Sourcing the Right Partners to Scale Your Tech Business with Jinesh Patel

Here's the real question: Are you wasting time on business development efforts that lead nowhere? And when it comes to strategic partnerships, are they truly about mutual benefit, or could that be a power play that leaves your company exposed? How can you tell if your partner is building with you? Or against you. If you make mistakes in business development, will your company recover, or will you watch your competitors surge ahead? Welcome back to Mastering Tech Growth, where we interview business and industry leaders to bring you actionable insights and inspiring stories. I'm your host, Mike, and today we're diving into how tech companies can scale effectively by leveraging business development and building strategic partnerships. We will explore the actionable steps that tech ventures can take to find the right partners and formalize these collaborations into partner programs enabling long-term success. Joining us today is Jayanesh Patel, a co-founder and CEO of Uptime Health, a rapidly scaling health tech startup revolutionizing dental industry. Under Jayanesh leadership, Uptime Health has recently acquired Dental Whale, and is on track to grow from $1 million revenue in 2023 to $10 million in 2024, an impressive growth in a single year. Uptown Health has built a network of 15+ strategic partners, including Aerodom and Derby Dental Supplies, demonstrating their deep expertise in forming successful partnerships that really drive growth. Before we dive in, a quick reminder to our listeners, if you find the value in the show, Please subscribe, leave us a review, leave us a comment on CastBox, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're getting your pods from. Let's go in. Welcome, Janesh. Thank you for joining us today.

Thanks for having me, Mike.

Absolutely. It's going to be one, one of these topics which we didn't talk yet about. So I'm very excited about that, Janesh. Before we go into real, you know, business building and partnerships, When I say mastering tech growth, what comes to mind?

I think it's all about repeatability. Like, so to me, when you master tech growth, it's really about making sure you have a process that is repeatable, where you know how much energy you put in and what energy you're going to get out. So that's kind of what I expect mastery is, because once you know those levers and knobs, then you can actually dial them and twist them the way you need to, to scale. So until you have those knobs, you're not mastering it.

What— how do you reach the level of actually going like, that's my knob, I want to pull it down, put it up, or, you know, or thinking about this? Because I feel like people in the beginning, they just really— I have these 105 knobs where everyone telling me I need to use. How do you actually go down to go like, that's my 4?

Well, that's, that's actually it. Everyone does have so many, and it's the art of finding those 4 is mastery. So I don't think there's a hack to be done except for the fact that you need to know yourself that you have hundreds of knobs and be very aware of that up front. Write all of them down. Really understand what the levers of each one of those are. So like when you turn this knob, what does it actually do or what do you expect it to do versus what it does? And then just start quickly turning some. Some are very quick to master. Like so I would say, you know, even if it's should I do ads? Ad spend is an easy thing to master, like click-through rate or viewership. And so there's quick ways to really understand, does your business allow you to use that knob or not? And you can then justify to yourself, did I do everything I needed to to understand that knob? So maybe it was a word thing in the, in the ad campaign, maybe it was what I'm sending out, like, so you can dial it down very quickly. But at the end of the day, if you said that's not a way to acquire users or clients for my business, then you can throw that knob away. And what I see— what I say by that, it's not ignore it completely, but don't worry about it right now. And there's other knobs there that if you do dial, it is the expected result in the quickness of that result that you do care for. So it's like one of those things, you have to touch every knob. It— you can't really know what it is, but there are knobs that you have in your head that should exist, test those first, remove them, keep them if they're good, and then start doing the rest of them. And that's why starting a business takes a little bit of time.

Okay.

Some people are very lucky and find that knob sooner than later.

They just go jackpot. The first knob I tried is, is working well. I love it.

And sometimes it's the traditional knobs. That's why for those businesses they're very quick to scale, because it's that traditional, you know, pay-per-click campaign or hiring sales heads and just doing cold calling across the industry. So those are the quick knobs I think everyone tests, and in some markets those are the knobs that win. Other markets those aren't. And I think once you realize that those obvious ones aren't for you, that's where it takes the time and the energy and the, in the struggle sometimes.

Okay, let me rephrase this a little bit, Jayanesh, and make it, uh, more challenging. So you have those X knobs, you know, which is likely a big number, depends on industry and, you know, the business you're doing. If you would choose one and you can only choose one, which would, in your view, is the most important one to drive growth?

Yeah, and I think it's the topic of this conversation. It's, uh, it's growing through indirect or partnership kind of channels. So really it's, to me, how do I scale my company without adding an excessive amount of overhead without adding an excessive amount of cost and making sure I get to my market as quickly as possible. And so what I learned early on from trying all the knobs that I talked about is if I were to grow just through traditional means of hiring a ton of salespeople, hiring, you know, a bunch of people who are going to call and make calls, you know, in the morning to set meetings, trying these paid campaigns and ads, it wasn't going to work for me. Because one of the early learnings I figured out was if I'm a novel and new concept, which my company is, it's not something that is already used in the industry, it is something that we're inventing for the industry. And because we have an education hurdle just to inform people that this kind of product exists, because we have also a hurdle to get people to pay for something they never paid for, so beyond just educating them Now we have to convince them to pay and use money for something that they never considered using or paying for in the past. Even if it makes all the sense in the world, that's still time and energy. And so you realize the traditional, you know, just calling people up and saying who you are. If you, if you speak a foreign language to them because they've never heard of you or the concept of you, it's not an easy sales model.

Mm-hmm.

If you go through just regular ad campaigns, there are sometimes you can create the right video, you can land the right placement that make it make sense, but still. That's just a lot of time for education. And so what we realized is our clients, because we sell in the healthcare industry, buy in a couple ways. One is results-driven, so they want to see other people have succeeded with it, which is great. I do the same thing when I buy anything I want. But because we're so new and novel, we didn't have a lot of people to point to, to saying, look at all these results, because we— everyone is like a first-time resultant, and we have to wait for some data to prove itself out. So everyone else is in a wait-and-see approach. So we needed to first figure out how do we get these people to trust us, which is the other reason people buy, is they trust the vendor and call it the backing or background or the science or whatever it is that created the product, and they are early adopters. For us to find those people, we needed to find the people who knew about those people. So we, what we realized is since we're also new to the industry we didn't have a Rolodex of all these types of clients or individuals, but we knew others in our industry that did. And if we could find those that were synergistic to our offering, meaning us plus them— if a client was using both products, they would get tremendous amount of value versus just one independently— that's an interesting partner to have. So what we did is we found those kinds of companies we asked them to ask their sales team based on what we're selling, who do you know that would be very interested in hearing about this idea? Then they would give us a curated list that's very targeted of the people they knew. And then from there, because, you know, we'd give them incentives to do so too. It's not without— there's a lot of how you make it work, which we can get into in a second. But let's say they give us this list, and then we can utilize that list, which is now hyper-curated. I'm no longer shotgun approach, you know, spraying as much information as possible and filtering later. These are pre-filtered prospects, and because they got introduced from a client— sorry, a vendor that they have already had success with— the trust is there because this vendor is not just going to introduce anyone to me. So that's how the client's feeling. And so we've eliminated a lot of those early barriers to get our product in the market. We started getting early wins, which created the results for other people to look at and say, oh, that's a tested and true and tried product, I want to buy it now. So that's how we decided to grow.

Okay. So much to unpack here. So how about we give a little bit of flavor to the listeners what the product is actually about? Because you mentioned that it's a new thing, you know, so you need to educate potential clients of what that is. So can you give us an understanding of what you guys do and why you need to educate before you're actually able to make the sale?

Yeah, so our product, it essentially helps dental offices or urgent cares or, you know, any kind of outpatient clinic. It helps them manage all of the medical or dental or just patient care equipment inside the office. So it tells you what you own based on what you own, how to take care of it, and if it breaks down, you can click buttons in our product to dispatch service people to come out and fix it. And you can engage in a marketplace of service technicians to come and fix your stuff. And then we can predict when you're gonna buy your next device because we know things like failure rate, how old your machines are, how much you spent on them, how much you spent taking care of them. All those, all that data allows us to help you understand what needs to be replaced instead of repaired next time it fails.

Okay.

So that's kind of what we do holistically. Before us, the reason it's new for them is these smaller healthcare environments didn't have a product like this. They, they just actually, most of 'em don't even know what's in their offices. As much as they believe they do, they might only know really 80% of all the machines and tools and equipment in their office. And if you ask them how they're taking care of it, most of them don't have a policy or procedure for this. And in the big hospitals, these are things that they're done every day, every second, every week, because they have a lot more infrastructure and, and department-level people that are taking care of it. So that's why for them, they've always just used pen and paper. They've just ignored the problem and they just called someone to repair it if it broke. But never do anything proactive to make sure it doesn't break or it can last as long as possible.

Okay. So the education piece is actually convincing them that they aren't aware of the inventory that much. And there's a huge benefit of actually tracking what you have, when it's going to break, and when it actually breaks, just making one phone call. Okay. I can see that. Do you mind sharing what's the sale about? So we had a couple of people on the show talking about the price ranges. Like if you have a small price range, it's actually quite easy to sell. But you know, the higher you go, the more funneling you have to do within your sales process, meaning that, you know, the higher the cost of the contract, the less likely you're going to, you know, make that happen on a phone call. So you need to have, you know, chop up that sales process a lot. So from your perspective, that education, is that like a very first step before you even start talking sales? Or is that part of the sales funnel?

I'd say both. Like, we, we want to qualify as much as possible before we start talking to people so we know that we're spending time appropriately. So we can do things like make sure that they've gone through some web form where they fill out enough information for us to then talk to them. Someone who's going to take the time to do that and, you know, really answer those questions with some thought is somebody who might have an interest of buying or at least understanding more. There's an intent to learn. So that's one of the things. The other ones through our partnerships, we educate the partners, they educate the clients, and they're only bringing us opportunities that make sense because a lot of times we have them sit on the calls as well. So it wastes their time as well as ours if that partner isn't vetted up front somewhat. So there's a little bit of that— do that vetting so we're not wasting anybody's time at some level. So I would say we, we do qualify as much as possible. There's many ways to do it. There's just a couple examples. But yeah, our product can be cheap for some, like it can be called $100 a month or $1,000 a year for each location. But a lot of our clients own multiple locations. They might own like 10, 20 dental offices, 30 urgent cares. And so for them, it's a $20,000 software, $30,000 software, you know, in how much they're spending.

I see. You mentioned, Raneesh, the partners and effectively you vetting the partners or you choosing a good partner which has good synergies and have access to people which are potential clients. So you're sort of closing that gap. But how do you even start thinking about who your partners could be and how do you convince them to actually have a chat with you? Because, you know, from my perspective, if, if that company is a partner, potentially they're bigger, you know, maybe they have more access to the market and things like that. Why, why would they even talk with me if I'm a startup?

So that's good, that's a really good question. Um, and one, you have to understand what your strategy is, like if it is partnerships, to then put the effort in, because there's a lot of effort that goes once you've decided to go down this pathway. So I want to preface it that it's not such a quick thing to unlock. It does take some time. So a good thing that we looked at was, because we sell equipment management solutions and software and services, we started writing a list of all the kinds of people who might be a partner, or the vendors, or kinds of groups that would sell something synergistic to us. A good example is anyone who sells medical equipment might look to also support selling a software that takes care of the equipment after it's purchased. That's a very synergistic sale, like buy both. Here's something that you spent tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars on. There's a way to protect it. Great partnership. Somebody who's servicing equipment, right? Like, because we also dispatch service, these groups that are technicians that are already knocking on doors, that are taking care of a lot of their clients Sometimes they wanna offer more to help. So it's, hey, I just repaired all of your stuff. Did you know if you use this software, you can actually make sure that you keep your stuff from breaking down as often? So try the software. So you start writing down like all the other tangential kinds of products or industries that work around yours. And then you just start calling them up a little bit and figuring out who they are, write how many there are down. Some are easier to get to than others. I usually like to find people who are younger in their vertical, so like not some big established company, but maybe some of the newer entrance to that industry, because they're looking to differentiate themselves from the bigger players who've been there for decades and are billions of dollars big. Uh, so what we are is a differentiator. Like, why would somebody buy you, this tiny startup, uh, versus that big billion-dollar company if y'all are equally competitive in what you sell? Well, if I come to you and say, hey, I got an idea, let's try this, they're much more willing to listen and figure it out too, because they're trying to compete with the bigger gorilla. So all of those early modes help us understand, is this even the right partner? Even though we hypothetically think this makes a lot of sense, you have to try it. And a lot of times it doesn't work either. So we probably spent a whole year going after these kinds of partnerships. We wrote down the types of partnerships So it can be everything from, are they going to be a license and distribution partnership where they actually sell our product with their product? So they're putting it on their contracts and we're now a SKU in their offering. That's a style of partnership. Are we doing a referral-based partnership with these guys, like where every time they send us something, we'll send them a check or something saying, hey, thank you? Or is this a rev-share partnership? So there's different types of partnerships and each of them motivate the partner differently. So not only do you have to test, is the messaging going to land, you have to test, is the way you're going to market together make sense, and is it motivating to your sales team enough to pull you out of their tool bag? One of the things you have to consider as a startup or a company trying to get into a partnership is if your partner's so big that when they go to their clients' offices and you're hoping they're going to talk about you, because that's the whole reason you have this partnership, But yet they're so big that they have tens of thousands of things to talk about, whether it's a different SKU or widget or tool or software or thing, because so many companies partner with us or they sell so much stuff. What's going to make you top of mind to pull out of their bag? How do you get that? So part of this is not just understanding what makes sense, but how do you motivate the people who are supposed to pull you out of their bag? It can be through incentive programs. It could be through just amazing education. A lot of times the reason people don't bring you up in a conversation is because they don't want to look stupid in front of the clients that they've spent lots of times building trust and value for. So imagine this, you go to your best friend and you're going to tell them, oh my gosh, I bought this toaster, makes the best toast ever. And so they're excited, they bring it up Think about that like somebody bringing up your tool in terms of a sales widget. And then you start asking them questions. Well, how much does it cost? Like, they say, well, I bought it for $50. I'm just making up a number. You're like, oh, well, you know, does it, does it use Wi-Fi? Does that— you start asking questions. If they're ecstatic about it, you start asking questions so you have understanding. The moment they can't answer the question makes them feel a little bit, I'd say, stupid in quotes. Like, they don't want to feel that way when they're bringing up something as a salesperson. Imagine getting asked a question that you don't have the answer to. So they will never bring it up ever if they feel like they can't answer the 90% of the questions that are gonna get thrown at them. So educating the partner and their sales team is more important than just standing up the partnership, because that, that's one thing that we learned early on. So there's a lot of that like trial and error that's going to happen, and it all depends on the type of partnership you have, the types of partners, and how they're motivating their sales team. That took us about a year and a half to figure out. After we figured out what kinds of partners make most sense, then it was about motivation. And now we're at a point where we really can have a good oil— well-oiled machine.

Okay, I love what you said there about the sales and the confused mind don't buy. And I think the number is like 3. Like, if you are as confident about what you're talking about from the range from 1 to 10, the person listening to whom you're trying to sell is going to be -3. So if you are 10 with everything, all the questions and all the answers, the best you can get is still 7. So the moment you have something less, you know, they are -3 less. So if you're not confident, you know, it's going to be very hard to make a sale if you end up, you know, being below 5. It's a very good shout. So you're not going to Avoid that experimentations in the beginning, Janusz, because you mentioned you spend a year understanding, you know, what the good partner is, you know, having chats about agreements and incentives and just generally making that business module work.

Yeah.

You mentioned cold calling, just going after the partners, you know, having a chat, what they do, you know, trying to look for the synergies. So there's no shortcut. In this way. There's no like, uh, you know, I don't know, programs or partnerships which help you to find partners, and programs where you can just, you know, shortcut that way or make a quick test. Effectively, what you're saying, you can't experiment too much with that partnership. It has to be a strategic positioning for the business to go and start developing partners. And if that's— that is the strategy, you're looking at the 12-month lead time until you actually you know, reaping the benefits?

Yeah, I think there's, there's a couple qualifiers in there. One is every industry is different, so everything I'm saying is from like what I lived in the healthcare industry. But I think there are industries where you can probably find a hack or two. And I'll actually tell you that if there was to be a hack, I'll tell you the hack that we created to talk to as many partners as we did. Um, so like, and then the last thing I'll say before I start on that is it's not that we weren't reaping benefits while we were in the experimentation phase. One, you're still getting it— while you're learning these partnerships and everything else, you're still getting in front of a lot of powerful companies, and they now know who you are. So whether you formalize something or whether you make something that makes sense still means that you're in the minds of dozens, hundreds other people that you never were before. And if you're a new company, that's an important thing— brand awareness. And people just bring you up in a random conversation at networking hour. It's like, even if they're not incentivized, they might hear something and say, hey, I actually just talked to this company, they do XYZ, maybe that's something for you guys. So there's, there's benefit on just the brand awareness, but there's also experimentation benefit where you actually are going to market and you are getting some early wins, but we're just trying to gauge the pace and the quickness of it and if it makes sense. So it's not all a wasted year or year and a half, it's just a, it's just a lot of time to make you feel like you have the knobs more than anything else. So going back to how we hacked it, we— the way that, as best as we could hack it, what I realized is a lot of the partners I had, or the partner types I had written down, a lot of them are at the conferences that I go to. So when we were first coming to market, we were also going to conferences, uh, to sell our product, because in healthcare in the US, that's something that's the easiest way to get in front of enough people to really get your feet wet with word tracks and price points and everything else. So we started doing is attending these conferences not as exhibitors but as attendees who are walking the exhibit floor. And during the times where everyone else might be in some kind of education session, or it might be like during the hours where it's just very quiet and dead, guess who's sitting there at the booths waiting to be talked to? Your partners. So instead of cold calling and trying to find the right person through email trees and like, you know, through your networks on LinkedIn, I just went up to every booth that would have been a potential partner. I just talked about who I am and said, is there anyone here I should be talking to? And a lot of times you get, eh, no, we're not interested, it doesn't make sense. But like, there's so many times like, you know what, my VP is right here. Like, this is interesting, come over here, Bob. Like, you know, it's like nobody's doing anything at this point, so they don't mind. Like, I'm not wasting their sales time, I'm not burning out their day. They're already sitting in a place where they have nothing to do during the break hours, so it is the best time to get their full attention and to listen to you. And if you want to do a quick demo, you can bring your laptop around. So I did that, and I walked the floor, and I grabbed 20 partnerships that way. And, and, or at least I started the conversation for 20, and we inked them, you know, later on to experiment, to figure out which ones were good and which ones are bad. But that was the quickest way I was able to get to the right partners in my mind.

I love that. I love that. I think it's, um, highly underrated what the face-to-face and just going to network actually does to anybody, you know, either personal career growth or business growth or, or any any answers you're trying to get, you know, people tend to, you know, go on LinkedIn, which of course still works, you know, DMing, you know, maybe automating some type of campaigns. But going on the floor and actually talking with 10 people can be so much more valuable in one day, you know, than trying to do a big 2-month campaign and trying to chit-chat with hundreds of people on DMs on LinkedIn. That's same experience for us. It's like if I want to get a certain guest on a show, I will do exactly the same thing. I'll find the guest, conferences, events where they're going to be, and I'm going to go, hey, let's have a conversation. It's just that, you know, that skin rubbing or whatever you want to call it, that face-to-face conversation is very powerful. I think it's a very great tip to our listeners. Don't avoid, you know, that approach. Go to conferences, go to events, and do that, you know, gorilla hacking. That's a good hack. Thanks, Janesh.

That's a Session, like you're saying, Mike, which is like not just face-to-face, which is very important, but like the fact that you can get to so many people in a single day. So if there was something you said that realized that's why they weren't interested, or I could have said that better, well, now you can quickly fix it and see if that works the next time. So it's a, it's a rapid prototype of like your, your pitch to these kinds of partners at the same time.

Yep, 100%. I, I want to touch a little bit of— I don't know how much you can disclose, you know, uh, but these incentives when you build these partnership programs, you know, uh, firstly, the conversations to me in my mind looks like, uh, like pitches, you know, like it's almost like I would be raising Series A or seed money and I would be going to, you know, VCs or investors and, you know, pitching the business, pitching the vision, you know, that's what we do, that's what's going to happen. So I feel like, you know, getting a partner is very similar in that sense that, you know, you want to close that and you'll need to convince them that you are a good partner for them as well. So that it would be interesting to understand how these conversations go. So once you, and once you close them, like, what is, you know, the agreements? Were you actually leaving on the table from MoneyRace perspective? You know, would be like equity, but from partnership's perspective, is it a cut of revenue? You know, is it something else potentially? So can you give us a little bit around that?

Yeah, so I think it'll Again, all depends on what your intent is for the partnership. Is it brand awareness? Are you trying to get them to sell something for you? Are you trying to integrate their product to your product?

Let's say sell. Let's just think revenue generation. Let's just say like my partnerships, I just want to get more revenue. I just want more cash flow so I can, you know, just get good numbers and maybe potentially raise some money on those numbers.

Yeah, so what we would first do is figure out how does that company sell? Because if If the theory is they're going to sell our product or bundle it or refer us in, like, what is their sales model? And if they are feet-on-the-street people who go into offices that sell something, that put like a catalog of invoice together and they write all down their paper, well, what we want to do is create a license and distribution agreement so we are now on their paper, like, that they can just write in and they are selling our goods. Then we want to learn how they're actually incentivized. So what does their commission structure look like? And usually if you're in these conversations in a good way, they will share this because they want this to be successful too. It's not hidden. It might be like, oh, well, they make a percentage of the profit margin, or they make, you know, this amount for every X dollars that they sell through their partner client. So once you realize then is like, how do I, based on what I'm selling, package this up? Because maybe it's even different than how you sell it directly. That is going to make the most sense for the person in their group. So then what the partnership agreement basically says is, okay, if they make a percent on profit margin that they sell to their clients, we need to figure out at what number do they feel like pulling this out of the tool bag. So is it they sell usually $1,000 items, so they're always thinking every line item in their thing is like $50 in my pocket? So how do we get to that same equivalency where we're not less If anything, we need to be more, but like, we're at least not less than that. And so then we start writing out, okay, here's how you sell it. You have to sell yearly packages together because like our yearly package is $1,000 a year. If you sell $100 a month, that's not going to feel that great to the person selling it. So it will say is you can only sell our annual SKU. Then what we might do is say for every, you know, first 20 of each region or team that's selling our stuff, we might say we will give you guys, the company, a rebate back that is a little bit higher than the profit share or whatever we're thinking about doing together. So there's more money now in the corporation's pocket, and we can, you know, gently let them know that that should probably go back to the reps so they are more incentivized to sell their first 20 to get this thing up and humming. Because we always know that the first few wins together is going to make sure that everyone gets excitement in that company. They start seeing a lot of wins, every, every other salesperson's like, wait, why am I not seeing that? Let me try and push this product. So we actually create a go-to-market plan inside the agreement where it says in the first 90 days, 30 days, we're going to be able to demo our product to all of your sales team. Day 30 through 60, we're going to create the go-to-market campaign with the team. So like whether it's the marketing or the press releases that we're going to do, like how are we going to express to the public that we're working together, and your team has something to fall back on. Okay. Day 60 through 90, it might be we say that we need to do buddy calls with every one of your sales reps. So meaning if you're going to an office, we might send one of our reps with you just so they can see how you sell and get the early kind of questions and answers done together so they don't have that embarrassment moment of not knowing the answers. So we kind of create this whole rubric as well as the incentive and pricing structure, and that's what gets inked at the end of the day. And then if we don't hit those metrics, like, we also put milestones. Like, by 6 months, we believe that we should have done X amount of revenue together, and if we haven't, then we should have a meeting to see if this should still continue or not. So you put in these checkpoints, you put in these milestones, you put in all these things that are going to help you Makes sense.

Feels very organic. Sounds very organic and feels very organic in the sense of, of the process. So is that almost like negotiation in the beginning or is it just, hey, you know, this is Uptime Health. This is how we roll. You know, you are potential partner. This is what we're going to give to you. We're going to give you go-to-market. You know, this is how it looks like. Pretty much everything you just gave to us. So is it more like, hey, you are a potential partner. We are to you as well. How do you think we should roll? And it's like ping pong between, you know, two companies to actually work this out.

Yeah, I think in the beginning it's always the collaborative way to do it, like do it together. And then as you realize most people are collaborating with you in the same way, then the next part you go to is you have the playbook saying what we've seen work the best is this, and this is why. And eventually you'll get to a point where you know yourself what's going to work best. You don't have to hypothesize, like, with— or put any kind of suggestion out there. It's like, for us to make this make sense, it has to look like this. So it's— there is a growth phase of just like figuring it out to realizing that this is the right form factor of it, to then telling everybody else, unless it's this way, we're not going to succeed, so I'd rather not do the partnership. So you can be more prescriptive later on.

Okay. Are there any qualities you're looking for, Janesh, in the beginning to sort of validate the long-term success potential? Because in my mind, if I'm going up the hill to build this partnership, you know, I'll be losing time, probably resources. So I need to be successful. So I need to validate a long-term success of that partnership. I'm not building partnership for 3 to 6 months. You know, I'm building something to grow businesses together, right? So are you looking for some type of qualities, or is it more like, okay, it doesn't matter, we'll look at the numbers, we'll look at how the go-to-market campaigns are yielding, and, and as long as the numbers are good, we don't really care about, you know, qualifying them before that?

Yeah, no, I think qualifying your partners, just like you gave the analogy of raising capital, it's the same thing you do when you want to raise capital from an investment group. You want to make sure you're taking in good money and it has good reputation and these are good people to be in bed with because you're, you're going to be with them for a while. So the partnerships are the same way, which is like, what is their brand in the market? Is it seen as a quality brand, a brand that cares, a brand that marries what you care about? So if I'm very— like, my company, we over-index on customer success. Like, our CSAT scores and everything else are things that we talk about all the time. Because we really care about adoption and growth and like getting the ROI. If another partner doesn't even talk about like how the onboarding experience is or how like this matters to them so much and it's really about, oh, look how much profit margin we make, and like that's it— it's not that it's a bad partner, it's just we might have disagreements in the future where I say, look, profit margin aside, if we need to give a little because we owe this company a little bit more since we didn't have the best experience, and I want to make sure they feel good about partnering with us. And if you're going to be the one that's going to pull me back and say we're not giving a dime to them, like, their fault for the experience or whatnot, like, that's going to create long-term issues. Because in our minds, there's no questions asked. We'll figure out how to make it right to a customer that we ever have had like a poor experience with. It doesn't happen often, but we go out of our way to make sure it doesn't happen. So if somebody else doesn't have that same gear, you're gonna have a lot of fights, and eventually you're gonna just be like, I don't want my brand associated with that brand. Or so that's one way to do it. The other way is how good are they at meeting your deadlines and the intention. So if they're always saying, guys, we're going to be done with this in 3 months, 6 months, whatever it is, but then they're months behind every milestone— if you're a startup or an up-and-coming company You are living minute to minute, hour to hour. These bigger companies are living quarter to quarter, fiscal year to fiscal year. So they're moving at a different pace than you're moving. So if they can't come back closer to you, you might be extremely exhausted and frustrated with their slowness, and that's gonna just create a bad taste in your mouth for the partnership, and you're just not gonna want it. And then you're not gonna put the energy and like excitement that you had up front into it. And it might just be doomed from that moment. So is the speed matching? Is the things they care about matching? How is their brand reputation felt in the industry? Because you don't want to tie yourself to like a very bad brand either. All those are good qualifiers. And then the rest is, like you said, how well did we do performing together? I think that's the last qualifier that we should get to, and then that's only after the partnership is inked.

I love the minute-by-minute What you just said, Janesh, and what came to my mind is when we were doing Idea Drop, which was innovation SaaS platform, at some points we had like a runway which was like 6 or 9 months.

Yeah, exactly.

We were very high-risk appetite, so we always kept it about 6 months runway. So any money which came in more, we just invested back in the business. But yeah, the time mattered a lot. So if any sales processes or partnership processes didn't really yield quickly, it was just a closed book, move on. The time was very important. Okay. So the Dental Whale started as a partner, which you then acquired.

Yeah.

Give us a story. That sounds like an amazing success story.

Yeah. So Dental Whale, when we started getting into the dental industry, You know, what we were doing obviously is managing dental equipment and dispatching service through a marketplace or even through their preferred vendors. When we saw Dental Whale, we were very interested in this company because not only did they sell equipment— so going back to the one partnership of like sell equipment, sell software goes together— they also had an independent network of technicians as well as franchise technicians that were to cover the entire nation. And those technicians were really good to our marketplace because they didn't have to sell what they serviced, which is important because if we're in a marketplace concept, people are repairing whether they sold you the device or not. They're taking care of your problems. And in the dental world, it was a very unique kind of company because it doesn't exist in a big way. A lot of the other technician groups out there belong to a big distributor and are W-2 employees, and they're not really independent. And it's always been tougher for them to service things that they didn't sell. So that's why Dentawell looked unique to us. So we first started partnering with them, we realized like we like their leadership, we like— going back to the qualifiers— I got a lot— we all got along well with who was running the company. We liked that they were feeling disruptive to the industry, which was kind of close to what we wanted to do. So there's a lot of that that was going on well. And the last thing that we realized is they needed help dispatching their independent network of service technicians. What do we have? We have a dispatching tool with a marketplace concept. And like, that was beautiful to them. And so we initially just started working together, like, look, we'll be the software engine behind you guys, we'll figure out how to sell here. So all that started happening, and we started realizing this is gonna be a really perfect partnership. Uh, they started having some troubles end of 2022, uh, just with everything going on in the industry— or sorry, end of 2023, not 2022. I think end of 2022, when they start realizing they have to start course correcting some things. Like, they were leveraged pretty heavily because of how they were built and growing, and, you know, interest rates started creeping up, and the markets, banks, and like, you— everyone kind of knows what happened for a little bit in early 2023, especially the banking Crisis. So a lot of people started being a little bit more conservative and concerned, and their investors said, hey, we need to rethink this business and this company. Maybe we got to find it a different owner or partner so we can get out and do something else with our money during this very interesting time. So whenever we realized it went through that moment, I got a letter in the mail saying like, here's like what, what's happening, we're restructuring, we're doing all these things. And I called up my partners, right, like the CEO, the— all their leadership, just to understand what's going on over there. Because I was like, you guys are a great company, you're big, you're growing, like, what is going on? And so they let me know that they were looking for a new home. And then I went to my board and I said, guys, this company is too perfect of a glove fit for what we're trying to build. They sell equipment, they have distribution lines, they have technicians, they have even a school that they were trying to build to help train more technicians to increase supply. I was like, we need to make sure that either whoever buys this, we have a really good relationship with them because I think they're going to be a big puzzle piece to us in the future, or we need to buy them so we can control that. And when we started realizing that we weren't sure who was going to buy them or if we're going to have a great relationship with whoever was going to buy them, we went after them. And that's when we ended up acquiring them. They were a pretty big business, so we shed off a lot of the business we didn't care for. We only bought the tiny pieces we wanted, which is like their team that does the dispatching. We care— team that kind of had the equipment solutions and like the lines and the partnerships there. And so those are the only two pieces that we care about the most. Then they had this other learning management software that we thought was pretty cool. So there's only tiny things we bought. Everything else said, we don't want this. Like, somebody else can have it, somebody else can buy it. And that's kind of where we came from, is it was all organic, was not anticipated, but it was one of the best decisions we ever made as a company. And it was because the partnership that we had up front, we knew that we would work well with these groups, we knew that they would integrate well. We were already some of the software that they were running on, so imagine that. We don't have to do a lot of, you know, when it comes to the operational side software, we didn't do a lot of changing because it was ours. So that's where this, this made a ton of sense and it wouldn't have happened unless they were a partner to begin with.

That's a great story, Dennis. It's one of these opportunities which came along and, and you guys jumped it, and it was a successful one. Sometimes, you know, maybe it's not as successful, but that sounds like a, you know, a perfect match, which, you know, I'm glad for you guys. Sounds like a great, great acquisition.

It was a lucky acquisition. Like, I don't think we would have ever thought to do it otherwise. But again, just having good partners, understanding that they're going to come to you in times of need because you are that good. Opportunities like this will fall in your lap too. It's all about going back to like, a lot of things are luck in life. These kinds of moments are lucky. It's just what you do when you're presented with that moment. And we realize we should take advantage of it by buying them.

Yeah, that's a very good, very good, a very strong shout out. Sometimes opportunities are in people's faces and You know, some type of fear or, you know, onboarding risk or whatnot stops them, and then they just pass and they go like, snap, I should have jumped on it. And big opportunities like that, they don't, they don't show up that often, you know, if you look for them potentially, but still not that often. So you guys have now 15+ partners, right, which includes, um, Aerodrome and Dental, uh, Derby Dental Supplies, which are, you know, big partners, right? So 15+ that's a lot to manage from like how I see that picture. Are you now sort of stopped doing partnerships or are you still looking for new partners? Is that how you grow the business? You know, you acquired one, so it's always like, you know, we're going to grow by, you know, through acquisitions or is it still partners? And the questions I'm sort of going towards, Janesh, is that If you rinse and repeat that growth of partners, do you think about creating like a partner programs where people can just sort of find you instead of you finding them?

Yeah, so we're now at that point where people come to us, and I will say if we were— our partnership is always evolving. Like when we learn, because now we have the dot, the dials and knobs that we talked about that we really like, but now we're finding like the fine-tuning knobs, like The ones that are big, that are obvious, it's like, okay, if they sell this kind of thing, we package it this way, it makes a ton of sense. Now we're finding smaller numbers that says, well, if this kind of partner needs this from us and this from us, like, because these are two missing puzzle pieces, not just like a nice organic sale, then our ability to go from inked partnership to first 10 wins together, that timeline is much smaller, which it's all about to me you know, speed to sale or speed to success beyond just the partner itself. Now what we're looking for is more partners that meet that other set of criteria, and we're starting to get rid of some older partners that might have been a little slower to grow, or, you know, they weren't bad, they just weren't amazing, because it's all about focus and energy. And so at the same time, our partnership is never stopping, it's always getting better and better. And so Maybe 15 is the number that it evens out at for how much we lose and how much we bring in on. But we also have a team that does this. So we have 2 people, one that actually finds and inks and solidifies partnership, one person that's a partnership success coordinator, so they make sure that we're mutually successful together. We have 2 partnership salespeople, like one who actually meets with the sales team of all of our partners and make sure they have everything they need We have a marketing team that's also assigned to these partners, whether it's creating collateral, decks, videos, whatever it might be to arm the partners with what they need to get that going. And then we even have demoers who are just there to demo on behalf of partners. And the reason this is important is it might sound like that's a lot of people, but think about the other way you scale. Most other companies scale by saying, I'm going to hire 100 salespeople. 200 salespeople, 300 salespeople, BDR, sales ops. Like, there's a lot of infrastructure on that side of the company. And we do still have a direct pathway because I don't think you'll ever lose that. I don't think anyone should ever ignore that because it's also your safety blanket and insurance in the event that, you know, this other stuff doesn't work or one of your big partners decides to leave. You still have this mechanism to go direct. But we're spending way more energy adding like 8 or so heads on the partnership side versus that same amount of growth might have taken me 15 or 20 heads on the direct sales side because the partners have their own sales team. So to me, it's a little bit of a— I'm not scaling. I think with the same partnership team of 20 is an equivalent of what a direct sales team of 100 would produce, at least for my business and the way I'm going to market. So that's why I'm indexing on that Okay, um, are you—

do you guys still do direct or is it just pure partnerships?

We still do direct because at the end of the day, not everyone wants to buy from a partner. Uh, people like their independence to make that decision. People like— it also helps us build our muscle, right? Like, we want to make sure that we are able to sell and understand and command value. Like, and also it's the insurance part mentally. You need to be able to sell your own stuff too. And if you can't, that's a problem in my book. So I think that's why we'll always keep it, we'll always grow it. It just won't grow as quickly as partnerships in my mind.

Okay. What's the percentage on direct versus partnership when it comes to revenue?

Right now I'd say it's close to 50/50. Um, you know, we only started partnerships a couple, a year or so ago, so like it was a lot heavy direct and then we started learning. Now it's about 50/50, I would say, for this year, at least the back half of this year is what it looks like. I think the beginning of the year it was like 33% was partnerships, but you can see it's ramping aggressively, and that's what I like to see.

On a partnership side?

Yeah, the partnership side went from 30% of my revenue mix to 50% of my revenue mix.

Okay.

And that's after some time these partners start coming, because think about them like a big— actually, one of my own employees gave me this analogy which I love. So one of the partners that we also have is called Henry Schein. They're like the largest equipment distribution company in dentistry in the US. And he says, you know, Henry Schein is like an elephant to get going. It's a sleeping elephant. So, and you're trying to make this elephant sprint down the thing. Like that's your intention is sprinting elephant means like sprint, like humming partnership. So he's like, well, first you have to do is you have to wake up this elephant. So first you have to get awareness. That takes time because of how big they are. Then it takes— puts one leg up, then the second leg, then the third leg, and the fourth leg. It's a very slow process. And then it doesn't start sprinting right away. It's not like a 100-yard sprinter in the Olympics. It walks, trots, and then it builds steam, and then it builds momentum, and then it's sprinting. And then it's hard to slow down once it's at full run. It takes a while to slow down, but it takes a while to speed up. So a lot of our partnerships which we've been, you know, helping the elephant stand, you know, like, and give it awareness and maybe take its first 1 or 2 steps, those are now producing at like, okay, now it's jogging, uh, now it's going to start running. And so like a lot of those started happening, you know, late last year, even the year before. That's why there's a long tail to all the effort at the end of the day.

Okay. Would you choose the smaller or bigger ones? Because I love that, by the way, that elephant analogy. It's almost similar to going after a big company to make a sale. You know, it's always going to be a much, much longer process. But if there's a confidence that you can close it, you want to invest that time because once you close it, you know, the benefits are very long-term benefits. So if you would be giving that opportunity to, let's say, take 10 smaller partnerships or one big one.

Yeah.

Would you look at the numbers or would, would you just make a choice based on—

you need both. Uh, that's why partnerships are awesome, is you don't have to have one, only one type. So we do want the big ones that take forever because going back to the momentum, once the momentum's there, that thing is a big powerful object that is going to run and bulldoze down pathways and make you successful. It just takes a lot of time. While this thing is taking a lot of time, you should be inking tinier, maybe easier to manage, quicker to speed up partnerships, because you're going to get all the kinks worked out. You're going to figure out what the word tracks are, what the collateral is, like all these things that are going to help that bigger partner. Once it is starting to jog, you can start feeding it all of the learnings that you're getting from these smaller partners. And sometimes the smaller partners are also just more fun to experiment with. Like whether or not it's just about speed to market because they're more nimble. If you have this wild idea of like, you know what we should do, we should do this instead. More times than not, if you're already somewhat successful together, they're gonna say, yeah, let's try it. And you don't get that same level of experimentation with the bigger groups because going to our point earlier, a lot of bureaucracy, a lot of red tape. They're not they're not there to invent something. They're there to just make profit off things that have been invented, right? So like them going through the motion of like, let's experiment, let's try something new, let's invent something— like, that's not in their DNA. It is in the DNA of the smaller partner. So you need them just as much as you need the big guys. You guys also create brand awareness. Like, if I do a PR announcement that says I'm working with the largest player in your industry, that's a good stamp, signal of approval for the industry at large to say that this is a good company to work with. That same press release for the tinier person that only has 2% market share doesn't have the same impact. So you— that's why you need them both. They each have their pros, they each have their cons, but I don't think you can deal without any of them. You have to deal with all of them.

What if I'm just starting? Let's say I'm listening to this episode and I'm like, it's been on my mind for quite some time we didn't do it yet, so I want to start my journey. Would you go after a couple of smaller ones or, uh, or, you know, bigger ones, just from the perspective of return of investment? You know, I'm going to put in my time. Let's say I get the partnership, then it's management of the partnership. You know, if I have more potential, there's a lot more admin work, you know, different emails, different people, maybe something, you know, some of them don't work, so I need to cut them. That's another headache and stuff like that. It's like, if I'm just starting, you know, is there a, a better way to start, smaller or bigger?

Smaller, I think. I mean, going back to the bigger, it's just even take longer to ink. Whether even if you have the conversation first with the bigger guy, they probably won't sign their contract till a year later. The smaller one will probably sign their contract quicker. Going back to that point earlier where I said these smaller groups are looking for a way to differentiate themselves from the bigger groups. Yep. More likely to say yes and get this thing, you know, humming faster than the bigger guy. And so for any new entrepreneur or new company trying to start this pathway, smaller ones are going to say yes faster, you're going to experiment more, but you're probably gonna have more failures, which is okay to know. Uh, going back to your point about spending this energy and effort, again, if you're brand new to this style of going to market, you have to go in eyes wide open and realizing I am paying for education at the same time. Just like when you first started your company, you're gonna have a lot of failures and a lot of burned expenses just trying to get your right sales motion direct involved. Same thing is gonna happen on the partnership side. So if you're expecting to like have a home run hit the first time at bat, you're not gonna have a good time and you're gonna hate the fact that you went through partnerships. But if you expect to at least go to the batting cages first, spend a bunch of coins on, you know, balls getting thrown at you, and it's just a wasted effort without a lot of reward. If you don't think about it that way, you're going to just set yourself up for failure. So I'd rather everyone know ahead of time, it's going to be some, you know, energy, non-ROI-producing activity up in the early days, but it's the learnings that you're getting, which is really how you should be thinking about it.

I love the mentality of the failure is a lesson, and you have to learn the lesson, and then proactively looking for lessons, which means proactively looking to fail. I can't remember which book I read this. It's one of the bigger guys where effectively the notion is that you have to have your failure quote and you have to reach that failure quote. So if you say that, you know, in a month I'm going to have 5 lessons around partnership building, that means you have to make 5 mistakes. So you have to, you know, just go after things you actually don't know. Which leads me to a question. Would you go ahead and do it yourself? All over again if you were given the chance? Or would you get some type of like business development coach or maybe another company which, you know, professionally helps you to develop business in partnership space?

That's a really good question. I don't know if I ever asked myself that. I don't know. I'm also somebody who loves to learn and go through those failure moments, and that way I can share like what we're doing on this podcast with a way of speaking of I've felt it, I've been there, I've done that, I've gone through those cycles. Like, it helps me internalize everything even more so to make the best decisions for my company. Because if there's a learning here that I can apply over there, like, I get that by going through the process. Now, I don't think that it's a terrible idea that once you have enough learnings to potentially hire somebody to say, you go figure this out, here's the book that I've just created, like here's the rules, like you can figure out how to play the game underneath these bigger rules. I think I could have done that faster, but I don't think I would have started off using somebody else out of the gates.

Is that a mindset thing, Janesh? Is that, that you love learning? And by the way, I'm, I'm literally like that. I would do things myself just for a, for a, for a fact of learning. If I don't know something, I will go and do it myself. I don't want someone doing. And then I had the chat with the person who actually, you know, does business professionally. So his motivation is actually making money. So he has the quote of like, that's who, not how, but who. So he doesn't care, you know, doesn't care about the how, doesn't want to learn. He just basically picks up a phone and goes like, do you know this guy? I need that done. And then he just hires people because it leads to, you know, more revenue or more business growth.

Yeah, I think it's an interesting way. And everyone's different in their motivation, right? Like, why did you start your company? Like, that's, that's probably the core feeling that you have to understand before you can make these kinds of decisions. Your friend over there looks like he starts companies in the pure aspect to make money, make profit. That's great. So many people do, and I think it's a great reason to start a business. So nothing against it. But in that world, you're not starting to solve a problem. You're not starting to build something novel and new for the industry. That's not your core of why. Your core of why is money. You know how else you can make money? Go run a gas station. Go run a hotel. Go do so many other things that pay really well. If it's just run a laundromat. Yeah, there's so many ways to make money that that definition is too vague for me to have at least a reason to get out of bed every morning and grind a ton of dollars. Like I can go make money in all those other ways. Well, the way I decided to was I wanted to solve a bigger problem, something that means a lot to me. And for me to truly be the best person to solve that problem, I have to have all the knowledge I can too. So going back to the reason we're probably similar is that might be your motivation for when you start companies as well, is knowing the most about the problems you're solving in the industries you're in is going to make sure that you are building the true solution to a problem. And so I think that's why I like it.

It is. I think we have a consensus. It is two different mindsets. It's just the big why behind it and that what drives you. And it's very, very important to really listen to that drive. Otherwise it's just going to feel like a grind.

I would do the same thing as that other guy. If my only motivation, maybe this happens to me later in life too, where I'm, you know, this company has been successful and that's what I want to do. I might just call people to do the problem solving at that point, and that might be the best method to make the most amount of money.

Maybe it's the size of a problem as well. Maybe, you know, you grow, you become a lot more experienced, and as a result, richer as well, which gives you ability to solve much bigger problems. And the problems which you currently have, you might go like, that's just too small. I'm just going to hire people for it. I want to go into that next level. Right, and take much, much bigger problems. So you're still solving problems, but you know, the domain of the size of a problem statement just, just becomes much, much bigger.

Agree. It's a really good way to think about it too, which is how impactful or how big of this thing is it, and how much of my own energy and effort should be paid attention to it. And because I believe from partnership side, that's how my business is going to scale, succeed, and grow, like that's so fundamental to my business working that I should be involved pretty deeply in it. Now, that's kind of the size of the problem narrative that we just talked about. If it was, I want to automate, you know, how we do customer support or demo, you know, serving up videos whenever they have an issue, it's not fundamental to my business success. What it is, it's fundamental to like customer success, And maybe I can find somebody who that is, you know, we already have the learnings that we want to do it, have somebody else go do it. And I really don't care how it's done, I just need them to feel successful at that point.

I love that. Do you ever think that you are behind other companies in partnerships, and does that bother you in any way? So yeah, let me maybe explain that. You're doing direct, right? So you, you have one-to-one or no middleman when it comes to the customer. With the partnerships, you know, you are behind the partner, right? Does that like, is that a trade-off which businesses needs to be happy with? You know, if I'm a co-founder or a founder, I might go like, I don't want that. I want to be talking with my client. I don't want to be behind someone.

Yeah, there's a definition of like who owns the client, right? Like that's actually a very big thing to discuss as you're learning partnerships is owning the client is a point of contention, especially for investors or people who you have to bring this part, like, idea up to. If it's not on your paper, you don't technically own that client. So if the partner walks, they can walk away with— and you don't have any say in the business. So you are putting yourself at risk at some level. The reason it works for some companies and not others is like, if we're also fundamentally core to how that partner works now like either they don't have another solution, there's not another like version of what we do. If we've already spent all this energy and time to integrate our software and our solutions into their infrastructure, like you can do all these things to give yourself more protection that's going to help like mitigate that issue. So we've done that with a lot of our partners. I'd say the other thing to think about is just, you know, where, where does your true value come from in the terms of like how you're user perceives it. In a lot of our partnerships, we have that— or like, we are the onboarding person, right? So even if the partner sells it, they have to get introduced to Uptime Health or somebody with an Uptime Health email to help set them up and do demos. And that's why you see the word 'powered by Uptime Health' on a lot of our partnership portals. And so at the end of the day, the value that the client is perceiving even though it was sold to them by somebody else, it's provided by Uptime Health. We're doing all the hard work. So if the partner ends up leaving us or whatnot, we still have an access point and a connection, even if it's not on our paper, to take that client back or at least try and win them back. So I didn't even bring that up earlier. It's a great question. But I would suggest anyone who's doing this is find those moments of leverage to make sure, even if you don't own the client, you have a capability to re-win them back pretty quickly right afterwards.

Any chance the partner might put a clause in the contractual agreements that you can't, you know, you can't get their clients for like 12 months or something like that?

Yeah, and that's fine too, right? Like, those are the trade-offs. Maybe you negotiate down to 6 months, or you say something else. Like, so there's all these, there's all these other trade-offs that have to happen. And the good thing is, if a partner's at the point where they are at the agreement phase. They already see value in what you're doing. And if you say, look, I understand that, but I need to survive too, so what is to stop you from signing this up, signing a ton of people, then you, you end our partnership? I need to protect myself. So there's ways to negotiate against that, that clause and either bring it down or get rid of it altogether. And if the partner's unwilling to budge, that's a discussion you should have with your team saying This is a risk. Are we still going to roll the dice? Are we not going to roll the dice? And sometimes you should say no.

Yeah.

If you really don't feel good about it. So I think there's always a moment to walk away from that if you feel it's too risky.

Yeah. I followed the rule. If you cannot say yes, by default it's a no.

Yeah.

You know, sometimes you have these like, I can't say yes, but I cannot say no. It's somewhere in the middle. I'm like, if you can't say yes, it's a no by default, basically. So it just makes it easier to make decisions. So we sort of walked into this, you know, red flags situation, which I wanted to ask a couple of questions about. So if I, you know, give this situation, which is not real, but entertain me, tell me how possible this is. So I'm small business, you know, I'm walking into these partnerships. Somehow I end up, you know, having chats maybe on LinkedIn. I do a partnership, you know, I sign it off. It's much bigger company. It works very well. You know, they feeding all the cash flow and it's almost like becomes a huge flagship for us as a business. And at some point they understand that and they go like, look, if we're going to stop selling for you, you know, you guys are going to go nowhere. So they start becoming, you know, negative partner, let's say like that. They start leveraging that and, you know, and effectively indirectly controlling us, you know, asking for features which we don't want to build. And, and it just becomes like this toxic relationship which I really put myself into it, but if it's gone, I'm gone. How realistic is that, where the partnership can be toxic like that?

I think it definitely happened. I don't think it's unrealistic at all. I feel like That's, that's actually— I'll give my board so much credit because this is where they— when we brought them up this idea of how we're going to go to market, these are the things that we talked about extensively. And they talked about their lessons learned from other partnerships and other companies that they've invested in where they've gone through that moment. So that what you just described happens and has happened many times. The best way to hedge against it is one, have more than one partnership. Of that size. So you're not putting all your eggs in one basket, and it gives you freedom and comfortability to say no sometimes. I think without the other partners or the multiple that you have— that's what we have, 15 plus— um, it's harder to say no because you realize you're so dependent on that group. So if any one partner has over 50% of your revenue, like, that's, that's just a business risk, period. Partner or not, even if one client that you sold direct is 50% of your revenue— that's how you should think about a partner, is just one big client, because that's the money coming in. Uh, if that's happening, you're just at risk. You have to diversify, or that's getting more direct clients to build a bigger business so that's not one, you know, channel of money coming in that big, or if it's having multiple of that. So that's one thing to do. The other thing is if they're asking for a ton of stuff It's almost put it back on them saying, you know, why are we asking for this? Does this make sense? Can we reuse this? Like, and so like you can have that business discussion internally, but if they're saying no, no, we need this to sell, and if you've already had success, maybe there's a good reason to do it because they might know what they're talking about. But if you've had no success with them and they're just like asking and demanding for the world, that's a red flag. And that should be like, well, 'Well, we have no money coming in, so how are you expecting us to spend a ton of money up front?' So what you can do, and we've actually done this, is you can ask for a significant amount of money up front and say, 'Pay us this to show us that you're really intending to sell this and move this, and what that money is going to allow us to do is we will sign a piece of paper that says we will only use that cash for the support benefit and the build-out of all the things you're asking for. And that way, you know, it's basically like you're paying us to get this done proactively, and we will credit that front of cash against your future invoices so you can earn it back quicker. So now they have an incentive to sell your stuff so they can earn back this big long sum of cash they've already paid you. And you've used that money directly to benefit them, so they don't feel like, I gave you half a million dollars and you're just gonna go spend it on building up my other partners, I've told you that that money is only going to go back to you. So you can at least feel good that we're spending all of this energy, whether it's bringing people in to create more customer support, whether it's building features out and hiring more dev people. And I would say that is a really big negotiation power that you should have and you can wield back. If they say no, that's a flag, you know, like, and if they say no, or they say like, hey, that makes sense, but like, I have to go get that approved, That's a great response because it doesn't say no. It's just like not everyone is used to somebody asking for that. I think whenever they come back and they'll give you a real answer as to why or why not, and that should tell a lot.

I love that validation piece of just putting someone a little bit outside the comfort zone to see if they actually gonna engage or not. It's a very good validation. And anecdotally, I have this one example where it's not about partnerships or deal structuring, but It's a very simple thing where I know a mentor who has, you know, a lot of inquiries, you know, to being a mentor. And when someone reaches out and goes like, I need your time, you know, to help me buy a business, they basically go like, okay, let's meet 7 AM on Saturday in some odd spot where he works. And he just looks if people will actually show up.

Yeah.

And it's just intention. Yeah, exactly. It just shows the intention and willingness to actually engage, which shows that you really want to do that. It doesn't cost anything. It just causes you to wake up early and actually travel. So if you can't do that, how serious are you, right? So it's very similar in that sense where if you have a partner, you go like, look, I feel like what we're asking is just, you know, paying upfront for the work we'll do. Then you have ability to, you know, get it back in a very comfortable way. That's a, you know, a little bit above comfort zone, but still just shows intention really, because it should be doable if you're really serious. Okay, I love that.

Yeah, and it's also very— it's not unrealistic ask at the same time, because essentially what you're also telling the partner is that's how much it's going to cost me to do what you're asking for. So if we can't get that back, through sales or something else, that's a problem. And if you don't have enough confidence that you're going to sell enough of my product to eat back what you just fronted me, that's something that I don't feel like it's a good investment for. Then it's like a little bit of like all these qualifying points that helps people understand like why you're asking for it, and then what's their capability of returning back that cash so they can get their money back. And if they don't feel comfortable about it, then you're like, well, why would I feel comfortable spending all this money on then it's not going to yield me an ROI.

And you should be— you should feel comfortable asking for things. Sometimes it's as simple as that. People don't feel comfortable asking for things, especially just like small startup founders. I met a couple of them— well, actually not a couple of them, a lot of them— where they just don't feel comfortable asking for things. It just doesn't come out naturally. It's just like, oh, I feel like people should understand themselves. It's like, no, just, just ask.

Yeah.

You mentioned the board, Janusz. You said we were lucky with the board. You know, they were good shield from these red flags. Did still, you know, situations happen where you would give this as an example of either bad partnership or partnership which never happened because of some red flags? Something people should be looking for in a negative way and being aware of that?

Yeah, look, I think it's again just this feeling of kicking the can down the road, doing tons of demos with their company and their team members with no response, like, or just delayed timelines between communication. It shows either they're wasting your time, which is not nice and it doesn't feel good, because what if somebody wasted their time? That wouldn't great. It could also just feel like they're trying to distract you so they can get something else going, whether they're building their own thing and they're just trying to get brain knowledge from you about how you built yours. Like, there's a lot of these things that you should always look out for in a partnership. I think the other thing is just also how— like, how do you see their future? If you don't think that they're going to be around for a while, or you don't think that they're— like, why would you attach yourself to a sinking ship? Like, are you their lifeline? Like, is that— like, that's sometimes what happens is these companies, again, going to these competitions. Now, the startup or the smaller businesses that compete against the bigger businesses, the reason they move faster is they want to differentiate. But that's a growth metric, not a, hey, I'm dying, I'm going back, I need to have something else to sell or something else like, you know, attached to, to show that we're still in the game. That's a, that's a form of desperation, not a form of like you know, aggression or like positivity. And so these are— there's a lot of those kinds of signs I think we should all be looking out for. Uh, the other things are, you know, how, how, how long do the people work at their company for? So if the average tenure of their leadership is like 3 to 4 years, terrible partner, because half the people you've built all this time, energy, and trust with— and sometimes these sales cycles take a year or 2 years just to ink the deal and spin up. And if that person you did all this work with is gone 6 months later, that's just a waste of everyone's energy and time. And usually the new person that comes in wants to do their own thing and make their own name, you know, like, and so they sometimes table exciting ideas because they don't want that to feel like the prior person gets that credit, or like that's— they, they want to erase that some way or somehow. But like, these are things to think about. I'm not saying it always happens, but it can happen. And if there's not a long tenure over there, maybe they're not a great company to work with at the end of the day, because their own employees can't stand them for more than 3 years, how can partners? Like, and so these are, these are other things that we look at outside of just, you know, does it make sense or not? These are very peripheral things that we can all look out for. And looking on LinkedIn and how long that person that you're talking to has been there The average, if it's like 7 to 10 to 15 years, that's starting to feel pretty good.

Okay, I love these. The very first partner, Janesh, very first partner which you inked became your partner, how did you go that? Imagine I'm, yeah, a startup founder, I decided to go after partnerships, I'm doing the all that work. Just give us like a high-level step-by-step of how you did it, you know. I went to conferences, I talked, you know, that's plus minus what we talked about. Then I called, you know, whatever was your like step by step, but from the point of, you know, you deciding to go after that until it happened, what were the stepping stones?

Oh man, when was that? That was probably 2020 or 2019 when we were selling into the urgent care industry quite heavily and we we pivoted to dentistry during COVID because urgent cares and surgical centers were, you know, taking care of patients, not trying to deploy new software. Even if we could help protect their ventilators, they just were in a firefight. It wasn't about incremental improvement, it was about like, I need PPE. So back then, what we were really thought of as is an equipment management, also compliance tool. And in the healthcare world in the US, there's this, there's a lot of rules and regulations around how you take care of your environment of care, which means how do you take care of your equipment. So there's a lot of these external auditing bodies that would come in and see what's your policies, what's your procedures, and we can automate that for people. And that's why that made sense. So we found and we tried to partner with these regulatory bodies that were identifying groups that were struggling in this area and showing them that we could be a tool in the tool belt of these auditors or surveyors that would go out and identify, you're not doing a great job here, you know who can help you? Because a lot of times people say, well, how do I fix this? How do I get better? Like, what's a— what should I be doing to improve on this negative report that you're giving me? We're like, what if you just told them about us? So again, we couldn't have any monetary thing back then. I mean, still not today, but because they're a regulatory body. But we could at least inform inform them of who we are and say that we are meeting their standards, and we can form a partnership in the sense of we're working together to really understand your standards and make sure my product meets those standards whenever they are needing reports. So that was the first partnerships we did, were these urgent care association or national urgent care associations. It was all regulatory bodies, and it was very interesting, and it was early learnings of Well, there's no real financial motivation. It's more just like helpful motivation. And although we thought it was a very synergistic way to bring us up, sometimes it didn't happen the way we thought, or there was just, you know, miscommunication on what, what is that we provided. And so then we realized we had to get some collateral, uh, like, all right, here's like a one-pager of what these things is, like how to talk about it. That wasn't going too well. Like, so there's a lot of it was I went to conferences, I knew who these people were because I thought about like maybe this is a good way to get to market. And then I just called them and stalked them on like, you know, professionally on LinkedIn saying, hey, do y'all want to get coffee? I noticed you're going to the show I'm going to. So it's like there's like that level of care and attention that got into getting my first one. And then again, like I said, there's so many learnings. It's like I wish I could do it again and do it differently, but everything I learned has helped me with the next one. At the end of the day.

I love how that feeds into product development as well. All these conversations, you know, you're having this— closing a partnership has this huge element of like pitching the product, talking about it, and, you know, getting feedback, come back, iterating. Just, you know, you're chasing that partnership at the end of the day, but along the way there's so much intangibles that you're actually getting from that process. Yeah, it's like, go ahead and do it almost. Well, okay, well, that wraps up our conversation for today. Thank you, Jayanesh. That was excellent. I loved every bit of it. If people want to know more about Uptown Health and your, you know, vision and the mission you guys doing, and as well about you directly, if they want to understand potentially a little bit more about the business or how you do business development, how would they get in touch Yeah, I mean, our website is uptimehealth.com.

So it's U-P-T-I-M-E health.com. You can find me on LinkedIn. My name is Jinesh Patel, J-I-N-E-S-H P-A-T-E-L. But we're always pushing out articles, you know, podcasts and stuff like that just to educate and inform the community. And that's been our go-to-market strategy. So happy to talk to anyone who's curious.

Excellent. And as well, to anyone listening or watching, just scroll down All the links will be in the show notes. A quick reminder: subscribe, leave a comment. We love your engagement. And thank you for tuning in today. Until the next time, stay safe and see you online.