3 builders who never spoke to each other

Arm the partner who already sells to your buyer

Find the people who advise or supply your customers and give them something that only works properly when their clients are on your product, an embeddable widget, a tool that makes their job easier, a branded section of your platform. Each one brings many customers at once, and opening the surface to other operators can pay better than defending it.

The method

1. 01

   Build a reseller or partner channel where each partner brings many customers, and give the partner a tool that only pays off when their clients use your product.

2. 02

   Give your resellers a widget they can embed in their own site. It puts your product in front of their prospects and helps them close.

3. 03

   Open your own platform to rival brands so they stop building their own, and take a share of the subscriptions their audience brings.

4. 04

   Open a marketplace of finished applications built on your platform: it adds a revenue stream and doubles as reference material for buyers deciding whether the platform fits.

What it returned

• $40

  Hearst let other publishers run branded sections on its puzzle platform and Vox Media's Polygon took one up, promoting a $40 a year subscription tier; Glen Allsopp has reported around 10 million people a week playing games on the New York Times site.

• 2024

  Zue launched the Pegasus marketplace in June 2024 with roughly a fifth of what he had envisioned, and calls it a modest success with meaningful add-on income and little extra support load.

• Intuit gave accountants software that made their work easier only if their clients were on QuickBooks, so the accountants began requiring it and a small number of them produced a much larger number of sales.

• Seomator ships an embeddable audit widget specifically to help SEO agencies win new business.

Sources

• How 16 Companies are Dominating the World's Google Search Results (2024 Edition) - Detailed.comGlen Allsopp · detailed.com · The Collaboration I Never Saw Happening (But Makes Total Sense): Hearst and Vox Media Are Working Together on Puzzles · 2023-03-07
• What makes a strategy greatJason Cohen · longform.asmartbear.com · Asymmetric · 2023-08-13
• Solopreneurship: Year 8Cory Zue · coryzue.com · Pegasus product improvements · 2024-12-20
• Growing a SaaS to $4k/month in a Highly Competitive MarketNick Sawinyh · failory.com · What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea? · undated