everybody. This is Stelly,

Ft. And this is heating Shah. And today, on the startup chat, we're gonna talk about our thoughts on setting up a partner program for your business,

like talking about more than your sales and market. We just want a bullshit and chat about business and life. And hopefully, while we're doing that, provide along value to be the best for people trying to get shit done way. Don't want to give you feedback. That's bullshit.

You want you to do your best. So you know there's affiliate programs and those air ones where you actually give somebody sort of, ah payment. Whether it's a few when they bring you a sign up for a fee on an ongoing basis, get a customer from them. And then there's partner programs and partner programs are actually quite a bit different, and they usually involve actually partnering up and having something more official happen doing joint PR and things like that. So that's the topic,

and that's kind of a high

level difference between officially a part of my partner program Partner program in some ways, is a keeper sort of relationship. There

tends to be yeah, depicted commitment relationship, and I don't know if you agree with this, but in my just my observation has been that in the kind of past two years or so two or three years, a lot of SAS SMB companies have started investing in partner programs where that used to be a lot more of a play and a channel a growth channel that, you know, enterprise companies would would go after. But now I see kind of warm, moist and be companies guard for that. Is that just my observational? Would you would you agree with that?

I would agree with that. I think it used to be something that larger companies would build out. Now it's like something that I said, Even if you're targeting SNB's, that in order your intestine, you might you might start working on this. I mean, the markets are bigger. There's just more buyers out there. And there's also more companies out there. So in a way, it feels like a natural evolution.

Awesome. All right, So before we go in before then we'll talk about like, kind of a few best practices to set up a successful part in program for those of you that are interested in the affiliate program and learning more about how to do that. Check out Episode 361 100. Use affiliate programs to fuel your growth. That's an episode that we recorded earlier. So coming back to the partner program and a little shadow on kind of, Ah, for the clothes peeps out there close just is announcing the launch of our partner program. So this is part of why I wanted to talk to you about this. So for those of you that are interested in learning more about how toe how we set that up and even potentially for some of you that wants to partner up with clothes, you could go to close dot com slash partners and check out kind of how we have set up our partner program, how we think about partnering with people. And if it's a good fit for you, what you're doing would love to talk to you. You can always get in touch with me directly at Stelea,

closed up, commenting on a check more about that. So let's go through this real quick and give people a couple of recommendations we can like ping pong. This all throughout my first tip for people, which I think goes back to a core principle that we've discussed many, many times before. My biggest recommendation is to always instead of just launched, like instead of just putting these programs together in the hope that they will magically bring growth. Ask yourself who would be an ideal partner for you and who would be an ideal partner for you. End the type of customers that you want to reach, and then I would actually advise people. And this is an exercise that we did to write down an ideal partner profile. You know, a lot of people know this about the ideal customer profile, like writing down and identifying who is the ideal customer that we're going after. You could do the exact same thing for partner and write down.

Who's the partner that we want? You know what are the kind of identifying criteria for somebody that could be an ideal partner for us to really help us grow and help our customers grow? And then you can also do the non ideal partner through the type of people that might be interested in partnering with us that we don't believe can bring value to us or customers or not sufficient value to what we're trying to do, and so that if you identify these two things in the beginning, it's going to really help you craft your messaging. Find the right places to promote your partner program. And when partners apply, for instance, to become part of your program, it's gonna be much easier for your team to decide. Is this somebody we should partner with or not? And how should we go about it? So my first tip for people, if you want to put together a partner program to grow your company and you grow it as a growth channel, is first, specify and identify who an ideal partner would be and who would not be a good partner. Before you start setting up anything else and start

promoting the partner program well, it's likely that you already have people who are such great advocates that some of them could be good partners. So there's ideology of, like, really thinking through who's actually reached out, who's actually helping you get more customers or who already wants to partner with you, which you know many companies that some size end up getting. There's that data point as well that you can use, which just whoever is already sort of tried to partner with

you. Yeah, I love it. And that's actually something that we did with closes. When we started considering putting that together, one of the reasons was that there was an increase demand of like requests, and we started picking a few and say, You know what? This company, this person, seems like such a potentially good fit. Let's do this in a very casual way. Let's work with them one on one and see this works and how it works. And once we had, like a handful of success stories where partners would bring in great customers and collaborate work with us really, really well, we started seeing real meaningful numbers were like,

All right, let's now turn this into a more formal thing. Let's start promoting it a bit more, but But we had I think, about 30 40 or so companies already that we're partnering up with in one way or another, and we're like a kind of a constant stream. Week by week, off companies and people reaching out. A lot of our customers reach out and wanting to partner with us. I think if you if you have that inbound demand, you can, like, analyze and see what kind of companies reach out to us, what kind of companies could be really good for us or not? The other thing is, you know,

in today's well, they used to be just like almost anything else. Used to be that you had to do so much heavy lifting to, like, organize all of this, to track it, to do the payouts, to do all this kind of stuff. But today, this software for a lot of this, So you know one recommendation that I could give this for people that wanna invest in apartment program. There's reward ful, which is kind of, ah, a fast product that allows you to manage, host,

promote payout and deal with anything that comes with the managing partner and affiliate programs. And there is a partner stack dot com, which is like a platform that's getting some steam recently, where a lot of like companies and people out there that are strong affiliates will have. Big audiences are looking to find new products to promote to the audience and customer basin. And so partner Stack and reward Fulla two platforms that it can recommend for people that are wondering, How do I manage all this? How do I deal with all of this? All right, maybe we'll do one more tip per person than will wrap up this before. Let me ask. You eaten like I would typically tell people that, I mean, just like everything else that we saved. Usually it typically depends on your particular circumstances, but I wouldn't advise in general startups before they get the 1st 100 customers to start investing in partner in affiliate programs when it's super early,

when they don't know that product market fit when they don't have marketing channels that work for themselves and they don't know how to acquire customers and have good funnels and conversion metrics. All that, I would usually advise start ups to start investing in affiliate or partner programs a little bit further down the line when they have a certain kind of acquisition machines already humming and they know how long customers stay, how quickly they churn. Who is an ideal customer, all that. Would you agree with that. Oh, do you think there's an exceptions to this rule where some start ups should look into this much earlier?

I think you need some level of scale to really have a partner program itself. Otherwise, like if you're earlier and you think that partnerships can provide a channel to the cut your customer and can really be a scalable channel, it's not. It's not a bad idea to explore it earlier. But usually the sort of two way mutually beneficial partnerships tend to be ones the wear once the company's air at scale

cool and the other like big mistake that you've seen with companies out there that try to launch or Ronald scale apartment program. Or particularly good examples of massive success like if you want to do a problem program, go and check out this company or do it this way. I've seen this work really, really well again and again

and again. I think this is one of those tactics, just like affiliates and things like that, where people quickly easily fail at doing it. And so I think the biggest biggest difference is basically two things. One having an application process being deliberate about communicating with whoever fills out your application as so like what the next step is. If there is one and it, you know you don't want a partner with them or you can you actually communicate that as well? I see a lot of people just ignoring applications. I don't think that's a good idea. And then the second piece would be they don't iterated. They don't actually learn and generate the program as they get more and more people into That's really about it.

Awesome. Alright, well, check out the episode, as I mentioned earlier about affiliate programs resulted in a 61. You know, if you already rocking rolling and you get a lot of high quality inbound requesting you think about a partner program or if you've done this incredibly successfully in the last one or two years, reach out. I'd love to hear from you were just launching this with close. We've seen some early success but would love to partner up with you or learn from you. You have something to teach so you can always get in touch with us each and child gmail dot com Stelian closed up. Come,