Business Partnerships for Software Developers

Filling Out the “About Us” Page

So far you’ve learned about three different types of partnerships: referral agreements, white-labeling agreements, and joint ventures. There is one more category that you should consider, and it is probably the most important and time-consuming of all: finding partners.

For instance, if you’re a software developer starting a software agency by yourself, one of the first challenges you’ll face is the blank “About Us” page on your website staring back at you. If you’re starting out by yourself, the only person you can list on that page is yourself.

A one-man “About” page is okay for a single consultant’s website, but not necessarily for a software agency’s. A one-man band will have a hard time competing with companies made up of multiple partners. Just from a marketing and branding perspective, who do you think a prospective client is going to call first?

If you’re going to have an “About Us” page at all, you should have at least 2 or 3 people listed on there. Ideally, they should come from diverse backgrounds, like engineering, design, UX, business development.

Partners by commitment level

“Wait a minute,” you might say, “I don’t have any employees or co-owners! How can I list anyone else?” Good question, read ahead :]

Take a minute and check out the About Us page of this website. At my current count, there over a hundred people listed on that page. Are we all full-time members of Razeware? There are a few folks that are full-time, yes, but the majority of us are not.

So how can you find partners to list on your company website? First, you should know that the word “partner” doesn’t have a solid definition. Like romance, the relationship can be as formal or informal as you both like.

Here are some possibilities for the types of partners you can have, ranging from less formal to more formal arrangements. Note that these are all examples that apply directly to service providers, not necessarily to product companies.

To make it more fun, the three different options are labeled “dating”, “engaged”, and “married” :]

Married: Maybe you’ve realized that there’s someone in your life that you and your business can’t live without. Maybe you’re thinking of renting some office space out in the suburbs and starting a team together. Simply working on projects together or owning projects together is not enough anymore. You want to go the full nine yards.

The next step for your and your partner is to make it legal. You need to set up an arrangement where you both own equity in a shared company. There are many ways to set this up, but what usually ends up happening is that you either create a new legal entity (usually an LLC) or merge two existing legal entities into one. From the outside, it can even look like an acquisition.

• Dating: Do you work with other contractors on project work on an ongoing basis? If there are one or two contractors that you prefer over others, you’re already halfway there. Why don’t you formalize your relationship more by listing them on your website? You can go on their website if they have one as well. You can also talk to them about setting up a referral agreement as discussed previously in this article.

• Engaged: Let’s say you jive well with a particular designer or business analyst. On top of simple referrals and the promise to work together, you can enter into a profit-sharing agreement on a per-project basis. For example, after all costs have been paid out, both of you agree to split the rest. If you’re thinking of going this route, you should have a legal agreement set up in advance, usually in the form of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). Talk to your lawyer to flesh out the details.

• Married: Maybe you’ve realized that there’s someone in your life that you and your business can’t live without. Maybe you’re thinking of renting some office space out in the suburbs and starting a team together. Simply working on projects together or owning projects together is not enough anymore. You want to go the full nine yards.

  The next step for your and your partner is to make it legal. You need to set up an arrangement where you both own equity in a shared company. There are many ways to set this up, but what usually ends up happening is that you either create a new legal entity (usually an LLC) or merge two existing legal entities into one. From the outside, it can even look like an acquisition.

As you can see, these are only some options that you can choose from when you want to formalize your partnership with someone else. If you’re thinking about it from an angle of full-time employees or part-owners, you’re missing a whole range of possibilities for partnering up.

Okay, I see the benefits. How can I partner up?

If you’ve read this far and agree that setting up partnerships can take you and your business to the next level, the next question is…how do you go about finding your ideal partners? There are two separate steps that I go through.

Step 1: Look inwards

The first thing you should do before you start talking with potential partners is to take some time to do some introspection. Look inwards first. It’s important that you answer these questions about yourself:

1. What skills do you have?
2. What services do you provide?
3. Who is your target audience?
4. What is your strategic advantage over your competitors?
5. What makes you different in the market? Why do people choose you?

These questions help you take inventory of what you can bring to the table in a potential partnership. This is what you’re good at and why people want to work with you.

Note: If you have trouble coming up with answers to these questions, search through your email and look at the emails you received from recruiters. You didn’t get those emails by accident. There was something about your experience and background that stood out to them. What was that?

The first set of questions focuses on what you can bring to the table. There’s a second list of questions that you should also answer. These focus not on what you currently have to offer, but rather on what you need to grow as a consultant or a business:

1. What related skills don’t you have?
2. What related services don’t you currently offer?
3. What are the weaknesses in your strategic advantages? Complete this sentence: [Your Name / Your Business Name] is great at [Strategic Advantage], but…
4. What makes you a commodity in the marketplace? Think of the clients that decided not to work with you, why did they do that?

The second set of questions focuses on the things that you don’t have that you would be looking for in a potential partner.