Ran affiliate programs for a handful of DTC brands this year, and the pattern is always the same: the founder reads a blog post, spins up an affiliate link in Shopify or Whop in an afternoon, posts about it once, and then wonders why nobody signs up.

Here's the actual order of operations that works:

1. Fix your margins before you recruit anyone. If you can't pay 20-30% commission and still profit after ad spend + COGS, affiliates will churn the moment they realize the math doesn't work for them either.

2. Recruit 5-10 affiliates, not 500. Everyone wants a huge network on day one. What actually moves revenue is finding 5 people who already have an audience that trusts them, giving them a genuinely good deal, and over-communicating with them personally for the first month.

3. Tracking has to be boring and bulletproof. If an affiliate can't see their clicks and conversions in real time, they stop promoting. This kills more programs than bad commission rates do.

4. Treat it like a relationship, not a listing. The brands that win send affiliates new creative monthly, tell them what's converting, and ask what they need. The brands that lose set it and forget it.

If you're a brand doing $10-100k/mo and want someone to actually run this instead of bolting it on yourself — that's what we do at Affilio Collective. Happy to just answer questions here too if you're doing it yourself.