Channel Partnership

1. Product

• I am working on my own product - ie, Fyno. It is a B2B SaaS product - It’s Zapier for communications | A communication infrastructure solution that allows product companies to:
• • Integrate with any communication channel/ vendor;
  • Manage multi-channel templates in one place; and
  • Comes with an orchestration layer to build notification flows, automate communication pipelines.
• Early stage | Have ~ 12 customers with signed contracts (including a couple of enterprise customers)
• No PMF. But Fyno product is very similar to Courier.com in the US. Courier has achieved PMF. It has ~ $5mn in revenue and recently closed Series B, led by Google ventures.

• As compared to Marketing automation platforms which offer similar multi-channel communication orchestration, Fyno and Courier is an engineering product which focuses on transactional, real time communications like OTPs, order status updates, payment confirmations, reminders etc.
• These communications are often managed by Product and engineering teams through APIs (to avoid latency and get better deliverability).

🎯 Fyno is fundamentally an Integration aggregator

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2. Partnership opportunity

🖋️ Map the user journey for your product on whimsical. Identify gaps in service, possible customer pain points, customer requests for a particular feature.

Based on your analysis, explain if the partnership can close gaps in service, solve for customer pain-point. Can you build the requested feature yourself? If no, can partnership solve for this?

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The Pship opportunity is to enter a new category and not solve the problems of an existing customer segment. Its repurposing and repositioning the product in the new market, explained more in Part 3 below.

3. Litmus test

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What is the new Market opportunity?

• These are the 3 primary types of customer communications
• ~80% of customer communication comprises of marketing nudges - oriented towards acquisition, conversion, engagement and retention. Primary tools used for this - Martechs like Moengage, WebEngage, CleverTap, Braze etc.
• While we are best positioned to solve transactional communications, we wanted to go after the bigger pie, i.e., the marketing comms as:
• • It drives higher perceived value for the customers since it directly impacts revenue; and
  • Taps into the growth / marketing budget of customers.
• When we did a thorough research about this marketing automation, we realised:
• • Martechs are typically customer data platform with a communication pipeline.
  • They come with an abstraction and a no-code orchestration layer
  • They require businesses to send all possible data points to their platforms (like clickstream data, transactional data, purchase history, profile data (including personal data, device, etc).
  • Then they allow businesses to filter through the data to build cohorts/ segments, chart journeys, build communication pipelines / automations and measure resuilts.
  • Most Martechs bill for data/ events stored on their platform - the pricing is based on the data / event storage.

❓ Yes, these are all very known facts. So what’s the insight here?

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• Now here’s the critical insight - There is a large segment of businesses that do not use Martechs. Who are they?
• • Regulated businesses (like insurance, financial services etc.): Strong regulatory oversight creates high friction for sending customer data to third party tools.
  • Tech first businesses with very large data sets: Businesses like Dream 11, MyCircle and Flipkart. They have built inhouse Marketing automation tools.
  • Businesses with data sensitive engineering head/ CTO: They are absolutely not okay to share customer data with third party tools. They will always choose Metabase over mixpanel/ amplitude since metabase has an on-premise offering.
  • Impactful Tailwinds:
  • • New data protection law in India which is potentially going to influence more companies to build inhouse solutions or look for safer alternatives to Martechs.
    • Standardisation of database solutions and data engineering practices that will make it easier to manage large volumes of data inhouse
    • Advancement and commoditisation of AI modules: Procurement and deployment of AI module will necessitate having complete access and control on proprietary customer date.
• So in-short, there is a reasonable audience who currently manage data in-house (and do not use a Martech) and there will be an influx of companies that will start managing customer data in-house.
• Managing data is one thing - but what about abstraction, orchestration and analytics?

🎯 This is exactly where Fyno will come to rescue

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Fyno will build a middleware (Lets call it **“Connect”)** which will consist of:

• A docker solution which will run in the infra of customers and contain a no-code abstraction and orchestration layer.
• The no-code abstraction layer (like metabase) which allows users to query databases and create cohorts. Using Gen AI, it will permit querying the database with natural language: Example: ‘Find me customers who invested more than 10K over the last 2 weeks’ and you will have your customer cohort ready.
• The no-code orchestration layer which will allow you to chart customer journey’s
• And finally, a secure connection to Fyno’s multi-channel cloud that will be used to trigger a specific communication to customers based on the communication flow (using the integration, template and the channel flow) configured on Fyno.
• So ultimately, critical customer data never leaves your infra and only the communication related data, that needs to be anyways shared with cpaas vendors will pass through Fyno.

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Value proposition to Businesses?

• Save data management cost (getting rid of expensive SaaS tools / get similar experience at no additional cost
• More control and security over customer data
• No more leaky ETL/ data pipelines
• Get the power of Martech without building one - Finally! Growth and marketing folks in such businesses can breath relief and feel empowered.

4. Identifying right partners

👉🏼 State the following for your product:

1. Who is your ICP?
2. What are your brand values?
3. What is your current market? (Types of companies, industry sectors, geographical reach)
4. Create a list of possible partners and perform a partner fitment test.
5. What does your partner gain from this partnership? </aside>

👉🏼 Explain your ICP here: User: Growth and Marketing team Decision maker: CTO/ CPO (depending on whether it is a product led org or tech led org) Influencer: Security and data protection officer

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👉🏼 Mention your brand values here:

• Integration first company
• Helping companies to provide better end-user experience
• Solving primarily for engineering and product efforts

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👉🏼 Explain your current market here:

• Data sensitive companies
• Regulated companies
• Companies nearing significant events like public market listing
• Companies on whom data privacy law would apply

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👉🏼 List of possible partners here:

• Data warehouses like Snowflake, Rudderstack, Redshift, BigQuery
• Databases like MongoDB, MySQL, Postgresql
• Visualisation Solutions like Looker, Metabase, PowerBi, Tableau etc.

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Scoring Method Yes - 1; Maybe - 0.5; No - 0

Note 1: Google search results for “can i connect snowflake to twilio” landed me to these top pages:

• https://hevodata.com/learn/twilio-to-snowflake/
• https://www.rudderstack.com/integration/twilio/integrate-your-snowflake-data-warehouse-with-twilio/
• https://pipedream.com/apps/twilio/integrations/snowflake

Similarly, Google search results for “can i connect snowflake to twilio” landed me to these top pages:

• https://www.twilio.com/blog/automatically-trigger-twilio-sms-mongodb-mongodb-functions#:~:text=Connect Twilio with MongoDB&text=Go back to the MongoDB,seen in the screenshot below.
• https://www.mongodb.com/docs/atlas/app-services/services/twilio/
• https://www.integrate.io/integrations/mongodb/twilio/

This signals that lots of folk do try to set up communication pipelines directly from data warehouses and databases.

What does partner stand to gain with this Pship?

• There is obviously monetary compensation to make from becoming channel partners with Fyno.
• Higher usage of their platforms: When businesses start using databases/ data warehouses as fundamental data platforms to power Martech operations, it will lead to significantly excess use of database and warehouses directly:
• • Businesses may start storing additional data points like click stream data since they now have a way to exploit it
  • Businesses may start storing cohort level and segment level data as well in addition to the base data (which in some sense means duplication) but is necessary to ensure that the fundamental database is unaffected by high frequency martech operations
• With more and more customer data sets in control, it will influence deployment of AI models freely and flexibly. This will influence faster AI adoptions, which is also a north star for many database/ warehouse companies.
• Companies like Snowflake and MongoDB have dedicated sections in their website speaking about AI processing in snowflake:

https://www.snowflake.com/en/data-cloud/workloads/ai-ml/

MongoDB For Artificial Intelligence

5. Outreach strategy

❓ Create a list of possible PoCs

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👉🏼 Mention your PoC list here Customer success head | Customer experience head | Partnerships head | CEO

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Use the decision framework to finalise your first outreach PoC

Scoring Method Yes - 1; Maybe - 0.5; No - 0

Result: We will reach out to the Partnerships team/ head first. Since they actively explore pship opportunities and are open to such discussions, it will be relatively easier to explain the value of our pship to them and the benefit it will bring to our mutual customers.

Next in line will be the customer experience/ success teams. One of the north star metric for them is to ensure that their customers realise the value of their offering and increase the frequency of usage.

For a database / warehouse product - the frequency is measured in terms of usage volume. The potential partnership will directly increase the database/ warehouse usage for mutual customers, positively impacting revenues.

📝 Draft your first outreach message to the PoC. Mention clear subject, your introduction, the ‘why’, goal alignment, and clear CTA.

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👉🏼 *Write your outreach message here ”Hey There, I am excited to speak with you regarding a potential opportunity that can positively impact your customer’s database/ warehouse usage, and at the same time, allow them to run marketing automations directly from the databases.

How does this help our mutual customers?

• Data control and security
• Single source of truth to run marketing campaigns
• Financial savings
• Also prepares our customers for easy and planned deployment of AI

This opportunity did not exist 10 years ago, but now it does. With enhancement and standardisation of data engineering practices, it is now easier than ever before for companies to manage their own data without any external intervention.

I am excited to discuss this opportunity in detail. Would you be available next week for a discussion?

Best, Rohit*

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🚨 Uh oh! Imagine haven’t received a response for any of your outreaches. Your filled out their partner form, tried contacting them on LinkedIn, found a POC from the company but to no avail.

Use the FES job matrix to identify potential follow ups approaches for different POCs.

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What would your strategy be to get your foot in the door to reach a meeting?

Outline the channel you’ll reach out on, the message you’ll send, and any follow-ups you might want to do. Build a comprehensive strategy from A-Z on how you’ll reach out on email, socials, cold calls etc.

👉🏼 *Submit your strategy here:

• Start with a couple of follow ups by providing more data and research: Here additional research would be sharing publicly available blogs, posts, search volumes, queries and may be snapshots of our customer discussions where customers were delighted to see this being possible.

Then lead them to believe that this pship does not impact anything in their product / sales road map. It merely requires minimalistic effort from customer success and marketing team. The attempt will be make them believe that the ROI on this initiative will be truly disproportionate.

Another thing that should be attempted here is to acknowledge their might and position they hold in front of their customer/ audiences and emphasise that the their customers only stand to get more from this opportunity

• If the above works with even one of the potential partners, it will be a great win and an opportunity to leverage that win with others. Generally, one such large success story is sufficient to drive attention.
• If we don’t receive any sign-ups, then start with exclusive offering. Try building FOMO. Say that you will only sign up with 1 or few in each category. Also, emphasise that customers using Fyno often consult us to advice them on which DB/ warehouse is better for marketing ops. Getting exclusive pships will lead also help us refer more customers to our partners.
• It is also good to use precedents of such partnership. For example: How Snowflake partnered with Braze and Moengage in early days and now paying off.
• With CEO, we could take a slightly modified approach. Most of these CEOs are angels, largely investing through operators fund, founders fund, YC and the likes. The attempt would be to create some visibility before them (like how account based marketing is done using linkedin) and then seek investment. The account based approach can also be used for pship/ customer success heads before initiating conversation with them.

There must be series of socials media posts, podcasts, blogs etc that we will roll out to create awareness about this category before we initiate any of our effort.*

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6. First call design

❓ Create your first call design with the partner PoC. Divide it in terms of what you will do:

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Before the call

Research your partner’s current goals (what do they talk about on their website, social handles, content blogs, recent events, other resources)

👉🏼 *Write partner’s current goals: Customer experience/ success: Increase frequency of usage of their product so that customers realise the value of their product

Partner: Better Pship opportunities

CEO/ leadership: Personally better investment opportunities. Ability to unlock value innovation. Always looking for new markets, categories to expand into.
Increasing shareholders and customers value. etc. *****

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Do these goals align with your current goals?

👉🏼 Justify your reasoning here Yes. Detailed explanation provided above.

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Why should the partner consider you? Perform a competitive analysis + identify mutual customer pain point to find your edge against the competition

Competitive Analysis Template

Mutual customer pain point:

• As referred to in various articles, many engineering first companies keep trying to connect databases / warehouses with communication platforms like twilio. The main intent would be to implement transactional triggers.
• Fyno Connect will make configuring transactional triggers entirely no-code with pre-loaded integrations.
• Not just that it will also allow users to configure and rain marketing campaigns as well. So engineers in our target set of organisation can say goodbye to the apprehension of building a marketing technology in-house.
• Since competition is entirely ignoring this space (or haven’t identified it yet), this is a blue ocean so mutual customer pain point is not a key to win against the competition. Its to fortify that the problem exists and our pship can solve it!

7. Company buy-in and alignment

❓ Mention your stakeholder and team concerns for this partnership. Explain how would you address each concern.

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👉🏼 Stakeholder / Leadership concerns: Execution concerns since this will be a new product vertical and involves development of new product, marketing it, selling it and then building support function for it.

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👉🏼 Product team concerns: Building a new product altogether to complement the Fyno communication infra offering

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👉🏼 Marketing team concerns: Change positioning, marketing collaterals, ICP focus - from only engineers and technical product managers to Growth and CTOs as well.

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👉🏼 Sales team concerns: Pitching 2 different products - Fyno for merely transactional communications and Fyno + Connect for the niche audience we identified for this market. So means new collaterals, education, training, strategy etc.

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📝 Create your stakeholder pitch. Make a small ppt (max 8 slides) to get your stakeholders and teams onboard. It must include the following:

• Partnership objective
• Value prop
• Impact on your org’s north-star metric
• Customer needs and user base analysis
• Competitive analysis
• Effort required from various teams
• What does success look like? </aside>

👉🏼 Upload your ppt here:

PPT - The slides only cover the last 2 points. The first 6 will be a repetition (may be paraphrased) of all that has been detailed in the Pship opportunity above

Pship deck for stakeholders (1).pdf

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8. Building Trust

💡 Solving for trust and engagement with the partner

1. Create a strategy for building trust with your partner at each step of the partnership
2. Create a strategy to improve transparency between you and your partner
3. Create a strategy to increase engagement with your partner </aside>

👉🏼 Strategy for trust building:

• In-person meets for critical decision making
• Meeting timelines and commitments. This is necessary to show that we are taking this Pship seriously.
• Give the SPOC or the Companies and opportunity to invest if they find Fyno and our product interesting. Their skin in the game will be a great indicator of trust.

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👉🏼 Strategy for improving transparency - Weekly, fortnightly and monthly updates about referred customers

• Frequent updates on product features

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👉🏼 Strategy for increasing engagement

• Frequent consultation before feature planning and rollouts
• Take interviews, create podcasts and provide visibility to partners

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9. Plan and Launch GTM

❓ Before creating your GTM strategy, answer these questions:

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👉🏼 What is the problem you are solving for? Power of martech on top of your own database

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👉🏼 Is there demand for your offering? Yes

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👉🏼 Who’s your brand offering for? Data sensitive orgs who are not okay to use Martech and customer data platforms

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👉🏼 Where does your ICP spend most of their time? Looking for on-premise offering, open source solutions, secure tools, and with engineering building most tools in-house.

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💡 Create a co-marketing strategy for your partnership, include the teams involved, timelines, and effort. If the co-marketing activity is on the partner’s real estate, please mention the approach you'll follow to convince your partner.

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If the co-marketing is on the partner’s real estate, please mention the approach you'll take

👉🏼 Write your approach here Use of other partners real estate may be in 2 cases - Socials & Website. In both cases, one thing very relevant to note here is our solution is only going to increase the value of what companies can do directly from a database/ data warehouse. So the value of thei software is positively influenced without anything for them to lose.

Approach would be simple: Imagine putting a post like this on LinkedIN - “Did you know that you can directly run marketing campaigns directly from MongoDB, without the data leaving your database”?

A post like this only increases the value of MongoDB, without anything that needs to change in their product. Yes they will stick their neck out for us, but that’s something we will earn with trust and alignment.

Approach here would be to first allowing them to repost our posts, so that viewers know that they are only endorsing it for better reach may be. Once they build confidence, they can directly start posting it as well.

We can given them everything they want - from content to collateral (designed as per their brand guidelines) to just push the post button.

Similarly for website landing pages, we can build all landing pages and hand it over to them only to develop.

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10. Channel Partners

Agency vs Affiliate Partners

📝 Choose either or both, and give justification based on your product & problem statement

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Affiliate Pship only: Since the implementation of the entire solution is on Fyno and we are trying to only leverage their existing distribution (and that too, a specific segment)

• Onboarding Plan 📝 Build a plan that enables you to Educate, Empower & Activate Channel Partners
• • Create a dedicated Connect page and list all the database and data warehouse integrations we support.
  • Give them blogs, and other content collaterals that they can use to talk about us digitally.
  • Build landing pages for each partner (build for 1 and replicate for others). Partners can add it to their website, index it and share it with prospects.
  • Organise and sponsor joint events (pull relevant ICPs using their brand presence) and create awareness about this new solution.
• Partner Directory📝 Think of innovative ways in which you can showcase your partners and gamify the process of earning incentives.
• • We will start with limited set of partners (prominent databases and data warehouses). Also, this partnership will implemented through leadership / customer success division in the partners company, who will refer Fyno to their customers while helping them maximise their value from using their database/ warehouses.
  • So the incentive and rewards process can be minimalistic, agreed % of the recurring revenue from the customers referred through the partner. It can range in 15-20%.
  • Also, since the potential partners are mostly all unicorns to start with, one time deals and non-lucrative terms will not cut it. It needs to be something that allows them to make money with minimal efforts.

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