Ask HN: Referral fees and marketing a new product?
I&#x27;m a forties something software engineer with a heavy slant towards finance that has spent my life working for other people (still am).  Lately I have been working on a personal finance application in my free time (think Quicken or Mint).  I have used many of the offerings currently available and grown frustrated with them over the course of 20+ years using these different tools and never being able to change what I saw as shortcomings in the available tools.<p>This started out as just, &quot;I&#x27;m tired of X, Y, and Z so I&#x27;m just going to build the damn thing I want.&quot; And even if I&#x27;m the only user ever; I will continue to build this for myself.<p>That said I think that maybe other people would be interested in the software, but I don&#x27;t know really anything about marketing.  I know some companies use referral fees, but I don&#x27;t know much about them.  Do you use flat fees or percentage of sale and what&#x27;s the right pricing?  If a customer was referred and later purchases an upgrade or adds a subscription service do you pay an additional &quot;bonus&quot; referral fee to the referrer?  Who do I contact to let them know about my application to get them to plug&#x2F;market it for me and how best do I go about this?<p>Any other pointers would be greatly appreciated.<p>At this time I&#x27;m not linking to my product as it is an installable desktop application (I know; old school nobody want that anymore...) and I haven&#x27;t yet created a website on which to market it.  I also don&#x27;t want the focus here to be on my product specifically, but on how I would market it or other products in general.