So Shape provides busy individuals with all the nutrients, vitamins and minerals they need in a single drink.

Raphaël had always been overweight and was used to a busy lifestyle fuelled by fast food.

This was before he met Steven, a chemist who was passionate about nutrition.

Steven realized through Raphaël that not everyone had enough willpower or time to diet and exercise.

And thus, the idea behind So Shape was born: a fuss-free drink for weight loss that contains 100% of the recommended daily supply of nutrients, vitamins and minerals.

To date, So Shape is doing really well with an epic referral rate of 12.6%. This means that nearly 13 out of every 100 purchases come from referrals!

We spoke to Raphaël, and asked him about his favorite marketing apps, referral rewards, and So Shape's success using ReferralCandy.

But first, here's some background on the company:

• Compact team of approx. 5 – Raphaël does everything web-related while Steven is in charge of product development. They didn't have developer for first 12 months, so Raphaël did all the barebones CSS, without any backend capabilities.
• Sells online from their website.

“What are the top 3 things that you care the most about?”

1. "Being Customer-first – We treat customers like our little brothers and sisters, and So Shape is like their elder brothers and sisters. We play with them, teach them nutrition, and inform them if they do something wrong in terms of nutrition."
2. "Our Products – We strive to make our products unique, pleasurable and most importantly, nutritious."
3. "Our team – We work very hard, so constantly need to keep a cool spirit."

"Where do you see the business heading?"

"We want to be a portable, online business that sells products of the highest quality to customers worldwide.

We want to sell directly to customers, so no margins will be given to middlemen.  This ensures they will always get the best prices."

"What are some business apps or tools that you have used for your business and are satisfied with?"

• Shopify – Shopify is easy to set up and manage, which helps us reduce a lot of cost of having an online store.
• ReferralCandy – Word-of-mouth is extremely important, so ReferralCandy provides us with a great and easy way to share our products.

“Why did you start using ReferralCandy?”

"Right from the beginning, we've always wanted to leverage on word-of-mouth.

We wanted a way for customers to refer our product to their friends in an automated and simple way.

While we've not tried any other referral apps before, we read the reviews (for ReferralCandy) and saw that there was no coding required. Since we didn't have any developers on our team then, it was a huge benefit for us.

To be honest, I don't really have to track it very often; all I do is check the ReferralCandy app occasionally to know what percentage of our orders come from referrals.

I also don't need an external tool for counting the discounted orders, which is pretty neat."

"Why did you choose to give both your advocates and their friends 10% discounts at your store?"

"I was inspired by Uber's double-sided incentives model and thought it was the simplest way to ensure that customers had a chance to get something at every step of the referring process."

"So what are two features that you like most about ReferralCandy?"

1. "Automation – ReferralCandy runs by itself in the background so I don't need to think about it at all."
2. "Design templates – I love how I can customize my referral emails to suit my brand."

Interested to find out more about So Shape? Check them out now!

Next: Referral Program Examples – An Epic List of 74 Referral Programs