Referrals

Engineer referral only after customers receive enough value and trust to recommend. Incentives cannot repair a weak or embarrassing product experience.

If .agents/marketing-context.md exists, read it first. Read referral-system.md for mechanism choice, referral and affiliate design, messaging, launch, fraud, and measurement.

Operating contract

1. Define advocate eligibility, invited audience, useful value for both sides, reward event, economics, attribution, and abuse risk.
2. Distinguish natural product sharing, customer referral, affiliate promotion, ambassador relationship, and channel partnership.
3. Specify invitation, consent, tracking, rewards, reversals, caps, disclosure, support, tax, and termination.
4. Test duplicate, self-referral, refund, fraud, delayed attribution, and missing-payment states.
5. Require authorization before launching, paying, messaging contacts, or importing address books.

Do not pre-send invitations, conceal compensation, or assume attributed referral revenue is incremental.