How beehiiv got its users

Your creators are your users. beehiiv's partner link sits inside the product at app.beehiiv.com/partner_program, and the Launch tier means it is live before anyone has converted: no follower minimum, no application queue. Do the same. Put a tracking link in your account settings, then email the users who already publish about your topic. With no audience of your own, make the ask a product feature instead of an outreach campaign.

done whenTwo weeks in, count how many existing users generated a link without you chasing them. If almost nobody did, the link is buried in your app or the payout does not cover the effort of making anything.

Name the artifact. beehiiv's partner promotion post points at three: a head to head piece ("Substack vs beehiiv"), a beginner screen recording shaped like "beehiiv Tutorial for Beginners: How to Get Started in Just 9 Minutes", and a top tools page. Write one brief per format: which competitor to name, which three product screens to film, where the link sits. A creator who has to invent the format ships nothing.

done whenHand the brief to one creator and watch them produce without asking a follow up question. If they come back asking what to cover, you wrote a wish, not a spec.

Make the link a gift. beehiiv.com/partners pairs every partner link with a reader side offer, a 14 day trial plus 20% off the first three months, so the creator hands their audience a discount rather than a referral tax. Build that coupon before you recruit anyone. beehiiv also gives converted partners a co-branded landing page, so the traffic lands somewhere carrying the creator's name, not your generic homepage.

done whenCompare signup rate on your partner coupon link against your plain homepage over the same window. If the coupon link is not clearly ahead, the offer is not worth spending someone's audience on.

Pay on revenue, not per post. beehiiv.com/partners pays a share of referred revenue every month for a year, rising with lifetime conversions across Launch, Bronze, Silver and Gold, up to 60%. Attribution is a 60 day first click cookie; payouts land on the 15th via PayPal. Copy that shape. Recurring beats a flat bounty because a creator with no audience can still earn from five readers who stay.

done whenModel the worst case: one creator sends three customers who stay a year. If that payout is smaller than what you would pay for one sponsored post, your rate is too low for anyone to bother filming.

Give the ladder visible rungs. On beehiiv's tier table, the first conversion releases $100 of merch, a partner badge and the co-branded page; higher tiers add performance bonuses, priority support and quarterly bounty opportunities. Publish your own version, with playbooks and case studies sitting in the partner dashboard. Require the FTC partner disclosure beehiiv asks for, so the format stays clean as it spreads.

done whenAsk a partner to describe the next rung from memory. If they cannot say what it gives them, your ladder is a page nobody read and the tiers are doing no work.