Week 5/6: Strategic Partnerships
By Pano Anthos

XRC Labs panel on Strategic Partnerships led by Pano Anthos.

Session Notes, December 1, 2015:

Three Worst Situations in Partnerships

• Too early
• Too late
• Platform is not a partnership
  • Android/iphone
  • Retailer (ex. Bloomingdales)
  • Pros: marketing, grow outreach
  • Example: Zynga + Facebook
    • Facebook was building an audience via Zynga
  • If you’re very early on a platform, you can make lots of money, but it’s a poor long term plan.
  • If you grow too large on their platform, it’s too difficult to leave.
  • Leveraging

Partnership Types that work

• Money or marketing
• Don’t expect silence is good
• Request a review fairly often to go over deal

Revenue

• Sell more of your product
• Sell more of their product
• Is someone making more money from the partnership?

Reasons partnerships

• Utilization of other products

Revenue Partnerships:

• Platform plays
  • Facebook Platform- gaming
• Distribution- E-commerce
  • Amazon distribution, farfetch- consigned product
  • Drop ship is becoming more and more prevalent
• Distribution- B2B
  • Who’s selling your product? Are they exposing your product to something new
• Calculate your revenue partnership with specific details

PR Value

• Do both benefit from the PR?

“Whoever is the platform wins”

 

Partnerships can change over time:

• Apple vs Google Maps App
• Google vs Yahoo
  • Yahoo didn’t have a platform
  • Google didn’t have traffice on their website
  • In the end, search was driving everything
  • You can be bigger but not be the platform
• Apple vs Windows
  • Windows gave Apple some investments

What works?

• Youth
  • Who is trying to keep the other one alive? Who has the upper hand?
  • Young + Young vs Young + Old
• Exclusives

[Reprinted with permission from XRC Labs]

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