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Comment by callmeed | Hacker News Reader

I appreciate the counter-point but you haven't said anything to convince me otherwise. The presentation I referenced and other replies seem to back that up (if the CEO of Constant Contact says it ...).

My main point was directed at people who are new at this. I've been there and I can smell a bad partnership right away (and most of them stink). But when you're new at this, it's an easy trap to fall into. Big companies dangle their customer base in front of you ("Wouldn't you love to get your product in front of our $HUGE_NUMBER customers?"). When you're new at this and deep in the slog of trying to grow your startup, that's a hard thing to resist.

(btw, I don't consider having an affiliate program part of partnerships)

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Well, let's not redefine partnerships to win an argument. It won't teach anyone anything. To speak plainly, I will include affiliates, resellers, system integrators, software integrations, trade associations, and distributors all as partners.

Distributors have not succeeded with SaaS yet because SaaS is intrinsically intractable to distribute. If the customer has to come back ultimately to the manufacturer (aka ISV) who will then insist on controlling the billing and customer service relationships, then the distributor has no opportunity for brand or margin.

Also, generally it is not a good idea to work with a "distributor" that has no experience retailing your type of products.

We talk about this a lot within the trade association (Disclosure: I'm on the board, as is Constant Contact) if you're interested.

http://www.thesmallbusinessweb.com

I didn't redefine anything–it was always my definition. I only brought it up because Olark's partners page is really just an affiliate program [0]. Affiliate programs are marketing–you build out your affiliate program once, with whatever terms you choose, and others can choose to send customers your way or not. For tools like Olark that need to integrate into CMS and ecommerce platforms, affiliate programs make a lot of sense.

But affiliate programs are not strategic partnerships or biz dev. Sorry.

Also, while I agree that distribution partnerships are bad for SaaS startups, it's not that cut and dry. Not everyone will approach you for a distribution partnership because they want margin or affiliate fees. Like I said, big companies often just want to slap partner logos on a web page or brochure. It is just a nice sounding bullet point for their enterprise sales people ("Look, we have over 40 integration partners here at Hooli").

Again, the comments here seem to back-up my side of the argument.

[0] https://www.olark.com/partners

I watched the constant contact video and its actually kind of ironic, She does in fact say that partnerships are a mirage at the start but if you wait until 38min in at the Q&A part she starts discussing how they partnered with local chambers of commerce and the huge value exposed to them in that they had access to their target audience through those organizations. Realistically, this is the same sort of partnership that a SaaS company would be after. Have a listen at the 38min marker!

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