How to grow your startup through partnerships

Partnerships is one of the most underrated growth strategies for bootstrapped startups. It’s powerful, it’s efficient and it’s most often free. Here’s a manual on how to use it.

Photo by Vardan Papikyan on Unsplash

Partnerships are any connections you can use to get yourself more traffic or more deals. VC-backed startups or accelerator alumnae are extremely good in using them because getting “into the network” is one of the most valuable aspects of being admitted into an accelerator or being supported by a venture fund. It’s not only about money, it’s about opportunities, and network of partners provides limitless opportunities for growth.

Just one “little” example: Reddit. This social media managed to use partnerships as a powerful boost for its growth. Everyone knows that first 600 accounts on Reddit were absolutely fake — they were created by the founders just to showcase their platform. But in 6 months the number of users were already dozens of thousands. I’ve just recently found out how did they do it. The reason for the huge traffic to Reddit in it’s infancy was Paul Graham — founder of YCombinator and personal advisor to Steve Huffman, Alexis Ohanian and Aaron Swartz (there’s even a rumour that Paul Graham was the one who suggested the idea). He…