When a partnership is a strategy, and when it is a wish
Their customers love you. You win their app-store search. They still will not return your emails — and there is a structural reason that has nothing to do with your product.
Here is a situation that plays out constantly and is almost always misdiagnosed.
A company builds something that works beautifully alongside a much larger platform. The platform's customers adopt it and love it. The company ranks first in the platform's app store. Every objective signal says this should be a partnership. They make three attempts to start one and are held politely at arm's length each time.
The conclusion most teams draw is that they pitched it wrong. They did not. Here is the actual mechanism:
It's hard to make partnerships with larger companies. There's usually not really anything in it for them. With a smaller company, you can't bring them more revenue. You're not really gonna move any needle. So the only time that works, I find, is when they have some pre-existing strategic mandate — we have to get into this market, maybe because a competitor did it and they need an answer.
Jason Cohen
The word doing the work is needle. A partnership costs the larger company attention, and attention at that scale is allocated against things that move a number somebody is measured on. If your entire customer base, transferred to them tomorrow, would not register in their quarterly reporting, there is no version of your pitch that changes the arithmetic.
The two questions
Before you spend a quarter on a partnership, answer these:
1. Are we within one power of ten of their revenue?
Not the same size — within an order of magnitude. WP Engine partners with BigCommerce, and Cohen is explicit about why it works: "we're like in the same power of ten revenue. So there is a lot we can do for each other." Two companies of comparable scale can each move the other's numbers, which is what makes the attention rational on both sides.
A company two orders of magnitude smaller cannot. This is not a judgement about quality. It is arithmetic about whose quarter gets affected.
2. If not, do they have a public strategic mandate we are the answer to?
This is the escape hatch, and it is real. Large companies periodically decide something must happen — a market they must enter, a story they must have, an answer to a competitor's move. Once that decision exists, the attention is already allocated, and a small company that is a ready-made answer becomes interesting for reasons that have nothing to do with its size.
Because of some strategic thing that has nothing to do with you and your customers and what you can do for them. It's like, no, no, no, they have their own reasons where they need to do a thing.
Jason Cohen
The crucial property of a mandate is that it is usually public. It gets announced on an earnings call, in a keynote, in a press release, or in a sudden cluster of job postings. That makes it findable from outside — which turns partnership targeting from hope into research.
If neither question gets a yes, it is not a partnership. It is a wish. You may still get customers from their ecosystem — the app store still works, the SEO still works — but you will not get a relationship, and planning as though you will is how quarters disappear.
What to do with a "no" on both
The mistake is to keep pitching. The alternatives are better:
- Go around them, to their customers. Their ecosystem is reachable without their cooperation. In the case above, the customers loved the product and the platform's own blog was the thing nobody updated. The customers were the opportunity; the logo was not.
- Partner sideways instead of up. The agencies, consultancies and implementers who serve that platform are within your power of ten, need what you have, and can each bring several accounts. They are also far easier to reach.
- Wait for the mandate and monitor for it. Put the target on a watch list rather than a pipeline. When the mandate appears — and it eventually does — you are the company that is already integrated and already loved by their users, and the conversation is completely different.
Screening a partner list
For each candidate, one row:
| Field | Why |
|---|---|
| Their revenue, ours, ratio | The power-of-ten test |
| A public strategic commitment we answer | The escape hatch |
| Where it was stated, with a link | Makes it checkable rather than assumed |
| Does it move a number they report on? | The needle question |
| Who inside owns that commitment? | Mandates have owners; find the person |
| Verdict | Partner now · Watch for mandate · Go around |
Most rows come back "go around", and that is a useful outcome rather than a disappointing one — it redirects a quarter's effort to something that can work.
The last thing worth saying
None of this is a reason to avoid ecosystems. Being excellent inside somebody else's platform is a legitimate and durable strategy, and it does not require the platform to like you.
What it is a reason to avoid is the specific, expensive belief that being genuinely good and genuinely loved by their customers will eventually earn a partnership. It will not, on its own. The larger company is not evaluating you on merit. They are allocating attention against things that move numbers they are measured on, and your merit is not one of those numbers until the scale or the mandate makes it one.
Keep reading
- Personalisation that works, and personalisation that costs you trust Using someone's first name is not personalisation — and the people you most want to reach read it as proof that a machine sent the email. Here is the line between the two.
- The only prospects worth emailing this quarter Most lost deals were never deals. They were people who agreed the problem was real, took the meeting, and then went back to the two things their job actually depends on.
- What to say when everyone already knows the problem Naming a pain your prospect discusses openly proves nothing — they hear it from every vendor in the category. There are two deeper levels, and the third one is where deals are actually won.