My invite button got 4 taps in 8 days. All 4 went to a dead link
The old invite button pointed to a dead link. Now referrals pay $2, but only after the invited developer's app gets real, tracked testing.
Shipped a real referral program for PeerPlay this month, and it started with an embarrassing find.
The "invite a developer" button had been in the app for months. When I finally checked why nobody used it, it pointed to the wrong domain with no referral code attached. Every tap opened a page that had no idea who sent it. Four people tapped it in eight days. All four were lost.
Fixing the link took twenty minutes. Deciding how to pay for referrals took longer, because I'd also found that wallet balances could be written from the user's own device. Adding a payout on top of that would have been asking for fraud.
So the reward is small and slow on purpose:
- $2 per referred developer.
- It only reaches review after their own app gets five testers with at least three real days each, and they test other apps for three days themselves.
- The first three payouts for each referrer are reviewed by hand. Only after that can it auto-approve, and shared devices or reused payout details still send it back to review.
No payouts yet. The earliest one can't happen before mid-October, because of the 14-day hold.
What I'm watching now: whether $2 and a two-week wait is enough to make anyone share the link at all. If you've run a referral program for a small tool, was the size of the reward what moved people, or just making the button easy to find?
