Got curious about this and figured I'd ask people who've actually done it. The obvious first step is finding your early customers and offering them the affiliate deal directly. That part makes sense to me. What I'm stuck on is the next step: if that doesn't get enough traction on its own, where do you actually find people who'd be interested in promoting a SaaS affiliate program in the first place? Curious how others have approached this, especially early on with a small user base.

Ten years selling and implementing B2B systems taught me something automation content usually skips: most "this didn't work" automation projects were dead before a single workflow got built. The pattern's always the same. Someone maps the process from memory, the way they think it runs, then automates that version. The automation runs perfectly. It just automates the wrong bottleneck, because the real one sits upstream of where everyone assumed, often further back than anyone expects. Pull the last 20–30 real cases for that process, whatever the record is: tickets, emails, support logs. Timestamp when each one entered and left every step. Don't ask anyone what they think happens; the timestamps don't lie. The step with the longest average gap between "entered" and "left" is your real bottleneck. It's almost never the one people point to in the planning meeting. That's usually the step someone remembers being annoying once, not the one quietly eating the most time. Automate that step first. Everything else can wait. What's the process you automated that turned out to be solving the wrong problem?

What I Built: I built a newsletter automation in Claude Code that researches a topic, generates AI infographics, creates a styled HTML email with Jinja2, and sends it through the Gmail API. My first end-to-end newsletter focused on Epigenetics and longevity. One Thing That Clicked: Debugging Gmail. I had a bunch of problems setting up the API. This taught me to isolate one variable at a time rather than making random changes. After a few tries, I discovered I was authenticated with an account that didn't actually have a Gmail mailbox.😅 One Thing I’d Improve Create a schedule that sends me the newsletter, maybe every Monday, and include a random factor to pick topics I am interested in (AI, Cybersecurity, Health, Manga, Baseball). TIP: Every time I am using AI to generate things, I wish I could understand more, so I can talk deeply about them. I always tell Claude to generate a Learn folder and to add 10 things I should learn from this project. Sometimes, I even ask to look for a good YouTube video <10 min and add the link for me to view.

Problem: same buyer messages twice, system logs them as two different leads. Messy CRM, agent calling the same person twice off two different records. Fixed it: 1. Clean the phone number first — strip spaces and country code, so "+91 98451 23670" and "9845123670" register as the same person 2. Search the database BEFORE saving anything new 3. Match found → update their existing record with fresh details 4. No match → create a new one The gotcha: a search with zero real results doesn't always come back truly empty — sometimes it hands you a placeholder that LOOKS like a result but has no actual data in it. My logic was reading that placeholder as "found a match" and routing every single new lead down the wrong path. Took way longer to catch that than to build the actual logic. 👇 Anyone else gotten burned by "empty" data that technically wasn't empty? Curious what tripped you up.

After Nate's second-brain walkthrough, I tried a simple check: could my setup find information I'd already saved? For three questions, the correct files didn't appear in the first three search results. The information existed, but those files weren't included in the search. After adding the missing file locations and adjusting the ranking, the correct sources appeared in the top three for all three questions. Small test, but it gave me something specific to fix. Here's a version you can try: 1. Pick three questions your saved notes should answer. 2. Ask them without supplying the answers or file names. 3. Ask for the supporting file and passage, then check them yourself. 4. If something is missing, check whether the search includes that file before adding more information. Prompt: “Answer from my saved files. For each answer, show the supporting file and passage. Flag missing or conflicting evidence.” Worth trying before expanding your library. Having a note saved doesn't guarantee it will be found.