The affiliate marketing playbook for apps

0:00There's something that's been bugging me. The app industry has been sleeping on affiliate marketing. Everybody's struggling to make paid ads work, but there's one channel that pretty much guarantees profitability on your ad spend: affiliate marketing. E-commerce has been milking it for decades. So why, in 2026, should you try affiliate marketing for apps? How much should you pay, and how do you even get started? I had a conversation with Michael Butler and Mark Kennedy about their

0:25playbook for affiliate marketing. I think a lot more apps should be trying this. The thing about influencer marketing is that when you pay a flat fee for an influencer to create a video, it doesn't really matter to them exactly how well that performs for you. But if they get a cut of the profit you make from that video,

0:43now they have skin in the game. That's why you see so many podcast hosts slinging supplements. They get a percentage, and that can be super lucrative. The challenge is, most of the tools for that are built around those kind of products, not for apps. With apps, you don't get UTM links and cookies and all the

1:00things that make that easy. But developers have been searching for a solution for years, and Michael Butler was one of those developers. I, I was looking for a solution like this when multiple pages back on Google, looked back five years of posts of people asking for this, and realized there just wasn't a solution.

1:14So I started building it for myself. Michael built Insert Affiliate. And one of the apps now using it is an old friend, Mark Kennedy, from the app None To Run. And affiliate marketing kept coming up as like, we need to investigate this. To Michael's point, there wasn't a lot of tools out there. I think I started looking into this two or three years ago. I had it on a whiteboard beside me, and I just kept looking up as

1:35I like, "No, maybe I should look now and see what's out there." So the plumbing actually exists. More on how it works in a minute, but first, let's talk about how much you actually pay an affiliate. As a general rule of thumb, we tend to say start 5% higher than you planned to originally. Start higher, um, and you can always, uh, have different

1:53percentages for different affiliates. As a general sweeping rule, you wanna pay somewhere between 15 to 40%, depending on how new the app is, how niche it is, and how influential that person is within the sphere that you're trying to reach. Mark kept it super simple. But we've got an affiliate program right now, and, um, we pay 20% on, uh, annual subscriptions and 20% on monthly for the first three months

2:18of their lifetime with None To Run. We've got about 15 affiliates in there right now, and most of them are already starting to generate, uh, revenue for us. Paying an affiliate 20% leaves a lot of room for margin on top. But I was actually laughing through a lot of this part of the live stream because I

2:34did a deal that Michael thought was crazy. I actually paid an affiliate 100% of my revenue after Apple's cut. But I still made money for two reasons. The first reason is spillover. A lot of people see a post like that and don't even bother entering the affiliate code. Because of that spillover, I kept something like 20 or 30% of the total

2:53new revenue generated by that promotion. The second reason is renewals. About 30% of my annual subscribers renew. So if I can do 100K in a month of affiliate marketing, that next year, I get $30,000 in what's essentially free cash flow. I probably won't do 100% again, but it, it did work out pretty well this time.

3:14There's something else to consider. How long does the affiliate keep earning a commission once somebody has paid? Michael's rule of thumb is that the longer the commission runs, the lower you should pay. Personally, I'd rather pay a higher commission on that first sale than do 20% forever. Those kind of deals do really complicate things if you ever wanna sell the app.

3:35But you don't have to pick a single commission and stick with it forever. You can pay different affiliates different amounts. You can even offer bonuses where you scale up the commission as they help make sales. Something that we see as really useful and we think is really important is the ability to sort of, like, escalate tiers and say, "From the start, we're paying 20% on, on your first few sales, but if you get three in a given month, uh,

3:57we'll, we'll increase it to 22% or 25%." Either way, you're never paying for a sale that doesn't happen. That's what I mean about guaranteed profitable. So how does the tracking work? Apple does make that a bit harder with their privacy rules, but Michael has a solution for that. They receive a link that they can share with their audience or a short code, um, that they can share, that you can, that they can then enter in the app Um, so we, we like to see it as we use the strongest attribution method that is available, um, automatic where it's possible, and falling back to user explicit entry

4:28of short codes, uh, where it isn't. We also find that YouTube is quite often watched on the TV. You know, someone is, uh, is sat with a laptop on their lap working into the late hours or doing the, doing the housework, um, and they can't click the link that's on the screen. For my experiment, I just used Apple's offer codes to make it simple, but

4:44there are two problems with that. One, Apple does limit the number of codes you can create, and it has other kinds of limits around that. But then two, that code actually redeems on Apple's offer page, not directly on your paywall. And that matters 'cause you can actually do some really cool stuff with your paywall. Anyone who comes through one of our affiliate links, they automatically

5:03get a one-month free trial instead of seven days, which is huge. And we've created custom paywalls for them, so when someone comes into the app through their link, it actually has a paywall with their face. For instance, this is one woman, Emma, she's also Canadian, got a big following, um, in the running space, and so when someone clicks through her link,

5:23it's gonna have a RevenueCat paywall that says, "Hey, glad Emma sent you. Um, she'd love to give you a free month." It's pretty cool to be able to lean on a creator's credibility right on your paywall, and the creators love it, too. They're right inside your app. That all sounds great, but how do you find affiliates?

5:40Signing a big creator to a rev share can be tough. Michael's advice is to start smaller. Asking your users, uh, that you're seeing returning to your app if they want to become an affiliate is, is a incredibly powerful way of doing it because they already enjoy your app. They probably know someone else that would enjoy your app if they're a,

5:57they're a user, and they enjoy it. So one of our users, uh, used this strategy and got about 100 affiliates in I think they said about two days. The first 15 affiliates Mark signed up were people he already knew. We had some relationships with some people from prior sort of influencer campaigns that we had worked with. We also have, uh, an email list, lots of, you know, super fans that have

6:18been Run Run App subscribers since it launched in March of twenty twenty. So these are the kind of people like, hey, we should let them know 'cause they're the ones who are, like, telling, you know, all their friends. And then we have a couple sort of online communities as well we mentioned in there.

6:32We have a Facebook group with, uh, thirteen thousand people in there. And your affiliates don't even have to be creators. One, uh, area we wanna explore is more B2B partnerships, and this, for us, this could be a really unique way to structure those partnerships. Um, so if we wanna partner with a race, a lot of these races

6:49are small or turkey trots. They just want money, um, so this is a way for them, like, "Hey, if you promote our app, our beginner running plans to your participants, you'll also get paid based on how many people start a subscription with our app." Signing up affiliates might be the hardest part, but you do

7:05still have to help them succeed. People do have to actually pay for your app. Feel like the best type of posts in general for us, and not even just affiliate, but just- helping promote us in general are the ones where it's like, "Hey, here's what I'm doing. Here's the app I'm using to start running and, and I'm just like you.

7:23I'm a beginner. I'm struggling. I'm out of breath. Here's what I'm doing. Follow along." You can tell when someone is reading from a script immediately. So we usually recommend you, you tell influencers what not to do. If you don't want them to, to compare you to another brand, you don't want them to use certain language, tell them that.

7:38Um, but allow them to speak in their own voice. Now the part that won't show up in your affiliate dashboard. There are other ways that those deals help your app grow. 2025, it was sort of the first year we weren't seeing significant growth. So a, a lot of people who found us, uh, were searching through Google

7:55at alternatives to Couch to 5K or searching for beginner running plans. In Google, like the AI snippet, you know, pushes everyone down. So that really, um, hurt us. It's about 68% of Google searches no longer result in a click. So a, a lot of the data that feeds these, these AI-generated answers comes from people posting to YouTube, posting to Reddit, posting to TikTok. And by working with influencers, especially ones that are really

8:20brand aligned, they're really incentivized to continually post. It helps train the, the algorithms to respond with your app. That search halo is a bigger version of the spillover I mentioned earlier. And the posts that do really well on social sometimes get picked up by the algorithm over and over again. Every mention raises the floor on your marketing. For posts that do especially well, Michael has even seen apps pay the creator a

8:43little bit extra to run it as an ad. Guaranteed profitable and a halo effect. That's why e-commerce has been all over affiliate marketing. I already dipped my toes in with that experiment I mentioned earlier, but after this conversation, I'm excited to make it a bigger part of my marketing plan. As always, I'll report back on how things go, but for now

9:02I'll let Mark close it out. For everyone, give affiliate marketing a try. Uh, like we always thought, ah, it's too hard, too much work on the back end, too messy, and it's not anymore. So it's, it's worth trying to compliment what you're doing maybe on the paid ad side, or try this before you, you dig into paid ads. If this got you as excited about affiliate marketing as I now am,

9:25make sure to check out the full conversation with Mark and Michael. And don't forget, we do these livestreams every Thursday. So subscribe and bring your questions.