In February 2023, Danny Porter, former Technology Partnerships and Partner Marketing Manager at Red Canary, was laid off. 

After five years of helping Go-To-Market (GTM) teams leverage the power of Ecosystem-Led Growth (ELG), he realized that many companies with existing partnership programs struggle to manage the entire lifecycle of their partners or align them effectively, often leading to failure.

In June 2023, he decided to create CoPort, a Partnership Lifecycle Management platform (PLM). He also became a consultant and took on all the roles required in a B2B SaaS business — essentially becoming a one-man agency.

With 18 months in the market, he has managed to build up a targeted ELG strategy with his clients and even helped one of them increase 3x their ARR just by giving them access to the ecosystem data they needed to vet, prioritize, and properly manage their existing partners. 

Read on to learn how Danny built his platform and an ELG strategy by leveraging ecosystem data to help his clients prove the value of their existing partnerships and drive more revenue. 

Building a PLM

The vision for CoPort was clear: to create a platform that helps partnership teams manage their partners. Unlike a PRM, CoPort is designed to guide partners through discovery, onboarding, enablement, and the ongoing relationship lifecycle.

“I started with trying to figure out if I could incorporate my methodology as a partner manager into a product that would help other partner managers be successful,” said Danny. “That was my greatest challenge. I’m not a developer by trade. I’ve never learned it, and I had no idea where to start.” 

By embracing one of the pillars of partnerships (introductions) and with the help of a referral, Danny managed to build his product’s V1 on a no-code app builder platform, Bubble.io. He also took a Kajabi course to supplement his knowledge, as he wasn’t a developer. Ninety-nine dollars and one month worth of development later, CoPort was born.

In June 2023, he learned how to build what he thought was his dream product. By July 2023, inspired by the book, The Lean Startup by Eric Ries and insights from Kenny Brown, Founder and CEO of Partner Fleet, he began making sales calls and gathering valuable feedback. Danny then launched his product to test whether it effectively solved a real problem.

Even though Danny knew his product was for partner managers, that audience is still a bit wide. So, during his launch (and in the attempt to get some customers), he had an assumption of who his ICP was. “No one really goes to market with their first product or on first phone call saying ‘I know exactly who my ICP is,” said Danny. “I presented my product to people in my network and asked for their feedback to determine whether it solved their problem and if I was heading in the right direction.”

The key to your first launch is to start wide. If you launch your product into a very niche market, you will miss very important feedback, which eventually leads to narrowing down your audience and product. “I started with partner managers, and after asking what does partnership mean to you, I found that what I needed was to find all those tech enthusiasts, with an ELG interest, ” said Danny.

“And despite all the efforts, no one wanted it,” said Danny. “I couldn’t even use it once I got my first consulting client. I had another partner leader give me some practical and challenging feedback.”

Based on trial-and-error and asking for feedback to the people he knew, in November 2023, Danny was able to rebuild his platform. And two months later he onboarded his first customer. 

“Seven months after first thinking of the idea, our first annual customer contract felt incredible,” said Danny. “We signed a contract with them even though I actually was asking for feedback, and at the end of all the calls, I asked ‘will you buy it?’, and luckily enough, he said yes.”

Just as Winston Churchil said, “Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”

CoPort now has a technical cofounder, Josh Hagel, helping build and structure the product to support the future needs of their customers. “We’re a bit too early to say we’ve found product market fit,” said Danny. ”The only way, at least for us, to find product-market fit is to keep asking for feedback to our customers and market, they are the experts who need a solution.”

The strategy

To launch his product Danny considered some elements: 

• The mentality 
• Partnerships
• The methodology

The mentality

It’s important to realize that when you’re starting your own company, setting up realistic goals is crucial. Sometimes, in the pursuit of “success,” you may focus on the wrong metrics and set goals that sound impressive but turn out to be unrealistic by year’s end.

“One of the greatest challenges in entrepreneurship is time management,” said Danny. “Something that I constantly ask myself is if I have enough time to do a certain play. I had very ambitious goals for 2024, and I couldn’t hit most of them because I didn’t know what I was getting myself into.”

In your first year, you may not hit your customer acquisition metrics. What matters most, however, is doing enough to keep your business profitable. What will help you “survive” your first year is to give yourself space to achieve one small milestone at a time. 

The partnership fit

Coming from a partnership job, the right next step to take would have been building a partnership program. “I know partnerships are important, the hard part is knowing which partnerships were the most important,” said Danny. “So, I first figured which partnerships were not the right time for me. I obviously took into consideration my limitations as a developer — technology partnerships were off the table.”

After vetting resellers and technology partnerships. He then partnered with another consultant. However, here’s where Danny learned one of his most valuable lessons, since that first partnership ended in a no-value relationship for a year.

“What I’ve learned is that partnerships will directly correlate with the growth of the company,” said Danny. “If you don’t have a product, partnerships won’t matter. So though partnerships are in my blood, we’re still building out the means for future growth.”

However, he’s still leveraging ELG in 5 ways: 

1. Allying with consultants to see if they’d be interested in using CoPort for their clients 
2. Leveraging ecosystem data to guide his clients’ partnerships decision
3. Partnering with marketing teams and talking with customers to find if someone would benefit from their software
4. Getting referrals and leveraging word of mouth
5. Planning the roadmap to include tech partners

The methodology 

Danny built up a methodology that within one year, with the help of Crossbeam and CoPort, has guided one of his customers to double the number of customers — 85% of which were sourced or influenced by partners — and helped triple their ARR. 

This client had six types of partnerships in their program (ranging from channel to technology), all in different stages. The problem was that the company kept adding new partners to their program, but the existing ones weren’t delivering significant results. So, Danny’s strategy was to focus on 3 technology partners, that according to the ecosystem data obtained from Crossbeam and Danny’s expertise on tech partners, were highlighted as more profitable and convenient. 

“It’s easy to get distracted by big numbers and miss the work that will help those large partner programs succeed,” said Danny. ”It takes time and focus. By simplifying our approach and betting on a handful, we saw the incredible growth they’ve been trying to achieve over the last 6 years prior.”

Once the partners were selected he helped his client align with their partners, and decide on the partner plays they would action throughout the year. 

“We’re already seeing the pipeline of deals help us achieve that again in 2025,” said Danny. ”The key was to discipline ourselves to manage partnerships one at a time, being incredibly focused and capitalizing on those early wins.”

Here’s what his methodology includes:

‍1. Get his clients signed up for Crossbeam: Identify your partner overlaps, revenue potential, win rate uplift, POC, and number of open opportunities to identify those key partners you have to focus on now.

This will also help you narrow down your ICP and identify your Total Addressable Market (TAM) and your Service Addressable Market (SAM) that you and your partner can service and add value together. 

“Crossbeam helps you find the right joint audience that you and your partner have to target to drive more value together.” — Danny Porter

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2. Align with the partners: Companies have to set their goals and make a plan for this to work. If a company doesn’t have a mission or a plan, then you’re setting your partnerships up for failure. Partnerships can only follow where their company is going, so before you start proposing co-selling or co-marketing activities, meet with your partner and ask the following questions:

• What’s your margin for adding more partnerships?
• What’s the structure of your GTM motion?
• What are your GTM plans for this year?
• Can we sell together?
• Do you believe in our product?
• Do we have a cultural fit?
• Is your company going in the same direction I’m going?
• What should we prioritize first?

3. Start planning the steps and plays both sides need to achieve those goals: Create a timeline and clarify why those plays are important. The important aspect here is to define what are you going to do, by what time you’re planning to achieve it, and why is that important. 

For example, if your goal is to generate meetings, and your partner’s goal is market expansion, and your partner is hosting some in-person events, you can participate in some of those events and co-market together.

4. Do a check in: Besides checking your partner management board, make sure you meet with your partner at least every quarter, and with Danny every six months. This will help you keep track of:some text

• The things that you’re doing
• If you’re going in the right direction 
• If you’re still aligned with your partner
• Update your partner regarding external events like lay offs, product launches, new head count, etc

If, during this meeting, you realize that your partner is not fully aligned with the initial plan, this is the time to pivot and rethink how you can work together. Don’t wait until the end of the year to have this type of meeting, as it may be too late to realign goals effectively.

‍5. Track overlaps over time: Once the partner cycle is done, you can check on Crossbeam how efficient your partner motion has been — the more effort you put in that partner, the more success you can have. 

With this data, it’s easier to tell the partnership story and celebrate the wins.

Last piece of advice 

For those who are building up their company from scratch, are in the early stages of your startup, or are a consultant flying solo, be willing to start slow and don’t forget to align expectations and GTM strategies.

“Learn from your early partners and go and try to identify partners that align best with your company,” said Danny. “Be willing to skip the whales of partnerships. As your company grows, those partners will come, but start small first. Figure out what works well then go and do it again. And again and again and again.”

Unfortunately, partnership teams are often under intense pressure to deliver results quickly, which can lead to signing contracts with unsuitable companies simply to meet expectations.

“The proof of a good partnership is in the longevity of the partnership…sometimes you’ll have to go beyond what’s in your contract,” said Danny. “We’re here to help each other succeed.” 

If you want to make the most out of the right partnerships, book a free ELG strategy call with our team.