Ep. #1214 - How to Monetize Partnerships

Matt Watson  00:00

And we’re back for another episode of the Startup Hustle, excited to be joined today with Nick Penev. He is the co-founder of Scayul and Extreme Power brands. We’re gonna be talking about partnerships today affiliates, other relationships, how can you partner with other companies and make more money and grow your business. Throughout the history of my companies, I’ve had some really successful partnerships that have really helped us grow. And I’m hoping to learn some things from Nick today. Before we get started, I do remind everybody that today’s episode of Startup Hustle is powered by Full Scale, we can help you hire a team of software developers to build whatever it is that your company does. Check out FullScale.io to learn more. Nick, welcome to the show, man.

Nick Penev  00:43

Thanks, Matt. Thanks for hearing me, you know, I stayed late for you guys. This is the second time I’m staying up late for a focus only for you and for a year. But for some for some crazy reason. I’m not tired. I mean, I don’t drink coffee. And anyways, I guess partnerships are keeping me awake. So where are you located at a boat, you’re actually associate my chair, I’m trying not to move. So my chair doesn’t make any sense. I’m trying to be awake, it wakes her up. And so I’m hearing all you can see ball gear on top of this. Everybody knows Greece, we have a hidden gem about Greece. Now if you want to extend the beaches, big waves, if you like surfing, you know, for the place to go because the Black Sea is actually has less salinity compared to the white, the Mediterranean Belgium. So the water is whiter. So the winds are actually picking up the waves and we hear waves is 10 meters, here. So

Matt Watson  01:40

Okay, well, so, you know, obviously, you’re an expert in partnerships and excited to learn from you today, some tips about how to make partnerships work for businesses. Tell us how did how did you get into this? How did you become an expert at partnerships?

Nick Penev  01:54

Honestly, I mean, I can go back to probably when I started with my E commerce that was like in 2010, it was 13 years ago, I was actually an affiliate manager for a company in Bolgar. There, we’re selling all kinds of like supplements, digital products, whatever that was, like for two months that they weren’t there. It was a very big period for the company. They didn’t make any money. No, I don’t make any money. So but I liked the idea I was. So in the meantime, I got an offer from a big traditional company to be wider General Manager in the balcony, they said took the offer. But they said okay, on the site, I’m gonna do what these guys are doing, you know, just by myself, I’m gonna order some products, I’m going to resell them. And just to run for that a little quicker. Now we set up a private cable supplement business No. And eventually know what happens. No, we grew very quickly, because we’re one of the first companies selling and siberie I’m not sure if you remember that it made you Brazilian for so we’re the first guys sitting that’s in Europe, we’re paying one cent per click on Facebook and Google ads. It was that, you know, that’s crazy. So long story short, we developed around 20 products. supplements like weight loss, muscle builders, mailing investment, all the vanity, bullshit, the whole sort of them saying that, but that’s no sound for price, we’re actually quality. But the thing is that you are totally cost per pay. And marketing was cheap. And we grew very quickly. But of course, everything has an end. So in 2015, or 16, you know, we started to actually get a lot of competitors. The PPC was starting to increase. Now Facebook and Google are actually cracking us. I mean, they were suspending our account, go supplements, shady business, and then we said, Okay, we’re told dependent, though, on the paid marketing. Now let’s find some companies who can actually promote our products, like affiliates. And this one, we started actually doing a lot of affiliate sneak No way, we switch from paid marketing to probably 100% affiliates. You know, in some of those guys, we’re actually making go out of orders personal. I think at the peak, we’re getting quite up to 10,000 orders per day, just from Wow. And this is what we did until 2020, where we sold the company, you know, we got into crypto in 2017 with let the company be managed by our employees. So you know what happens by that? I mean, we just sold everything, you know, we dealt our co founders and then like I told you and my wife, I could walk equations and snow I was using a company called Hill tax is acquired. They were filing our vat reports in Europe. It’s like the sales tax in the States. Now, why can the stakeholders different six sales tax in each county, county, in your opinion, issue of that rich culture? So we’re doing that for us? I get to know the founders in the meantime at the Itagaki Nick, your decode of partnerships and affiliates for your company can replicate out from here with our skinny on devices, how we can grow Hill tucks with partnerships. So let’s tuck him in. Liz Lemon, I’m too young to retire, my wife told me that I’m getting them but they don’t work. So I’m gonna take your offer. And I do that. I mean, the first thing I did is I checked in olders correspondence with partners. And what they saw is that a lot of partners were complaining that the partnership is very one sided. Here, Walters was expecting to get without giving the Gollum guys, this is not scary, the partnerships were only gonna give. And by giving, we’re gonna get in this, okay, Howard Schultz said, don’t worry about it, we’re gonna create content, we’re gonna find partners, we’re gonna connect partners, and they have this approach with partnerships when they meet somebody, even if I’m not an ideal fit, I must have a partner who can be better fit than me or cookie appel. So the idea is, I would say no to anybody, I’m always gonna find somebody and they just connect people either. I meet somebody created with somebody, and then a few other companies know, in the space, one of them is called Zoho. The other ones is merchant spring, they said, organic. Can you do it for us? And I said, Okay, guys, you just gave me an idea. I’m gonna set up a partnership agents, and we’re gonna help you guys get other companies to help for partnerships. And that’s one story short is I give advice and help over 40 companies since then, many of those companies are still quiet. And the main thing about partnership is we’re helping those companies to grow up without spending any money on paid marketing, what they do they create content like we do with you right now. You know, it creates content, the content stays, you have a partner, the partner is distributing the content, there’s more more company sees, you know, the the outreach to you know, you just stopped with them. So that’s the long story short, know how I got into partnerships. But I can continue to talk forever. But I assume that we might have a question. So we can go like into a detail about the partnership stuff in?

Matt Watson  07:03

Well, so from my experience, my, my very first company was going to call VinSolutions. And we sold a CRM system to car dealerships. And we were selling it for 2000 $3,000 a month. And it we were very rapidly growing, we ended up being the number one CRM system and for car dealers, and people all the time would come to us and ask us to sell their software. They wanted us to sell their stuff. We they wanted partnerships with us. And the problem that I always had is like, why would I spend my time selling your stuff when I could spend my time selling my stuff? Right. And so it that I think that’s the problem, that’s the struggle with partnerships is it’s got to be a win win. And so it the partnerships made sense for us if it helped us sell our product, or if whatever we were partnering with, like, we partnered with some data providers and things like that, that made our product better. Right. So by selling that thing, it was kind of one plus one equals three. And to me, I think I feel like that’s always been part of the struggle with partnerships is they’ve got to be a win win for both sides. Or, or it’s the type of partnership where somebody’s just looking to be an affiliate, and they just want to sell all sorts of things. They’re trying to make like a small percentage of the share, whatever. What What are your What are your thoughts on that?

Nick Penev  08:23

Exactly. I mean, you you actually just hit the gold nugget. No, the when we think and this is why a lot of companies are doing it wrong. Why is it? Why should they spend time selling your stuff? Yeah, why? Okay, I’ll give you exactly how I answer your question. So for example, we’ll give a LKL toxin is an example that can give a lot of agents an example, a client comes to them, and they tell him okay, I would like to sue in Europe, or who lives here in the USA. Okay, do you have sales tax compliance? Do you have VAT in Europe? Do you have product compliance? No, we don’t. Okay, go and set it up and then we’re going to talk with you. Okay, so what would be the alternative? I mean, the alternative would be to say came in don’t worry about that. I have a partner A who is going to help you with the VAT I came a Partner B who is going to keep up with the product compliance and your partner and see who is going to cover the logistics partner Dee who is going to cover translate Yeah, so so instead of telling them Okay, do it do the stuff yourself and come back to us? You tell them okay, I’ll help you out. And then once you’re ready with all these things, because some of them might be needed before your service then where you got like your appealed so how do we know about the first thing is you don’t need don’t turn down the client. People don’t like to be rejected regardless for relationships for business, whatever. So by helping this guy, he might not return as a client because he might find the cheaper service but yeah, he’s gonna go to partners are going to help him out. And it’s very likely that those partners are going to return the favor. Yeah. Even even if they don’t onto that, this guy is gonna say, You know what, I friend them my old way too. And you’re going chat with these guys, they were kind of expensive for me. But they had this huge network, they helped me set it up. So there is no way that you can lose by doing that. The other alternative is that you’re not different other guys, because what they’ve not seen a lot of companies waIks, they just want to sell their service, they don’t care about the risks. But this is the, this is actually a short sighted thing, because you should be a partner of your clients, not just somebody who would like to sell them stuff. And, but of course, here there is another equation, some partners, so they receive, they don’t give back in return. But this is the thing with the partnerships game, you know, when you build a Partner Network, you shouldn’t expect that you’re gonna find Corp, you’re gonna find five companies who end up ideal clients, you should find 100 companies, it should scare away multiple companies for each problem that you need to solve for clients. So you can actually screen those guys, you’re gonna send coin to those guys, two delegates, and you can see what they do in return, how they treat the client, to their return the favor, are they reliable? It’s as simple as that. And that’s what they tell everybody, we have a meeting, we’re gonna do all these things with you. I don’t care what we just discussed, what we do after the meeting is going to show us if we’re good partners, or no, so a partnership is about the action after you meet not water promising to each other.

Matt Watson  11:29

So let me see, let me ask you this, if if I own a business, I’m listening right now. And I’m thinking, I’m thinking you need a new chair. But I’m also thinking, I’m also thinking, I need to find some business partners. What where should somebody start? They’re like, Okay, who do I partner with? Like, where do they start? What what what do you what do you recommend?

Nick Penev  11:50

I mean, it’s really easy, by the way, I mean, II, LinkedIn is probably the best channel to find anybody in anywhere, but issued right here wake a blueprint of how we do that. Everybody who starts a business, they should know who is your competitor. If you don’t know that, it will be hard to find partners, because I mean, you we cannot see who your partner your competitor is partnering, partnering with. But the the easy steps are the formula, you’ll find our competitors, see who they partner up with you outreach to those guys, then, you know, what’s your ICP, you actually find companies who provide the same service, but they’re not competitors, you Alfried those guys on LinkedIn. And ideally, you don’t just make sure that when you tell them, Hey, man, I have this service. And we’re like, give us some commission. If you send somebody don’t give everybody gives commission, nobody hears about it, tell them, we’re work with the same clients, we would like to introduce to our audience, we’re going to do something we do, let’s create some content so we can show what you guys do. And vice versa. So the best way to grow a network or a business is by actually giving to the others no, because first now you will see okay, but why should they bother with this guy? I’m gonna promote them. Actually, that’s correct. But by promoting them, the parties are going to create content, which you share it on your channels, people see those guys, they share that on their channels, vice versa, they’re gonna share about what you do on their channels. And actually, it’s, it’s actually we call it multi level partnerships. So But to answer the question is simply no, LinkedIn is the best channel for partnerships

Matt Watson  13:26

for finding fit for finding potential partners,

Nick Penev  13:29

exactly in our software. But we’re gonna go deeper into that, because LinkedIn is, is a huge, huge ocean. I mean, I hear like 11,000 followers on LinkedIn, I know probably 1000 of those. Yeah, hit.

Matt Watson  13:42

Well, let me let me tell you about a story. I had a conversation with another founder yesterday. And his company is a CRM, it’s a CRM software, they had a bunch of partnerships with other companies that they had integrations with. So that’s that was the key to their partnerships was the integrations that they could do with basically thinking about him like accounting systems. And so it was, you know, very beneficial for each of for, because the integration for them to work together, and it drove a lot of their business. But they got acquired by by another company. And after they got acquired, all of those partners saw the new parent company as a competitor, they lost all of those partnerships. And now they have a terrible time trying to sell their software at all, unless it comes from leads that come out of that parent company, because now they’re competing with with all these partners that they add. And that’s that’s, that was like you’re gonna have a kind of a dangerous story of an acquisition. You know, it’s like when you’re, when you’re relying on partners, all of a sudden you get acquired and you lose all your partners. Have you seen you seen things like that before?

Nick Penev  14:51

Yeah, honestly, is the first time hear about because integration is probably one of the best way to secure a SASS company. So, but of course, So usually when when the company gets acquired, I mean, the water stuff gets broken. So the soul does no surprise, but the thing is not that’s what they tell to people about competitors. Now sometimes people say, Okay, this guy’s a competitor, I don’t want to chat with you, that is a huge mistake. You know, I talk with all my competitors, I advise all my clients in the company, which we advise to talk with those because sometimes a competitor reduction in the deal partner will give an example, let’s say with your Alteryx company provides the same service. But the company B, who is a competitor, they don’t have the SAS solution, they just have a service. So what happens, they actually use Hello tech service to service their clients are actually one of the biggest partner though. So it doesn’t, it’s never it never occurs, talk with your, with your computer, sometimes somebody might be a competitor on the outside, but they actually service bigger clients or smaller clients. So there is always something that you get or get even in mind, if somebody comes to us or for something, and that’s okay. Do you offer that domain? I don’t offer that. Let me connect with a competitor. Yeah, absolutely. Because see, the thing is no, if you cannot service, nobody should show them all. Because this is gonna benefit you. In the long term, they will say, Okay, this guy is not chasing the money, though, he’s willing to help us. And this is actually good for the competitors. Because you never know, sometimes the competitor is acquiring a company. So this happens all the time. So shop, keeping good relationship is always a good thing. But in regards to integrations, that’s probably the best thing that you can do for any Sass company. But of course, here is there’s why it goes to the psychology, okay, don’t want to share, I don’t want to do that. So that’s always an issue with any company, no, not willing to share, because if they would like to get first without giving in, to be honest, this is probably the hardest thing that I need to actually break, actually to change with companies that we advise, but whilst they see the truth, they soak him in, that’s much easier than before, you know. And I know founders, which are telling me, Nick, I don’t want to get anything. I just want to get here every day, every packet though. And then, you know, while this are giving this document, I have so much business, right. And everybody’s doing business without asking. So this is kind of the magic of partnerships. Yeah, that’s how I’ve grown my company, and giving everybody and people recommend more of my hit for when paid service. I never sell my paid service. If you have a waiting list for that I can even choose who I work with. It was for a reason I put them in a trail. We do sell free stuff we do. And I kind of evaluate though, are you ready for that, because if you don’t understand how partnerships work, you’re never gonna understand that. So this actually how you do with any partner, you know, you do like a list of things that you guys are gonna do in here, like step one, let’s feature on the website. Step two, let’s do a social song. Step three, let’s do a webinar. Step four, let’s do a joint white newsletter. Step five, let’s do a joint offer step six, let’s do an integration. So if you don’t bother to the one, two or three, you can never talk about number six. So this more steps are actually evaluating heart rate here is the other partner to actually work with you, and how productive they are, in a way. So well,

Matt Watson  18:27

you’ve so you’ve got me thinking about this. So you know, our company Full Scale, we do software development, for other people, we have 300 employees in the Philippines. So we can, you know, we can provide senior level software developers at a very affordable rate. We have, you know, dozens of companies that we work with, and we don’t have a lot of partnerships, but I’m always thinking about, you know, what kind of partners can we work with, and, and part of it is, I’m thinking, I’m thinking about our existing customer base and thinking about, Well, who would love to sell stuff to our existing customer base. And those could be the perfect partners for us if they can then turn and sell or recommend our software, or services back to their customers. Right. So. So tell me, tell me a little bit about scale. And and what is what is the goal of scale and that new company that you’ve built?

Nick Penev  19:20

Open Source care, we know, just to expand on? The one thing about the partnership network in the agencies is the fork know, you meet somebody, and you connect them with companies for a good match. They might be quite as they might be partners, it doesn’t matter but this used to be manual, it is how it works. Let’s say I meet you mosque for the first time and they say hey, guys, now we just chatted, I just checked with my Hey, guys. Hey, James, please meet Matt. He’s the founder of skate. What do they say scale, scale up, or scale? False historically, here at Fowler school scale, they’re doing custom development they gave this and that they do this and that And then just connect with people who might be a good fit for you that that’s how it works. But of course, it’s a very manual process, and then figure it out to know what, let’s do it why currently not when you meet somebody, instead of sending them Okay, is it Friday Good to meet is it Mondays at 1pm? Is it’s 5pm, when we decided, okay, let’s build a software where we just share our link, and the other guy’s gonna see who we know, instead of wondering, though, who is a good fit for me, I’m gonna send you a link by Canon. It’s like scale dot, your name, white mutt. And when you click on the page, and we want to see all your partner context, or white quiet context, wherever you consider a warm context, so I hear, I might see, like 510 50 companies in Ghana select five of those, and they say they came up in a click request, it introduced me to those companies. So what we do and of course, once you do that, you expect the same from me, I share my link with my contacts, you go and check who I know, in your request introduction. So we call those introduction or referral swaps, or some people might call them practice referrals. So instead of waiting for a referral to come, instead of waiting for somebody to came up, during our company, which does that you practically introduce the new partner to them and say, Hey, partner name, please meet Nick, Nick is doing this and that, whatever. But all that is produced in the software is a template. So you don’t need to write all those emails, you just select who you would like to meet on the other side to be introduced your company to be introduced and vice versa. And the good thing is that this is not just a one time fee. Once you become a new user, we based on your ICP, we connect with other users who are not competitors. And we design which we call matchmaking, we send an email. Hey, Matt, please meet Nick, he’s the founder of this and that here is Nick scale page, go ahead and check out his contacts and make some introduction requests vice versa. Here is Matt page, Nick, you can request I’m sorry. So the idea is to streamline the referrals. And this actually very good for b2b it for anybody who is selling a high ticket service, because some companies will never require you to trade arteries, them, but you should know them, they’re gonna chat with you. And also, if you’d like to fill out your pipeline, this is the best thing, because he can do outreach as much as you want, because he does my business. Now I have 20 employees, we do outreach, and my pipeline is full. But most people don’t know how to do that. They struggle with booking meetings. And kill skill is eliminating the warmup period, because you just need to connect with one guy who knows 50 of your prospects. You know, you can request those introductions. Of course, the current sales of the scalar is not money, it’s connections. So you pay by giving a connection back together again. And this is as simple as how it works. So you upload your contacts, you create your page, whenever you meet somebody to them, select who you would like to meet, sign up in the broader context. And they can do that the same way. On top of that, whatever, if you have the context, we connect with more users. And we kind of it’s an never ending cycle. The idea is to keep everybody engaged.

Matt Watson  23:29

And so it all works based off of your LinkedIn profile is that

Nick Penev  23:33

not actually we need you here, right now we can, you can work right because CSV import, you can do it manually. But ideally, though, you can correct a cerium as well. But the idea is not to upload your whole client list. Because, I mean, some companies here Wait hundreds of 1000 minutes. And so you don’t want to put everybody. So those should be just your warm contracts. Why? Most people don’t know like 10,000 people who I’ve met, why commit Whiteout, to be honest, like 1500 is the worst. And we check how many we can admit of those guys, with probably half of them, we communicate very often. So I can introduce the museum, but generally know most people don’t have that many horse partners. So that’s why I say weighing 50 is probably the maximum that you would have there. But of course, if you’re weighing a big company with big pipe drive you need to work with everybody can totally give her like a larger list. But the main idea is that you use your existing contacts to get more leads, in a way.

Matt Watson  24:34

I like it. I like it a lot. This sounds great. And sounds like something that can be very beneficial for us at at Full Scale. So let me ask you this in regards to partnerships, do should all partnerships river revolve around some sort of revenue share or just you know referral or what do you recommend there as far as that that side of true partnerships

Nick Penev  24:59

Oh, Okay, basically, I mean, there is different types of partnerships and also the first one is likely to referrals just commission I’m gonna send somebody to you’re gonna pay me commission are gonna pay me a discount or commission or whatever. So the second one is content partnerships. Some companies are huge. Our access companies, they don’t tend to like clients in a referral basis, because many of them actually, don’t talk with your clients. All the onboarding in the signup is automated. So with those guys, you can do a webinar, you can call friends, you can donate it or whatever. In this way, you’re going to get outreach to their audience. So they promote to your audience and vice versa, social subs is the same, use the following in this all content. And there’s actually two more types though, the other thing is like white label partnerships, this actually very successful for many of the users of skill, because a lot of our clients are actually SAS providers in the space. So they meet an agency and aggregator or pick a common provider in DC, okay, I like your software. But I don’t want to send people to your to your software, I would like to wait table games up here, yes, I’m gonna hold on to that, you know, you need to sign the contract for white collar, it’s like 1000 White sis, we’re going to build the poster, we’re going to put the skin on top of that, we’re going to call it power by our company, we’re going to sell it to your client. So this actually one of the most successful type of Parship that we do in the network, because you get one partner who is not willing to send business, we just white papers stuff. So in the worst part is integration partnership. So I can sit in, they’ll either put your tool in their dashboard, or vice versa. I know some companies call it like dashboard swaps, they put like a link on their dashboard. So whenever somebody needs funding, they click on the link in the call to the partner, or they can simply integrate with a partner, you know, and they can kind of refer the clients directly. But these are the, I guess the four types of partners that MC in all the time and whenever we talk with Buddy, we kind of evaluate what what this partner is good for, you know, easy to refer calls. And sometimes they’re good for all sometimes just good for one of those things. But there is no such thing as somebody who is not good for partnership unless they say, I don’t want to do anything. I just want to get this you want to get document from go. Just do it yourself that if you don’t want to get

Matt Watson  27:24

so let me ask you, if I’m a company like Full Scale, and I’m like, Hey, I wish I wish NIC that you would resell our services. What? What kind of revenue should we offer as a? You know, should we offer 10% 20%? Like, what do you what do you recommend, uh, trying to figure out how to split that up, you know, economics of that.

Nick Penev  27:47

Honestly, I don’t deal with money though. My wife is dealing with the managers talk, I just advise people pricing, pricing is not there’s not many things said the thing is with where they help quest to connect, they just make the connection, advise them how to meet, how to stop and never do about the pricing because each company owner should know their margins. So based on their margins, you know, you should know how it works with the general revenue share or partnerships. The more it gets from the partner, the bigger should be the good that you’re giving them. Or it depends how much work their date. So it’s different. I mean, there isn’t like a standard process, for example for permissions, or if commission awaken the affiliate niche on the SAS it’s like 25 30% recurring is waking it up. Okay, but it’s for me Sure. I cannot tell you know, the results like a fixed you know, the minimum should be like 10% the base would be 30% and it’s good to adjust for that because whenever we started writing a company this is the first thing we check, how much do you pay your affiliates and your partners in a lot of standards they pay them peanuts, and I told them okay, why do you do that? Okay, let me know without doubt a lot of mistakes that I’m seeing with a lot of companies they pay their brand new like partners or affiliates higher commission that than existing clients and they said okay, why do you pay your existing clients wait one time create a 50 US dollars and then you pay your affiliates 30% recurring and say okay, because their clients Okay, so you’re punishing them because their clients, your clients should be your best affiliates or partners because they use the software they know how much you’re good or not. So these guys are gonna promote even without money, but you should not punish them. They should get this much as you pay somebody who just a fitting you just to get the commission. Oh,

Matt Watson  29:40

yeah, it’s all over the board. Right? It’s totally different if you’re selling something for $50 a month and at some little marketing widget or whatever, versus a company like ours at Full Scale that could be 10s of 1000s of dollars a month, right? So it’s it’s all over the board nurse. There’s definitely no no one answer, but I think to summarize what you said earlier, you have more white labels, you have different referral partnerships. I like the content partnerships, integration partnerships. Did I miss one? I think that was it.

Nick Penev  30:09

Yeah, it’s actually really fertile content. white labeling and integration. So for

Matt Watson  30:15

Yeah, yeah. And I’ve I’ve had a lot of success in the past with the integration ones in that other CRM system. I mentioned earlier, that example. There’s was integration too. And it was it was really big and event solutions. Those were the integrations that mattered to us. It’s like, you know, we were we integrated with some other vendors. And so we were reselling their product, because it was an integrated solution. So I love those. Those types of

Nick Penev  30:40

issues aren’t tech savvy, you should don’t want integrations that we were did the integration is you don’t need to do white cowork theory for or anything like that. In some companies, just integration. Some companies are doing just content, some are doing just referrals. And some are just looking for white label partnership.

Matt Watson  31:01

What other kind of tips do you have for people out there that are thinking about doing partnerships?

Nick Penev  31:05

In the partnership, you know, it’s really simple. I mean, the water guys are doing core it set up a podcast, invite industry, leaders, let them talk about creating like short form content, post out on socials all the time, people are gonna see that the people that you invite, they’re gonna share that on their content. And of course, like everybody should do you promote your businesses? Well, so give the stage to others, and use them as content creators. And then is a distribution channel for partnerships. And then of course, one thing is you can always still okay, Nick, Matthew, just we just met with you just came out on our podcast, please recommend like five guys that you think we’ll be good speakers for a while. So it’s simple is that why giving you know, I have, for example, a newsletter and on my newsletter, he has 20,000 ecommerce sales, it’s not commercial, everybody would like to pay me to put them here. I don’t know, I just put whatever I want. The open rate is 60%. And the click through rate is 4%. Because the audience was well tweeted, whenever I meet somebody, promote them, I promote them on socials whenever I see something valuable not only for me, but for the community to that. So by giving, you’re actually promoting yourself. And of course, no of you helping others by helping others you’re being remembered the best think about parking, the most important thing about partnership is being remembered because the you’re gonna talk with 1000s of people, you’re gonna talk with your competitors, you know, if they don’t remember your internal guidance, and you are different when you’re really human inquiry about so you need to make sure that you’re being remembered by your partners in of course, other people, which is very important to be if you promise something, you do it. Nobody likes people that promise up adultery. So that’s, I think, is not only for partnership, but in general.

Matt Watson  33:01

I’ve had that experience a lot where I meet with somebody and like oh, I’ll I’ll introduce you to this person or I’ll do this or do that and then it never happens and and yeah, you’re absolutely right, that that’s critical. And you’ve you’ve got to facilitate that yourself if you’re going to expect it from other people and partners, partnerships and referrals are huge like at Full Scale. Referrals is a huge part of our growth I mean a lot of our customers all come from referrals and networking and and that comes from giving right it’s coming from all the all the events you go to and talking to people helping people and to some degree it’s it’s creating noise and you know I love I love what you mentioned about creating content and sharing other stuff. It gives you something to talk about and something to make noise about right at the end of the day the more you make noise the more you talk about it drives drive leads it drives business Yeah,

Nick Penev  33:56

exactly. It just won’t be proud of people this not only for partnership, but in general when you do something try to give 10% external and usually people are not willing to do so for example when they meet somebody it doesn’t cost me anything to just make some introductions. And they tell everybody no do that for your business you’re gonna benefit as much as one only 5% of the people with the reading in this one of the reasons why we build skill because there is no matter how many times I tell them that they don’t do that say okay, let’s make it easier for you guys. I want to do the software you just need to share a link so now they’re doing it by the way but still it needs some pushing. Well Nick How do I do this where they do that so i That’s why I do the matchmaking Hey guys. Here’s the link a CLICK HERE request injection curious a little bit. But anyways man.

Matt Watson  34:47

So is that in? Is that part of like separate consulting you do and stuff or that that’s not part of SkeleT so no,

Nick Penev  34:53

that that’s part of secure means the government is for requirements. Of course we will onboard them but unless they shift their context or skill, we’re not going to connecting with anybody. Because if you don’t have context, you cannot request interactions from delegates. So it should be fear. Of course, there’s companies who use scale only is paid clients, because there’s companies who don’t want to share their country. They just want to receive interaction. So those guys, we have packages for them. You have like introductions you just paid. That’s it. But it’s like, if there’s one case, you’re willing to share context, we’re going to keep on introducing you with new companies who are willing to work with you. So we just need to swap leads and midweek referrals.

Matt Watson  35:36

Well, I’m sold, I need to sign up and try this. For sure. I think I think it can be very helpful for us. And I do remind everybody, if you need to hire software engineers, testers or leaders Full Scale can help we have the platform, and the people that help you build and manage a team of experts, software developers, when they visit FullScale.io. Get an answer a few questions that will match you up to our fully vetted, highly experienced team of software developers. The key is we specialize in building a long term team that works only for you. We do staff augmentation for the long term, please visit full scale.io to learn more. Well, I love this, Nick. And it’s a great topic and great episode and timely, timely conversation about partnerships. Curious if you have any other final tips for other entrepreneurs out there? It could be about partnerships. Could it be about something completely different? Any other final tips for other entrepreneurs out there?

Nick Penev  36:28

Yeah, of course. Man that had been a remote for the last 13 years. And I live on the beach in the summer. I work only four days. That’s my last meeting work of the week if you if you if you say so try to I mean, I mean, I’m not sure if we invented the five day week is bullshit man, you should do all the work in four days because people are not in a work boat on Friday. So try to do less to do more for less time because I mean, this is the most valuable thing and you should find way Quality Partners I mean, everything could be much easier for you but just a tip for everybody just tried to give a little more you know, most people don’t bother to do anything extra so if you just do like five 10% texture you will be surprised how much you’re gonna get all the successful guys are actually giving an effort this Morris our nobody is he has gotten poor or she’s going bankrupt by giving though give a lot of you will be surprised how much you’re gonna get in the world. Regardless, regardless for water, what business or whatever relationship, etcetera.

Matt Watson  37:37

All right, everybody. Well, this is Nick Penev. Again, his company has Scayul. That’s s c a y u l.com and we’ll put that in the show notes too. And you’re also the co founder of Extreme Power brands. Well, thank you so much for being on the show today.

Nick Penev  37:55

Thanks so much and thanks for ya sure the chair have been quiet most of the time. So thank you guys and enjoy the weekend. Everywhere.

Matt Watson  38:03

We’re gonna get you a new chair.

Nick Penev  38:05

Yeah, I can use it the less and less but anyways, I figure okay, my chair is saying good night. Bye.