They made the Twilio referral program pretty straightforward, which is nice because many affiliate related solutions can be pretty cumbersome—it goes something like this:
- You get a personal referral link that you can share with your networks
- Users sign up with your link, upgrade, then receive $10 to spend with Twilio
- For each person you refer who signs up for Twilio and upgrades, you get $10 in your Twilio account
As Twilio says on their announcement, “depending on the country where you’re sending… that’s over 1250 SMS messages… or 1,000 free voice minutes.... or over 12,000 chats. And that’s just for 1 referral”. As part of their announcement they even give you some template referral text, and recommendations of where you can share your referral message and code, taking advantage of your common social networks like LinkedIn, Twitch, YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, and in your email signature.
Twilio provides a pretty basic example of an API referral program, a building block I will be adding to my list of the more business elements we can be baking into our platform. I could even envision this being offered by a startup or existing API service providers allowing API providers to quickly implement as part of their API management, portal, and other existing services and tooling. Making for dead simple, plug and play API referrals for API providers, helping them leverage their existing networks to help grow their base, and attract new users.
