Just launched our first referral engine: 10 days of Pro for every signup.

Hey Indie Hackers! 👋

We just hit a major milestone with SmartWalt: we finally built and deployed our in-app referral system.

Up until now, our growth on Android has been entirely organic. But as we prepare for our upcoming iOS launch, we knew we needed a structured product-led growth loop to help lower our CAC and turn our early adopters into advocates.

Here is how we structured it: We went with a milestone-based approach. For every friend a user invites who successfully signs up, the referrer earns 10 days of free Pro access. They can stack these rewards up to 90 days (3 full months).

To make it as frictionless as possible, we:

• Built an interactive horizontal milestone tracker right into the user profile so they can visualize their progress.

• Integrated native sharing sheets so users can instantly blast their custom promo codes via WhatsApp, SMS, or Telegram with pre-filled text.

It’s exciting to finally have this live, but it was definitely a learning curve getting the reward logic and tracking dialed in.

I’d love to hear from anyone else who has built a referral system from scratch. Did you find that capping the rewards (like our 90-day limit) helped create urgency, or did it disincentivize your super-sharers?