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Ask HN: Will referral codes cheapen honest referrals?

1 points by mh_ ↗ HN
Last year we cleared $11 million in ARR¹ with almost 100% inbound sales (while bootstrapped).

Some customers have taken us into > 9 different gigs.

We are considering a Tesla style referral reward program (use this code, rewards accrue) to say thanks, but don’t want to accidentally cheapen a previously honest, organic thing.

Any thoughts?

__ ¹ https://blog.thinkst.com/2021/03/we-bootstrapped-to-11-million-in-arr.html

2 comments

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ljoshua
If it is already working, and your CAC is essentially $0 for those referrals, do you anticipate seeing a huge amount of growth if you introduced a referral program? One that would be large enough to outweigh the new costs?

Seems like a great thing to have customers loving you enough to be bringing you new leads without any incentivization. Perhaps you could find other ways of thanking your good referrers in a more natural way (even sending them a box of chocolates or a personal outreach from the CEO to offer a one-time consultation session) that might go even further, be more flexible, and keep you from introducing new costs and problems.

mh_
We are already pretty ok at gifting back (our hoodies/gifts have a pretty good rep).

I kinda default to “don’t mess with it” but sometimes wish we could do more to say thanks.