort the underlying thing first, then come back.
Every vendor in this category makes money when you start an affiliate program. We're one of them. Which is exactly why all the advice out there starts at "here's how" and never at "should you". So this module is step zero, the one that's allowed to say no. Four questions. A no on any of them means wait.
Does anyone recommend you without being paid?
This is the whole test in one question. A commission pays for word of mouth that already wants to happen. It cannot manufacture any. So if a few customers are already sharing your product in a Slack group or a newsletter with no reward attached, a program pours fuel on a fire that exists. If nobody is, a commission is you asking strangers to stake their reputation on a product its own users stay quiet about. Almost nobody takes that trade at 20%.
You can check this in an afternoon. Go through your signups for customers you never acquired: no ad click, no cold email, no launch spike. Ask three of your best customers how they found you. If the answer involves a person, you've got the raw material. If every customer traces back to something you paid for or posted yourself, the honest next move is making the product more recommendable, not building a system for recommendations that aren't happening.
What to do instead: find the moment users get their first real result and shorten the path to it. Word of mouth starts there. So does every future affiliate's willingness to promote you.
Can your margin actually carry a commission?
Do this on paper before you touch any software. It's arithmetic, not strategy. Take your monthly price, knock off payment processing, hosting and the support cost of one customer, and look at what's left. A commission comes out of that remainder. Every month. For as long as you pay it.
Two versions of the same product make the point. A $49 plan at 80% gross margin has about $39 a month of room; a 20% commission of $9.80 leaves the unit clearly profitable, and the only question is how long the customer stays. A $9 plan with a heavy support load has maybe $5 of room, and the same 20% takes $1.80 of it while the fixed cost of managing the partner, answering their emails and paying them out stays exactly the same. At that price the program can be busy and still lose money.
Churn is the multiplier people miss. A recurring commission on a customer who stays three years is a bargain. The same commission against 10% monthly churn pays partners for customers who mostly vanish before their second invoice. And partners notice: their earnings graph tells them your retention before you do.
What to do instead: if the numbers don't clear, that's information about pricing or retention, not about affiliate marketing. Raise the price, cut the churn, or accept that this product gets its customers some other way.
Is there an audience someone else can reach for you?
An affiliate is a person with an audience shaped like your buyer. For a program to work, those people have to exist: newsletters your customers read, YouTube channels they watch, consultants they hire, communities they argue in. For most B2B SaaS they do. But if your buyer is one procurement lead inside each of two hundred hospital trusts, there's no creator whose audience is those people, and no commission conjures one.
The test is concrete. Write down where your last ten customers spent their attention before they found you. If the same few names keep appearing, that list is your future program. If it's empty, or every entry says "Google", your channel is search or sales, and an affiliate program would sit there unused while you felt guilty about it.
What to do instead: go where that attention actually is. If it's search, write. If it's sales, sell. A channel you can name beats a channel you wish existed.
Can you name ten people to invite?
Programs don't fill themselves. The directories are a trickle, and "affiliates find you" is a thing that happens to companies with traffic, years in. Your first partners will be people you invite by name: customers who already refer, writers who've covered you, hosts of podcasts you've been on, friends with relevant lists. Ten names is the floor.
If you sit down and can't get past three, the program has no launch cohort. And an empty program is worse than none, because it shows every visitor a door with nobody behind it.
What to do instead: spend the next quarter becoming known to ten such people without asking for anything. Reply usefully, share their work, be a customer of theirs. The list writes itself faster than you'd expect, and when you do launch, the first invitations land warm.
When to come back
The threshold is lower than the textbooks suggest, and it isn't a revenue number. Come back when all four answers are yes: a couple of customers arrived by genuine word of mouth, the commission arithmetic clears with room to spare, you can point at where your buyers' attention lives, and ten names are on a list. For some of you that's true today. For others it's six months of product work away, and starting the program now would only document that fact in a dashboard.
This module ends without a sales pitch on purpose. If your answers were no, the most useful thing we can do is not sell you anything. When they turn yes, the rest of the manual is waiting, starting with the money.