You’ve got your Dream 50 list. Or your Dream 10. Or maybe it’s a Dream 3.
Either way, you’ve identified the companies, creators, and communities who already have your customers. Now what?
This is where a lot of founders I coach seem to stall.
They send a proposal too fast. They pitch the wrong person. They offer the wrong currency. They walk in with a deal structure when they probably should have walked in with a question.
I’ve written before about how to build the Dream 50 - the list itself. This article is about what happens inside the conversation once one of them replies.
Here’s the approach that’s worked for me and most of the founders I’ve coached through it.
1. Contact the partnerships person, not the CEO
A common instinct is to find the CEO on LinkedIn and shoot your shot at the top.
It rarely works.
Mid-sized companies usually have a partnerships person. Or a bizdev person. Or an integrations lead, channel development manager, something in that family. Titles vary.
That person’s whole job depends on making connections like yours. They tend to be highly incentivized to take your call. And any deal that gets done has to go up the chain for approval anyway - which means you want this person championing you internally, not the CEO forwarding your email to them with zero context.
Go to LinkedIn. Find the partnerships/bizdev/integrations person. Contact them directly.
The CEO can be a reasonable fallback if the company is genuinely small (under 10 people) or if you’ve exhausted every other option.
2. Open with the gap, not the deal
Try this structure:
“Hey, I’ve been looking at what you’re doing. One thing I noticed you don’t have is [specific capability]. This could be a real value-add for your community. Want to chat?”
No deal terms. No revenue share. No proposal deck. No pitch for your product.
Just a gap they don’t fill, and an invitation to talk.
This reframes the conversation from “another founder wants something from me” to “someone thinks I’m missing something.” Totally different psychological starting point.
And don’t offer your full solution on the first message.
If you have an API, don’t lead with the API. If you have a commission structure, don’t lead with the percentage. Hold that back until you know what they value.
3. Discover their goal before you propose anything
This might be the step that makes or breaks the partnership.
One side offers the wrong currency. The other side nods politely and ghosts.
Before you propose any structure, it helps to know what this company is optimizing for right now:
Are they chasing growth - users, installs, DAU, geographic expansion?
Are they chasing monetization - revenue, margins, ARPU?
Are they prepping for an exit - vanity metrics to attract acquirers?
Are they prepping for a funding round - numbers to show investors?
Most are doing some of each. But there’s usually a dominant one in any given quarter.
If they’re growth-focused, a JV where you cross-promote to each other’s audiences might be gold. A revenue share is noise.
If they’re monetization-focused, an affiliate commission could be gold. Cross-promotion with no dollars attached is noise.
Pitch the wrong one and it rarely matters how good your product is.
4. Do the research before the call
You don’t always have to wait for the call to learn what they’re optimizing for. A lot of this is discoverable in advance:
End-of-year reports or shareholder updates (public or semi-public companies tend to surface priorities here)
Press releases from the last 12-18 months - what are they bragging about?
LinkedIn posts from the exec team - they telegraph priorities constantly
Local news coverage if they’re regional - hiring sprees suggest growth mode; “reaching profitability” headlines suggest monetization mode
Growth charts in any investor-facing materials
Build a working thesis before the call: “Based on what I’ve seen, I think they’re focused on X.”
Then test it in the conversation.
5. Walk in with a thesis, not a proposal
Try opening with something like:
“Hey - doing some research on you guys, it looks like you’re focused on [X]. If that’s right, here’s how I think I could help. But tell me: is that where your focus is right now?”
What this does:
Shows you did the homework
Demonstrates you have a point of view
Invites them to correct you (they usually will)
Gets them telling you the real priority, often more candidly than they’d volunteer
Come in with some idea, but don’t predicate the whole conversation on it. Let them refine it.
6. Handle exclusivity by being expensive about it
If you’ve got multiple partners in the same market or vertical, exclusivity will probably come up.
Default position: don’t give it. Exclusivity caps your upside and can trap you for years.
But if they push, there’s no need to refuse outright. Price yourself out instead.
If their proposal is worth $X a year to you, counter with 5X over ten years for exclusivity. Make it a number they have to stop and think about.
One of two things tends to happen:
They walk. You keep non-exclusivity and your other deals alive.
They agree. You just locked in 5X your expected value.
Both are fine outcomes.
Worth knowing: some experienced CEOs throw in exclusivity clauses plus five other asks specifically so they can “negotiate down” and still land four wins. If you price every ask appropriately, that game tends to evaporate.
7. When your list is short, don’t abandon closed doors
The Dream 50 approach assumes you have 50 targets. If one shuts the door, you move on.
But sometimes the list is smaller - three partners who own your market, ten creators in your narrow niche.
In that case, a shut door probably isn’t a signal to move on. It’s a signal to find another way in.
Maybe the first contact wasn’t the right person. Try someone else at the same company. Get introduced through a mutual connection. Attend an event they’ll be at. Become one of their customers and reply to a receipt email. Find them as customers of another partner and ask that partner to introduce you.
When the list is small, doors have to be wedged open. Not knocked on once.
8. Simple and hard beats complicated and fun
This is the principle I come back to with founders more than almost any other.
You could spend three months building an automated tool to scrape every Facebook community in your niche. It’s fun. It’s complicated. It feels productive because you’re shipping code and checking off boxes.
Or you could spend three months on three partnership conversations that unlock a significantly larger audience than you could reach yourself in a year.
The second one is simple and hard. No code to write. Just emails to send and calls to take. And because it’s simple, our programmer brains often tell us it can’t be that valuable.
Partnerships tend to be the highest-leverage activity bootstrapped founders avoid, because they feel unproductive. You’re not shipping. You’re not building. You’re just talking to people.
That’s kind of the point.
A note on the transition
In the early days, people engage with your content and product because they want to talk with you. You’re the brand. The scrappy founder building in public. “I heard about this guy who’s doing this cool thing.”
Once your product becomes a real company with users and a pricing page, some of that magic can fade. You’re no longer “that one person building in public.” You’re a business.
That shift is often why cold outreach on Reddit or Facebook starts delivering diminishing returns right around the time partnerships start mattering. It’s less about you doing something wrong and more about how the audience sees you now.
The good news: the same shift that dulls the scrappy-founder channels is exactly what can make you attractive to partners. Partners usually aren’t looking for the hot new thing that might disappear in six months. They want stable, sustainable, not going anywhere.
That’s you now. Lean into it.
Where to start
List your partner targets. Three is enough. Ten is plenty. Fifty is a lot.
For each, find the bizdev/partnerships person on LinkedIn.
For each, spend 30 minutes building a thesis on what they’re currently optimizing for.
Write one message per company. Lead with the gap. No deal terms.
Send them.
When one replies, walk in with your thesis and let them refine it.
Match your proposal structure to their stated goal, not what’s most convenient for you.
I’ve watched plenty of founders run this process. A good chunk of them landed at least one partnership that changed their business meaningfully. Some outreach gets no reply. Some replies lead nowhere. But running the full process - not just firing off the first email - tends to produce wins. And honestly, a lot of the leverage probably comes from the fact that so few founders seem to run it all the way through.
It’s simple. It’s hard. And it might be the most reliable lever a bootstrapped founder has once the early scrappy channels start drying up.
Now go send the emails.
If this article helped you, you might also be thinking “Jeeze, I wish I had more help like this with this SaaS startup thing.”
If that’s you, consider joining the smart people in the Founder Labs Community - a tight-knit group of SaaS indie hackers, solopreneurs, and early-stage startup founders, guided by me, Nate Ritter. I’m a founder, consultant, and mentor with 3 exits and 20+ years of experience building startups.
If you’re a sub-$100k MRR SaaS founder who needs help getting to the next level, get in touch today.
→ Read How to Partner for More Sales and Traffic
How to Partner for More Sales and Traffic
In the Founder Labs Mastermind, we had a question around how to do partnerships for traffic and sales.