Your recommendation is deal flow.
A creator with an audience that actually listens has four well-worn ways to earn from it. Ads pay for attention alone, at whatever the auction says an impression is worth — trust never enters the price. Sponsorships pay a flat fee, up front, blind to outcomes — a recommendation that sends a sponsor the biggest customer they sign all year pays the same as one that sends nothing. Merch and courses mean running a business the creator never wanted. And affiliate links — the one path that even claims to price outcomes — price the click: tracked checkout on low-ticket goods, a cookie window that expires before a serious buyer finishes deciding, and nobody working the lead after the tap.
Meanwhile the one thing a trusted recommendation actually creates — serious buyers, ready to talk to someone — has nowhere to go. A link cannot take that conversation. The creator can’t work those leads without becoming a salesperson, so the value either evaporates or accrues to the brand, invisibly, with no attribution back to the person whose word created it.
The rail under this plan is not this deck’s to promise: the Deal state machine, the Mandate, the Gate, and settlement are live and documented on api.forsale — the demand rail this brand feeds (propose → gate → commit).
The referral-specific pieces of the plan — the share line, the intake tag, the automatic share computation — are design until the pending claims in this deck post.
The Register selects closers from settled outcomes — which means it needs settled outcomes to select from. Until a settled deal is in evidence, the verified-closer bench is a design, not a roster. And a settled-outcome record measures closed deals, not conduct toward an audience’s leads — how that conduct will be measured and enforced is not yet decided. This claim posts when the first cohort of closers stands behind it, settled track records in evidence.
A setter works a Role inside the pipeline — a claimed Gig, a defined exit condition, a place in the deal’s staffing. The creator is none of that. An influencer holds no Role, claims no Gig, carries no quota, takes no calls. The audience’s leads will be worked start to finish by others; the creator’s part ends where it should — at the recommendation.
That line is structural, not stylistic. It is what lets a creator earn from outcomes without becoming a salesperson — and it is the crisp split between this door and every setter program that dresses pipeline work up as “partnership.”
On a closed-won deal, the seller’s settlement carries stated lines: the platform fee — a flat 5% of closed value, seller-side — and any closer commission, which the closer keeps in full: 100%. Nothing is charged on effort — no fee exists until a deal settles. These are api.forsale’s posted terms.
The declared referral share is designed to ride that same settlement as its own stated, seller-side line — the seller’s declared cost, never carved from the pay of the person actually serving the audience’s leads.
Where a discretionary partner payout can be quietly re-decided after the deal closes, a declared line in settlement cannot — that difference is the product.
developer seller
offers via API — the demand rail and sole authority over every deal
individual closer or setter
labor — role-scoped Gigs, commission and fees
firm
a bench — the Firm as envelope, members as actors
connector
vouched participants — sellers (demand referral) and closers (supply referral), one introduction at a time
creator
deal flow — an audience’s demand, standing outside the Deal
substrate — api.forsale
The referral layer itself has two doors over one primitive, and the split is crisp: this door brings an audience’s demand; referrals.sale pays for a vouched person you can name. Know a seller or a closer personally? That’s referrals.sale — and a creator who lands there belongs here, by design.
The door is live: the creators.sale waitlist is open today.
There are no live offers to promote yet, and this deck won’t pretend otherwise — a brand asking to borrow a creator’s candor owes its own. The claim that matters posts when the first declared-share offer settles a deal, with the settlement in evidence.
Share bounds, stacking rules (referrer + firm + platform), and attribution windows are open questions, named as open. Whatever they land as, they will be declared before a creator promotes — never discovered after.
A short survey — platform, audience size band, niche, and the offers you’d actually stand behind — so matching happens only on genuine fit.
Joining before the first settlement is not a formality: the first cohort’s answers inform which sellers get vetted for the opening offer catalog, and first-cohort creators may be fast-tracked against those declared-share offers when they go live.