referral-program

Trigger phrases

Phrases that activate this skill when typed to Claude Code:

• referral program
• affiliate program
• viral loop
• refer a friend
• ambassador

What it does

referral-program is a Claude Code skill from Corey Haines’s marketing-skills repo. It turns Claude into a referral-program designer who handles the full design — incentive structure (give X, get Y), viral coefficient math, ambassador tiers, payout mechanics, attribution — and the operational stuff that kills programs (fraud rules, payout cadence, T&Cs). The skill activates when you mention “referral”, “affiliate”, “viral loop”, “refer a friend”, or “ambassador”.

The output of a session is a referral-program plan: incentive structure with rationale, viral-coefficient math, attribution rules, fraud detection thresholds, ambassador tier ladder, payout cadence, T&Cs outline, and the success metric that determines whether the program is earning its overhead.

When to use it

Reach for it when:

• Customers refer organically and you want to reward and amplify it
• You’re considering a paid affiliate program and want the math first
• An existing referral program is bleeding budget without producing real growth

When not to reach for it:

• Your retention rate is bad — referrals from churning users compound the wrong direction
• You don’t have a way to attribute referrals; the program will produce “untracked” growth no one can defend

Install

The skill is distributed via Corey Haines’s marketing-skills repo. Install via the repo’s recommended path — copy the referral-program SKILL.md into your project’s .claude/skills/referral-program/ directory, or use the repo’s plugin install if you’ve set it up.

Once installed, the skill activates on the trigger phrases above. The first time it runs, it will check for .agents/product-marketing-context.md (or .claude/product-marketing-context.md) — populating that file with your product context first dramatically improves output quality across all of Haines’s marketing skills.

What a session looks like

A typical session has three phases:

1. Incentive design. Two-sided (give X, get Y) is the default; the skill will argue against one-sided unless you make a strong case. Reward type (cash, credit, product) tied to your margin economics.
2. Math + attribution. Viral coefficient calculation, payback math, attribution window, fraud detection thresholds. Without these, the program is hope, not strategy.
3. Tiered ambassador layer. For high-volume referrers, a separate tier with better rewards, more visibility, sometimes content-creation perks. The 1% who drive 80% of referrals get treated like ambassadors, not customers.

The discipline that makes it work: math before mechanics. A referral program with bad payback math doesn’t break — it just slowly bleeds margin while looking healthy.

Receipts

Honest reporting on what referral-program produces and where it has limits:

Where it works well:

• Two-sided incentive design beats one-sided in almost every category — the skill defaults to it for good reason
• Viral-coefficient math separates programs that scale from programs that linger near 1.0 forever
• Fraud-detection thresholds catch the inevitable abuse before it scales

Where it backfires:

• Programs need a referral culture — not every product has one, and incentives can’t manufacture it
• Tracking attribution accurately is the wall most teams hit; the skill scopes it but tooling matters

Pattern that works: soft-launch the program to a segment first (your top NPS detractors, ironically, often refer well after a save), measure the coefficient, then open it broadly only if the math works.

Source and attribution

Originally written by Corey Haines. The canonical SKILL.md and any supporting files live in the referral-program folder of his marketing-skills repository.

License: MIT. You can install, adapt, and redistribute the skill, with attribution preserved.

This page documents the skill from a practitioner’s perspective. For the formal spec and any updates, defer to the source repo.