607. Ecosystems 🪼
The can't-miss strategy for expanding your brand presence
Hellooo 👋 So happy to have you here. I’m Kevan. I have spent 15+ years as a head of marketing for some cool tech startups. Now I’ve co-founded a brand storytelling business called Bonfire. We do coaching, advisory, and content. If you identify with creativity and marketing, we’d love for you to join us.
The #1 place for startup brands to find traction? Other people’s brands
Let’s say you have a brand new startup and are looking to be seen by masses of your target audience.
Or let’s say you’re an established brand looking to take your brand presence to new heights or crack into new markets.
There are a billion different marketing channels where you can do this. (OK, maybe there are more like 47.) The other day, I shared my most reliable channels on LinkedIn, and alongside content marketing and PR and email was a surprise entrant: partnerships. But of course, wouldn’t you know, partnerships just might be the most powerful of them all!
Partner marketing is one of the most misunderstood aspects of a diverse marketing mix, so I like to simplify the concept down to its core: Partnerships are about connecting with fellow brands and influencers to help one another out through promotion.
Sounds simple. Is actually complex.
Partnerships includes co-marketing and can also envelop events and even community. It goes by a lot of different definitions at different places, and it can even report into different teams. (I’ve seen it report to marketing, growth, sales, and even product.) But it’d be a miss to deprioritize partnerships because of its complexity, especially when it can drive such meaningful results for your brand at a very efficient cost and a huge, enormous scale.
Let’s go back to the premise. Maybe you’re a …
brand new startup and are looking to be seen by masses of your target audience.
established brand looking to take your brand presence to new heights or crack into new markets.
My favorite way to get noticed at scale is to apply a partnerships strategy where you get your product listed within the ecosystems and marketplaces of bigger brands.
Sounds simple. Is simple!
It might seem like a small thing, but getting your product listed in places like Shopify’s App Store, Salesforce’s AppExchange, or even within the integrations of a popular platform can make all the difference.
Take AI tools, for example. If you’re launching an AI product—or pivoting your previously fuddy-duddy product into an AI product (we’ve all been there!)—one of the world’s most notable AI tools is ChatGPT. They are ubiquitous in the tech world, they are a household name in the zeitgeist, they run Super Bowl commercials!
So getting featured in their app marketplace is almost as good as a free billboard ad on the 101. Think of all the eyeballs! 👀
(Speaking of which, some marketplaces might actually charge—or could charge—to be featured.)
Your spot within the ecosystem of a major software player signals a few things:
You are a brand that is to be taken seriously (trust)
You are a brand that is established and not going away tomorrow (permanence)
You are a brand that this other big brand is comfortable showing off (perception)
You are a brand that has their act together enough to build an integration or develop a partnership strategy (confidence)
Also, the beauty of these ecosystem listings is that you have to distill the essence of your product into a single phrase or two. Take Descript for instance. In the screenshot above, they are a featured app in the ChatGPT marketplace. I know them as a speech-to-text video editing tool. They have named themselves here as an “AI Video Maker,” a point that is further underscored by the fact that they are listed on the marketplace of the #1 AI tool in the world.
Ecosystems are great places to reposition yourself.
Ecosystems are also great places to establish yourself.
I have been vaguely aware of the Arc browser for awhile, but it has always felt like an afterthought in the crowded browser category, dominated by Chrome. The Arc browser is pretty and cool, but small potatoes.
Well, when I saw them featured in Notion’s list of Notion Calendar integrations, my perception of their brand immediately changed.
Simply by seeing them on this page (note: there is no CTA and no Arc product marketing copy even), my rank of browsers went from this:
Chrome
Firefox
Safari
Brave
Arc
To this:
Chrome
Arc
Firefox
Safari
Brave
All because they showed up within Notion’s ecosystem. Since I am an ardent Notion user, I now can imagine myself being an ardent Arc user, too.
Being listed in a major app directory or marketplace like Notion’s isn’t just about exposure then—it’s also about validation. Think about it: when your product is listed alongside trusted, well-known software, people assume that you’ve been vetted. You get an automatic “stamp of approval” from the platform you’re integrated with and you get to ride the coattails of their brand perception, loyalty, and trust. That’s a powerful thing when you’re trying to build an early brand on a shoestring budget.
And of course, there are product and growth benefits, too.
Within these ecosystems, you’re not just listing your product and hoping for the best—you’re positioning it alongside complementary tools that create a fuller, better experience for users. You are stating your case to be part of a toolkit, helping users solve problems in new and unique ways. (And no, a product manager did not make me write that. I believe it!)
Even moreso, the ecosystem play is also about growth. Being integrated into marketplaces and directories of these bigger brands is one of the central tenets of Product-Led Growth: Be where your user lives. If your user spends all day on the web browser, then make a Chrome extension and get listed in the Chrome marketplace. If your users are always on-the-go, then look into building an iOS app. If your users are Canva fans, then partner up with Canva.
Doing so will of course boost your brand visibility, but it will also have positive impacts on growth because new users will get to experience the value of your product with as little friction as possible.
Over to you
Have you tried this strategy before? What are some marketplaces and ecosystems you might try to break into?
About this newsletter …
Hi, I’m Kevan, a marketing exec based in Boise, Idaho, who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I previously built brands at Oyster, Buffer, and Vox. Now I am cofounder at Bonfire, a brand storytelling company.
Each week on this substack, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. Not yet subscribed? No worries. You can check out the archive, or sign up below:
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