Case Study: How BeyondConvert Migrated DreamCompanion From FirstPromoter to Trackdesk Without a Cutover

Executive Summary

Migrating an active affiliate program is the project every manager postpones. The fear is specific: reporting breaks, partners get paid on the wrong numbers, months of history go missing in the move.

That is not what happened here. DreamCompanion had outgrown FirstPromoter, and Trackdesk introduced the program to BeyondConvert, the affiliate management consultancy matched to the complexity involved: recurring subscriptions, in-app purchases, LTV offers, GEO-tiered payouts. The two teams ran the migration together. FirstPromoter stayed live throughout. Trackdesk earned the switch on real data before the old system came down.

Once the program was running on the new platform, Trackdesk’s native MCP server gave BeyondConvert a way to query and operate it from their own AI tools.

We moved the whole program onto Trackdesk and wired its reporting and billing straight into our own tools — and the part I braced for hardest, pulling a full month of billing data, turned out to be the part that just worked.

— Oded Abbou, BeyondConvert

What BeyondConvert runs on Trackdesk today:

A mature program moved off FirstPromoter with no downtime window
Subscriptions, in-app purchases and LTV offers each carrying their own conversion path
RevShare, CPA, hybrid and GEO-tiered deals paying out exactly as negotiated
Monthly billing pulled through the API and reconciled against platform totals
Program reporting and actions available from their own AI assistant through MCP

About BeyondConvert

BeyondConvert is an AI-first affiliate program management consultancy, founded in 2015 and based in Tallinn. It runs client programs end to end: strategy, commission architecture, partner recruitment, compliance and payout operations. Its platform practice is deliberately vendor-neutral, and tracking gets proven with end-to-end test conversions before any partner sends traffic.

Trackdesk introduced BeyondConvert to DreamCompanion as the right partner for the migration and the ongoing program management.

Founded: 2015, Tallinn, Estonia
Model: Founder-led affiliate program management, month to month
Client featured: DreamCompanion
Migration path: FirstPromoter → Trackdesk
Layered on top: Trackdesk MCP server for AI-driven reporting and program actions

About DreamCompanion

DreamCompanion is an AI companion platform running a performance affiliate program on Trackdesk. Its revenue model combines recurring subscriptions with in-app purchases, which is exactly what makes the affiliate side complex: partners stay attached to revenue events that fire days or weeks after the original click.

The Challenge: A Migration That Could Not Afford a Broken Month

FirstPromoter had carried the program for years until the program outgrew it. The complexity sits in the revenue model itself:

Recurring subscription renewals
In-app coin purchases
LTV-based offers that pay out across the customer’s lifetime
Events firing inside the app days after the original click
GEO-tiered payouts that shift by market

Every one of those events has to be attributed back to the affiliate who brought the user in.

Why BeyondConvert Chose Trackdesk

BeyondConvert works across the whole tracking landscape and picks the platform per program rather than per referral fee. Both FirstPromoter and Trackdesk sit inside that stack. So the question was never which platform is better in general. It was which one could hold this particular revenue model without bending it.

The revenue model transferred without being simplified.
Most platforms have an opinion about what a conversion is. Subscription renewals fit one shape, in-app purchases another, LTV offers a third, and the usual answer is to flatten all three into one generic event and reconcile the difference in a spreadsheet afterwards. On Trackdesk each revenue type keeps its own conversion type, offer structure and postback. Nothing had to be approximated to fit the tool.
Every affiliate deal kept paying the way it was written.
A mature program is a stack of individually negotiated agreements: RevShare, CPA, hybrids, and rates that move by market. Rebuilding those from scratch is where migrations quietly lose partner trust, because the affiliate finds the discrepancy before the manager does. The commission layer moved across intact, rule by rule.
Engineers answered the same day.
On a project touching billing data, the gap between a smooth month and a stuck one is usually how long it takes to get an answer to one specific technical question. BeyondConvert had direct access to Trackdesk’s senior developers instead of a ticket queue, so questions raised during the rebuild were closed the day they came up.
The API was complete enough to build on.
Links, sub-IDs, postbacks, conversion data and balances are all reachable through a documented API. That mattered twice. First during the migration, because a full month of billing had to be pullable and verifiable. Then afterwards, because the same API is what the MCP layer runs on.

How the Migration Ran

Three stages, with FirstPromoter kept fully live until Trackdesk had proven itself on real data.

1. Mapping the Revenue Model

The first stage was not technical. It was establishing exactly what had to survive the move: every revenue type in the program, and every requirement of the monthly reporting and billing cycle. Subscriptions, in-app purchases, LTV offers and events firing days after the click, each needing its own path with the affiliate still attached at the end of it.

2. Rebuilding on Trackdesk

Each revenue type became its own path: conversion type, offer structure, postback configuration, with attribution fields preserved so the right data carried through. The commission layer sat on top. RevShare, CPA, hybrids and GEO-tiered payouts each moved as their own rule, so partners kept getting paid the way their deal specified.

Nothing was simplified in the move. Subscriptions stayed subscriptions, LTV offers stayed LTV offers, coin purchases stayed coin purchases.

3. Testing Against Real Data

The monthly billing workflow was tested before anything else, deliberately, because it was the highest-stakes piece. Full-month pulls of clicks, conversions and commissions ran cleanly. Settled balances reconciled exactly against the platform’s own totals. FirstPromoter was retired because the new system earned it, not because it had been dismantled.

The Part Everyone Braces For: Billing

Every migration has one question that keeps the manager up at night. For BeyondConvert it was API pulls at billing time: can a full month of a live program be looped through with every single record coming back?

Two things could have gone wrong. The platform could refuse requests under rate limits, or return an incomplete set without saying so. Neither happened. Full-month pulls run cleanly. Settled balances feed straight into the monthly payout process, with no manual exports and no transcription step where errors used to hide.

The data we were told we’d get is the data we got: clean, complete, matching what the dashboard shows. That sounds like a low bar. It isn’t. Most platforms don’t clear it.

— Oded Abbou, BeyondConvert

Running the Program From an AI Assistant

With the program live on Trackdesk, BeyondConvert connected it to their own AI tooling through the Trackdesk MCP server.

MCP is an open standard that gives an AI assistant scoped, real-time access to a platform instead of a CSV export. Trackdesk hosts the server itself, so there is nothing to install or maintain, and it exposes the Trackdesk public API to any MCP-compatible client. Permissions are set by the personal access token issued for it, so the assistant can do exactly what that token allows and nothing beyond.

For an operation already built around API access rather than manual exports, that turns program reporting and routine actions into questions asked in plain language.

Advice for the Same Migration

Oded’s three-point framework, in his own words:

→ Anchor to one real deliverable. “Don’t ‘migrate your reporting’ — that’s an abstraction with no finish line. Pick the recurring output your program depends on.” For BeyondConvert, that was the monthly payout package.

→ Keep your current process running. “This costs nothing and removes all the risk. There’s no dramatic cutover moment; there’s just a day when you notice you haven’t opened the old spreadsheet in a month.”

→ Use the support you’re given. “The people who built the platform will save you more time in one conversation than a week of figuring it out alone.”

What This Means for Programs That Have Outgrown Their Platform

The fear of getting stuck halfway through a migration is legitimate. It comes from migrations run the wrong way, where the old platform is torn down before the new one has proven anything.

Run in parallel, with real engineers on the other side of the project, the worst case is that you carry on exactly as you already were. If your program has outgrown its platform, the risk is not in the migration - it is in postponing it.

Move Your Program Without a Cutover

Trackdesk gives established programs somewhere to land: conversion modeling per revenue type, RevShare, CPA, hybrid and GEO-tiered commissions preserved as their own rules, a documented API your billing can run on, and direct access to the engineers who built it.

Run it alongside your current platform until the numbers match.

Talk to a Migration Expert