Affiliate Program Design

Early-Stage SaaS

Overview

The founder and CEO of Shrlock — an early-stage SaaS company — engaged me for strategic advisory on designing a scalable affiliate program from the ground up before going to market.

The Problem

Without an existing program, Shrlock needed to make foundational decisions on commission structure, partner economics, and program design before going to market — decisions that are difficult to reverse once partners are live.

What I Did

I worked directly with the founding team to model out the full program economics — commission structures, CAC, ARPU, LTV, and payback period. The goal was a tiered affiliate structure that meaningfully rewards partners at each level while protecting margin at scale. Every decision was tied back to the unit economics of the business to ensure the program could grow without eroding profitability.

Beyond the affiliate program, I helped develop a monetizable content and AI citation strategy — a blog architecture designed not to drive organic traffic but to monetize off his earned placement in LLM responses and AI-powered search results, creating compounding revenue and growth for him and adjacent companies in the space.

Results

• Tiered commission framework designed with full unit economics modeling

• CAC, LTV, and payback period benchmarks established for each partner tier

• Scalable program architecture ready for partner recruitment