This is helpful. Just to clarify, so you had created your own affiliate network and run this manually? Tracking, payouts, etc?

There's software for running your own program so they handle most of that except the actual payment part, monitoring for fraud, etc. Plus they don't give any visibility to your program which a network would help with to an extent

Can you recommend this software? It's definitely not considered an ad, but just to understand what exactly you find useful.

If you search something like saas affiliate marketing software it's the first non ad result

yes - please recommend affiliate software that is actually good, lots of people here woudl love it to get off the ground