The answer’s simple: you need one person. Two, tops. And a cat. Life just isn’t the same without a cat. Two cats is fine too — they won’t do any work either way, but morale will go up. I could wrap the post up right here, but I get the feeling I’m going to have to explain myself.
Heard of the Leadbit affiliate network? In its early days the entire team consisted of exactly one person: the founder. And that’s no exception — plenty of networks start as a one-person effort. It’s perfectly ordinary.
When you don’t have tens of thousands in investor money that you wouldn’t mind burning, you have to save on everything. People first of all: they’re expensive, they need vacations, and they get terribly offended when you don’t pay them. Besides, one person means speed: to change a payout, you don’t have to call a meeting. Decided — changed.
So let’s hand out the duties:
- Find and hook up an advertiser? You. At the start, a founder negotiates more convincingly than any hired manager — it’s his own money on the line.
- Talk to affiliates and support them? You. As a bonus, you’ll learn first-hand what drives affiliates nuts about your network. No hired support agent will ever pass it on to you that honestly. And AlterCPA integrated CRM will make it for you with great pleasure.
- Build the engine? Stop. Nothing needs building: AlterCPA Cloud costs peanuts and works from day one. Writing your own engine at launch is like getting a cat by first breeding your own breed from scratch of lion pride.
- Balance the books? Just enter the numbers into AlterCPA’s built-in accounting on time — balances, receivables and payables are all right there in plain sight. Hiring an accountant while you can still count your transactions on your fingers is a luxury.
- Marketing? You. Yes, again. A post in your channel, a couple of industry chats and DMs — that’ll do at the start.
You could, of course, go the other way and start your network by hiring a CTO. Six months later you’ll have a CTO, a repository, a spec as thick as War and Peace, and not a single lead. But it’s all yours! Except the engine isn’t where a startup should be getting original. Get original with your offers, your payouts and how you treat affiliates.
Want to poke at the engine for free first? There’s AlterCPA Moe, a free, stripped-down version of Pro for advertisers. You’ll learn the platform’s logic without opening your wallet. Honest warning, though: Moe has no affiliate module, so a network with outside affiliates needs Cloud or Pro specifically. Moe is a fitting room, not a network. Even combined with AlterCPA Red tracker.
If not even your mom would call you a programmer, and a task like “integrate an offer” sounds to you like a scream from hell — here’s that second person from the top of the post: the techie. You can hire one freelance and pray he doesn’t vanish halfway through the integration. Or you can skip hiring altogether and just order tech support from us: our techies set up integrations and offers at a public price — one-off or as a package.
And if at the start you’re also running traffic to your own offers, in 2026 you can add one more helper next to the cat. Our trackers come with an AI assistant: in AlterCPA Red it works for free, and in AlterCPA Lite it’s installed as the aibot hack in two clicks from the panel. It takes basic technical questions about the tracker and part of the analytics off your hands — and, unlike the cat, doesn’t sleep most of the day.
Want to make your work even easier and avoid dealing with live humans altogether? Replace these meat bags with a good AI. Lady Claudia Anthropy or sir Codex Altmani will come to the rescue, and for just a couple dozen bucks in an agency subscription, they’ll replace a whole pile of staff:
- Basic support with offer creation? The
adminapihack for the AlterCPA platform will take over management tasks. You give it a ready-made skill for Claudia, and it gives you a plain-text technical task. And a link to the documentation wouldn’t hurt either. - Basic traffic analytics? The
crmhack automatically monitors your webmasters and tracks whether they’re having any traffic issues. It even creates tasks automatically if problems come up. Plus, Claudia can grab whatever she wants via the API. - Basic landing page for your network? Claudia, darling, we’ve got work to do! Knock together a landing page for the affiliate program and make a skin for AlterCPA — here’s the instruction.
- Basic marketing and promotion? A Telegram bot, channel, chat — all under the control of AlterCPA TOP for tracking. It can be free, or cheap with mailings. And all of that again via the API through Claudia.
But that’s it. Once turnover starts growing, you can put people on payroll. A sure sign it’s time: you can no longer keep up with replying to affiliates, and the cat has stopped recognizing you. Networks that are past the newbie stage usually grow a staff of a couple dozen people. Who to bring in and why, I’ve covered in the post about the DreamTeam. Heads-up: there’s no line that says “hire programmers and write your own engine” in there either.
But that’s later. Right now our job is to launch fast. Launch cheap. Cut the risks to the bone. And not go broke. What such a launch costs in actual money, I’ve counted in the post next door. Spoiler: less than a purebred kitten.