Let’s start this out with some clarification.
What is a partnership? Let’s take it from a business perspective.
A partnership business, by definition, consists of two or more people who combine their resources to form a business and agree to share risks, profits and losses.
What is an enigma?
Something that is mysterious, puzzling, or difficult to understand.
Partnerships in the Open Source Space
Now you could go as far as saying that partnerships in our ecosystem are unique in many ways. Of course this could be said for a lot of ecosystems. The aforementioned meaning of partnership sounds a bit formal. In a nutshell, to me, it’s a fair give and take. At least that is where it starts.
And how that value of give and take pans out for you, will depend on a lot of variables, including your own standards and values. So in reality, there is no single, solid definition, at least from my perspective.
But calling partnerships an enigma is how I can best describe how they are perceived by many people, especially in this ecosystem. When someone asks me to be a partner, well, in a lot of cases it is a mystery to me why they are approaching me. Other times puzzling. And more often then I care to admit, difficult to understand.
I don’t profess to being an expert in this area, but with 16 years in the WordPress space, running a business outside of WordPress prior to that for 17 years, and building dozens, if not hundreds of various partnerships in those three decades, well I do have something. Experience.
What I am going to do is break this down into four kinds of partnerships. My thoughts and some examples.
Affiliates and income generating partnerships
This one can be broken up into two pieces.
First, there are the one’s that are simply an email asking me to be a partner. Often this is part of the subject of the email. But essentially it is one thing only. The question essentially ask me to be an affiliate by proxy and calling it a so-called partnership. The give and take here is simple. I push your product or service for you. If a sale is made I make some bucks. So essentially, beyond that, I am really a commissioned salesperson aka affiliate partner.
Secondly, it does enter the partnership realm a bit more when there are efforts on both sides to create a partnership beyond affiliate commissions. Sharing content, guest posts or podcast guest spots. Finding creative ways to use affiliate links or expand your partnership to other elements of either businesses.
Over the years I have had dabbled in both. For me, an affiliate was an affiliate. When it wasn’t, it was a bigger by-product of a more intensive relationship with a solid give and take balance.
The Real Business Partnership
Why do I call this “real”. Well, it’s something that has been a part of running our businesses for over 3 decades and covers a large gamut on how they all play out. For example, back in my days of print design and marketing, I had partnerships with printers, photographers, and yes, other designers and marketing companies. Each one of these were unique. Later in my WordPress and Woo life, these partnerships varied depending on my needs. The balance of give and take was always dependent on the partner. In other words, it’s never a 50/50 split that you can measure. If you have the right partner, it will help you to both grow your business and your client base. How you actually measure the effectiveness of the partnership, will come with experience and finding that sweet spot.
The Sponsor Partnership
Now this one has some gray areas as some may perceive it similar to affiliates, yet different. With sponsorships, looking from the outside in, the sponsor pays $xxxx and receives certain benefits and exposure. Somewhere along the lines metrics come into this. Now that is the standard model.
But these days with the battle over sponsor dollars, you must create a partnership. When someone pays you xxxx dollars, deliver or over-deliver. Metrics can weigh down the sale, and there is much more behind what an effective sponsorship can provide. Obviously, say if you have 4 sponsors, and they pay the same for the sponsorship, each one will be a unique partnership that you create. And that’s where the sponsorships extend to partnerships.
I do this with my sponsors here at Do the Woo. And don’t always expect that the intended partnership will go as you foresee it. As you will have a good mix of hands-on and hands-off sponsors or, what I will call, partnerships.
The Soft Partnership
The is the one that is the biggest enigma. Specifically because you can neither define it or follow some existing model. These are the partnerships that you go into because you know they will work. It’s a gut feeling and often it happens with someone you already know. In fact, the partnership may have already organically started, but you never really formalized it with simply attaching the word partnership to it. And that is exactly how it grows and can be one of the most powerful partnerships you have. It’s organic and doesn’t have any parameters attached to it. The give and take all balances out. And the most important part is that you believe in this partnership so much that it takes on its own life.
Often, either one of you end up using your soft skills as well as your established skills to help each other. These to me are the most valuable partnerships you can have with your business. And the three that I have mentioned previously, any of those can turn into this kind of a partnership.
When I announced a strategic partnership between Do the Woo and Post Status, this was what I call a soft partnership. People asked me what it meant. Did PS own a part of DTW? What was going on?
Because this partnership had already sprouted prior to any announcement or what might even have been a glimmer in either one of our eyes, it was there and needed to be nurtured. This natural turn of a partnership is priceless in my opinion.
Now as you can guess, I could talk about this for hours, literally. But to wrap this up, I hope that have realized two things.
First of course is the importance of partnerships. You do need to be selective and determine when a potential partnership materializes and if its right for you and the other party.
But even more important is how you recognize them in your own business and what potential they can bring to the table. The soft partnerships fill in the gap of where the other three don’t.
I didn’t talk about a traditional partnership where two individuals go into business together. That’s another podcast for someone else with that experience.
For me I would not be where I am today if not for some of the partnerships I have had over the years. And I look forward to growing more in the coming years.
Growing in WordPress through partnerships
In a recent post I asked several speakers from WordCamp Europe 2022, Jonathan Wold, a co-host here at Do the Woo, gave a tip on creating strategic partnerships.
If you are a WooCommerce builder and you’ve built a product for the WooCommerce space, one of the frustrating things that you can deal with is like, how do you get people to know that it exists? We work and live in this big decentralized ecosystem, which is fantastic for a lot of reasons. As a builder, though, if you’re creating products in this space, it can be challenging. Like, how do you get in front of the audience? How do you connect with the folks who care about the problem that you’re trying to solve with your product? My suggestion for you is to think about how you can grow through partnerships. How can you find other people, other companies, organizations in the WordPress, the WooCommerce space that serve the same audience that you’re serving?
Ideally, they’re helping solve a different problem, but a complementary problem. And the idea at a high level is to look at how you can do partnership deals with them. Figure out ways to find aligned interests and create something together that provides benefit to that audience. And that ends up being a way for you to get in front of that audience. Solve a problem for them and have the benefits of being able to create a win for yourself, for the audience and the partner that you’re working with. So if you’re creating the product in the WooCommerce ecosystem, and you’re feeling some of the frustration of not being able to get that product in front of as large an audience as you’re wanting to, think about partnerships as a way of being able to do that. Watch the video of this presentation
He also shared a unique strategy on partnerships and loops in this post.
