SaaS Partnerships: Catastrophes and sob stories!
Every startup runway is different and your marketing should be too. In this practical session, Christelle Blanchet‑Aissaoui and Tim Nichols (Proxi) map the go-to-market moves that fit each stage of a tech company’s journey, including: what to spend (and what not to), how to measure what’s working and how to align ambition with cash in bank. They share a step-by-step framework for matching your marketing strategy to your growth stage, budgeting realistically and proving traction.
Key themes:
First principles for channel success
- “ICP comes before any channel activity.” If you’re under ~$10m ARR, keep it to one (maybe two) Ideal Customer Profiles (ICP). Without a clear ICP and early product-market fit, partners can’t help you.
- Choose your model deliberately: affiliate/referral, reseller/distributor, value-added reseller (VAR), white label, white label + services, strategic alliance/joint venture.
- Treat partnerships like a funnel: start with marketing → sales enablement → product. “Start your partnerships at the marketing level.” Test demand with joint campaigns and landing pages before you build.
- Design “carrots and sticks.” Margin is the carrot; leverage is the stick. If a partner under-delivers, what recourse do you have?Thematic’s sob stories: a large private company acting as a VAR sold one deal in three years and took two years to close it! Leadership turnover and low momentum made it fragile. A white-label prospect praised Thematic’s product in tests, then “launched a copycat” after extensive access, attempting to reverse engineer user interface (UI) and flows. Legal action is costly and distracting. Lessons:
- Bake intellectual property (IP) protections into non-disclosure agreements (NDAs).
- Create leverage by engaging the partner’s customers early (with permission), so there’s “customer pull” the partner can’t ignore.
- Don’t delegate critical partnership explorations to inexperienced team members without close oversight.The consulting partner that went nowhere: a small actuarial software company partnered with a global consulting firm. It felt promising (validation, access, integration, joint marketing), but reality was “hundreds of meetings, none with a customer.” Minimal marketing/sales muscle from the partner and no outbound motion = no leads. Lessons:
- If you can’t sell your product yourself, your partner won’t either.
- “Be promiscuous and opportunistic” before you “get married.” Trial a few deals together; don’t over-invest in legal frameworks up front.
- If promises sound too good to be true, they probably are.Webster x Vimeo pilot: a six-month pilot with acquisition upside but vague success criteria became “six months of free product development insights for Vimeo.” No independently verifiable metrics, limited legal protection, no plan B, and the team remained in NZ, “out of sight, out of mind.” Leadership churn at Vimeo wiped out champions; a parallel internal build emerged; momentum and morale suffered. “We’d spent 6 months kind of building someone else’s competitive advantage.” Lessons:
- Get brutally clear on goals (are you optimising for acquisition, revenue or validation?) and define success with numbers that both sides track.
- Keep alternatives warm to maintain leverage; never go exclusive unless they do.
- Proximity matters: embed onsite to sense politics, push integration, and keep champions.
- Keep pilots short; speed is your advantage.
Key takeaways:
Nail your ICP and product-market fit (PMF) before partners. Under ~$10m ARR, keep to one ICP and prove you can sell direct.
Start light, test fast. Use joint marketing to validate demand before integrations. Choose the least-commitment model that answers your next hypothesis.
Design leverage early. Secure access to the partner’s customer base for demand tests; create clear “sticks” (performance gates, territory/segment reversion, time-boxed exclusivity).
Protect your IP and time. Strengthen NDAs against reverse engineering, UI protection, data use, add breakup/walk-away fees, and avoid exclusivity unless truly mutual and time-bound.
Make success measurable and mutual. Define numeric targets, shared reporting, owners, and a short pilot timeline. Keep plan B partners warm and stay physically close to strategic partners.
Watch the full discussion and explore these insights in depth.