PROPER-RESPECT

One place for the products you actually use: affiliate links, proof, and the story of who put you on.

PROPER-RESPECT is a product-stack profile. It is not trying to predict a person's whole software life from surveillance data. It helps a linker collect the products they use, attach the best available proof, add their affiliate/referral links where they exist, and credit the people, content, communities, or events that introduced them.

Current Direction

The product starts as a manual-first profile builder:

1. Add a product you use or have tested.
2. Add your affiliate link, referral code, or canonical link.
3. Attach proof: Loom, YouTube, screenshot, article, GitHub repo, receipt, or API/OAuth evidence when available.
4. Add lineage: who or what put you on.
5. Publish a public product-stack page.

Automation is additive. It should get a user more than halfway toward a useful profile, but it should not become the product's source of truth.

What Problem This Solves

Affiliate and referral links are fragmented across product dashboards, YouTube descriptions, notes apps, old tweets, newsletters, and link-in-bio tools. Most products either have no referral program or make it hard for actual users to present their advocacy in one place.

PROPER-RESPECT gives linkers a single surface for:

• Products they actively use
• Products they are testing
• Products they used and archived
• Affiliate/referral links when available
• Proof that they know the product
• Lineage for who put them on

What We Are Not Building Right Now

These ideas are parked in docs/future/ until the core profile works:

• B2B dashboards
• Pricing and paid tiers
• Company reward configuration
• Public API monetization
• Analytics dashboards
• Mobile screen-time tracking
• Company outreach workflows

Proof Sources

The product should support multiple proof sources because no single source covers every product.

Source	Best For	Signal	Launch Priority
Manual curation	Everything	User says this belongs on their stack	Now
Content proof	Loom, YouTube, screenshots, articles	Shows the product in use	Now
Link imports	Linktree, Beacons, GitHub README, Twitter bio	Existing public curation	Now
Receipt forward	Paid products	User chooses a receipt to convert into a draft prop	Next
Claim-on-visit extension	Web products	User clicks while on a product page and captures URL/screenshot	Next
Public profile scan	GitHub repos, public articles, YouTube descriptions	Public evidence of usage or mention	Next
Product API/OAuth	GitHub, Linear, Vercel, Notion, Figma	Product-specific verification	Later
Email metadata scan	SaaS signup and receipt discovery	Broad but noisy	Later, optional

MVP App Flow

Linker signs up
  -> creates profile
  -> imports existing links or starts manually
  -> adds product cards
  -> adds affiliate/referral/canonical links
  -> attaches proof
  -> adds "put on by" lineage
  -> publishes profile

Visitor flow:

Visitor opens profile
  -> browses Active / Testing / Archived products
  -> sees proof and lineage
  -> clicks affiliate/referral/canonical link

Suggested Technical Stack

This remains a small web app until the profile builder proves itself.

• Frontend: Next.js + TypeScript
• Styling: Tailwind or plain CSS modules; design should feel like a polished product stack, not a generic SaaS dashboard
• Auth: Clerk or a simple auth provider
• Database: Postgres (Neon is fine)
• ORM: Prisma or Drizzle
• Storage: Vercel Blob/S3 for screenshots; external embeds for Loom/YouTube
• Hosting: Vercel

Documentation

• CONTEXT.md - domain language and product principles
• PRD.md - current MVP requirements and architecture
• GRILL-SESSION.md - latest grilling decisions and unresolved questions
• INDEX.md - active and future documentation map
• docs/adr/ - accepted active decisions
• docs/future/ - parked ideas that are not part of the current build

Current Build Target

Build the smallest useful product:

• A public profile for one linker
• Product cards with status: Active, Testing, Archived
• Link slots: affiliate URL, referral code, canonical URL
• Proof attachments: Loom, YouTube, screenshot, article, GitHub repo
• Put-on-by lineage: person, content, community, event
• Import from existing public surfaces where easy

If a feature does not make the profile more useful for the linker or more credible for the visitor, it waits.