Raphael Barros

Raphael has spent more than a decade in affiliate marketing and channel development, including time leading partner programs at enterprise SaaS companies. That operator background shapes how he writes: he has seen which program structures keep partners engaged and which ones quietly fall apart after the first payout.

His core focus areas are affiliate program strategy, SaaS partnerships, marketplace design, and partner economics. In practice, that means he is less interested in a flashy commission percentage and more interested in whether the underlying numbers add up over months and years.

Raphael starts with the economics. Before judging a program, he asks a simple question: what does a partner actually earn over the life of a referred customer? A generous rate on a product people cancel quickly rarely beats a modest recurring share on a tool that sticks.

From there, he weighs the parts of a program that operators tend to overlook:

• Payout structure — whether commissions hold past the first year and how renewals are handled.
• Attribution and cookie windows, which matter most for the long B2B buying cycles he reviews.
• Program transparency, since clear terms are usually a sign of a healthy, sustainable program.

Raphael concentrates on SaaS and AI affiliate programs aimed at businesses, where deals are larger and partner relationships run longer. He has reviewed programs across the marketing, CRM, and payments space, including the kind of high-value tools that reward partners on renewals rather than one-time signups.

For AI Distribution Partners, he helps shape the framework we use to score and verify programs, so readers can compare options on consistent, grounded data instead of marketing claims.