[00:00:00] Zack Katz: What if teaming up with other WordPress companies could unlock new opportunities and faster growth? Whether it's integrations, joint ventures, or co marketing, partnerships are often the key to scaling smarter, not harder.

Hi, I'm Zack Katz, founder of GravityKit, Trusted Login, and DataKit. And today I'm hosting WP Product Talk solo, which is fine by me because we have so much to talk about with our guest. Today we're talking about building partnerships in WordPress, and that's why we've invited Jason Coleman today to talk with us.

Jason, welcome, and please introduce yourself.

[00:00:41] Jason Coleman: I'm Jason Coleman. I'm the co founder of PaidMembershipsPro, a membership platform built on top of WordPress. I'm also the co author of the book, Building Web Apps with WordPress, and recently the co owner of LifterLMS, an LMS solution on top of WordPress.

[00:00:58] Zack Katz: Jason, why is this topic important for WordPress product owners to consider?

[00:01:05] Jason Coleman: Yeah. So recently over the summer, this is always a good thing to do is talk with customers.

you're like, Oh yeah, I should talk to the customer. So I had a moment like that over the summer and I chatted with, set up phone calls with a bunch of customers. And it reiterated again when you're, I'm asking the question, like, how did you find out about Paid Memberships Pro?

Why did you make the decision to use Paid Memberships Pro? And the number one answer, or one of the number one answers is, I'm using this other tool, and you have an integration with them, so it was the only one that did it. Or, I'm using this other tool, and they said these really glowing things about you, so I use that.

[00:01:39] Zack Katz: We get a lot of deal flow, user signups, through our integrations with other services and plugins and platforms. yeah, it's interesting to consider, like there's the, let's promote each other, let's integrate with each other, but there's also just the partnerships are a way to build awareness about your product, and mind share in your customers, who knows how many times people will see you when they go to.

An integration page on somebody else's website and learn about Paid Memberships Pro for the first time.

[00:02:12] Jason Coleman: Yeah. And I'm finding this is different for every product, but I found for the membership plugin in particular, even though. We feel it's one of the most important components of the website. It's like the bedrock.

In reality, people like, I have an idea. I get a domain, I build a website, I put all the things on the website and then I go, Oh my God, I need to charge for access to this. It's like the last thing in the queue that they think about doing.

And that's like a challenge for us as a business to figure out. But I think that's true of a lot of products is like when actually are people thinking about using your product and like. Where are they? Are they within the WordPress dashboard? Are they trying to connect?

And if that's the case, then, business relationships with all those different tools and services are going to be like good lead gen for users.

[00:02:58] Zack Katz: Yeah. And that's a great point. Not only should contacting hosts, for example, like Awesome Motive is excellent at this and contacting hosts.

And making sure that they are a solution that is seen at the very initial installation of WordPress on the host side okay, while you're doing that, also do this. but that's a great point. Every point of the supply chain of the customer journey, every single point, is an opportunity to identify a partnership that could expand your business.

And I think it's also important for people to consider when they're building products, because so many people have an idea of partnership that I don't know what is it. Properly calibrated. And I think that people get the idea of like partnerships wrong, where partnerships are this thing that happens, but it's not a thing that happens.

It's a series of relationships and interactions that results in outcomes. But it's not something that happens overnight. You don't just go from zero to 100 and all of a sudden your partners, it's partnerships as a relationship that you build over time. one of the problems is when you're starting out, you don't have any power, you don't have any influence or not as much as you would, after you've built up some of your customer base and your brand, so it's going to be tough to build a relationship when you don't have anything to offer.

So I think that is where you need to make a proactive choice and say, I'm going to write a blog post about your product first. I'm going to make a video about your product first. I'm going to find where you are weak. GravityKit doesn't have a good TikTok presence. If somebody wanted to become a TikTok partner for GravityKit, where they promote GravityKit on TikTok, that would add value to us in a way that we are not doing, and I could see the value there.

So yeah, first build that value for them and then find out who is the person in charge of relationships and partnerships, contact them and say, I did this for you. I can keep doing this for you. What can we work together on for you? Providing a give and take on the value that I've just given you.

[00:05:05] Jason Coleman: I love doing the work up front. If there is a partner. That's really important to you. Like you said, cause you're the small guy and they're the big obvious business to partner with and you really want it bad, there's this mental trick where you can do, where just assume you're already the partner and do all the things anyway, right?

I heard this trick, I forget who said it, but it was, you could do this with mentors as well. So you're like, I wish this highly prominent, smart person in my field was my mentor. It's just pretend they're already your mentor. What would you do if they already were?

that's not it. But give the good karma, they'll give back to you. But also you think in your head, if we were already partnered, I would start doing these things and just start doing them. And there's going to be benefit in doing that, whether or not, it eventually gets recognized, appreciated and turns into a formal partnership.

It's still good that you created these blog posts, created tools, filled the market. Pointed things out and, participated in their systems.

[00:06:01] Zack Katz: Yeah, and, part of what we try to do in WP Product Talk is talk about our experiences as product owners with the topic that we're talking about.

So let's go to story time and talk about some of the personal experiences that we have. Jason, what are some experiences you've had with building Partnerships?

[00:06:20] Jason Coleman: Yeah, I told you before the show, I was like, it's funny that I'm talking about this because I think I'm actually not good at it.

I always think there's like a missing third founder for Paid Memberships Pro, who's a really strong extrovert that just likes to go out there and talk to folks. But that said, we have had very key partnerships, and I've learned a lot through, it not working, I have, these red flags, and there's stories behind any of these, if you're interested, In particular, when building integrations with other services, like we build integrations with email marketing services, other WordPress plugins, e commerce payment gateways, tax tools, hosts, things like that.

There's these red flags that come up when you're early in the talks that are like, What's going on here? So one is the inability to create a free or pro bono account. So if you're like, I'm going to integrate my technology with your technology, you're like, give me a free account so I can do it properly.

And if they say no, that's very weird that they're focused on making one sale instead of integrating with your product. Or if they technically can't do it, that's a weird thing that, I don't trust, even these very big multi million dollar companies that don't have any way to give someone access to your tool for free.

It's weird, right? It means that they don't do this partner thing a lot. it's like a red flag that you're going to find other roadblocks further too. Another one is like sharing code or stats. Or other important data and tools. So again, like talking hey, build this thing and it'll help our customers.

And it's yeah, you have this similar thing. Like, how many users does that have? Eh, I'm not going to tell you. It's wait, you're just like asking me to spend time and money and effort. But you won't tell me the number. We work in open source code, so a lot of times the code is available, but it's weird if they have code, oh, that's just like this other thing.

Let's share this code that isn't public and open source. It's if they're reluctant and it's understandable why they are, but it's also just another indicator to like, oh, they must not do this partnership thing that often. And then the other one, which is hard to figure out is this total disinterest, because, in some cases it feels good.

If you're, Do I have permission to do this? Hey, do you mind if I build this thing or reach out to your customers And sometimes it feels good. You're like, yeah, whatever you want, go ahead. And you're like, cool. All right. They said, whatever I want, I'm going to do it.

And then you build it. But the fact is they didn't really think about it. And so if you start building stuff and then maybe six months from now, they're like, Oh, actually we don't want this. Or they think about it then. then they might change their tune and their idea, about the partnership.

And we've had cases like that where we, spend a lot of time and commitment and then be like, Oh yeah, this is we don't want this thing. We're not going to promote this thing. And we're like, wait, what's going on? why didn't you tell me that before?

[00:08:50] Zack Katz: Yeah. When dealing with partnership development, one thing that becomes clear in my experience is that you're dealing with individual humans and the individual humans have different levels of authority to do different things.

when you reach a certain scale, like you were just talking about, if you're sending a lot of traffic or you're using their trademark in ways that might not be something that they knew about until you reach a certain scale, then the deal might need to be renegotiated because it reaches the level of somebody's attention that it hadn't before.

recognizing that people are flaky, people are lazy, people are, uninformed, they're all the things that you normally have to deal with individuals is the same thing when you're dealing with a partnership. And I think that to counteract that you can have contracts, but if you are just getting started, that's a lot of legwork and a lot of focus.

And one of the other things that people always are is busy. And so trying to find time to develop a partnership is one of the big things that is hard to break through. So when in the WordPress space, when dealing with partnerships, a lot of the time it's. Code integrations and I was wondering if you could talk more about how you approach that.

[00:10:06] Jason Coleman: Yeah. This is more my forte, but we struggle with this too. It's okay, how do we actually do this? Literally, where does the code go? the answer is it depends, but I think it's useful to talk through, the different options and things that we've run into, for folks that they can think about it.

So I'm thinking, for example, if GravityKit and Paid Memberships Pro had an integration, we, and maybe we can talk later about what that might be, but assuming it makes sense who's gonna, who's gonna maintain the code? Where's the code gonna go? Is it in the, there's a bunch of options. So one is, it goes into Paid Memberships Pro as a module or an includes.

And then we just handle it like we own it and maybe you do a pull request or you send us information if something breaks, but it's like this is a PaidMembershipsPro module,

Like maybe GravityKit, has it as a module inside its code base that says integrate with PaidMembershipsPro. So then there's another option is that it's an add on for Paid Memberships Pro. And so technically the code isn't in the core membership plugin, it's in an add on, it's a separate plugin, but it's still like in our ecosystem, our license and update server, it's on our website, it's an add on we have for GravityKit.

Or you could go the other way, I think GravityKit probably has add ons of sorts, right? Like it's an add on for Paid Memberships Pro, is it a separate product? And that's useful for like the 80 20 rule, so a smaller percentage of people need this integration, so it's useful that it's in its own code base that's on its own update schedule.

Because we have add ons that maybe haven't been updated for three years, because they just do the thing really good and they don't have to be updated. And it's almost like you don't It's not even worth the overhead of loading the code or even just showing it as an option.

a third one, which I've tried over and over again, and I thought was the ideal solution, but I've changed my tune that I probably will never do this again because it has almost 100 percent failure rate is to, create a separate plugin that sits between the two. And that's a bridge between them.

And then we both maintain it together. So that was my idea. Hey, let's build this thing, this integration, make it free for both our users, and then we'll maintain it together every single time. It's I'm trying to think of like a relationship analogy, like people grow and change. What we need from the relationship becomes different from what they need from the relationship.

[00:12:20] Zack Katz: Yeah, it's like a plant that needs to be watered. And neither of you are good at watering plants, that you don't own. It's like a third plant in between two neighboring houses.

[00:12:30] Jason Coleman: Yeah. So we've had cases where It's a really useful tool.

They want to charge for it. So then they're like, they build their own version and charge for it. And you're like, okay, their business model is different from ours. We've had cases where, the thing that we integrate with kind of becomes more of a competitor. This is this weird WordPress space where we are very friendly with our competitors.

But that's changing. I say, it feels like it's changing over time and we've all seen a front end login plugin, become a profile plugin, become a membership plugin, become an e commerce plugin. And now you're like, shoot we used to they used to fill the gap of a feature and vice versa, but now we have more overlapping features than not, and it's awkward that we have this integration that we have to figure out what to do with.

But yeah, so there's, pros and cons to each method.

[00:13:13] Zack Katz: What's the line between partner and competitor? Like how, if I'm looking at, like I, I am friendly with a lot of people that do computing products. But they, I don't know that it's a problem because people run multiple plugins to do different things.

You're in my products. Do, have some overlap, but they don't, they're not, our customers are very different, I think, in a way. Even though they're also very similar , like they're trying to accomplish similar things from different directions.

Where do you identify a competitor versus like, where does it become a problem?

[00:13:49] Jason Coleman: becomes, and that's why I think the, competitors is, it's just the nature of the business and working with your competitors. It's also the nature of business. What is tough is I think that like third option, which if we work together, we should avoid, right?

Where it's We said we would maintain this thing together, because then we have competing, incentives that we'll push in another direction, and it's I think it's healthier technology wise if it's one of the two parties just says, I own this relation, I own this integration. And that way then if it changes, like the other parties, okay they can go on the race but maybe that's just my personality is I want control and I need stuff,

I dunno, we could talk through the, I don't know when you wanna segue to Yeah, sure. let's segue working together,

[00:14:27] Zack Katz: but it might help people to have, so Jason, I and I have known each other for a long time and we met a while ago and we were in the same group and we talked a lot about our products.

And at the end of Cabo Press, I was like, Hey, Jason, we should talk about integrating and partnering somehow. And he, Jason said, yeah, sure. Let's figure this out. And I still have it on my reminders app, Jason. I saw it. I scrolled. I have a pretty much infinite scroll on my reminders list. And it's talk to Jason with PM Pro.

And recently I was thinking, the GravityKit, team meeting revealed that we needed to have a preferred membership plugin that we can work with, and, refer people to because the plugin that we've been referring people to didn't do all the things that our customers needed. And so I said I happen to know Jason and, the support team said, that's great.

Paid Memberships Pro is one of the tools that our customers love. And so I said great, let's figure out some sort of way that Jason and I could talk about partnerships. in advance of our partnerships call today, I said, Jason, why don't we do this live? What does a partnership between GravityKit and PayMembershipsPro look like.

And here's my pitch to you, Jason. This pitch is not going to be perfect because I didn't prepare the actual pitch.

[00:15:56] Jason Coleman: friends. And that's a

[00:16:01] Zack Katz: good lesson for people who are, Trying to figure out their own partnership approach. The more you know somebody, the more open ended something could be.

You can figure it out with somebody because they will give you the bandwidth and the leeway to figure out an approach together. If you don't know somebody, you will want to know who they are. What they're looking for ahead of time, ideally, in the partnership. But because Jason and I know each other, I will say, something along the lines of Jason.

Our customers often want a partner, a membership plugin that gives people a membership dashboard, and in that dashboard, they would see the submissions that they have created with GravityForms. And, what we currently don't have great support for that with Paid Memberships Pro. part of that is because of the technical, things of getting the username from the slug and the URL is a little different than how, you, there is a really easy way to do this in WordPress with Paid Memberships Pro.

There's a single function to get the ID. All we need to do is a quick little integration in code and we can make it easier for GravityView users. to add, their form submissions on the account page. There are not hooks that would make that easy yet, but I think that adding those hooks, on the PayMemberships Pro side will allow us to add an integration on our side to display GravityView views.

I'm proposing that we add things on our side, you add the hooks on your side, and we co promote it with blog posts. We will promote it on our newsletter. We will maybe add a compatibility page that talks about how you can use it together, to cope on like how you can use Paid Memberships Pro with GravityView and talk about how well it all works and give some testimonials from customers who love the integration.

[00:17:59] Jason Coleman: I'm excited. I'm sold. Let's do it. It's a good idea. We, I like it because in general, Paid Memberships Pro Restricts access to anything in WordPress. We have a blog post and it's I think it's 30 or 40 things. Here's how you block this. Here's how you block this. And so it's here's how you block, form entries is maybe or maybe not something we already have on that list.

But it's basically, this is not like a, I don't think it's a tall ask technically, and we're always open to putting hooks and filters in place. So that's all on you if you build it and you show us a proof of concept, we might change the name of the hook or exactly where it goes, but roughly we'll make it work for you.

If we saw the proof of concept. in particular, I think it's more than just hey, you can do that. And we'll allow it, it's us, we're interested to co promote it in a sense because recently at PayMembershipsPro, we have a membership directory add on, which kind of potentially competes with, GravityKit in a way.

That is what we would be integrating into. Oh, okay, the membership directory add on. Because I didn't Unless you think that it could be something else.

Yeah. See, and here's I approached this from the technology standpoint, because that's my, personality.

And also how we operate as a business is users first, solutions first, Business and I'm not even talking about the business money aspects of this yet. That just would always come later. So this is the way I would operate. And I don't think every, company and business person is this way.

If you're talking to a nerd like me, it's Hey, start with the technology and get them excited about it. And then you're like, how can we make this make business sense? I think for other folks, it'd be different, we have a membership add on and a directory.

add on rather. the membership component built into our core plugin is like a front end login, a front end profile, a front end account page, which I think is pretty useful if you have a tool like GravityKit that's Requiring people to log in and do stuff on the front end.

Some of those features, you probably do some of that also or don't want to or something. But we have a membership directory add on, which is, pretty rough. We did some updates we're due to do some more updates, but when we were figuring out exactly how to do those, one of the things that complicated things was that there's different types of directories.

And trying to serve them all was really tough for us. So we've actually decided that we're only going to focus on membership directories that are literally directories of human member members. Every member has to be a human being and every member has to be like a user account on the website. And so that means there's A bunch of directories of businesses, listings, products that people were using and already using paid memberships pro for, but like forcing the square into the round hall or however that analogy goes.

[00:20:44] Zack Katz: And that's exactly those are the things that GravityView excels at.

[00:20:49] Jason Coleman: yeah, it's useful for us if we work on this together, because then when those people come into our system and they're, Unhappy at any point of our sales funnel Oh my God, you don't do this. Or I tried to do it and I can't if we could catch them early and say, no, you should just use GravityKit.

[00:21:02] Zack Katz: agree that this is a cool thing. The next steps would be probably, I would say something along the lines of, because we're doing this live. I'm happy to offer a discount to pay Memberships Pro, customers that you refer to us as well as an affiliate. And there's a referral, a commission that you get for people that you refer to us, so that you benefit from sharing our tools and your customers also benefit by paying less to get in, to get started with the solution that we're trying to put together.

[00:21:34] Jason Coleman: And vice versa, and I think you probably do like we have a standard affiliate program that we could easily slot you into. It's funny. It's nice to have the easy stuff. It's Oh, give me an affiliate account. You come through this link, people get a discount, you get a kickback. we have add ons where our other integrations kind of third party integration show up.

And so we already have a process. We can do that. And then promote to the email list. Because. I found over time that it doesn't work. if we built this and I sent out an email, here's a new thing, check it out. It was like, I could send it to, and we, our list is some like 50, 000 users.

I'd be surprised if it was more than 10 or 20 sales. It's just, our email audience is not looking to buy random, like no offense to this project we're building, but to them it's random because they're like, they already built a site and it's running. So I always like, So that's the We don't do, but it's nice if we can find like a clever way to do it where we either use it ourself.

Create like a blog post, find a common customer case study, quietly get it working for a really good customer, build a case study. Then we put the case study on our site. So it gets more clever and there's more work involved, but that's also like after we've already built the stuff.

[00:22:45] Zack Katz: And a lot of this, when I approach people for partnerships, I try to come to them with a blog post that's already written by Casey, who's in charge of our content at GravityKit. They've written the blog posts that they will post on their blog. For the cross promotion, the more that we do to make your life easier as a partner, the better.

And, the goal good partnerships, I think is try to reduce each other's friction as much as possible. for email, for example, if you find that it's not been successful, one of the things we can do is. Propose a different approach and say Hey, we know a lot of our customers use GravityForms.

hey, y'all who use Paid Memberships Pro and GravityForms, check this out.

[00:23:31] Jason Coleman: Yeah. And I think even, the specific integrations, partnership is interesting to me, like I said, because we're making a direction on our directory product, and we have customers already using our directory product that really should be using yours.

And so I would focus on finding and probably likewise. Yeah. get them to transition, Did we talk about Shape Up on Product Talk? I should come back and talk about that. ,

[00:23:56] Zack Katz: think.

[00:23:56] Jason Coleman: Shape Up is a book by the Basecamp folks, but it's our process for figuring out what we work on and how we work on things. And we have a schedule of quarters sometimes we get so much, we're excited, we're at Cabo Press, and we're like, yes, we should build this, and we could find a developer building in a weekend, make it launch, but the reality of my business at this point is that, there's a cadence to how things get proposed, how they get worked on, and when they get done.

Pitched. And that's different from yours. And it's do we get lucky that we're both in the mindset to work on this at the same time? Like not just us, but the whole team. That's another,

[00:24:28] Zack Katz: that's a topic that we haven't really talked about is, how to prioritize partnerships because it's so easy for partnerships to get pushed down when you're trying to release a really cool new feature versus just like adding an integration to another thing, How do you prioritize partnerships in your own internal planning?

[00:24:50] Jason Coleman: Yeah, that's a great question. Because for me,

[00:24:54] Zack Katz: I am a very intuitive business owner. And sometimes that means I change our priorities.

that sometimes can frustrate the team a little bit, I think. But it also means that when I see, when I realized that we aren't spending enough time on something and the alignment of the company isn't properly aligned to moving the ball forward, as opposed to it's so easy to navel gaze when it comes to writing code.

You can say Ooh, I can improve this. I can improve that. I can add this feature. None of that matters.

[00:25:26] Jason Coleman: I think that's why it's important to this like nice guy syndrome type thing I'm thinking about with the incentives and where does the code go is you should do this work and make sure it makes sense for you.

Like in a vacuum That you're not going to be upset with the work that you do if you build this tool for PayMemberships Pro. And then they say, I just, you won't understand this, but we use this thing called shape up and I'm not gonna be able to get to it till next year. And then you're like, what?

use that to your advantage. These bigger companies are like, you really can't get a blog post out. Like in a week, it's with rare exceptions, can I force my team to write something in a week time? So make sure like when you're doing that, that The work that you're doing works for you.

You're like always learning or it's easy to translate to another partner. I built this for PM Pro and they seem like they're not into it. I'm just going to ask MemberPress to do it. I did all the work, like conceptually at least,

[00:26:12] Zack Katz: part of it. And yeah, that's great advice.

And like thinking strategically for my company, the more partners that we have. Better if they're good partners. the more alignment we have with our partners, it boosts everybody.

for example, we're developing a new Elementor widget for GravityView. I am going to be reaching out to the Elementor partner team whom I know because I've gone to conferences and develop those relationships, and see what we can do to help Elementor and what they can do to promote our integration with them.

So all of that is based on our customers need for an Elementor widget, but it also, when thinking of features, thinking of like the partnership opportunities that come in with this. It's important, like for your payment processing, for example.

[00:27:01] Jason Coleman: Cause it's, and it's related to that, how do you decide if you do an integration? I have this thing that I'm calling, wait, hold on, where is it? oh yeah, I'm calling this the Sucker of Last Resort, which is how I feel sometimes with some of these integrations, and one in particular is for example, Authorize.

NET is the oldest existing payment gateway, and we integrated with that forever ago. In 2009 or something like that. They didn't support secure customer authentication. Now MasterCard is going to drop the old API. And apparently they have a new API, but it was totally off our radar.

We've been telling customers to switch away from Authorize. net. It's not really a good fit culturally for. Our product, because authorized. net tends to be a gateway that people really big sites use because they can shave like a fraction of a percent off their transaction fees.

You say just use Stripe and you're like, Oh, it's 3 percent instead of 2. 5 percent and you're like, yeah, it's worth it. I don't understand, like how much are you actually saving? Whereas our product actually is focused on the little guy. So we probably should spend our time integrating with Square, which is more of a gateway that kind of promotes, like we support people who can't get supported in the traditional market.

That's a lot of background, but why do I call it like the sucker of last resort? We have this integration with Authorize. net. My dog's bothering me. We have this integration with Authorize. net. And it's needed to be updated for a couple of years.

We didn't even realize there was a new version. And we were like, should we build it? And I'm like, why should I build it? Visa owns authorized. net. They're literally the 15th largest company in the whole entire planet with 560 billion in market cap. It's like a fraction of their budget to hire one developer to maintain this thing.

And it would probably be worth it for them because they also make the most money out of this thing. They make one to 3 percent of all credit cards that go through. So it's like, why doesn't Authorize. NET have some team to build these integrations and maintain them for everyone?

I don't know. I guess they do for strategic partners, but in reality, I guess the solution is people, Authorize. NET doesn't want people using paid memberships pro with their thing, otherwise they would have built it themselves. Okay, so then you go to next in line. Who's next in line to be the sucker? It's just people using Authorize.

NET and Payment Services Pro together. A lot of them make more money than my company makes. They're making millions of dollars a year selling stuff with Payment Services Pro. And it's where is it in their budget to maintain the integration? Like they don't know. They're just, they would switch technologies if it actually was an issue and they had to pay a developer.

So then it falls to us and these things fall to us. And it's okay, cause we're listening to the users and the customers. And like you said, you do it based on feel. It's if enough people bother us. That hey, you should build an integration with Authorize. Net. And we're like, man, there's like a few hundred people asking us to build this.

Maybe we should build it and we'll get users. But I, it's almost are we just building it? It's good for me to think, why is no one else building it? Why did it fall to us? That means it's not really important to them. Maybe I don't have to build the solution for them. And I think more strategically, like Authorize.

It's not necessarily in alignment with like our target user avatar. And instead of just, there could be more people bugging us about Authorize. Net, but integrating with something like Square is actually a better opportunity.

[00:30:06] Zack Katz: anyway, when it gets more niche, it often is a good idea to, reconsider whether or not it's a good idea, and maybe charge more for the product. If fewer people use it, you could say, okay, it's going to cost more than our normal integrations. And yeah, that became our first premium add on.

[00:30:23] Jason Coleman: Yeah. Outside the core bundle.

[00:30:26] Zack Katz: Yeah. So at this point in the podcast, we tend to go to best advice for new product owners. When it comes to partnerships, Jason, what you got for best advice?

[00:30:37] Jason Coleman: So I'm almost certain that, I did some version of this last time I was on the show, but I think it's, really important.

It's worth being stated twice and it's timely, but it's very important that you maintain the connection to your customers at all costs. And so what I mean by that is, In the beginning, you could leverage other platforms for exposure. So for example, are you selling your plugin in the WooCommerce marketplace or on ThemeForest or downloading off WordPress.

org? But when you're doing that, you should still try to capture that relationship with your customer. So like a very specific example is if your plugin is on ThemeForest or your thing, and people come to your website first. Don't just link them to ThemeForest and cool, done. It's worth it to add a little bit of friction and say give me your email or sign up for a user account here.

[00:31:26] Zack Katz: if you have a free plugin on. org putting up a product page on your own website that says we have a free, like free version.

And here, enter your email to get access to it. And then you submit and it goes to the dot org page even, but at least you've developed a connection with your customer that you would otherwise have.

[00:31:43] Jason Coleman: Insert your business in there and gather at least their email address or as much information about that customer as you can, because then you actually have a customer and there's lots of people have talked about this in the context of the Apple app store or the Android app stores.

Where it's people pay for something on Apple and then, you don't, you're not actually connected to the customer and you can't solve their billing issues and stuff like that. you want as much as possible to be connected to that customer. So even in the early days, do it.

And who knows, maybe later on you're changing platforms or you want to do something like that. And if you have direct access to your customer, all that stuff is a lot easier.

[00:32:17] Zack Katz: Yeah, that's good advice. For me, when I'm putting together a proposal for a partnership. I find it very helpful to be specific in the partnership goals and deliverables.

a certain number of downloads, a certain number of referrals, a certain number of emails that are sent referencing things, a certain number of clicks on those emails, like some sort of metric that you can determine, is this working or not?

Is this helping both of us or not? When will you do what you said you were going to do? That is a, that's hard to land on sometimes, especially when you plan, quarterly, like it might not come up for another quarterly, round of planning, but it's okay, by this time I will have done this.

And then you can look back and ask yourself, has this partnership, has the person delivered on what they said they would? If not, then maybe they don't care, like Jason was saying earlier, maybe it's a unilateral relationship. And that's fine because our customers use your product, your customers use our product, and if we each individually add some functionality that helps integrate, that'll benefit our customers.

Like you were saying, Jason, I think that makes a lot of sense, to build whatever works for you regardless. But I find that having clear partnership goals and deliverables is really a good idea off the bat. And then, follow up. It's so easy to just say we made a deal. That's it.

We're done. We are now partners. And this is good. No, you've got to follow up on a regular basis to check in and see how things are going. If not, nothing generally happens. So that is my best advice for new product owners. I love it. Yeah. So much, Jason, for joining us. That's a wrap for the show. Where can people find you online?

[00:34:04] Jason Coleman: Yeah, I'm Jason underscore Coleman on the X app and you can find my personal blog at therealjasoncoleman. com PM Pro is available at paidmembershipspro. com. So it's been awesome chatting with you, Zack.

[00:34:20] Zack Katz: Yeah, thank you. Everybody tune in next week as we discuss how email is freaking hard with Adrian Tobey of Groundhog.

That's an important one to tune in because Black Friday is coming up, y'all. We gotta get our emails scheduled if you haven't already. Special thanks to PostStatus for being our green room, where we plan and coordinate this stuff. If you're enjoying these shows, please do us a favor and hit subscribe, share it with your friends, reference this show in your newsletters or your own podcasts.

But most of all, we hope to see you next week. Thanks, y'all.