“When is the right time to think about partnerships?” is a question often asked about early stage ventures. Often, in turn, the frequent advice is to first get your own shop in order, before thinking of collaboration.

Although there is some truth to this advice, demanding a fully validated business model before starting with partnership strategies is bullshit blanket advice. There are more nuanced ways to address early stage partnering risks!

My advice to early stage venture partnerships, or to established companies that want to work with early stage ventures is to sense-check the potential of a collaboration. Here’s some pointers for doing this, covering the biggest risks:

1. Know your X-factor. You could have a technology, a hard to access user-group or community, and unique expertise that might be a resource for others to leverage. Scan for that something you have, which you can amplify, and which also has the potential to amplify someone else.
2. Mingle with the right people to sculpt the collaboration. There are people with specific mindsets for exploration, and those with a mindset for exploitation. Either persona strongly impacts the type of conversation you’ll have about your partnering. The former might be blunt, and start with saying things like “it’s a joint venture or bust!”. The explorative mind is a better prospect for shaping the early stage venture collaboration. Seek out the people who are willing to invest the time with you in defining a joint hypothesis for the partnership, things to experiment on, and discover.
3. Causality is king! Figure out a theory what the business value of the partnership could be. Define testable ways for how the partnership could change the customer experience in both partners’ business models! And remember, it’s never about the experience the partnership causes to you, making a splash in the media, standing besides a big name brand on a press release. It’s all about the experience the partnership causes to your customer.
4. Keep money out of the equation. You don’t know what value the partnership creates yet. On top of that, a partnership works best for you when you can capture its value within your own business model. Build a narrative for an equitable business case, where both sides stand to gain from the partnership’s created value, and work from there. The money equation will reveal itself when you’re testing, and seeing how revenue from the partnership will actually distribute over both partners.
5. Be prepared.  According to KPI, the law of partnership design says that for every 1 hour of making great ideas with your partner, you’ll need to spend 2 hours convincing your own team of their merit. Make sure you involve the right decision makers, and apply the partnership design process in a simulation before engaging with the partner. That way you anticipate many of the “yes buts” from your own team on design decisions. It shifts the process from a drudge of iterating on partnership meetings, to constructive creativity of iterating on partnership execution.

There is no clearly defined graduation moment for your business to start partnering. Play with partnering strategies as early as you think it makes sense to do so. Tools like the business model, and partnership canvas are made to explore such what if scenario’s. By applying them in a short strategy session with your partner, your team, or even just for yourself, the tools give you enough sense to determine whether you’re at the right time to partner, or to determine when you will be.

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