Casey Zeman and team discovered a dormant partner contract after acquiring a company that paid $4 per unit. They activated it and grew the channel from zero to $1.5 million monthly revenue, accidentally building a major B2B operation they'd planned to shut down.
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Now, you guys have a pretty substantial partner channel. And has that always been that way? Was that the original model for the business, or did you find that channel over time? And then, speaking about this, of course, the unit economics of obviously you have to share revenue with those partners. You've had to obviously think through those unit economics as well. How long have you had that channel? And is that one of your largest channels?
So, Casey, I'll tell you a story and it's funny and kind of sad at the same time. So, we bought a business. I can't tell you the name of which business, but there's 7, you can figure out which one it is. So, we bought a business and we closed the transaction, we financed, send them the wire, the whole thing is done. And we go into the office and we're like, okay, we're here, here are all these employees and this tech stock. Great. iterating, right? And I start looking at all the contracts the company had, just reviewing them. I already reviewed them, but I didn't review 'em in great detail. So I start picking the ones that I think are the biggest names in terms of brand names. And I started reading them and I found this one contract and it says, do X, Y, and Z and we'll pay you, I think, like $4 per unit or something like that. And I went to the team and I said, why isn't this launched? And they said, oh, it's not a priority. I said, well, look at this partner's name and it's a big company. We should probably prioritize. They said, well, it's, we'll get to it. We'll get to it. I said, you know what? How about you make this priority right now? You go execute it. So they go execute it. This thing goes from $0 to $50,000 a month. Next month, $150,000. Next month, $300,000. Next month, $1.7 million or $1.5 million. I don't know, it was like the top line, $1.5 million a month in revenue from this one partner because nobody cared. Nobody in this company cared to go and look at this deal and actually execute on it.
Yeah.
And so we said, okay, well, we think we have a business here. Because of this one relationship. Let's go iterate. Let's go do more of the same. And so we hired a bunch of people to do biz dev and enterprise marketing. And we now we have a real business there. But it didn't— it wasn't like we sat down and said, let's go out and build enterprise-facing, you know, business. We actually did the opposite. We said, but not touch B2B. Let's not touch enterprises. We only want to focus on B2C because that's Its own, you know, it's got its own challenges. Um, and we sort of stumbled into enterprise and it became a success because we figured it out.
So, I mean, I'll add to that, Casey. I'll give him more credit than that. We, well, I wanted to, when we had our, you know, when you buy in a company, you have to have a plan, you know, and our plan was to shut down their B2B2C, their B2B2C business because it was like break even. And I was like, Gary, let's, let's go shut it down. He goes, let me just look at the contracts for a minute. I just wanna look for one minute. And now, you know, we have a lot of people working full-time on supporting all of our enterprise partners. So sometimes you stumble, there's a little bit of luck along the way and you stumble into it. But, you know, you have to be opportunistic as somebody who's— if you're acquiring a business or starting a business, you've got to see the opportunities and go after them. And that's where you'll find your success.
Well, it sounds like you guys, you did an evaluation of your customer base, of the different opportunities, and you said, oh, well, this Is gonna— this is the opportunity that's probably gonna gain us the biggest result instead of like looking at, you know, obviously it's one of those things where it's like, do we wanna be partner heavy with just this one partner? Because then our resale value is not as great, right? And I totally understand that. But I'll tell you what, from my own experience, partner growth was the number one thing that allowed me to like scale my company.
