You’ll get partnership opportunities

There will be opportunities where the right partnership seems like a dream. You’ll work together so well that you’ll both blow up.

The reality, in our experience, is very dull.

They rarely work out

And the results are very underwhelming, in our experience.

A great result is that you will see a bump in your numbers that tapers off very quickly. It is unlikely that there will be any long-term effects.

But, in all likelihood, not much will happen. Perhaps, a slight and very short-term increase in traffic.

For partnerships with other startups, it’s almost a certainty that nothing will happen.

First, integrating with other small startups rarely has any measurable effect. If both companies struggle to acquire customers individually, neither can afford to make the necessary effort to promote the partnership sufficiently. So, you’ll put in potentially a lot of work and gain nothing.

On the other hand, integrating with a significant potential client nearly always means that you’ll be the one doing all the work. In this case, it’s prudent to minimize the work done for the partnership alone. In addition, you should try to recoup the cost of the work immediately.

Instead, make use of existing features

In Supplybunny, we had experience with this from our previous companies and were aware of this trap. Instead, what we did was make use of existing features to fulfill the requirements.

For instance, one potential partner wanted us to build an API so that they could generate coupon codes. Making a fully-fledged feature would have required quite a lot of development effort. Instead, I manually created 2000 codes and gave them an excel file with all of them. It took about 10 minutes. They could then make the API entirely on their end if they chose. They ended up using only about ten codes.

We “integrated” with another startup simply by tracking sessions with a UTM tag.

Or estimate the immediate benefit

You can do this by estimating the cost of the development work versus the immediate benefit you receive, such as publicity or a short-term increase in sales.

We created a bespoke feature that ended up being used by only three suppliers. But, they made up a decent chunk of our GMV, and this change had a significant positive impact on their sales. Therefore, the immediate benefit justified the development effort.

And if you must develop something, make mockups first

And if you see that you must develop something, first make high-fidelity mockups. Only start building once the ink is dry and there is a specific commitment from both sides.