Reward for referral program?

@kevin is an IH community member who built http://growsurf.com/
I would recommend checking it out :)

I suggest you look at how PayPal grew its user-base with referrals - It's covered in Zero-To-One (Peter Thiel). As a starter though, figure out what users you're targeting, and who you want them to refer, then provide value to both those sets of people with your referral program.

I agree that the PayPal example suggested by @regal has some learnings but it's also worth pointing out that they were burning through capital at an insane rate, something like $10 million / month. They were essentially giving out free money in order to get people to use a product that was about transferring money.

I think Dropbox's referral program provides a better example for most products where users would get an extra 2gb of space for every user they referred.

I guess in both of these cases they were giving the current users something that would also help them get more out the product and the referral reward was aligned with the value proposition.

I built an invite program in my site.

It's a monthly subscription model with a free tier too. Each user can send 5 invites. If the invitee accepts the invite (meaning goes on to subscribe to a paid plan), both of them get 50% off for one month. I may even include some other rewards or cool things.

I have too few users right now to tell you how effective this is, but I guess it couldn't hurt. Everyone's goto example is Dropbox, and in fact I tried to emulate that in a way. For me, I'm already paying the server, every extra user costs me nothing and I can only profit from them (actually it costs fractions of a penny, but it's ridiculously close to nothing).

They way I see it, if you don't want to pour your own money from the start in this program, it's pretty simple. You have something that people would normally pay for, some value that you offer. You've already built it so in a way it doesn't cost you anything to give away some of it. All you want in exchange is refferals.

Check out https://viral-loops.com/ and https://maitreapp.co/ - useful tools for referrals and give examples of successful campaigns

Agree with others that it has to be specific to your domain. In this case, you could try a refer x and get y months added for free.

Whether you’re building your program in house, using plugins, or looking for a complete set up that handles everything for you - I think you’ll like some of the resources we have over here:
https://www.getambassador.com/resources

And of course, feel free to ask any questions you might have - if I’m not sure if the answer ill send it over to someone on the team who knows the answer... always happy to help another Indie Hacker out.