Why Most Founders Wait Too Long to do Partnerships | How to Avoid the 20% Partner Dependency Trap | The Hidden Costs of Partnerships | Inside the Acquisition by Dialpad with Natasha Ratanshi-Stein, Founder and CEO Surfboard

How to nail partnerships from Day 1

Get insights into the counterintuitive playbook that defies conventional wisdom about when startups should pursue partnerships with Natasha Ratanshi-Stein, Founder and CEO Surfboard, who nailed partnerships as their main GTM channel almost from Day 1 and eventually generated 55% of revenue through partners.

Surfboard is a workforce management platform for customer service teams. After raising a $5 million seed round in 2022, they successfully exited to Dialpad in 2024 - a company they started engaging with as a partner first.

In Today's Episode We Discuss:
01:17 - Why partnerships before customers isn't crazy
02:20 - Which partners actually move the needle for early startups?
04:55 - How to convince big partners when you have zero revenue
08:20 - The exact story framework that opens partnership doors
10:17 - From informal to 20% revenue share: partnership evolution
13:37 - Critical enablement mistakes that kill partnerships
19:38 - Running partnership meetings that actually drive revenue
21:41 - Do your partners even watch your enablement videos?
22:39 - The Series B to pre-IPO partnership sweet spot
27:17 - Early signals a partnership will fail
29:31 - Negotiating partnership agreements: what founders miss
33:53 - Why paying marketplace listing fees is usually worthless
37:38 - When partnerships generated 55% of total revenue
39:40 - The hidden partnership integration tax nobody discusses
40:30 - Launching 20 partnerships, 5 worked
43:29 - The dangerous 20% rule for partnership dependency
45:21 - When Zendesk bought our competitor: partnership nightmare
52:18 - The one hiring mistake every founder makes