Partnership Types
Adapted from Corey Haines's Founding Marketing, Ch. 11 — "Partnerships tap into existing audiences." The fastest way to reach customers is through companies that already have their attention.
Flagship proof: HubSpot's partner program = $100M ARR, ~40% of revenue, 3,400+ partners. Mature partner programs average ~28% of revenue and 2× the growth of companies without them.
Co-marketing (in the SKILL.md) is one of five partnership types. Use this reference to place a given partnership in the right category and pick the right play. The types stack — most companies run several at once as the program matures.
| Type | What it is | Primary payoff |
|---|---|---|
| Integrations | Your product connects to another's | Retention, expansion, marketplace discovery |
| Reseller | Partners sell your product for you | Distribution + services revenue |
| Affiliate | Promoters earn commission on referrals | Low-risk, pay-for-performance reach |
| Co-marketing | Joint content/campaigns with a peer | Borrowed audience, brand halo |
| App Store / Marketplace | List inside a platform's ecosystem | Built-in distribution, effective CAC |
1. Integrations
Integrations are the foundation — they make you sticky, unlock expansion, and earn a spot in the partner's marketplace.
Four ways to build:
- Native — you build and maintain a direct connection. Best UX, highest cost.
- Platform via Zapier/Make — ride an iPaaS to cover the long tail without building each one.
- API-first — expose a clean public API and let partners build toward you.
- Embedded — your product runs inside theirs (widget, SDK, iframe).
Calendly's staged integration ladder — build integrations in order of buyer intent:
- Calendar (Google/Outlook) — table stakes, required to function.
- Sales stack (CRM, dialers, Salesforce/HubSpot) — where revenue teams live.
- Marketing stack (forms, ESP, automation) — top-of-funnel capture.
Each rung deepens the account and widens who inside the company depends on you.
Marketplace strategy + ASO. Getting listed isn't enough — apps compete for placement. Treat a marketplace like an app store: optimize the listing (title, keywords, screenshots, reviews, category) the same way you'd do App Store Optimization. Shopify App Store and Salesforce AppExchange are discovery engines; ranking well there is a channel, not an afterthought.
Why it matters: 83% of enterprise buyers cite integrations as a purchase-decision factor. Missing an integration a prospect needs can lose the deal outright.
2. Reseller programs
Turn other companies into a sales force. Partners resell your product and layer their own services on top.
Economics: resellers typically earn 20–40% of LTV on the software, plus 2–3× that amount in services (implementation, training, retainers) they sell around it. The services margin is what makes the partner care.
HubSpot's agency playbook (Peter Caputa). HubSpot turned marketing agencies into resellers by making the agency's own business better: give them a product to sell, certifications to differentiate on, and a co-selling motion. Agencies became a durable, compounding distribution channel — the engine behind the $100M ARR partner program.
Partner enablement is the work. A reseller program lives or dies on enablement: onboarding, certification, sales collateral, deal registration, co-selling support, and a partner portal. Signing partners is easy; getting them to actually sell requires you to train and equip them.
3. Affiliate programs
Pay-for-performance reach. Affiliates promote you and earn commission on conversions — low downside, since you pay only on results.
Proof points:
- ConvertKit + Pat Flynn — a single trusted creator can become a top-of-funnel channel on their own.
- Demio — 50% commissions to make the program worth a promoter's real effort.
- Cometly — $251K in a single launch day, driven by one top affiliate plus Rewardful for tracking and payouts.
The 20/80 affiliate power law. ~20% of affiliates drive ~80% of revenue. Don't spread effort evenly across a long tail — identify super-promoters and invest disproportionately in them (higher rates, custom assets, early access, direct relationship).
Buyout clauses. For a super-promoter you want to lock in (or eventually replace with owned channel), a buyout clause lets you pay out future commissions as a lump sum — commonly ~12× the monthly commission. It caps long-term liability and gives the affiliate a clean exit.
> Affiliate mechanics — commission structures, cookie windows, fraud, tooling (Rewardful/Tolt/PartnerStack) — belong in the referrals skill. Keep affiliate work here at the partnership-strategy level: which promoters to recruit, how to tier them, when to buy out.
4. Co-marketing
Joint campaigns with a non-competing peer who shares your audience. Covered in depth in the main SKILL.md (campaign types, partner scoring, agreements). Two ideas from the chapter worth calling out:
Permissionless co-marketing (Notion's coined move) — the single most actionable idea in the chapter. You don't need a signed partnership to ride a bigger brand. Notion built and published templates for Airbnb, Amazon, and Tesla — no permission, no contract — capturing search demand and brand halo from companies far larger than itself. Build assets around brands your audience already loves; let the association do the work.
Content ecosystems. Gong earned reach by showing up consistently on SaaStr (the audience it wanted, hosted by someone else) rather than only building its own. Pair with the lowest-friction swaps — newsletter swaps and cross-promotion — where each side keeps its own leads and simply exposes the other to its audience.
5. App Store / Marketplace
List your product inside a platform's ecosystem and inherit its distribution.
- Grammarly's Chrome Web Store extension took it from 0 to 10M users — the store was the acquisition channel.
- Platforms take 15–30% of revenue. Treat that cut as effective CAC: you're buying distribution instead of running ads.
- Go all-in on one platform when it maps to your ICP. Arrows built its entire GTM around HubSpot — deep integration, AppExchange presence, co-selling — rather than spreading thin across many ecosystems.
When to choose this: if a single platform owns your buyer's daily workflow, being inside it beats trying to pull users out to your own site.
Choosing where to start
- Retention/expansion problem → Integrations first (and the marketplace listing that comes with them).
- Need distribution without headcount → Affiliate (fast, pay-on-results) or Reseller (slower, higher-touch, services upside).
- Have content but no reach → Co-marketing, starting with permissionless assets and newsletter swaps.
- A platform owns your buyer's workflow → App Store / Marketplace, all-in.
Programs compound: integrations create marketplace presence, marketplace presence attracts resellers, resellers and affiliates create the case studies that fuel co-marketing.