Ask HN: Refer Madness [critique my idea]
Would love to get HN's feedback on this idea. The feedback from HN on http://todoneapp.com/ was useful and it's actually seeing some traction now. This is an idea I had while thinking about how to spread the word about To->done.

PS: If you are interested in being a user/tester of this product, please let me know! I'm looking for some early adopters/drivers!

(EDIT: Sorry for the crap formatting of this.)

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Name:

Refer Madness (har har), Refurl, Referly, Referee, whatever...

Overview:

Hosted referral system. Easily integrate a set of widgets into your site that allows users to refer their friends and be rewarded. Stylistically and programatically customizable. Increase your viral coefficient by recognizing top referers, thus motivating higher than normal sharing rates.

Target market:

Long tail social sites/communities that are looking to acquire new users without cpc/cpm mkting. This isn't targeted at e-commerce because there's already a lot of hosted affiliate systems, and this product has a social/community angle (e.g. persistent and public identities) that doesn't make sense in an online store.

Basic flow:

1. Publisher signs up for service.

2. Publisher sets up a site in their account.

a. Enter some pertinent data about the site (name, URL, etc).

b. Set goals (e.g. page URLs matched by regexes) that constitute "conversion" (e.g. post-signup page)

3. Publisher obtains "Share Widget"

a. Several styles/variations of the widget. Can be customized.

b. Widget is placed anywhere on the user's site where they want to motivate sharing

c. Widget needs slight modification by server side logic to emit a unique user identifier (e.g. hash the user's internal id) This is for consistent identification of the referrer.

4. Publisher obtains "Landing Widget". This is a widget that appears on every page in the site and is used to capture the referral code of a new visitor when they land on any page on the site.

5. Publisher obtains "Award Widget". This is heavily customizable with a variety of modalities, such as:

a. Profile mode, where it manifests as a badge on the user's profile e.g. "Super Referrer - 25 points"

b. Gallery mode, where it can show all time top referrers, top referrers of the day and so on (requires server integration to pull the user's public data in order to render the gallery

c. Real-time ticker mode to show live referrals that are happening right now.

d. The look and feel of these widgets can be customized... e.g. using iconography/language specific to your site... it'd all be based around JSONP so the site's webdev should easily be able to go crazy with it.

6. User of publisher's site sees widget and uses special link (with their referral code embedded) to share with their friends

7. Potential user clicks on shared link. When they land on the site, their referrer is stored in their cookie.

8. When new potential user lands on a goal page, the referrer is rewarded (receives a "point" -- later used for showing badges rewards etc, see 5a-5c

9. JSON/JSONP API of course to build whatever custom solutions a publisher can dream of. (Enable secondary ecosystem/marketplace of plugins for the system)

10. Publisher metrics dashboard, obviously

Business model:

Freemium with monthly (yearly for lower charging overhead/simplification?) charge for higher tier services. Price point, no idea. On the order of other hosted site enhancements ala GetSatisfaction, Mixpanel, etc.