How PlusVibe grew ARR 5X in 6 months with Affilial and PartnerStack

PlusVibe is an AI-powered cold email platform that helps sales teams and agencies run outreach at scale, with automated sequencing, deliverability tools and inbox warm-up built into one platform. A meaningful share of its pipeline comes from partners, including integration partners, technology partners, agencies and individual consultants, each on its own track. But as the partnerships side of the business grew, it quickly became clear that PlusVibe needed more support to keep the affiliate program running well and unlock its next stage.

“I was still the one managing it with a lot of issues around follow-through, launching new initiatives and overall keeping track of partner health, and onboarding and sourcing for new partners,” says Yaro Yashnyk, Co-Founder and CEO of PlusVibe.

That’s when Victor Moen, Co-Founder and CEO of Affilial, reached out. Affilial is a hyper-focused agency that manages affiliate programs exclusively for B2B SaaS companies, handling the entire lifecycle from partner recruitment to active management, so clients don’t need to build that expertise in-house. It was a natural fit for a program that had outgrown one person’s bandwidth.

With Affilial overhauling the affiliate program — including a move to PartnerStack for better tracking, automated payouts and streamlined partner support — PlusVibe grew ARR 5X in six months.

Trimming the list to build something that scales

When Affilial took over PlusVibe’s affiliate program, the first move was, counterintuitively, to shrink it.

Working directly with Yashnyk, the Affilial team audited the partner base, paring the roster from 600 down to 250. They also restructured how the remaining partners were paid, shifting to a tiered 20–30 per cent revenue share, capped at one year instead of running indefinitely — a structure designed to give partners something to keep working toward, rather than a flat, open-ended payout.

Finding a platform that could actually keep up

PlusVibe had been managing its program on a platform with a setup that made visibility difficult — Moen says it required manually counting which partners had driven a sale to track how many were active.

The previous platform limited what Affilial could do for PlusVibe’s partners. “We can’t communicate with them. We can’t give them resources. We can’t onboard them,” says Moen. “It’s basically almost the bare minimum of what you need, and not even that. So that’s why we made the switch.”

PlusVibe felt the operational costs, too. “For migration, my customer support team had to constantly deal with incoming requests about the affiliate program, which they were not always trained well to handle,” says Yashnyk. “These requests just ended up being added to my queue and had to be troubleshooted personally.”

Affilial moved PlusVibe onto PartnerStack, a platform built to give them the visibility and control the previous one couldn’t. The team reworked the asset library and set up a direct line between partners and the team through in-platform messaging. Account manager Nicole Pyzyk led the rebuild of the onboarding sequence.

The transition took some time. “It was not smooth, especially early days throughout the technical integration,” says Yashnyk. “I honestly hoped it would take much less time, but the main bottleneck was still sitting on the technical implementation on our site.”

What made the difference, he explains, was the team on the other side of it: “The implementation team on PartnerStack’s side was extremely helpful in that regard. I cannot praise them more than that.”

Yashnyk adds: “The integration process on server-side events is not an easy one. The team on the PartnerStack side makes it as painless as possible — and once implemented properly with all the custom events tracking, it just becomes an asset for the product, for PLG teams, where everything just works on autopilot.”

From a 2 per cent baseline to a habit that sticks

Once PlusVibe’s affiliate program was overhauled, Affilial — with account manager Pyzyk leading the activation push — turned its attention to getting more of that smaller, sharper partner base to actually drive sales. Here, one of the biggest levers was PartnerStack’s Challenges feature, which Affilial used to launch a series of time-sensitive bonus campaigns for PlusVibe.

“The challenge feature too has been really helpful for the activation campaigns,” says Moen. “Those have been some of the main drivers of revenue. We launched a $50 first-sale bonus campaign that made a ton of affiliates start promoting from that one campaign alone.”

The campaign started as a 30-day offer — a $50 bonus for a partner’s first sale. It worked well enough that Affilial made it permanent, and doubled it. “Now we permanently have that $100 first-sale bonus on top of the commission if they drive a referral within their first 30 days,” says Moen. “And that has been leading to a really strong performance.”

The results were immediate. “That jumped from 2 per cent before we ran that first-sale bonus up to 18 per cent when we started running that bonus,” Moen says. “Now we’re over 20 per cent of partners driving sales every month.”

Asked how that’s trending, he adds: “It’s been growing steadily every month, even though we’re adding new partners.”

Altogether, these changes have helped drive PlusVibe’s ARR 5X in six months.

Looking ahead: more partners, more precision

Affilial and PlusVibe are already mapping out where the next wave of growth comes from. Whatever partner types come next, the infrastructure stays the same: the same PartnerStack tracking, payouts and Challenge campaigns that powered PlusVibe’s first phase of growth are what Affilial plans to lean on as it expands PlusVibe’s partner mix.

Affilial is already testing new territory, from lead generation networks to larger-scale partners with more experimental reach. “We’re continuing to look for those that we know work, but we also want to test different sorts of partners for PlusVibe,” says Moen, “because if we test and experiment, we will find more stuff that works, more ponds of people that we haven’t had access to yet.”

At the same time, PlusVibe is going deeper in a category it already knows well: individual consultants and community leaders. The pool here is small and well understood. “The ICP in that sense is pretty mapped out,” says Yashnyk. “It’s a matter of execution now.”

In the end, PlusVibe’s affiliate program overhaul came down to the right tools paired with the right team — a platform built to scale with them, and Affilial’s hands-on work reshaping the program from the ground up.

Asked to sum up working with Affilial, Yashnyk doesn’t hesitate: “Delivered more than expected in a professional manner,” he says. “Really love working with you guys.” Pressed on whether that’s the whole story, he’s just as direct: “If there was anything bad about the work, I wouldn’t hold back.”