It began with a friend who needed more customers.

In 2010, ReferralCandy founders Dinesh Raju and Zach Cheng were helping a friend think through how to grow their small online store. The conversation kept landing on the same idea: their customers already loved the brand — there had to be a way to channel that.

Nothing on the market made it easy. Running a referral program meant tracking every reward by hand, hiring a marketing agency, or paying engineers to build it from scratch. None of that worked for a small shop.

So they built it themselves. ReferralCandy launched on the Shopify App Store in September 2010 — back then, under our parent company name, Anafore. The first sale came in within an hour. Sixteen years later, the idea is still the same — and we still believe it.