Expert Advice: How Startups Can Build Strategic Partnerships

I stopped knocking on big doors and started helping small ones win first. Originally, I was sending emails to big companies. No response. I was an unknown small player, right?

Thus, I decided to change my tactics. Instead of reaching out to big players, I identified small SEO consultants who had regular communication with my target audience. We sold different products, so we weren’t competitors in any way.

There wasn’t any request in my emails, but I conducted a free website analysis of several of their clients’ sites and sent them brief suggestions on what to do. One of those consultants showed my report in the client meeting. The client loved it, and the consultant looked like a genius. A week later, she gave me two new clients.

Also, I didn’t stop building relationships. Every month, I sent her a brief email with some useful information about the trends in the industry without any marketing message whatsoever.

Here is my advice for you: Identify those people who work with your clients and give something to them first before asking for anything.

Partner with businesses that already own the relationship you want, and do not compete with you.

I started WP Creative in 2016 with an $18,000 loan and no salary for nine months. There was no budget to buy attention, so I looked for people who already spoke to my buyers every week.

Marketing agencies were the natural fit. Their clients needed fast, reliable websites, and most agencies had no web team in-house and did not want one. We did not want to run campaigns. No overlap, shared client. That became our partner model.

My tip: give before you ask. Make the partner look good in front of their client first. Fix something fast, report back to them, and let them take the credit. Referrals follow trust, not contracts.

And be picky. One partner whose clients match your ideal customer is worth more than ten logos on a partner page.

I’m Cody C. Jensen, founder and CEO of Searchbloom, a digital marketing agency. My first partnership came through a friend of a friend. Reflections Recovery was a brand new rehab in Orem and Provo, Utah, and they needed everything. A website, SEO, and Google Ads. I had just learned to build websites, so I built theirs, and much of that early work I did for free. They stayed with Searchbloom for roughly eight years and grew into a very large rehab. That taught me what I still tell founders. Expect not to get paid at first. Prove you can do what you said you could do, then go charge for it.

My one tip? Get out of the inbox. Email is getting crazy right now with all the spam. Like, call people up. Walk into their shop. People badly undervalue their local community, and the business five minutes down the road might be the best collaborator you will ever find.

In the early days, we skipped broad networking and went after partners whose clients already needed what we built. AmpiFire helps brands earn authority through content and media placements. So we approached marketing agencies, consultants, and PR firms that served the same buyers but sold different services. We opened with a clear offer instead of a request for a meeting. With Ampcast, our podcast-led content product, we gave each prospect a working sample: one interview turned into a podcast episode, articles, and social posts, all distributed across multiple channels. Partners saw the result on their own brand before they committed to anything.

Our one tip: start with a small, low-risk pilot that gives the partner a visible win. Agree on one shared goal, such as qualified leads or press mentions, and review it every few weeks. Partners who see proof early invest more time and send more referrals. We also keep sharing results, credit partners publicly, and ask what they need next. Trust grows from small, repeated deliveries, not from a signed agreement alone.

In the early days, we made the classic startup mistake of chasing partnerships that looked impressive rather than ones that moved the business. A logo on a slide feels like progress. It rarely is.

What changed our approach was a simple question: who already has our customer’s trust and daily attention? We build management software for salons and clinics across the Middle East. A salon owner doesn’t wake up looking for software, but they talk to their product suppliers every week, they run their business on WhatsApp, and they rely on a small circle of people they trust for advice. Those are the relationships that matter, so that’s where we focused.

That led us to prioritize two kinds of partners: platforms our customers already use every day, where integrating makes our product easier to adopt, and businesses that already serve salons and clinics in a different way and see us as a complement rather than a competitor.

My one tip: before signing anything formal, run one small joint project with a measurable result. That might be a co-hosted workshop for salon owners, a referral trial over one month, or a single integration with a handful of shared customers. It tells you more than any number of meetings. You learn whether the other side actually follows through, whether their customers respond, and whether the partnership creates value for both companies or just for one.

The partnerships that lasted for us were the ones where both sides could point to a concrete win within the first few months. The ones that faded were built on enthusiasm and good intentions, with no shared goal to measure.

Nurturing a partnership is mostly about keeping that shared goal visible. Check in on results, not just the relationship. If the numbers stop mattering to either side, the partnership is already over, even if nobody has said so.

My first real partnership started with an overnight drive. In college, my teammate Dave Costlow and I raised $50,000 through Lift for Life, a weightlifting fundraiser we started for kidney cancer research after my dad’s diagnosis. We drove through the night to Chicago to hand the check to the Kidney Cancer Association in person. An hour outside Chicago, we learned the keynote speaker for their event had canceled, so we filled in.

That organization had three staff members. Showing up in person did more for that relationship than any formal agreement could have, and that instinct has stayed with me.

Pledge It grew the same way. I built our performance-based fundraising tool because I needed it myself while running Uplifting Athletes. When we introduced it, around 1,000 professional athletes wanted to use it almost immediately because they had the same problem we did.

My tip is to look past the request a partner makes and find the problem underneath it. A partnership built on a shared problem tends to last because both sides keep needing each other.

We grew our business from 100% owned trucks to 5 regional hubs and 8500+ completed moves. I learned the hard way that brand value is not the main KPI for partners. We actually got more volume from smaller local businesses because our business interests were more aligned.

Make every business development channel a 90-day sales experiment

I started approaching every business that deals with people moving: real estate agents, property managers, storage facilities, etc. I didn’t consider a contract signed a win, I considered it the opening of a new sales channel.

My advice is to set a 90-day probationary period for every potential partner. We classify every lead in our CRM as:

– Booked (sourced by partner)

– Booked (influenced by partner)

– Booked (transactional)

The KPI for every partnership should be closed transactions, not closed meetings, not closed co-marketing events, not closed hands. I only consider a partnership successful if it generates closed business. If you track this you will quickly learn which partners are actually valuable.

In the beginning, we made the mistake most young companies make. We wanted partners with big names, because we thought it would make us look credible. Those conversations went nowhere. Large organizations had no reason to take a small, unknown team seriously, and we spent months chasing meetings that never turned into anything.

Things changed when we started looking for partners who had a real problem we could solve, and who needed us as much as we needed them. They weren’t always the most impressive names, but they were willing to work closely with us, and those relationships grew with Tecknotrove over many years. Some of them are still with us today.

My tip is to start small before you sign anything big. Do one modest project together first and pay attention to how the other side behaves when something goes wrong, because something always does. Anyone can be a good partner when things are going well. The ones who pick up the phone and help you fix the problem instead of looking for someone to blame are the partnerships worth nurturing.

When building X Agency, I approached strategic partnerships with one guiding principle: focus on creating mutual value before asking for anything in return.

As a digital marketing agency, I recognized early on that we couldn’t be everything to every client. Instead of trying to offer every service in-house, we focused on building relationships with complementary businesses, including web development firms, technology providers, and other specialized agencies. These partnerships allowed us to expand our capabilities, exchange referrals, and deliver better outcomes for clients without significantly increasing overhead.

One of the biggest lessons I learned is that the best partnerships aren’t necessarily with the biggest companies, but with those serving the same customers in complementary ways. For example, a web development agency and a performance marketing agency often work with similar businesses but solve different problems. That creates natural opportunities for collaboration without competing for the same services.

My biggest tip is to approach partnerships as relationships, not transactions. Identify businesses that share your ideal customer profile, look for ways to deliver value first, and invest in maintaining those relationships even when there isn’t an immediate opportunity.

At X Agency, we believe the most valuable partnerships are built on trust, complementary expertise, and a shared commitment to measurable client success. When both parties consistently create value for each other, referrals and growth become a natural byproduct of the relationship.

Building early-stage startup partnerships: start small and mission-aligned

Start with partners who already serve the same people you want to help, and test the collaboration on something small and concrete — in my case, community-facing work around mental health and music — before formalizing anything. Nurture it by making the partner’s audience genuinely better off first, not by asking for promotion; trust built that way lasts longer than a logo swap.

Partner with the businesses that serve your customer right before or right after you do. That’s where the valuable collaborations hide.

For an SEO agency, that means web designers, developers and branding studios. Their clients need search work the moment a new site launches, and most designers would rather refer someone trustworthy than learn SEO themselves. The overlap is shared customers, which is what makes a partnership last.

My tip for finding the right ones: look at who your best customers hired just before they came to you. That list is your partner shortlist.

Then nurture it by being useful first. Send a referral before you ask for one. If you spot a problem on a shared client’s site, fix it in a way that makes the partner look good. Partnerships die when one side keeps score and the other doesn’t.

Keep the structure light. A clear understanding about referrals and a short monthly check-in will do more than a twelve-page agreement nobody reads.

When we first launched, we took any partnership we could get in an effort to lay a strong foundation for our business. The strength of our business at that time was in the strength of our network. It’s still a strength of our business today, just less so than in those early days.

Now we work to know as much as possible as fast as possible what the deal is worth to both sides before we agree to it.

Over the years, we’ve had several partnerships that sounded great at the start and then run into some issue that derailed projections after we had already put in a bunch of time, money and effort into making it work.

We’ve ended several partnerships when the costs outweighed the benefits. Those experiences reinforced the need to understand the partnership in greater detail before getting underway.

The worst position is needing the deal. It’s much easier to build a useful collaboration when you can walk away from one that doesn’t work.

Net Net: Do as much research as you can into a potential partnership before getting to work on it. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

In the early days, my approach was basically to turn up to everything.

When you’re building a startup, a huge part of the job is just being in the room. I went to every event I was invited to, even the ones that didn’t look particularly useful on paper. By doing so, you make connections and you stay visible.

I often think founders can be too quick to judge whether a relationship has value immediately. Someone might not be able to help you today, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be relevant six months or two years down the line. Don’t overlook them.

My biggest tip is not to network too transactionally. Keep showing up and staying in touch with people. Be curious about what they’re building and support them where you can, as the best partnerships often come from relationships that started with no obvious commercial outcome at all.

I think the most important thing is to avoid partnering just for the sake of it. I’ve seen companies do this simply for visibility. They announce a partnership, get some attention, and expect it to help the business. In most cases, it doesn’t.

I believe a partnership has to give you a real economic advantage over your competitors, especially in early stages. That’s it. When two companies work together, I want to see what comes out of it. Could we build a stronger product? Would it give us something a competitor couldn’t easily copy? If we can’t answer those questions, I don’t see why we’d do it. Sure, we’ll have a nice social media post. And then what?

Say you work with a company that can give you a much better price on a service you need. Now you can offer your customers a better deal. Or you’re trying to enter a new market. You don’t know the people there, you don’t know how things work, and your partner does. That could save you months. Maybe they have access to capital or contacts you’d struggle to get on your own.

When we started DeCODE Digital, a web and digital marketing company, we focused on finding the best partner collaborations. They weren’t necessarily the ones you’d immediately think of.

A business that wants a new website often goes to its IT company first. To the client, the IT provider is the tech, software, web-esque company, and often it’s the one hosting the website anyway. But it’s rare for an IT company to actually build websites, because it’s such a different skill set.

To get a quick start we met with and helped IT companies. We helped them with web issues on their clients’ sites, rebuilt their own websites at exceptionally reasonable rates, and gave them suggestions, improvements and updates for sites they were looking after. Then when the inevitable question came from one of their clients, “Hey, we need a website refresh”, they’d say, “It’s not something we do, but we know DeCODE Digital can help.” We were recommended quite often.

My tip for nurturing those relationships is to understand what the referrer actually wants. In our experience the IT companies didn’t want money, kickbacks, or anything like that. They wanted someone who would look after their client and deliver the right result, because that adds value to the referral they’ve given. So the best thing we could do was give their client a great website at a reasonable price. The client is happy, the IT company looks good for recommending us, and the next referral comes a lot easier.

If you’re looking for collaborations early on, find the businesses your customers already trust and ask for help, but who don’t do what you do. Then make them look good every time they send someone your way.

In the early stages, I’d look for partners who serve the same audience as you but don’t compete with you. A software company and a web design agency, or a tool and a training provider, can send each other relevant people without any conflict. Instead of starting with a formal agreement, start with one small, concrete project like a co-written guide, a guest post swap or a joint webinar. It’s easy for the other side to say yes to, and within a few weeks you learn whether they’re reliable and easy to work with.

My one tip is to make the first collaboration easy for the other side to win. Do most of the groundwork yourself, deliver the finished piece, and then share what it produced, such as traffic, signups or new backlinks. A partner who sees a real result from a small project is much more likely to agree to a bigger one. Keep in touch after it ends with a useful link or an introduction, not just a request, and the relationship stays warm without much effort.

I think a lot of founders get partnerships backwards. They lead with their own product and their own roadmap, when the other company honestly doesn’t care yet. What they care about is their own problems. So I’d rather start there. Take a software company that wants a payroll provider as a partner. Instead of pitching features, ask what eats up their support team’s time. If it’s clients sending messy data, fix that on your end so it arrives clean. You’ve just made their job easier before asking for anything, and that’s a much better start than another demo. Figure out what wastes your partner’s time and get rid of it first. The rest is a lot easier after that.

Adrian Begic

Founding Engineer, Acquipayer

https://acquipayer.com