Affiliate Networks to promote your project

I'm going to make an assumption that you are going from 0-->1 and not 1-->n for your project.

If so...I'm going to say something controversial...but something I wish people would've told me earlier on for my project (www.tribefive.me for reference).

DON'T look for affiliate networks at the moment. Instead, as Paul Graham says, do things that don't scale. http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

What that means is that you need to manually go out and look for potential customers of your product!

A couple things are going to happen when you do:

1. You'll learn who your actual customers are versus who you think they are (it'll often be different than you first think, or more niche, etc)
2. You'll learn more about what your customers care about and don't care about so you can either build those features into your product or to address those concerns on your landing page

Either way, you WILL learn about your customers!

Let's say you do this manual process for the first 10 customers and you are starting to see positive patterns of behavior (ie. they convert on the landing page, they move up into a paid account, etc)...THEN it's time to look for affiliate networks.

Good luck!
Jonathan

I have heard about JVZoo marketplace, AppSumo and GrowSumo. GrowSumo looks expensive for an IndieHacker just starting out.

I'm also interested in knowing which affiliate marketing tool have worked for people in the past.

Have you thought about AppSumo?

Or should we build a similar service as IndieHackers?