Ask HN: Tips/secrets for partnering with large businesses?

Perhaps you will find it a bit helpful.

One of the hardest things to do is pitch something where the potential partner doesn't see a problem. And by 'a problem' here I mean 'is causing pain at the moment.'

You can tell a company until you are blue in the face that you will get them more leads, cut their operational costs, or streamline the experience the customers have when they deal with them. But unless the company 'doesn't have enough leads', 'has a problem with current operational costs', or 'has customers complaining about their interaction', all you will get is a thank you for sharing and nary a call back.

The fact is that the larger a business is, the more averse to changing they are. The reasoning is pretty simple, most larger businesses both don't know all of the variables that are going into their costs and customer experience, and they know they don't know all of the variables. Thus, if the system they are using is working for them (for their definition of working, not yours) then they won't change it. All they see is downside (change makes things worse), and little upside.

The only successful strategy that I have seen work with these folks is to find a way they can somehow canary your product with their own real data but without changing anything they currently have. That may take some extraordinary steps on your part to set up a completely parallel chain, but the payoff is that you can tell your future partner/customer, using their own data, how your change will help them and not hurt their existing system.

1.) See gap in market where the existing software is limited in functionality and difficult to use

2.) Develop software where everyone who uses it thinks it's amazing, easy to use, intuitive etc.

3.) Discover that although everyone loves it, it's really hard to market against the entrenched incumbents

4.) We got a salesperson in who after seeing the product agreed to being paid on an if-and-when the product succeeds basis

5.) Started looking for synergies and partnerships to help market it. Our salesperson had a lot of industry contacts and he used them to find out who the best people were to talk to at various organisations. He also managed to get introductions to some people. Other companies he found out who to approach just by doing some basic research, calling the company and asking around etc.

6.) Found an appropriate partner with huge customer base who was interested in providing it to their users

7.) They show interest, get NDA, legal agreement etc. drawn up, start negotiating

8.) Spend months demoing product, negotiating, graduating into meetings with increasingly senior staff etc.

9.) The main person we were dealing with is replaced with someone else, things go very quiet for a while

10.) After much deliberating be told that they've decided that the product wouldn't provide sufficient benefit for their users so they've decided not to go ahead

11.) Watch them launch a grossly inferior clone of your product a year later and win sweeping accolades

12.) Lawyer tells you initial legal agreement isn't worth paper it's written on

Then we considered open sourcing the product, but it turned out to be a nightmare because we'd used so many 3rd party components that it would've require huge amounts of work to get to a point where we could do so and we'd poured too much time and effort into it already.

As you can see, plenty of mistakes were made. I learnt a lot in the process though. I don't regret a moment of it.