How Leveraging Partnerships Can 2x Your Growth with Gorgias CEO Romain Lapeyre

of Gorgias, live from my daughter's room. And with me today, there's Axelle from our team.

Yeah, hello everybody, excited to be here. I'm head of operations at Gorgias and excited to talk more about how we're doing things here at Gorgias.

All right, so yeah, let's dive in. So today we're going to talk about how you can leverage partnerships to double your growth. And so the reason we picked this topic is, uh, at Gorgias, we are a customer service platform for e-commerce merchants, mostly on Shopify. And so, as you might know, Shopify has a huge partner ecosystem. And for us, partnerships have been a great way to grow from, uh, $1 million of ARR to $15 million of ARR today. And actually, they fed half of our growth. So obviously, uh, we don't have, uh, the perfect recipe, but we've learned a few things along the way. And so that's the goal of this session, is to arm you with a clear understanding of what partnerships are and how you can leverage them to boost your growth up to 2x. For us, partnerships have been a great way to grow from, uh, $1 million of AR to $15 million of AR today. All right, actually, Taylor, so do you have any, uh, housekeeping notes to get started?

Obviously Yes.

Hi, Roman and Excel. Thank you so much for joining. Just a few housekeeping notes before I pass it over back to these folks to take over a great session. But thank you all so much for joining. A few different options to contribute. We really want this to be an interactive session. So most of you are joining from the event platform. We hope you're enjoying it. So just make sure to submit a question to our speakers using the question feature on the right side of your screen. We're also going to have plenty of time. They have a full networking session after this session. So you can also click the join Join Us on Stage button found in the player. It's going to bring you into this room with us so that we can chat face to face. So it will be an interactive 20-minute session of content and then this 20 minutes of networking. So if you come and join the room, please make sure to keep your cameras on and your audio muted and just weigh in whenever you have a question. But really excited to, to have this time with our wonderful speakers. And just so you all know, all these sessions are being recorded, slides are available and will be shared post-event. And we're here to answer any questions that you have. So really excited to kick things back off. Roman and Axel, I'll pass it back over to you.

All right, sounds good. Cool, thank you so much, Taylor. So yeah, so let's dive in. So we made a pretty bold statement at the beginning saying, hey, partnerships can double your revenue. So the first thing I want to talk about is, is that true? Like, is that like just like a salesy title for that session, or can it actually happen? So, uh, what I did is that I pulled a few examples of SaaS companies that IPO'd, and so we looked at the S-1s that they had when they IPO'd. So the two that actually shared numbers were HubSpot and BigCommerce. And so I think what was really interesting about them is that they mentioned that half of their customer base or half of their leads were coming from partners. And so you can see that it's actually happening with existing companies at IPO, partnerships are fueling half of the growth. So that's one thing that was really interesting. Another example I wanted to touch upon today is Salesforce, which is both the largest SaaS company that's out there and also the— that's the company that has the largest community in the space with 200,000 people. And so while we don't know if Salesforce is making half of their AI from partnerships, What we know is that this has been— partnerships have been an extraordinary mode for them with, again, 200,000 partners.

They—

and essentially what I think is interesting with Salesforce is that their partner ecosystem makes 5 times more than Salesforce themselves, which is, I think, a pretty good learning from them. So bottom line is that partnerships have a tremendous potential to tilt your growth curve, and this max potential is about half of your revenue, as we can see with HubSpot's and e-commerce. Alright, so before we dive in, I want to talk about what partnerships are exactly. 3 years ago, we were roughly at $1 million of ARR and we were trying to figure things out. And so I was hearing a lot of things like there's business development, there are channels, there are partners, like what are all of these things? And so I realized that they're roughly the same thing. And so that's why I just wanted to kick it off with a clear definition. So partners share a common goal, typically the success of your customers. I think that's the north star that we all have. And obviously they also want to share leads both ways. And then they collaborate to reach these goals. And so what collaboration means here is a few things. It can be gaining visibility. One partner can share the audience with the other partner. It can be sending leads both ways. It can be getting paid with revenue sharing. Or it can be also like driving actual value for mutual customers. And so if we take a step back, what are the types of partners that are out there? So I think the most obvious one is businesses. So that's what you can see on the slide. Agencies, SaaS apps are sort of like your obvious partners that you can work with. One interesting thing that we've learned working with partnerships is that there is another type of partner And this can be individuals. So again, the obvious ones can be evangelists, affiliates, but one that's actually really interesting is that, for example, we work with Shopify, which is essentially the big platform that has the ecosystem we are into. And so Shopify is a partner in two ways. One, as a business, there's a partnership team at Shopify and we do events together, we do co-marketing together, etc. And two is we also work with individuals at Shopify. So for example, CSMs, like people that have merchant interactions. And so we treat these individuals as partners as well. So essentially, there's like the same company has two types of partners, the institutional partnership program, and then like one-to-one interactions with the CSMs. And so you want to nurture the relationship that you build with these partners as well, who are individuals. All right, so that being said, let's dive into whether or not partnerships are a fit for you.

Yeah, so exactly. Now that we know what the different types of partners are, you need to ask yourself, can partnerships actually work for my business? Because, you know, you need to look at what other people are doing in your ecosystem and figure out if this is something that really fits your use case. So the first thing that you can ask yourself or the first thing that you can look at is identifying the stakeholders in your sales process. Is it just the lead? Are they bringing in consultants? These can be affiliates, agencies. If you're in the e-commerce world like us, it can be website developers. You can also look at things like existing communities where people share best practices on the different SaaS tools that they use. So looking at this initially, will help you get a first glance of whether or not partnerships are something that are common in your ecosystem. Then you should ask yourself, what does your ecosystem look like in terms of cross-tool customer base? So to get a first idea, you should look out for specific patterns in two things. First, you can look at recurring sales frictions that you can track throughout your sales process. Typically for us, we have seen a sort of a trend of customers asking or leads asking for integrations with tools like Klaviyo or other return platforms. So this gave us a first idea. And then you can also look at your own customer base and looking for trends in potential churn reasons, feature requests, and from there, get a sense of what's really happening and what's beneficial for your customers. From there, you can use market data to assess the total addressable market of your target partners. An example for, for us at Gorgias, initially when we started, one of our strong suits was our integration with Shopify. So when we started looking at the world of Shopify partners, we learned that there were 37,000 of them. We identified that we could work with potentially 2,000 of these Shopify partners, and knowing that each partner bring in approximately $6K of AR, total of $12 million AR partner TAM. So pretty beneficial for us to go after that kind of partnership. And so another final thing that you can look at is really understanding what's going on in your ecosystem at all. Like, what are competitors doing? What are other companies in your ecosystem doing? So we noticed, for us, for example, that companies like Recharge or Klaviyo had about 50% of their revenue coming from partnerships. So seeing this trend was really a good indicator for us that, you know, partnerships could actually work for us as well.

All right, so yeah, now that we've done this time analysis of saying, are partnerships worth it for our business? I think let's dive into like how we can make this happen. And so when Alex and I, sorry, Axel and I were preparing for this presentation, one of the things that were really interesting is that there's two-thirds of the audience of Saastr that's composed of entrepreneurs below $10 million of ARR. And so I think that's the sweet spot, below $10 million ARR, when to start your partnership program. So the first thing I wanna dive into is, okay, you've made the decision to start, Great. What should you do next? So one of the mistakes I made was that I, at first, was the one leading the partnership initiatives as CEO. And so that was like sort of a part-time thing for me. And it wasn't really happening. Like we were not getting a whole lot of results. And so I think one of the things we did well in the early days was to say, hey, it's not gonna work like this. We need an owner for partnerships. And so we decided to hire Phil, on our team who's now the VP of Biz Dev. And essentially, like, Phil took the channel from 0 to 1 following the playbook below. And so as a SaaS founder, it can be a bit scary. I see that Jason is watching the call, and like the SaaS playbook is always saying, hey, like, go ahead and make this hire. It's going to be accretive. It's going to pay back for itself. It's going to pay for itself. Great. But it can be a little bit scary at first. So I just want to like stress that like this is definitely an accretive hire that you want to make. So you make like a $200K investment on somebody, plus like giving them a budget, and then he's eventually gonna generate some AR for you. All right, so we hire someone. Number 2 is let's go find some partners. So where do we find these partners? Chances are you already know them. For example, for us, there's Jesse. I pulled his LinkedIn profile, who was a Shopify developer working with an early customer of Gorgeous, Dan Goodhjarn. And so Jesse was already in touch with them. He was reaching out to our support team. He knew our CSM team. We met in person at some events. And so it just turned out like he was a partner of ours, but we didn't know. Like we were not leveraging this relationship. And so, yeah, we essentially like looked at our customers and tried to find early partners to undig them from the existing network that we had. Once you have your list of partners, How do you get started? I think there's something to take from the Salesforce example at the beginning, where the ecosystem makes more than the company themselves. You want to give first. I think it's extremely important. So what we did is that we tried to help Jesse. We sent leads his way, and then we pitched him on Gorgias as well, so that he had a clear understanding of what the value of our product could be for the people that he worked with. Last thing, don't forget to follow the, the SaaS playbook here. So set a key result that you want to reach by a given date for your pilots to make sure that it works.

Yeah, exactly. And now it comes down to how do you measure everything. You often hear from different companies that partnerships are incredibly hard to track. They very often seem like it's only a human relation partnership very hardly processed. But at Gorgeous, we believe that it's not only a stake in the game, it's also a numbers game. So you shouldn't wait for your partnership program to be big enough to start tracking your efforts, your successes, as well as your failures. Investing early and tracking everything will go a really long way, not only in evaluating efficiently your initial efforts but also in scaling it moving forward. So first thing you want to be tracking, obviously, is your partners and the partnership stage that they are in. So they would start in awareness, partner in training, lead sharing, and then potentially premier partners and things like that. So to do that, you can manage your partnerships in your CRM as you would manage your sales pipeline. Then the second thing you want to measure is your partnership efforts. So when, you know, in terms of brand awareness with your partners, you want to be able to track your partner trainings and where your partners are at in that brand awareness training. You can do that with a tool like Lessonly typically. And in terms of co-marketing, whether you're doing webinars or, you know, sharing content, typically for webinars, you want to track how they're going and their success rate with a tool like Livestorm, for instance. And last but not least, you want to be able to measure your results. So typically that's the number of leads received versus the number of leads sent, conversion rate, generated revenue from that partnership. And so to do that, you can use pretty much any tool that can automate not only the management of your leads, but also the reward models that you want to try out and the payout system. Typically a good tool for that would be Partnerstack. Overall, the general idea here is that you want to be able to centralize all of your, your reporting in one place, which would be your database. And so you need to make sure that you can easily pipe all that data into that database. We typically use Segment for that, but the general idea is that you should be mindful of the tools that you want to use to manage your partnerships in general and make sure that they can scale and integrate easily with the rest of your stack.

Alright, so now that you have an infrastructure to scale your partnerships, let's talk about how far you can take it. So I think you can take this channel to about 10 million of AR if it's a fit for you. And so I want to dig into how to do that for your business today. Step 1, we talked about in the pilot we want to give first. So the same way we were sending leads to Jesse, our first partner, we want to do that at scale. And so how do you do that at scale? The first thing you want to do is to embed partnerships within your company. So there are a few ways to do that. One, you put that— you put your partners in the product. So for example, in Slack, there is an app directory where you have like all of the apps that's integrated with Slack. And so your customers can find the apps and then use them, and then your partners make money out of it. The second thing you want to do is to educate your team. So you want to do lunch and learns with the AEs, with the CSMs, so that they know about the partners. And then you can essentially like track calls with a tool like Gong to see, hey, like they just mentioned a return platform, so maybe I should offer them an introduction to this return platform. So you're already sending leads to your partners. Another thing that I think has been really interesting on our side is that last year we did 291 events with our partners. That's more than 1 event per business day in 2020. And so I think what was interesting here is that we gave essentially an event content in a box for our partners. We would tell them like, hey, here is one topic you can talk about. We're gonna do like Uber Eats to your, to the attendees so that they can have lunch watching the content. And so that was a nice way for our partners to essentially like do their own events to their own audience, invite their leads, and deliver value to them. So obviously since it's all about collaboration, like we would send them leads, they would send us leads, and everybody wins. And so the last thing is that you want to track how much you are sending to your partners. So that's the dashboard I put on the screen here, is how many outgoing leads we are sending to partners. And partners will love you for that. Like nobody sends— tracks how many leads they are sending to partners. And so like, whether like, oh, like I'm partnering with Gorjas, so I'm partnering with your company. It's just amazing how helpful they are. And so the obvious thing they want to do is you're helping them, they're going to help you. And so another thing to keep in mind is that you want to be as helpful as possible to your partners because you're competing for mindshare. They have other partners. I saw somebody in the chat asking about like, hey, like when there's a giant partner out there, how do you compete? Essentially, like you try to be scrappy, you try to be more helpful. So this way you have more mindshare and like the partnership is better. And so as you help your partners, you're going to receive things in return like leads or better integrations. They're going to use your API better, etc., etc.

Exactly. So when you get to this point where you've sent enough leads and now you're finally receiving in return, the question is what can you do to manage all of your partnerships, sorry, in a scalable way? So as I mentioned earlier, you can manage all of that like you would a sales pipeline. So log everything in your CRM and have a pipeline dedicated to your partnerships. Then from there, you need to start identifying the different stages that moves a partner from one step in the partnership to the next. So you can use things like partner training completed, number of leads received from the partner, revenue generated from that partnership, number of common successful marketing actions. By that I mean, if you take a webinar, for instance, you should be looking at attendance rate, engagement rate, and things like that. And you should also note that you can identify different tiers of partners and include that in your pipeline. So much like not all leads are handled similarly depending on their needs in the sales pipeline, you might not have the same relationship with partners that generate larger ACV deals for you as you would manage other partnerships. So you should really take that into account in your pipeline so that you can build healthy relationships with these different profiles of partners. And so to ensure that long-term relationship, you should come up with specific playbooks or specialists within your partnerships team to manage these different types of profiles and different needs. And so talking about successful long-term partnerships, you need to treat your partners like VIPs, like your best customers, and consider them as very high-value customers. So you need to list specific metrics that you want to measure over time, because once the partnership is well established, partner managers act like CSMs, so customer success managers, with their partners, and they should start focusing on maintaining certain levels of engagements within their portfolio of partners. So typically, like we mentioned on the slide, you want to look at the last time you had an engagement with your partner, number of referrals per month, close rate, average contract value, but most importantly, be able to measure that over time and understand how your portfolio evolves over time and thus have a good understanding of the health of your portfolio. And finally, these metrics will help you identify your top-performing partners in terms of ROI, but also specific champions within your partner organizations. So to do that, you should really think about tracking everything, not just at the company level, but also at the individual level, because each engagement has its importance in the partnership nurturing process.

Alright, so yeah, let's wrap up here. So essentially, like, we started the session by saying, hey, partnerships have the potential to double your growth. And so we just want to recap a very quick playbook to follow if you want to launch that today for your business. Number 1, you want to evaluate if that's a fit for you. Doesn't work for all companies, but there are a few simple steps that you can follow to see if it's applicable to your business. Number 2 is Pick 10 partners from your existing ecosystem like your customer base or the folks that you're already connected to and start small. Like start with those 10, give first, and then your partners are going to engage with you and help you grow. Last thing is like Axel mentioned, like you want to treat your partners like your top customers. If you take a step back, for us like our ACV is $2,000 a year versus a partner is roughly like $6,000 a year. So a partner is essentially like a customer, 3 times bigger. And so you want to give the same high-quality treatments to your partners as you would do for your customers. That means having SLAs, that means having like a regular touch base with them, track NPS, everything there. And so, yeah, if you do that, you want to have like, look at specific metrics because the really like, I think the complexity with partners is that it's very like, you run relationship-based and so you want to convert that into a process so you have like at the same time like you build relationships with your partners and you also make sure that you're treating your partners well. Alright, hopefully that's helpful for you to launch your partner program. So now we have a Q&A with a few questions that came already. So let's dive into these. So the first one is from Brigitte. So you're saying how do you convince a giant SaaS brand to partner with you when you are a startup. So if we take a step back, so for us there's been sort of two types of partners. There was one which was like the individual developers. And so for us, for them, it was like easier, obviously, like they were not working with a whole lot of partners at the time. So we would just engage them and pitch them. For the larger companies, it was Shopify at the time, they were launching their Shopify Plus partner program. And so obviously, like we were a 6-person startup, and they were like a several thousand people company. And so I think that's really applicable to your question. What happened is that we essentially hustled. Like we tried to find like who was launching the partner program. We said, hey, like we really wanna work with you. And it turns out like when you're a small company, you're typically hungrier than a large company. So like, for example, it would be like Zendesk was sort of like the large player in customer service versus like we are like the very small startupy, team in the ecosystem, and we just showed them like, hey, like, we really want to work with you, we're gonna like go the extra mile, etc. And so like we managed to convince Shopify this way. All right, um, you want to take the question from Jason M. Lemkin? Do you pay commissions to partners? If so, do you still also pay a full commission to your own sales team?

Uh, yes, we do, uh, how they work program based on commission, based on the leads that are sourced by our partners and that we end up closing. We do pay full commission to our own sales team in that case. I think it's two different things that you want to look at here, right? Like on the first side, you want to incentivize your partners to, you know, give you more leads and continue the healthy partnership, but you don't want to be hindering the sales efforts on the other end and having a kind of a contradicting, uh, relationship between your sales team and then your biz dev team, right? So, um, yes, we are doing both of that simultaneously.

Yeah, and I think it's an interesting question. Like, I've seen companies like Looker or Tableau that just have resellers, and so it's actually like Looker or Tableau don't talk to the end customers. Like, they just have the resellers handle everything. So that's definitely a model that's possible. In that case, you don't have to involve your sales team because the partner is selling. But back to the other question that there was, how do you break into a partner that is already working with another competitive vendor? So typically the more value to provide, the more incentive there's gonna be for this partner to work with you. And so on our side, we just chose to say, hey, like, yes, we're gonna pay 20% to the partner. Yes, we're gonna pay 20% to our AEs, maybe another 20% for the events that was hosted by the partner. So 60% so far. Of the AR of year 1. And also you're gonna pay the success team for the activation and the CSMs for the first year, but you're still good in terms of your like 12-month guide payback. That's typical in SaaS. So even if it's expensive, it's definitely worth it. And that's a way to accelerate your growth. All right, let's take the next one, Axelle. Question from Martin.

Actually, I just wanted to— I just saw the other question about who provides support. Just because this is something that's really important in our partnerships and the way we manage them. This is where the partner trainings come in very handy. At first, because sometimes you will have leads coming in that just need that final demo from our sales team to, you know, have the final touches and final information about the product, and then sign on with us. But it's really about how you're training your partners and how you educate them on how your platform works. And if they're integration partners, really understanding how your tool and theirs work well together as compared to other integrations typically. So this is where, this is where the partner training comes in really handy.

Right, so we have a question from, uh, Dietrich. What would be your advice in making exclusivity arrangements? Because of the joint investments we have made, they have the potential to reach 40-50% of the country market. Of country markets, should you give them a try for 2 or 3 years? So on that, I think you want to make it as easy for anyone to partner with you. And so if there is a— I think exclusivity is like an extra ask that you have on top of, hey, like, can we do things together? Can you send leads my way, etc.? So I wouldn't recommend to do that because essentially at the end of the day, like, the best product wins. And so you really want to essentially make it easy for anyone to work with you. You don't want to play games or have tricks in your partnership agreements. So I would just like be upfront, like, hey, It's like 10 or 20% rev share. You can work with us if you're working with a competitor, no problem, like keep working with them. You're just gonna provide value to the people that you send to us. And ideally the end game is that you wanna provide more value to customers. And if you do that well, then you'll win the partner over against your competitors.

And Roman, if you wanna stop your screen share, we have a few people in the room too who may wanna ask a few questions. Face-to-face. Um, so that— and I think there are a couple more that have come through the chat too, but everyone can keep it coming. Um, either drop your questions into the chat, uh, for Roman and Itzel, or feel free to click the Join Us on Stage button, and then you'll be able to get in this room with us and chat face-to-face. So either way works, but if anyone in here with us right now has a question, feel free to unmute yourself and jump right into Yes, I just see the other question about, do you think partner payments is marketing expenses, and are they cheaper than directly acquired customers?

I think something that our data showed us at Gorgeous actually is that partners— sorry, leads that are coming in from our partners, typically agencies or other has a much higher ACV, uh, than, you know, potential others, um, other customers that we're acquiring over time. So it's probably a better ROI for us to, to be doing this and, uh, still maintaining our partnerships because they're bringing in the much higher value leads, uh, to us at the moment. So yeah, it's, it's probably a better idea for us to target these higher value at least, because they already have them in their portfolios and can directly introduce them to us.

All right, there's another question from Rodrigo. Do you guys have partnerships with service companies, not only software companies, marketing agencies? What are the main differences in terms of process? So I think that's a very interesting point. So we have partnerships with SaaS companies like return platforms, like Loop Returns, for instance, or marketing platforms like Klaviyo. But the bulk of our partnerships are around e-commerce agencies. So essentially like service agencies, like you just said. And so the thing you want to do is like figure out how you can provide value to both. So typically it can be very different. Like for example, for a software vendor, like I think what they expect is getting leads in return versus agencies, like what they expect is maybe to engage their existing portfolio of customers So that can be like doing events together like we were talking about, that's pretty popular, or essentially like unlock things for their customers that your other customers wouldn't have. So yeah, like each type of partner has their different kind of expectations. And so you can adapt your offering to each of the different types of partners out there. And just to follow up from Martin as well, could you confirm that you said you shouldn't launch a partnership program before 10 million AR? No, no, I said the, sorry, the opposite. I mean, yeah, let's say like after like 500K AR to let's say 10 million, it's a great time to launch your partnership program. Turns out Salesforce launched it one year before IPO. So like there's always, you can always launch it later, but I definitely recommend doing that earlier because it's something that we've learned at Gorjas that I think it's extremely interesting is We've built this partner network at first mostly focused on the go-to-market, and now like we are opening up APIs, improving the API docs, providing a better developer experience. And essentially like the two add up. Like you have the go-to-market efforts that are getting easier and easier because people build on your API, and the opposite happens as well. Like people build on your API and now they want to become partners. So I think you have this combination of go-to-market and product that you want to have at the same time. Shopify is a good example for that. Like, they've been like API first since the beginning, and they've also had this huge network of 30,000 people that are partners of theirs.

Is there a quota an agency has to hit of referrals before you allow them to become a partner? So The way we handle our partnerships is that as soon as somebody starts sending us leads, they are a partner. And then we have the different tiers of partners that I mentioned earlier, with which we're going to have different relationships, obviously. So it's more about— it's a mix of different things. It can be size of leads that are sent our way. It can be number of co-marketing efforts that we're doing. So typically, as Roman explained, with a lot of these e-commerce agencies, we're gonna be doing like co-hosted webinars that they're gonna be broadcasting to their entire portfolios and things like that. So it's more a combination. There's like obviously a certain revenue that they reach, but also in terms of everything else that's happening, lunch and learns and co-marketing efforts. For them to be considered like premier partners and whatnot.

Yeah, and to add up to that, I think you don't want to make your partnership program too complex. We saw plenty of partners that had like bronze, silver, gold, and then you need to pay $10K to be bronze, $50K to be silver, etc. And I think that's great when you are like a billion-dollar company and everybody knows you. That probably works pretty well. When you are an underdog like us, at like, let's say around 10 million ARR, like you definitely don't want to do that. Like you just want to say, hey, the door is open. If you want to work with us, just come. We're going to make it easy for you and just invest on that. So that's the mindset we adopted to get our partnerships started.

I think about the question, So do you think a company at 1 million ARR with 20 partners should have a dedicated engineering team for integrations, or is that overkill? There are a bunch of different options that you can find out there. And typically, you can also find third parties that can help you build out the initial integrations in combination with your engineering teams that are focusing on integrations typically. So you don't necessarily need to have a team dedicated to these partner integrations, but you can have like easy zero of that integration that build with another partner. And then if that proves successful, you can, you know, move it to your actual integrations dedicated engineering team. I think that the goal here is to also be mindful of the roadmaps that are already there with your engineering team and make sure that you can prove that, that additional effort is actually worth the time and also provide a first product to your customers that are waiting for that integration. That's a good option as well.

Anyone wants to join the stage and ask questions? So yeah, I have a few questions. Thank you all. First of all, we're about to kick off our partnership program pretty soon. So this is super great timing. You kind of touched upon it, but I'm not sure if I was following 100%. Like if there's lower ACV and higher ACV customers that you partner with and you send referrals to, how do you structure those deals? Like you're saying, like if you send like a $10K ACV or $6K ACV, if your ACV is lower, how do you structure those? So you mean the partner has a higher ACV than you and so you have a lower ACV? And so how do you make the relationship even? Um, that's a good question. To be 100% honest, like, that's not something we've run into at this point. We don't say, hey, like, the ACV is too different, we can't really work together. But it's kind of interesting, there's a, there's a balance, I think, in the SaaS world. It's like, if you are super high ACV, you're gonna have few customers, versus like, if you're super low ACV, there's gonna be a lot. And so like, we have some partners that have, uh, ACVs around like 50K or 100K. And so what happens is that this, they send us very few customers and we send them a small number of customers as well. But at the end of the day, it turns out like, okay, like these 50K, 100K ACVs for them turned out to be like 10 or 15K for us. So it all works out. Like we haven't had like particular issues of saying, hey, like ACVs are too different, we're not compatible. We just found ways to make it work. And yeah, at the end of the day, like if it's not a partner that's driving a whole lot of revenue, like Axel said, like we have different tiers. And so like if you're like a super high-value partner, like we're going to spend more time with you. But at the same time, like we want to make sure we still dedicate a lot of time to the long tail because your competitors are not going to care about the long tail. And so there's plenty of opportunities there. Cool. There's a question from Martin about how to include partners into your tool. And so I think that's a very interesting one because not a whole lot of companies are doing that. So I have two examples that come to mind on top of us, obviously. So on our side, like, what we do is that we have a list of integrations, uh, so it's mostly SaaS vendors. So we focus on that at this point, but I think you can go much further than that. So for example, Shopify has a way to recommend agencies based on your stage or So it's actually like services, it's not software. And so they actually put that in the products. Same goes with HubSpot. You can select like what are the agencies that you're working with within the product. And so I think as partners get more important, like you want to find ways to put them somewhere in your product because that's where they get the best visibility. Your email, your websites are going to have certain visibility, but Product is definitely key in terms of showing your partners to your ecosystem.

Roman and Axel, Rodrigo's asking, any big mistakes made along the way?

I don't know, Axel, what would you say?

Oh, I mean, you mentioned one during the presentation of not having a full-time person dedicated to that from the start.

One that comes to mind is partnerships. Like you were saying, Axel, it's like a steak dinner game for a lot of companies. And so the stack to measure what's going on is not very mature. So we started off with PartnerStack. There was tons of bugs. The whole thing was not very stable. But I think— so we had this discussion on, hey, should we build something in-house, like hacking together, like Coda and Zapier to get something that works, or should we just use a tool, even if the tool is a bit immature? So it's not a mistake we made, but that's definitely a mistake we could have made with a pretty high probability. I'd say you want to invest in tools to track this whole thing. You'd want to build that yourself because otherwise you're going to end up with like very old processes. So yes, it's expensive. It's going to be like a few 10K checks you're going to make here to buy all the toys you need to do to track the whole partnership. You need to track the whole partnership game. But I think it's definitely worth it to invest in a process.

Yeah, and to add to that a little bit, it is It comes with a lot of education of the team or, you know, initial member and then team members that are going to be handling these partnerships. Because if you want to make that a scalable process and track everything, like obviously, like I said, there are still people even in other companies and partners you're going to be working with that, you know, you need to educate as well on your process so that you are able to track everything from start to finish. So there is a continuous education effort on that as well to make sure that this is actually scalable and that you can track everything consistently, if that makes sense. So yeah, this is a choice that we've made to make sure that we would track absolutely everything— leads we're sending, leads we're receiving, and all that. You know, really making that effort and keep pushing for it is definitely something to mention, I think.

Yeah, and I would add to that two more mistakes that come to mind. So the first one was at first we tried to join all of the events in the ecosystem and say, hey, like, we're gorgeous, we're here, like, we have a booth. So it's like 2019, come see us. And we got some initial traction, but I think one thing that played out pretty well is like these 290 events we did last year with like 15 people at each of the events. Like, this is super small, and so it turns out like people love it. Like, super intimate, super personalized, lots of impact. And so I think year 1 was very committed to large events when we had like very small visibility, versus year 2 was more towards like, let's do a lot of events, lots of small events that are very catered to the partners. And this playbook worked much, much better than the previous one. So definitely worth looking into that. I'd say another point to look into, to look at, is when you hire for your partnership teams, you have two options. Either you hire somebody with their Rolodex, or you hire somebody who's like, has the grit to go out there and go talk to everyone. Sometimes you can find both. In that case, it's the best fit. Sometimes you have to choose. In our case, And I'm not saying we are right, it's just like one approach. Maybe the other would have worked really well. We took some people who really knew the ecosystem extremely well, and I think it's a good asset. So a good learning here, like you need to know what you're talking about. You don't want people that learn on the job. But then at the end of the day, it's like you're gonna knock on like hundreds of doors and say, hey, like, do you wanna partner with us? And so it's more the lower your ACV, the more it's a grid game. The higher your ICV, the more it's a Rolodex game. So higher based on this consideration.

Great. Any other questions? Anyone else either that's in here live? Look, I'm just checking the chat one more time. Not seeing anything else come through. Roman and Excel, we just want to thank you guys so much. What a great session. And thank everyone for joining, for all your great questions. I really appreciate you. We have a few more sessions today, a full day of schedule tomorrow, so definitely keep tuning into sessions and we'll see you in the next one. Thanks, everyone.

See you, everyone. Thanks for joining.

Thank you.

Bye.