Your best
customers know
ten more like them.
Herd finds them.
Coffee, apparel, skincare, home goods. You've spent two years building a brand customers love. Turn that love into distribution — without a twelve-month contract or a custom build.
LTV of referred vs. paid-acquired customers in DTC (Herd cohort, 2025)
median time from Stripe-connect to first share link sent
median CAC on referred orders, after rewards
Meta costs are up 38% this year. You know this.
Ads don't scale the way they used to.
ROAS is lower, creative cycles are shorter, and every new cohort is more expensive than the last. The customers you already have don't get any more expensive.
Discount codes are leaky by default.
Generic codes get scraped, shared in Reddit threads, and posted to coupon sites. Your best customers aren't extracting that value — strangers are.
Your ops lead doesn't want another dashboard.
Anything that requires a third weekly meeting will not ship. The program has to live where operations already live.
of Meta spend replaced in 8 weeks
“We were two weeks from pausing Meta entirely. Herd replaced about 60% of that budget with a referral loop that converts at 4×. The Stripe math stopped being scary.”
Three rewards you can ship
this afternoon.
You pay when a referred order lands — never before. Best for apparel, home, accessories.
Free-product rewards have 2.3× the share rate of cash. Best for consumables under $30 wholesale.
$10 on first referral, $25 on third, $60 on fifth. Best for brands with 30%+ gross margin.
Plug in your numbers.
Watch the line bend.
The calculator is live and tuned to dtc brands benchmarks. Stays honest, whatever you type.