Asher's Blog

Partnerships are where startups go either to grow rapidly or to become unexpectedly slow. The right partner can give a young company access to infrastructure, customers, credibility and capabilities that would take years to build independently. The wrong partner can trap the same company inside meetings, integration delays, poor economics and promises that never become revenue.

This is why founders should not evaluate a partnership by the size of the organisation, the seniority of the person proposing it or the excitement surrounding the announcement. The useful question is whether the partnership makes the company more capable of serving customers and building an enduring business.

In a fintech company, payment partners are critical because they influence transaction success, settlement, reconciliation, cost and the customer’s trust in the product. A weak provider can damage the experience even when the application itself works perfectly. A strong provider can reduce operating costs, increase reliability and allow the company to concentrate on the layer where it creates distinctive value.

The same reasoning applies to sales, distribution and marketing partners. The founder must understand exactly what the partner contributes, what the arrangement will cost and whether both sides have enough incentive to keep doing the work after the initial enthusiasm disappears.

Start with the outcome, not the partner’s name

A startup should define what it needs before deciding whom to approach. “We want to partner with a bank” is not yet a strategy. The company may need lower transaction costs, access to a customer segment, regulatory infrastructure, credit capacity, settlement accounts or credibility with enterprise buyers. Different banks may be suitable for different outcomes, and a non-bank partner may sometimes solve the problem better.

The founder should be able to complete a simple sentence: this partnership is intended to help us achieve a specific outcome for a defined customer within a stated period. If the intended outcome cannot be expressed clearly, the company will struggle to decide whether the partnership is working.

This discipline prevents founders from pursuing recognisable organisations simply because an association looks impressive. A partnership can produce a press release and still have no commercial or strategic value. Visibility may be useful, but it should not be confused with distribution, product capability or revenue.

The outcome should also be measurable. Will the partnership reduce cost per transaction, improve payment success, shorten implementation, increase qualified leads or open a new market? The measure does not need to capture every benefit, but it should reveal whether the relationship is producing what justified the effort.

Infrastructure partners must protect the customer experience

For infrastructure partners, I begin by asking whether they make the product more reliable and economically sustainable. Do they drive down cost as volume grows? Can they support the service level we promise? Do they reconcile accurately? Will they respond when there is an incident, or will our team spend hours moving through an escalation chain while customers wait?

Price matters, but the lowest quoted price can become the most expensive arrangement if the provider fails frequently, settles slowly or requires the company to employ additional people to correct its records. Founders should calculate the complete cost of the relationship, including integration, support, downtime, reconciliation, failed transactions, reserves, switching and the reputational harm created by poor performance.

The company should also consider whether the partner strengthens or weakens customer loyalty. Some providers quietly position themselves to own the end customer, restrict the startup’s access to data or make it difficult to switch later. The startup may initially receive useful infrastructure but gradually become a thin interface sitting on another company’s system.

This does not mean every partnership must leave the startup in complete control. Shared ownership of the customer can be reasonable where both sides contribute substantial value. The important thing is to understand the arrangement before dependence develops. Data access, branding, customer communication, service responsibility and termination rights should be agreed clearly.

A critical infrastructure partner should be evaluated almost like a key executive. The founder should examine technical capacity, financial strength, regulatory standing, operational history, leadership quality and the partner’s behaviour with other companies. A large institution is not automatically a reliable partner; internal fragmentation can make it slower than a smaller provider with clear ownership.

Sales partners need access, influence and motivation

A sales partnership works when the partner has credible access to the right buyer, understands the product and has a reason to recommend it consistently. Having a large contact list is not the same as having influence. A partner may know many businesses but lack the trust required to shape their buying decisions.

Founders should ask how the partner currently serves the target customer. What conversation creates the opportunity to introduce this product? Who inside the partner’s organisation will make the introduction? How often does that person meet the buyer, and what else are they expected to sell?

The answers matter because agreements are signed by executives, but distribution is usually performed by people further inside the organisation. If those people are not trained, measured or rewarded, the partnership will remain inactive no matter how enthusiastic the signing ceremony appeared.

The company should test a sales partnership before building a large programme around it. Agree on a small number of qualified opportunities, define the process and observe what happens. Does the partner identify suitable prospects? Can it explain the problem without misrepresenting the product? Do the customers convert and remain? A short pilot reveals more than a long memorandum filled with general intentions.

Compensation should reward meaningful outcomes rather than introductions alone. A commission can be connected to activated customers, collected revenue or retention, depending on the sales cycle. Paying for unqualified names encourages volume without responsibility, while delaying every payment until years of revenue have accumulated may give the partner too little reason to begin.

The strongest sales partners also receive value beyond commission. The product may help them retain clients, deepen a professional service, enter a new category or provide data that improves their own offering. When the partnership makes both companies more useful to the customer, it is more likely to survive changes in personnel and short-term priorities.

Distribution partners must be easy to enable

Distribution partners can help a startup move from hundreds of customers to thousands, but only if the product is designed to travel through the channel. The distributor should be able to identify the ideal customer, demonstrate the value, begin onboarding and obtain support without depending on the founder for every step.

Before selecting a distributor, the company should assess geographic reach, customer fit, operating capacity, reputation and the economics of the channel. It should examine what other products the distributor carries and whether any create a conflict. A partner with excellent reach may still be unsuitable if the startup’s product receives little attention alongside more profitable offers.

The startup must then create the infrastructure required for the distributor to succeed: training, certification, sales materials, account registration, pricing rules, lead protection, implementation guidance, reporting and escalation. If the channel fails because it was not equipped, replacing the partner will not solve the underlying problem.

The company should also protect the customer from being passed between organisations whenever something goes wrong. The contract may assign responsibilities, but the customer experiences one service. A clear support model should state who responds first, who resolves each category of problem and how the case moves across both companies without requiring the customer to repeat everything.

Marketing partners should produce more than attention

Marketing partnerships are sometimes evaluated by reach because reach is easy to report. A partner may offer access to a large audience, an event, media coverage or association with a respected brand. These benefits can matter, particularly when the startup needs awareness or credibility, but the founder should decide what the attention is expected to change.

The objective may be category awareness, qualified demand, enterprise credibility, product education or entry into a community. Each objective requires a different partner. A large general audience may be less valuable than a small professional community containing the exact buyers the company needs.

Founders should examine audience quality, message control, measurement, historical results and the partner’s own reputation. They should ask whether the audience trusts the partner on this subject and whether the format allows the product’s value to be explained properly. A creator who drives consumer purchases may not influence a chief financial officer selecting payroll infrastructure.

Marketing partners should be tested through defined campaigns with agreed attribution where possible. Not every brand outcome can be measured immediately, but the company should still record what changed: direct traffic, qualified enquiries, sales conversations, activation, search interest or customer perception. “People talked about us” is not enough unless conversation was the intended result.

The company should also consider reputational transfer. Association works in both directions. A respected partner may lend credibility, while a careless or controversial partner can introduce risk that exceeds the reach being purchased.

Use a partnership scorecard

Before committing substantial time or creating technical dependence, founders can evaluate a proposed partnership across several questions:

1. Strategic fit: Does the relationship advance a current company priority, or is it merely interesting?
2. Customer value: Will the partnership improve price, reliability, access, convenience or another meaningful outcome for customers?
3. Partner incentive: What will motivate the other organisation and the individual operators to keep participating?
4. Economic value: What revenue, savings or strategic capability can the partnership create after all direct and indirect costs?
5. Execution capacity: Has the partner successfully delivered similar work, and is there a named team with authority to act?
6. Speed: How long will contracting, integration, approval and launch realistically take?
7. Trust and reputation: How has the partner behaved with customers, regulators and other startups?
8. Data and customer ownership: Who controls information, communication and the ongoing relationship?
9. Dependence: What happens if the partner changes strategy, raises prices or experiences failure?
10. Exit: Can the company leave without losing customers, critical data or the ability to operate?

The scorecard does not replace judgement, but it forces the team to consider the complete relationship rather than the promised upside alone. It also makes alternatives easier to compare.

Every important partnership needs an operating rhythm

After the agreement is signed, the partnership needs owners on both sides, shared measures, regular reviews and an escalation path. Without these things, problems remain unresolved because everyone assumes somebody else is responsible.

The operating team should review performance at a frequency appropriate to the relationship. A payment-infrastructure partnership may require daily monitoring and immediate incident escalation. A sales partnership may be reviewed weekly or monthly through pipeline, conversion and revenue. A strategic marketing relationship may be evaluated around campaign milestones.

Senior leaders should not attend every meeting, but they should intervene when incentives, resources or decisions exceed the authority of the operating team. Executive sponsorship matters most when it removes a real obstacle rather than when it adds another layer of ceremony.

The contract should also anticipate change. Service levels, pricing, confidentiality, regulatory obligations, liability, intellectual property, data use, termination and transition should be clear. Founders sometimes avoid detailed agreements because they want to preserve goodwill, but ambiguity becomes most dangerous when the relationship is already under pressure.

A partnership should create leverage, not dependency without options

The best partnerships allow both companies to achieve something neither could do as efficiently alone. They create leverage by combining complementary assets: one company’s technology with another’s distribution, one company’s customer trust with another’s infrastructure, or one company’s product with another’s regulatory capability.

However, leverage becomes dangerous when the startup has no alternative and the partner’s incentives no longer align. Critical relationships therefore need contingency plans. The company may maintain a second provider, preserve the ability to export data, negotiate transition assistance or avoid granting exclusivity until performance has been demonstrated.

Not every form of dependence is avoidable, and maintaining unnecessary duplication can be expensive. The goal is not to eliminate dependence but to understand and manage it deliberately.

Partnerships can accelerate a startup more quickly than almost any internal initiative because they allow the company to borrow capability, trust and reach. They can also drain years through slow decisions, weak ownership and economics that looked attractive only at the beginning.

Choose partners according to the customer outcome, test the relationship through real work, align the incentives of the people responsible for execution and define how both sides can leave. A partnership should make the company faster, stronger and more valuable to its customers.

If it consistently does the opposite, the prestige of the partner’s name will not save it.