3 builders who never spoke to each other

Refuse the partnership that costs more than it brings

Most inbound cross-promotion and integration proposals want a quick win or expect you to carry the work, so they belong at the bottom of the list. Put anything non-obvious through your written values and be willing to walk away, never hand your customer to a partner whose service you cannot control, and expect a purely performance-based deal to collapse rather than deliver.

The method

1. 01

   Move inbound partnership pitches to the bottom of your list or delete them, since most people proposing cross-promotion or integrations want a quick win or want you to shoulder most of the work.

2. 02

   Think twice before handing your acquired customer to a partner whose service you cannot control, because their delays become your customer's experience.

3. 03

   A purely performance-based growth deal with aggressive targets and nothing paid on a miss tends to collapse rather than deliver; expect to manage the partner's expectations far more carefully than the contract.

4. 04

   Put every non-obvious decision, partnerships above all, through your written core values, and pick one of three outcomes: reshape the thing to fit, revise the values, or walk away.

5. 05

   Turn down most inbound opportunities, speaking slots and summit invitations included, because businesses rarely succeed off a single yes.

What it returned

• 50%

  The author offered a share of lifetime revenue plus equity ratcheting up to 50% against firm user growth targets; the partner came nowhere near the first target and the arrangement was dissolved

• Writing openly about the business produced a constant flow of inbound proposals covering cross-selling, affiliate deals and content marketing services, and the author found them collectively a large waste of time

• Customers passed to solar installers sometimes waited nine months or more for the work, through slow and painful processes, which pushed the founders towards owning the whole journey themselves

• This is how Hillman and his co-founder Geoff decided Indy Hall partnerships, which he says removed ego from the call.

Sources

• The Importance of LinesAlex Hillman · dangerouslyawesome.com · Defining Self · 2011-02-01
• Chapter 6: Thriving in the Long, Slow, SaaS Grind - Tyler TringasTyler Tringas · tylertringas.com · Partnerships · 2017-03-14
• Closing SolarList: a cleantech post-mortem - Tyler TringasTyler Tringas · tylertringas.com · Go big or go home · 2014-11-14
• Storemapper: Bootstrapped to $50,000/year in 2 years (with live metrics) - Tyler TringasTyler Tringas · tylertringas.com · Hiring a growth-hacker hit man (badly mis-managed expectations) · 2014-08-23
• I don’t actually care about growth - Fathom AnalyticsPaul Jarvis · usefathom.com · Growth without growth · 2016-10-17