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v9.5: Partnership Based Growth

· 3 min read
abhiyerra

opsZero will release products and grow our business through mutually beneficial partnerships. Our business is Cloud Infrastructure and our long term plan is to become a Platform for Cloud + AI. However, each vertical has domain specific knowledge we lack and do not have a large team while limits our reach.

Partnerships​

When I look at opsZero's failures it has been largely around going into new verticals alone. If opsZero goes at a vertical alone we had to figure out the market, the marketing, and sales. It creates the onus on us to deliver and sell and learn a new industry. Even if we move horizontally within an industry we will still need to context switch as we sell from startups to governments to healthcare. This prevents us from focusing on a single vertical making our growth feel haphazard and lacking focus. We need teams single threaded focused on each vertical.

Traditionally, a company that wants to grow its business either hires people with expertise to build that business or buys a business that has those relationships. The problem with that is it becomes a capital expenditure where a failure means a total loss, partnerships allow us to make entering new verticals an operational expenditure. This reduces the cost of launching and testing something new and attacking it with people who are already knowledgeable.

Our goal long term with opsZero is to build a bazaar style platform servicing the needs of multiple verticals cobuilt with partners. We will become a distribution focused company with the current services becoming another “partner” within the ecosystem. Our buckets are Cloud and AI. All our products and services should live within these two buckets. And each service we release should have a partner who is responsible for servicing it.

This changes the organizational structure of the company to be like a startup studio or incubator. While we should sell a cohesive whole to our customers, behind the scenes it can be our partners who service the end result for a particular vertical while we complement them with our value add.

Solutions​

Our release methodology will change to the following:

  • Figure out the service we want to create for a vertical.
  • Find partners who could be good fits for coselling that product. Figure out ways we can partner with them.
  • Cobranded and create a joint venture and cosell with partner. Focus on distribution and support the partner with data and sales resources.
  • Continuously work with partner to more effectively reach customers and service the work for the customers.

The things we can do with a partner are three fold:

  • Comarketing such as content, webinar, videos or other.
  • Build new products that combines our strengths.
  • Emails or other joint collaboration.
  • Products