Over the past years, I’ve received literally hundreds of offers from businesses, some legitimate, some not, to partner up and make lots of money. I’ve never really been able to figure out which ones to follow up on and which ones to dismiss.
Generally, I just email back anyone who mentions my site somewhere in their email, and ignore the rest. I also tend to dismiss emails from people who use Gmail, Hotmail, etc., instead of an actual business email address. The way I see it is that if a business is unwilling or unable to immediately provide a reference website, I probably couldn’t expect them to know much about web marketing.
Recently, out of the hundreds I’ve answered, a few are actually turning into real money and may end up being the key to profitability. Sometimes I wonder how much money I’ve lost in development time while answering all the bogus emails, though. I really need to figure out how to filter out the crap.
One thing I’ve started doing lately is asking myself these two questions:
1. Will they make more money than me if we partner up?
2. What is their alternative to my company?
If #1 is no, I don’t proceed with the partnership. If someone solicits me, and I don’t think they’ll make more money out of the deal (if it’s because it sounds like a bad idea), I don’t bother to reply. One thing I’ve discovered lately is that if the person on the other end doesn’t end up making much money off the venture, they also don’t tend to put any effort in to marketing it.
#2 has been great for me, because I offer a service that doesn’t have any direct competitors (yet). When I say direct competitors, I mean professionally designed sites that offer services with the same price point, of which there are currently none. I did find myself in a situation the other day where if I didn’t partner up, they would squash me, but I think I came out on top at the end of the day. At some point I an going to have to address this however.
I guess none of this really matters right now, but when you have very little money, it’s hard to turn down offers. The question really becomes, will I make more money spending my time developing this partnership, or developing new features?
