I’ve been working on the referral program at TransferWise, and I can tell you a couple of things about referral program with monetary incentives:
- no matter what, you’ll get abuse / “friendly” fraud / fake accounts… and that means also an increase in workload and costs for the support teams. do not underestimate.
- measuring pure word of mouth is very hard
- early adopters are much more likely to use a referral program, but that’s because they are also much more likely to talk about you (even without incentives)
- the vast majority of the users might not care about personalization when sharing a link to a product. that’s more for early adopters (as we are now)…
- what could help more to convert new people is to actually show them what the product is about and how it works
what could be interesting, at least until when the waiting list is still closed, would be to allow existing users to invite a restricted number of personal connections that could skip immediately the queue (similar to what Product Hunt did).
aside referral programs and as a few of you mentioned, it’s much more powerful to include features that make the product viral by nature or that facilitate engagement outside of the product.
think about Venmo: they grew so much in the US because:
- they built a better way to send money to friends
- they made it easy to send money to a person that was not on the platform
- in the meanwhile, they used this opportunity to push adoption