Referred customers are our highest quality signups, but the channel is small. Referred signups convert to paid at 26%, about 10 times the 2.6% trial baseline. Most stay: 83 to 92% of referred converts still pay today. The channel adds about 4 paying customers a month, around 1.4% of new paid customers.
We raised the US reward from $300 to $1,000 on 1 July 2026. Early signs are positive: invites doubled in the first week, and half the senders are first time referrers. Referred signups have not moved yet, and 6 days is too little to call it.
Workspaces sent 79 invites in the first 6 days of July, against 51 in the same June window. Daily invites are running at about twice the June rate. The reward changed on 1 July, and that day saw 27 invites, the most of any day in the past month.
The lift is in sending, not visits. Opens are flat, so people who open the referral page now send at about twice the June rate. New referrers are arriving too: 29 of the 56 workspaces that sent in July (52%) had not sent an invite in the previous year.
Invites sent each day, 8 June to 6 July 2026. 6 July is a part day.
| Measure | 1 to 6 June | 1 to 6 July | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Referral page opens | 84 | 79 | -6% |
| Invites sent | 51 | 79 | +55% |
| Workspaces sending | 37 | 56 | +51% |
| Referred signups | 4 | 3 | flat |
Treat this as an early signal, not a result:
The instrumentation gap still stands. Referral events do not record country, so comparing the US ($1,000) with other regions ($300) needs a join to signup location data. We suggest a full checkpoint at the end of July on 3 measures: workspaces sending invites, invites per referrer, and referred signups.
Counts are events, not unique people, except workspaces sending. The joined and activated steps only exist since 12 and 25 May 2026, so they undercount the 90 day window.
Workspaces sent 136 to 263 invites a month all year. Opens spiked to 1,099 in October 2025, but signups only reached 42 that month. Invites rose to 245 in May 2026 around the relaunch, then fell back to 194 in June. Referred signups did not follow: 24 in May, 13 in June.
| Month | Opens | Invites sent | Referred signups |
|---|
The charts show full months only. July appears in the table and in the daily chart above.
Admins account for 95% of paid workspaces that referred. Only 35 staff members sent an invite all year. Staff are the largest untapped audience. Whether staff can even open the referrals page is an open question with engineering.
| Referrer role | Paid workspaces referring | Share | Invites sent |
|---|---|---|---|
| Admin or owner | 753 | 95% | 1,800 |
| Staff | 35 | 4% | 101 |
| Contact | 1 | 0% | 1 |
A further 110 non-paying workspaces sent 226 invites. The adoption denominator is approximate: 777 referring paid workspaces against a paid base of 3,600 to 4,800, so 16 to 21%.
The median referrer sends one invite. The mean is 2.5. A small tail of 26 workspaces sent 10 or more. Getting one-time referrers to send a second invite is a bigger pool than finding new referrers.
857 workspaces sent at least one invite in the past year, including non-paying workspaces.
203 people signed up through a referral link in the past year. 53 of them started paying, all after their referral signup. That is 26%, against a 2.6% trial to paid baseline. The median time from signup to first subscription is 67 days. 2 of the 53 converted in the first days of July.
Retention is strong. 9 of the 53 have a cancellation event, which puts retention at 83%. The current subscription flag says 49 of 53 still pay, which puts it at 92%. The truth sits between the two, because some cancellations were trial cancellations or were followed by a resubscribe.
One caveat: this is correlation, not proof the reward causes the quality. Referred signups choose us because someone they trust recommended us. Proving the reward adds customers we would not otherwise get needs a holdout test.
Five events cover the referral funnel. The two server side events are new, so conversion telemetry only starts in May 2026.
| Event | Count, past year | Tracked since | Useful properties |
|---|---|---|---|
| Referral opened | 4,878 | Before July 2025 | role, providerId |
| Referral sent | 2,162 | Before July 2025 | role, providerId, isSubscribed, code |
| Referral signup | 204 | Before July 2025 | code, providerId, isReferred |
| Referral joined | 35 | 12 May 2026 | referrerProviderId, referredProviderId, referredEmail |
| Referral activated | 10 | 25 May 2026 | referrerProviderId, referredProviderId, activatedAt |
Prepared by growth. Source: PostHog production, events from 3 July 2025 to 6 July 2026. Reward records: Customer.io workspace 199150.