I come across a lot of startups who have a go-to-market strategy predicated on sales and marketing partnerships with partners.

The reality is, however, that in an early b2c business, If you can’t sell your own sh*t then it’s unlikely a partner can do it for you.

Partners are usually a great way to spend endless hours in negotiation and ongoing alignment struggles only to see a meddling success when the partnership is executed.

Even then, all they usually do is magnify your own process. So if your process produces poor results then a partnership will just multiply that out. 0 x 10 is still Zero.

Instead, figure out how to tell your own story with a gorgeous website, explainer video, self-serve onboarding and training flow and more. Then figure out how to scale it with low hanging fruit like ads, content marketing, mailing lists, etc.

Then, and only then, lightweight co-marketing partnerships might be useful to supercharge these activities. Deep integrations should typically be left until later.