239. Partnerships 🤝

A partnerships strategy playbook for up-and-coming companies

Sep 27, 2021

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Use cases are the fuel for land and expand (so make a bunch of templates)
More 4-day workweeks in the news. Does your company have one?

Hi there 👋

We had a big week at Oyster, launching a number of new things and making some big announcements. One thing we did was refresh our mission statement.

Previous it was:

Our mission is to remove the barriers to cross border employment so that companies can tap into the global talent pool and talented people improve their employability no matter where they are.

Now it is:

Our mission is to create a more equal world by making it possible for companies everywhere to hire people anywhere.

Thoughts?

Wishing you a great week ahead,

Kevan

Partnerships 101: An overview of partnerships strategy

When I think of successful Product-Led Growth companies, I find partnerships to be an unmistakable part of the winning formula. Step One toward getting your product to your end users is:

Distribute your product where users live

And with all the various online places they could reside, you need to build strong partnerships in order to reach them.

Partnerships are key to PLG, but they’re also quite essential to running a world-class sales org, too. Partnerships can be as big a source of new business pipeline than your traditional channels like inbound and outbound. Partnerships is already delivering $1M+ in new pipeline at Oyster.

But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself …

Partnerships is a necessary avenue for PLG and a lucrative source for sales. To get that point, you first need to build an understanding of all that partnerships can do for your business, then choose the partner strategy that fits best today, tomorrow, and well into the future.

I’ve been very fortunate to work with some amazing partnership leaders at Buffer (Amanda Marochko 👋) and Oyster (Jess Romano, Bruno Cunha, and Kim Kadiyala 👋). If you’re looking for the ideal profile for partnerships teammates, copy-and-paste these folks’ CVs.

In my experience, partnerships is defined as strategic relationships that bring value to both partners, typically within these four areas:

1 - Platform partners.

These are the product partnerships that create necessary usability and feature functionality within a product. Without a platform partner, some products can’t work as effectively … or can’t work at all. For instance, our platform partners at Buffer were Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. Without those partnerships, you didn’t really have a Buffer 🙃

2 - Integration partners.

These are technical partnerships between two companies, usually through an API integration. Integrations extend the core functionality of a product. They’re nice-to-haves. Think of a tool like Greenhouse, which integrates with your Calendly.

3 - Co-marketing partners.

These partnerships are goaled on awareness and lead gen. Nothing technical required. Oftentimes, marketing teams can lead these partnerships. A co-branded webinar is a classic example.

4 - Affiliate partners.

With these partnerships, the goal is revenue. You can think of a classic affiliate program where people refer customers to your product and get a kickback in exchange. This can happen at the individual level or at the company / industry level, for instance an affiliate partnership at HubSpot with marketing agencies around the world.

At Buffer, we primarily focused on the first three.

We had platform partners that helped our product work. We had tons of integrations both inside the product (like Canva) and outside (like Pocket and IFTTT and Feedly). Then of course, we did lots of marketing campaigns with partners like Mailchimp, Shopify, and Wistia.

At Oyster, we have the ability to do all four. Parts of our product rely on functionality or data from partners. We are exploring integrations with hiring software and accounting software. We have co-marketing opportunities with an ecosystem of cool products, and we have a robust affiliate network being built out.

Big-to-small and small-to-big

One aspect of the partnerships puzzle worth highlighting is integrations.

Entire books should be written about how to pull off an ace integrations strategy because the thing is so complex.

Integrations = enhancement, yes. But there’s a lot more to them than that. For example, what is an integration? Buffer integrates into Feedly. Canva integrates into Buffer. Zapier uses the Buffer API to integrate Buffer into their product. Ghost uses nothing to integrate Buffer into their product. Buffer opens up an API that is used by thousands of people — should it be a paid feature then? Companies reach out all the time to have Buffer integrate with their products — should they build out a separate integrations team?

Regardless of how you define it, I think it’s valuable to consider integrations for what it is: a growth loop.

You integrate with another product, you bring in lots of new users who eventually become paying customers, allowing you to have the capital to go out and invest in another integration. Think: Polly and Microsoft Teams.

Or, you integrate with a product, allowing your users to gain deeper usage, leading to higher LTV and upsell/cross-sell, which enables you to have the capital to go build more integrations. Think: Polly and Zoom plus Slack.

If you’re just beginning your partnerships journey, you can think of it through this paradigm: Small-to-big and big-to-small.

With small-to-big … you are the small fry building off of a big potato’s API.

This is what Buffer did initially with Twitter and Facebook. This is where most companies start.

And it’s a really great place to start because you are building off an established entity with a large, eager userbase of happy, active people. What’s best is if your big-potato integration partner wants to highlight your partnerships as well, through their ecosystem or partner program. This is especially worth looking into if you’re building on a newly-release API.

With big-to-small … the relationship flips. People are coming to build integrations onto your API.

Most companies will be very lucky to get to this spot. It takes a sizable reach and influence to be able to make this effective. No one’s going to want to build if you have a couple dozen users.

But this is the direction you need to head if you’re going to make integrations successful long-term. Your growth loop will slow down once you knock off the most obvious integration partners. When you have big-to-small integrations (people building on your API), the loop gains speed again because you have an exponentially huge volume of interest and a long-tail. Think about the WordPress plugin library for instance.

Think in terms of ecosystem

Probably the most important concept when it comes to partners is the ecosystem. You are not partnering with someone for a one-off cool feature or a single, transactional guest post. You are engaging with a partner in order to be part of their story and to exist within their ecosystem.

Ecosystems are vital, especially for early companies, because you gain instant access to an audience, instant access to functionality, or instant access to a new sales force. Often times, if you’re partnering with someone who has an existing ecosystem, there are tools and resources in place to help you make the most of the relationship.

Same goes for the flip side: when you build an ecosystem yourself, you are creating incredible value for your customer base. They simply need to click a page to have a bunch of goodies at their fingertips.

Ecosystems are like rocket fuel for your business, and they’re like Christmas morning for your customers.

Where does partnerships live?

At Oyster, partnerships lives in sales.

At Buffer, partnerships was called Biz Dev, and it lived in product.

Funny that I’ve yet to work somewhere that marketing owned partnerships. That being said, it has never stopped me from having opinions. Often times, marketing’s role in partnerships is to help identify opportunities where partnerships can boost a GTM strategy, amplify awareness efforts, or build strategic relationships. At Oyster, our partner marketer Kim lives on our marketing team and works closely with our partnerships team, helping to activate and amplify relationships.

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