How SimpleCheck Built an Affiliate Program That Mostly Runs Itself

SimpleCheck serves 600+ businesses and runs one of the leanest affiliate programs we have come across, accounting for approximately 68% of their total revenue over the past 12 months with minimal hands-on management. We sat down with Grant Eilertson, co-founder of SimpleCheck, to hear how they built it from scratch, what happened when they switched to another platform, and why the right infrastructure is the difference between a program that demands constant attention and one that quietly does the work.

About SimpleCheck

SimpleCheck is a lead qualification software built for high-ticket sales teams. Using an FCRA-compliant soft pull, it surfaces a lead's real-time credit score, available credit, and income at the point of opt-in, before a sales rep ever picks up the phone. The result: better-qualified conversations, higher close rates, and less time wasted on leads that were never going to convert.

SimpleCheck now serves 600+ businesses across 80+ industries, with a particular concentration in coaching, consulting, and service businesses selling offers in the $3,000 to $50,000+ range. The company offers two core products: SmartForm, a self-serve qualification tool, and Custom Build, a done-for-you deployment for more complex sales environments.

Building from scratch: why affiliates made sense from day one

SimpleCheck launched its affiliate program from zero. No legacy system to migrate from, no existing partner base to import. But the reasoning for building one was clear from the very beginning.

"Statistically, our best customers come from warm introductions," says Grant. "Someone sees their peer's close rate double and asks what changed. That's the perfect referral moment."

The product itself creates the conditions for referral. When one operator sees another operator's results with SimpleCheck, they want it too. The challenge was not convincing people to recommend the product; it was giving them a proper system to do it through.

The requirements were specific. SimpleCheck needed a platform that could handle tiered commissions, because their best affiliates typically operate within layered networks: a sales agency refers business coaching clients, who in turn refer direct-to-consumer offer owners, and so on down the chain. They also needed a clean partner dashboard that their affiliates would actually use, and reliable Stripe integration. On the recommendation of a mutual contact, they started with Partnero. It worked.

The detour that confirmed everything

A year into running the program, a new in-house affiliate manager joined and advocated for migrating to a different platform, convinced it would offer more functionality. The switch was made. It did not go well.

"After the arduous transition, we found that it not only lacked features that Partnero already had, but caused multiple integration and tracking problems," Grant recalls.

Affiliate tracking is unforgiving. When attribution breaks, partners lose trust in their commission data, and that trust is very hard to rebuild. The problems were serious enough that SimpleCheck made the call to switch back to Partnero.

What they found on return was a platform that had kept improving in their absence: better UI, better reporting, and features that had been added in the time they were away. The entire episode crystallized something important: switching affiliate platforms can be expensive and disruptive, and the cost of a difficult migration is often invisible until you are already in the middle of it.

"I was surprised to see that Partnero had already significantly improved in terms of UI and reporting since we had left, and now we're fully committed to Partnero for the foreseeable future," Grant says. "We appreciate the continued growth and evolution of the platform, which currently provides everything we need, and I actually look forward to seeing what they roll out next."

What a low-maintenance program actually looks like

Ask Grant what a typical week inside Partnero looks like, and his answer cuts straight to what most affiliate program owners quietly wish for.

"Honestly, that's the best part; it mostly runs itself. We check the dashboard weekly to see which partners are active, review pending commissions, and occasionally update creative assets for partners. Aside from maintaining relationships with our top affiliates personally, that's it."

The features carrying the day-to-day load are the partner dashboard (which affiliates consistently praise for its clarity), automated commission tracking, and automated payouts. Partners can see exactly what is happening with their referrals at any time, and they are fully in control of their own payout scheduling - a detail that matters more than it might appear.

"We keep things very simple," Grant notes. "But we've found that 'simple' is not necessarily 'easy' unless you have a quality referral and affiliate platform like Partnero."

The results of that simplicity compound over time. Affiliates account for approximately 68% of SimpleCheck's total revenue over the past 12 months. Crucially, these customers also tend to be their highest-LTV segment, because they arrive with trust already established through a peer recommendation.

"The best affiliates are happy clients who naturally recommend us. We don't have to convince them; they've seen the data, and they want their peers to have it too."

Solving the usage-based billing problem

One of the less obvious but most significant wins has been how Partnero handles commission calculation on top of a usage-based billing model. Most affiliate platforms are built around fixed-price subscriptions. Usage-based billing,  where a customer's invoice changes month to month based on how much they consume, introduces a layer of complexity that breaks many commission-tracking systems.

Reconciling partner commissions against variable charges typically requires custom engineering work, manual adjustments, or both. It is exactly the kind of operational overhead that makes a program feel like a burden rather than a channel.

"Usage billing economics are apparently very hard for most platforms to consider - I know because I looked all over" Grant says. "Partnero made it so simple we don't even need to think about it at this point, and we could not be more grateful."

Multi-tier commissions added another dimension. When Partnero introduced the feature, it aligned perfectly with how SimpleCheck's best affiliates already operated. The referral networks run deep: a sales agency refers its coaching clients, those clients refer their own networks, and commissions flow through each layer automatically. Higher-performing partners unlock better rates, but the baseline commission is strong enough that most affiliates never need to think about tiers at all: the tiered structure functions as a meaningful bonus that requires no additional management effort on SimpleCheck's end.

"In particular, the intermediary payouts and automatic reconciliation stand out above all competitors we've evaluated," Grant notes. "Our partners love the ability to be fully in control of their payouts."

What's next for the program

SimpleCheck is focused on deepening the success of its top-performing partners rather than simply growing the total number. That means better creative assets, potential co-marketing opportunities, and developing new ways to reward partners who bring in Custom Build clients at higher ticket values.

One initiative on the near-term horizon illustrates the compounding advantage of having solid infrastructure in place. An industry contact is preparing to launch a full campaign to enroll and educate a new cohort of affiliates. SimpleCheck's role in the whole thing is to supply educational materials. Partnero handles tracking, integration, and payouts automatically.

"I can't overstate how important this is to us," Grant says. "We would have likely overlooked opportunities like this due to the sheer integration complexity without Partnero making this simple."

The pattern is consistent: because the infrastructure is not a bottleneck, SimpleCheck can say yes to growth opportunities that would otherwise be too operationally complex to pursue.

Advice for founders considering an affiliate program

Grant's framework for building a referral engine is straightforward, and he has distilled it into three conditions that all need to be true at the same time.

"To get referrals, you need three things: people need to know you want referrals, it needs to be clear how it benefits them to send referrals, and it needs to be simple and easy to send referrals and get paid."

Most founders get the first two right. The third is where programs fall apart. The integration and facilitation work, such as onboarding partners, tracking attribution, managing payouts, and reconciling commissions, becomes the real barrier, and it is largely invisible until you are trying to run it at scale.

"I can almost guarantee your happiest customers are already recommending you," Grant says. "There's a massive revenue unlock waiting for you if you give them a reason to do it more often and a way to get paid for it."

His closing point is unambiguous about what distinguishes a program that grows from one that stalls.

"With Partnero, the technology is no longer a constraint. The only barrier is having a product good enough that people recommend without being asked. If you have that, an affiliate program is a no-brainer. Just keep it simple, pay fairly, and let your product do the selling. If you get even just 10% of the lift that an affiliate program has afforded us, the only regret you'll have is that you didn't launch with Partnero sooner."

Ready to build an affiliate program that works as hard as your product does? Get started with Partnero.

SimpleCheck uses Partnero to manage its affiliate program, including multi-tier commissions, automated payouts, and partner dashboards. Learn more at simplecheck.com/affiliates.