Requirements · PRODUCT.md

Product

Platform

web

Stack

Next.js (App Router) on Vercel, Supabase Postgres with RLS, TypeScript, Tailwind. Chosen by the user to match the rest of the portfolio (vera-wellness / booked), so engineers and patterns carry across.

Mobile is browser-based, not native. No app store surface.

Users

Affiliate (primary). Two populations that must share one interface:

Novices — existing customers, coaches, gym owners who have never run an affiliate link. They need one obvious next action and proof that the thing they just did worked.
Working affiliates and creators — already promote products, already have other partner dashboards to compare this one against. They want density, EPC, per-link breakdowns, and fast copy-paste.

Confirmed: the interface must serve both without a mode switch. A novice must not drown; a pro must not feel babied. Progressive disclosure is a product requirement, not a preference.

Affiliate on mobile. Confirmed as a hard constraint by the user. The affiliate's real scene is a phone: checking earnings between other things, grabbing a link before posting, copying a swipe into Instagram or email. Phone is where the portal is judged.

The phone is also a production device, not only a reading one. The teleprompter capture flow means an affiliate records video inside the portal, on a phone, probably held one-handed, possibly in public. That is a camera surface with its own rules — it is not a page with a button on it.

Program admin (secondary). Jonathan, or one ops person. Success is defined as not logging in. Their screen is an exceptions queue, not a dashboard. Admin work is desk work; it may be desktop-first.

Product engineer (tertiary). Integrates the next product. Needs an SDK and a webhook, not a UI.

Product Purpose

A single affiliate platform that sits beside the products rather than inside any one of them. Products call it; it never calls them.

It tracks clicks and conversions, calculates commissions across two tiers, pays affiliates on a schedule, and equips them with links and promotional collateral.

Built first for the user's own products — HealthyApp, GetBooked, WhoHire — but shaped so it can become a sellable multi-tenant SaaS without a rebuild. Confirmed direction: internal first, commercial-shaped. The information architecture and visual system must survive the transition; the feature set does not have to.

Positioning

One affiliate identity earning across several products at once, with a shared downline and per-product rules. Rewardful, FirstPromoter, and Tapfiliate all scope an account to a single product, which would mean three subscriptions, three affiliate logins, and three sets of collateral for the same person.

The second differentiator is the collateral vault: assets rendered with the viewing affiliate's own link already substituted in, so an affiliate copies sendable material rather than homework. What ships in competing tools is a file list.

Operating Context

The affiliate's scene is a phone, in gaps between other work.
The admin's scene is a desk, a few minutes a week, handling exceptions.
Money is real and arrives on a schedule. Trust is the product; a number that looks wrong once costs more than a month of polish.
Commission states are visible to affiliates, not just internal: pending, approved, paid, and the hold period between earning and payability.
Products billed through Stripe; conversions largely derived from Stripe webhooks rather than manual reporting.

Capabilities and Constraints

Two levels, permanently. L1 direct, L2 override on the people an affiliate recruited. A third level would make the compensation plan an MLM in the FTC's eyes and is deliberately excluded, not deferred. No rank advancement, volume qualifications, or breakaways.
Append-only commission ledger. States: flagged, pending, approved, paid, voided, reversed. A 30-day hold sits between earning and payability.
Clawback reverses every level of a conversion on refund or chargeback.
Fraud flags (self-referral, duplicate customer, chargeback rate) create exceptions-queue items rather than punishments.
Link anatomy: a redirect route on each product's own domain, so the first-party cookie is first-party. Deep links, QR codes, campaign labels.
Collateral has three delivery modes, in rising order of ease (confirmed by the user 2026-10-03):
1. Download and post yourself — the baseline. Asset downloads, copy goes to clipboard, affiliate uploads it wherever they post.
2. Connect the account, we post for you — the affiliate authorizes their social accounts once and publishes from inside the portal. Scheduling, per-platform formatting, and the tracked link are handled for them.
3. Teleprompter record — the affiliate opens a supplied script on their phone, hits record, and the script scrolls over the camera. They get a finished video to post, or push it straight out through mode 2.
Collateral assets carry token substitution and required FTC disclosure language.
Downline visibility is deliberately limited: names and activity, never earnings or contact details.
Payouts through Stripe Connect Express; PayPal Payouts secondary; CSV as escape hatch. Minimum payout threshold, monthly runs.
USD only in v1. No multi-currency, no i18n committed yet.

Undecided (do not invent): commission rates; whether affiliate signup is open or approval-gated; whether customers may become affiliates; whether a sponsor earns across products their recruit promotes; whether the domain is registered.

Brand Commitments

Confirmed by the user: tellatribe owns its own identity. One neutral, confident brand. Products appear as logos on cards and link rows, not as a skin over the chrome. This is also what makes the platform sellable later.

Adjacent brands that exist and must not be absorbed into this one:

HealthyApp — purple #5F3FAB, teal #11AC96
booked.coach — hyper magenta #C2007B, teal #11AC96, warm graphite ground

Those are product marks that will appear inside tellatribe surfaces. tellatribe must not adopt either palette as its own, and must not collide with them so badly that a product logo looks broken on its ground.

The identity now exists: DESIGN.md (dark catalog wall, Big Shoulders Display + Schibsted Grotesk, accent #4D7CFF) and the tellatribe wordmark used in the apps, the deck and the paid-social set.

Evidence on Hand

PRD.md (v0.1, 2026-08-14) — the internal platform requirements. Current.
PRD-Activation-Platform.md (v1.1, 2026-09-03) — the commercial SaaS definition. Its own status line says it is pending reconciliation with PRD.md, and the BUILD-PLAN.md it refers to does not exist. Treated as forward-looking scope, not current requirements.
No code, no design, no brand assets, no live affiliates, no collateral library yet. Nothing is implemented.
No real performance data, testimonials, or affiliate counts exist. Any number shown in a mockup is placeholder and must be labeled as such.

Portal Priorities (confirmed 2026-10-03)

The user's own words on what the affiliate portal must do, very quickly:

Understand what products they have available to promote.
Understand the payouts, their current standing, and the guidelines.
Jump right into the collateral and start promoting.

"It should feel simple to take some action." That sentence is the acceptance test for the home screen. A first-time affiliate should land, see those three things, and be able to take one promotional action without reading anything.

Future (not v1, shape for it): bonus awards for affiliates who take a certain number of promotional actions in a time frame. Actions means promotion — posting, recording, sharing — never recruiting; a bonus for recruiting is the pyramid marker in §Capabilities. The data model should count promotional actions per affiliate per period from day one so the bonus can be switched on later without backfilling.

Product Principles

Trust is the interface. Every number maps to money someone is owed. A figure shown without its state — pending, held, approved — is a dispute waiting to happen.
The phone is the real product. The affiliate's whole job can be done from a phone: see what you earned, get a link, take a piece of collateral. Desktop is a larger view of the same thing, not the canonical one.
Depth on demand, never on arrival. The novice sees one next action; the pro reaches density in one gesture. Same screen, not two modes.
Collateral is finished work. An affiliate copies something sendable, or the vault failed. The ladder runs download → publish-for-me → record-with- teleprompter, and each rung removes a reason the affiliate would stall. The portal's job is to get someone from "I should promote this" to "it is posted" without leaving the phone.
The admin's success is absence. Automation by default, an exceptions queue for the rest. Designing the admin as a dashboard would invite the daily login the product exists to eliminate.

Accessibility & Inclusion

WCAG 2.2 AA for all principal affiliate and admin flows. Status must never be carried by color alone — commission states are financial facts and appear constantly. Keyboard navigation and visible focus throughout. Touch targets sized for one-handed phone use, which is the primary affiliate scene.

Rendered from PRODUCT.md. Edit the source, not this page.