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How to nail partnerships from Day 1
Get insights into the counterintuitive playbook that defies conventional wisdom about when startups should pursue partnerships with Natasha Ratanshi-Stein, Founder and CEO Surfboard, who nailed partnerships as their main GTM channel almost from Day 1 and eventually generated 55% of revenue through partners.
Surfboard is a workforce management platform for customer service teams. After raising a $5 million seed round in 2022, they successfully exited to Dialpad in 2024 - a company they started engaging with as a partner first.
In Today's Episode We Discuss:
01:17 - Why partnerships before customers isn't crazy
02:20 - Which partners actually move the needle for early startups?
04:55 - How to convince big partners when you have zero revenue
08:20 - The exact story framework that opens partnership doors
10:17 - From informal to 20% revenue share: partnership evolution
13:37 - Critical enablement mistakes that kill partnerships
19:38 - Running partnership meetings that actually drive revenue
21:41 - Do your partners even watch your enablement videos?
22:39 - The Series B to pre-IPO partnership sweet spot
27:17 - Early signals a partnership will fail
29:31 - Negotiating partnership agreements: what founders miss
33:53 - Why paying marketplace listing fees is usually worthless
37:38 - When partnerships generated 55% of total revenue
39:40 - The hidden partnership integration tax nobody discusses
40:30 - Launching 20 partnerships, 5 worked
43:29 - The dangerous 20% rule for partnership dependency
45:21 - When Zendesk bought our competitor: partnership nightmare
52:18 - The one hiring mistake every founder makes
Get insights into the counterintuitive playbook that defies conventional wisdom about when startups should pursue partnerships with Natasha Ratanshi-Stein, Founder and CEO Surfboard, who nailed partnerships as their main GTM channel almost from Day 1 and eventually generated 55% of revenue through partners.
Surfboard is a workforce management platform for customer service teams. After raising a $5 million seed round in 2022, they successfully exited to Dialpad in 2024 - a company they started engaging with as a partner first.
In Today's Episode We Discuss:
01:17 - Why partnerships before customers isn't crazy
02:20 - Which partners actually move the needle for early startups?
04:55 - How to convince big partners when you have zero revenue
08:20 - The exact story framework that opens partnership doors
10:17 - From informal to 20% revenue share: partnership evolution
13:37 - Critical enablement mistakes that kill partnerships
19:38 - Running partnership meetings that actually drive revenue
21:41 - Do your partners even watch your enablement videos?
22:39 - The Series B to pre-IPO partnership sweet spot
27:17 - Early signals a partnership will fail
29:31 - Negotiating partnership agreements: what founders miss
33:53 - Why paying marketplace listing fees is usually worthless
37:38 - When partnerships generated 55% of total revenue
39:40 - The hidden partnership integration tax nobody discusses
40:30 - Launching 20 partnerships, 5 worked
43:29 - The dangerous 20% rule for partnership dependency
45:21 - When Zendesk bought our competitor: partnership nightmare
52:18 - The one hiring mistake every founder makes
Creators and Guests
Host
Pascal Unger
Co-founder / Managing Partner at focal.vc We lead pre-seeds in North America with up to $1M: We exclusively back AI native software startups at the very start. Thereafter, we help them get off the ground better and faster, supported by a network > 200 GTM executives. That's our singular, unwavering focus.
What is focal podcast?
Pivotal early lessons of today's best startups.
Welcome to the focal podcast where we go deep with some of today's best founders and operators on ONE crucial lessons from their early days.
This podcast is not the usual "highlight reel" startup podcast that goes one inch deep across 20+ topics. Rather, we ask the questions you’d ask if you were sitting across from them. No fluff, just the real, actionable insights you’d get if these founders were mentoring you 1on1.
We cover topics including:
- What worked and why.
- Costly mistakes and how they fixed them.
- Frameworks that truly made a difference.
- Tactics to move faster.
- What they wish they’d known sooner.
- And much more!
"Only a fool learns from their own mistakes. The wise learn from the mistakes of others."