# Pay It Forward

> Track referrals, introductions, and mentorship. Measure real outcomes — hires, deals, career moves. Prove your professional impact. Powered by agentic AI.

## About

Pay It Forward (payitfwd.app) is a measurable referral and relationship impact platform. When someone helps you — with a referral, an intro, a mentor call, advice — you acknowledge it. When you help someone else, you log it. And when an act pays off in a real-world outcome (a hire, a deal, a new opportunity), you record that too. The result is a traceable chain of who helped whom and what came of it: measurable proof of impact, not just feel-good tracking.

Built for professionals who believe success is a team sport. Used by HR, Talent Acquisition, D&I, and CSR teams to track referrals, mentorship analytics, and CSR-ready reports.

## Agentic AI architecture

Three autonomous AI agents work behind the scenes. Every action requires user approval — AI that empowers, never AI that overrides.

- **Gratitude Scout.** Notices when someone helps you and surfaces reminders to acknowledge them.
- **Chain Orchestrator.** Analyzes your skills and the network to prepare your next pay-it-forward action, drafting the message for your approval.
- **Impact Narrator.** Writes the story of your chain in natural language so you can share it anywhere.

All three agents are available on the free plan.

## Core loop

1. Receive an act of support (referral, intro, mentorship, advice) → acknowledge it in the app.
2. The platform matches you with the right person to help next.
3. AI suggests concrete ways you could pay it forward, tuned to your skills and network.
4. Help someone. The chain grows.
5. Record real-world outcomes — hires, interviews, deals, opportunities, connections, skills gained — on the acts that pay off.

## Impact Score

Every user has a visible, personal Impact Score that reflects the real-world outcomes they've helped create. It's calculated from:

- 10 points per act of support given
- 25 points per recorded outcome across your chains
- 5 points per person reached downstream
- 2× multiplier when active three or more weeks in a row

Impact Scores are not competitive — there is no global leaderboard. They're a personal figure you can carry into performance reviews, promotion cases, and professional profiles.

## Key features

- **Outcome tracking.** Receivers record the real result of an act: hire, interview, deal, opportunity, connection, skill gained, or other. Outcomes show up as badges on chain timelines and feed every downstream metric.
- **Traceable chains.** Each act points back to the act that inspired it. Chain view shows the full graph: people, depth, total acts, outcomes, branching.
- **Impact Score.** A personal number summarising the outcomes you've helped create, visible on your profile, on public chain pages, and on /impact.
- **AI suggestions.** Anthropic's Claude generates personalised paying-it-forward ideas from your profile, skills, tokens, and network.
- **Impact dashboard.** Impact Score, outcomes created, outcome rate, monthly chart, completion rate, cities reached, biggest chain, category breakdown.
- **Social auth.** Sign in with Google, GitHub, LinkedIn, or email + password.
- **Public chain sharing.** Any chain can be shared to a public URL with its own OG image and the originator's Impact Score.
- **Email notifications.** New-act-received, chain milestones, weekly digest, nudges — all toggleable per user.
- **PWA.** Installable; offline fallback; push-ready.
- **For companies.** A Teams-tier dashboard (in pilot) tracks referral-to-hire rates, mentorship analytics, and produces CSR-ready impact reports.

## Pricing (USD, monthly)

- **Free — $0.** Unlimited acknowledgements, chain visualization, outcome tracking, Impact Score, all three AI agents, interactive chain graph. Free forever.
- **Pro — $4.99.** Advanced analytics, detailed chain reports, priority AI matching.
- **Premium — $12.99.** Everything in Pro plus exportable impact reports (PDF/CSV), custom chain themes, API access.
- **Teams.** Book a demo. Per-org referral tracking, mentorship analytics, diversity-impact reporting (on roadmap), internal mobility insights (on roadmap), and CSR-ready quarterly reports.

Billed via Stripe. Cancel any time. Existing chains stay visible forever.

## Buyer personas

- **HR & People Ops.** Surface quiet helpers; reward relationship work in reviews.
- **Talent Acquisition.** Track referral-to-hire rates with real attribution.
- **D&I / DEI.** Audit referral and mentorship patterns for inclusivity.
- **CSR / ESG.** Turn mentorship and pro-bono work into board-ready impact numbers.

## Founding story

Pay It Forward started with one sentence a senior leader said after referring the founder for a role: "You don't owe me anything. Just pay it forward." The insight grew into a question — what if every professional favour could be traced to a real-world outcome the way a wire transfer can? Today the platform turns that question into a product.

## Tech stack

Next.js 14 (App Router), TypeScript, Prisma, PostgreSQL on Neon, NextAuth v5, Anthropic SDK (Claude), Stripe, Resend + React Email, Tailwind CSS + shadcn/ui, PostHog, Upstash Redis, Sentry. Hosted on Vercel.

## Links

- Landing: https://payitfwd.app/
- For Teams: https://payitfwd.app/teams
- About: https://payitfwd.app/about
- Founder's story: https://payitfwd.app/story
- Pricing: https://payitfwd.app/pricing
- FAQ: https://payitfwd.app/faq
- Compare with alternatives: https://payitfwd.app/compare
- Sign up: https://payitfwd.app/signup
- Terms: https://payitfwd.app/terms
- Privacy: https://payitfwd.app/privacy
- Source code: https://github.com/mir-quadri/payitforward

## Contact

hello@payitfwd.app