We’re testing a partner-led growth model for Trackly
We’re opening Trackly’s referral program to HR consultants, payroll providers, IT firms, agencies, and BPOs.
The model is simple:
Refer Trackly to a relevant business. If the referral becomes a paying customer, the partner earns 20% recurring revenue every month for as long as that business remains a Trackly customer.
Trackly helps remote and field teams manage attendance, payroll, and workforce operations.
For founders who have built a partner channel, what helped you turn interested partners into consistent referrals: stronger incentives, better enablement, co-selling, or proven customer results?
20% recurring for a referral that converts is a clean model — makes sense why you’re testing it. I’m circling something similar with The League Dispatch (AI-generated fantasy football content), trying to figure out sponsor/distribution partnerships before I’ve got real traction to point to — just ~7 users so far. Curious how you’re thinking about timing this: are you opening the referral program now to build the channel early, or did you already have a few paying customers first so partners had something concrete to point to?
That’s a really good question. We’re opening it up relatively early because we want to build the partner channel alongside the product rather than wait until we have a fully mature channel.
That said, I completely agree that having real customer results makes the referral conversation much easier. We’re working on building those reference points now, while also learning what partners actually need from us to feel comfortable making an introduction.
And ~7 users isn’t nothing at all, especially if you’re still figuring out the distribution side. I’d be curious to hear what kind of sponsor/distribution partnerships you’re considering for The League Dispatch.
Of your four, proven customer results is the one that unlocks the others, a partner needs a win they can point to before incentives or enablement mean anything. But since this is the core question you keep coming back to, here's a different angle: the honest bottleneck at this stage usually isn't the partner program design, it's that you don't yet have the 2-3 reference customers that make any partner program work. Building the program before the proof is optimizing the wrong end.
So the higher-leverage move right now might not be recruiting partners at all, it's landing a few great customers directly, then the partner channel almost builds itself. What's blocking that?
I think that’s a fair point, and honestly, I agree that customer proof is probably the strongest thing a partner can have when making a referral.
We’re not treating the partner program as a replacement for direct customer acquisition. We’re doing both, getting customers directly while testing whether we can build a repeatable partner channel alongside it.
The part I’m trying to understand is what actually makes a partner comfortable referring their first customer. Is it the results, how easy the referral process is, the support they get, or simply having a clear ICP they know they can introduce us to?
So I think the bigger question for us is less “how do we recruit partners?” and more “how do we make the first referral easy enough that they want to make a second one?”