Sub Club Podcast: App Growth Through Strategic Partnerships: Adam Allore, Wavve Boating App

0:00hello I'm your host David Barnard and with me today Revenue cat CEO Jacob idy Our Guest today is Adam allore the founder and CEO of wave boating wave provides a better Marine navigation experience that is easy collaborative and fun on the podcast we talk with Adam about Landing PR for a niche app negotiating strategic Partnerships and how pretending to have an app helped validate that he should actually build one hey Adam thanks so much for joining us on the podcast today thanks so much for having me uh huge fan of the show so it's an honor to be here and Jacob nice to see you on a Friday morning David

0:41it's my dream we got to talk about apps we talk about boats we get to talk about strategic Partnerships I'm thrilled let's go yeah I do want to dig into strategic Partnerships I think it's something more apps should seek out and I think you got a lot of really great lessons that other apps can learn from in that respect but before we get there I think it'll help to have a little bit of context around What wave boating is so tell us the story how did you get started with W boating and what is it yeah sure thing so I went to school for mechanical engineering and to pay for

1:15that education I worked at marinas and while there I kind of realized people really struggled with reading nautical charts and it's a fairly crucial point to be able to have a good day on the water kind of knowing where you're going and not ultimately running a ground so fast forward five six seven years I'm working as an engineer climbing the corporate ladder there and I really didn't have a lot of opportunity to be creative so I had this side project in my head which was I'm going to rethink how a nautical chart looks like the traditional nautical chart the way it's designed is so that it's easy to Mark

1:52with a pencil and it reduces ink when printed so thought I was like okay in digital age let's re-evaluate how this thing looks and I want to make it custom to me as a boater and to my vessel and the initial concept was where you go on like a personal watercraft or a jet ski which only draws six inches into the water versus a sailboat that draws six feet into the water those vessels have very different places where they can go especially when they're a close to shore I want to build a map that would just show me where I could go in blue and where I couldn't go in red you know in a

2:28sense kind of like dumbing down the experience so you don't have to know how to read a topographic submarine map right exactly like just try and keep it as simple as possible and so my goal initially was I want to build a map that I would use so I was using some free GIS mapping software I got a sample of nautical Digital Data from Canadian hydrographic Services a Canadian company here and just started messing around and built a map that I was excited by and that I would actually use out on the water so completed this project was excited was proud of what we had and

3:01then coincidentally 2 weeks later I learned that there's a boat show in the area and this is where my life started to go down more an entrepreneurial Avenue where I was like you know what what the heck I'm gonna get a booth at this show I'm GNA see if anyone else likes my map essentially so I took this map I hosted it on a web page and added it to the home screen on a couple iPads so it looks like it was an app but it was just totally a dynamic map on a web page and went to this show and was like oh right you got to have a company name

3:33right so name this company well wave with two v's asking why well the domain name for wave with one V was taken so went for the double vs and away we went and went boo had a booth had a couple iPads there had this map and it was one of those weird experiences where things go better than you expected I was just getting tons of positive feedback of people seeing this map of this area saying hey I really like this like I want to use this and then I was also seeing people starting to get a little attraction at the booth here going into the app stores and trying to find wave

4:07with 2vs and coming up with nothing and be like where's your app I can't see this and I was like oh okay give me your emails we're in beta your emails I'll let you know when this thing gets released and that was the point for me to realize that I had something and I was going to pursue something I was still working full-time as an engineer at that point and and the quantity emails that we got was one thing but seeing people kind of light up and get excited by that map and that experience that I built that was what gave me that confidence to quit my job and pursue

4:42this thing full-time and make this beta a reality that I was telling people about how much did it cost the booth do you remember all in all probably less than $ thousand dollars that's good that's not bad you know a fake app that you built side hustle with your GIS and a $1,000 booth and I mean more entrepreneurs should be that Scrappy to go validate your idea with a fake iPad app are you just unshame I think a lot of people would get afraid of that because they'd be like oh I don't want to be caught right like I don't want to seem like I'm something I'm not and like

5:15stuff like this but and then I think other people are just like I don't care what other people think and they'll try things you know no there was tons of impostor syndrome going on at the time I me but apparently cuz you literally were an imposter at that point so I think probably an okay diagnosis remove the syndrome part I would right always makes it easier right then it's not really a syndrome then it's just it's just truth I've just seen so many people like I have this app idea and then they go hire a contractor or they spend six months building it themselves so by the time

5:47they get any Market validation they're either like months and months of their own time or they're even figures in the hole Yeah $50,000 upside down before they even get any level of Market validation and L pictures a lot of people listen to this podcast probably are the app person in somebody's life right so you've gotten the pitch hey I got an app idea I just need somebody to build it and I'm like well have you literally like drawn it out and asked people like would you use this have you like done any interviews have you built it with a spreadsheet that's my favorite when people pitch me

6:19something I'm like you know this would work with just like a spreadsheet and you could operate it out of email like you should try that first and see if people care right or in your case just like a picture and see if there's any response whatsoever I mean this is I don't know I guess part of the show's thing but that I think it causes a ton of failure to start for people because people don't go just like what is the bare minimum investment and like $1,000 that's even kind of pricey but if you're thinking about launching on something like just heads up $1,000 going out of

6:46your pocket is going to be something you have to get used to like when you're you're trying to build a business right exactly and I'm kind of weighing at this point like a career change right like do I leave my comfortable engineering position there to go full risk so for a thousand bucks it seemed worthwhile at the time yeah even if it had been a negative result it also would have been worthwhile at the time because you wouldn't have ruined your life trying build an app what he cares about right right on so you get this initial excitement at the boat show you've got emails of people but you've got no beta

7:18to actually send them which you promise them what's the next step in the journey to actually build that beta and start actually building an app yeah so I knew I wanted to build something first my Approach wasn't run out for investment at this point it was get to the next level seen that excitement in people eyes that's great that's one thing would people open up their wallets and give a credit card number was sort of the next thing that I ultimately wanted to validate so my thinking was okay I've got the skill sets that I can work on these Maps I can build the maps mobile

7:49Dev is where I'm lacking and I'm going to start with an IOS app so I found a local contractor to essentially build that wrapper so that we could put these maps on an iOS device and I could get some early traction with that so worked closely with this contractor was just self-funding this aspect of it paying for that development to get something out in the store as quickly as possible and admittedly like it was bad like it was it was very bad it had the map people like the map but everything around it was like bare bare minimum but it was I think in hindsight enough to

8:27draw an attention from early adopters just what I needed at that point and that's the key I think a lot of folks missed too is like in the idea of an MVP the minimal viable product you had the viable part it was the map people Lov the map the map was the True Value prop and so rather than focusing on the fluff you got that valuable part out and people cared oh I mean in fact it's the right way to do it cuz if one there's the investment aspect right it but probably cost you 10 times as much to make it two times better right or

8:58something like that that in terms of like having like a good experience or like getting App Store Rewards or whatever your benchmark is but the worst part is that that I think actually hide signal right because if you can get people excited about a crappy app it's not going to be scalable right because it's crappy right because it's got problems but if you can get people actually using it despite all and that's the hidden secret of launching an MVP it's one half is about it is moving fast the other half is you really shouldn't work on something unless it's got such a pull from the market that you're going

9:28to get people using it despite the problems because that really tells you there's a need you know if you build a really pretty app you might like load people into the app for those reasons and it's just not going to be that sticky because honestly that stuff is pretty replicable right like making a decent app experience like you can spend money and create that having like a unique product ins sight that's more rare that's where your margin's going to come from and you should test that in that first MVP and if you get anything then it's signal that's kind of a continuation of what you did with the

9:54boat show right it's like what's the minimum I can spend to get some validation and then like do that again right and I'm gonna guess the next stage was to do that again yeah and just keep going and then I mean from there it was starting to prove people would actually pay for this solution and I'll step back a little bit like as much as recognizing that the map was so important like the yearly MVP we did add in other feature sets and functionalities and just realized that those weren't ringing true with people like there was an emergency response functionality to it that thought was oh this is gonna be amazing

10:26everyone's gonna love it this is why this thing's goingon to Skyrocket but it just kind of came back to like no we just like the map I was like okay all right focus on that but then yeah naturally the next thing was then how do we get some traction with this you know the build it and they will come unfortunately isn't really true at least in my experience you kind of have to drum up some excitement and get some people coming in and downloading it so that was sort of the next thing it's not a completely clear Market you're coming into right there are other antical chart

10:51apps and things like that even with a different take like you're going to have to find some wedge and figure out how to like steal Market Shar and so yeah what was that wedge for you you had those emails but I imagine that was like tens to low hundreds of emails by the time you got to launch so that's not enough to really I mean it's enough to like get some validation but not enough to like really Kickstart a real business so what was that first step to start getting real traction yeah it was really took an engineering mind testing approach from there kind of a shotgun to

11:24marketing so tried everything that was available on paid acquisition at the time Facebook ads let's try a little bit there let's try a little Google search run a test I think I was doing you know $500 $1,000 maximum spend test Apple search ads was just actually been out for maybe a year or two that one was actually one of the wins out of all the tests there I remember looking back now like think we're getting downloads for like 50 cents or a dollar the good old days ask my wife for a loan or something and just it all there I don't yeah because you you were still like doing

11:57all this out of your own pocket right yep still self-funding and you know I had the luxury of I'd worked as an engineer for seven years prior to that so I had some savings to give this some breathing room and then tested other things too like going around to marinas with my drone to take aerial footage to see if they put up a poster this is one of the failed attempts realized that to get find people to find a time to then come and take photo of their Marina to then print out a poster for them to then put it up to then get the amount of

12:28activation on it like it just did not make any sense but it was one of those things you got to try and fail and then one of the things I was particularly successful was actually getting some PR hits on the app itself what I was kind of realizing especially that there's some advantages being in the Marine space is one wasn't particularly inated with Mobile Solutions and a lot of the articles in the Marine space were kind of the same old story you know Mercury Marines got a new o board with like 15 more horsepower same story we've heard for the past 50 years so I thought

13:01there's a cool angle here mobile solution I haven't really touched on it but like there's a ways feature set like Community element to the app itself people are sharing points of interest which is unique I think from other products in the market right exactly exactly so that was kind of a community element was exciting and so what I did with the journalists was recognize like they have a very difficult job I think especially today when there's just so much pressure for them to create content so my thought was like how can I make their life easier and so what I did was first get a huge list of journalists who

13:37were writing in the Marine space and then basically wrote the article for them had all the image ready to go so like this if they wanted it was like drag and drop ready to go here's your piece of content that you needed to execute today done some would still want to do an interview and actually create their own content and obviously would absolutely facilitate that but that was one of those strategies that was was helpful to start getting some credibility and people publishing and writing about wave that's really cool I think a lot of people underestimate that aspect of making it easy on a journalist to tell your story but the other part

14:14you didn't really dive into it but the storytelling part like what was the story you were telling because I think that's a huge part of getting pressed is like you said so many in the Marine space are having to write the next story of this outboard has 15 more horsepower like that's just boring but it's what's going on in the industry how did you tell a story that was compelling enough to get those picked up I think it was just kind of circling back on the problems that I was seeing when I was working at a Marina and recognizing that anyone writing the Marine space that would sort of resonate

14:46with them so one of the aspects of the application was the community aspect and I think that added the exciting part to it so the story there was sort of this here's his application that can allow anyone to boat like a local wherever they go so in wave boating people are marking points of interest you know Ming locations Beach locations fishing locations super helpful like by the way there's a trailer at this boat ramp under the water that somebody left or something you know what I mean there's always like weird things you don't know you go to a lake you never been to before that only somebody who's been

15:18there a lot probably knows right exactly and that's kind of unique with the Marin there's so much knowledge but it's in people's heads and quickly tanging one of the hypothesis there was like would people actually share that if they were given that opportunity that wasn't a known when we started the application was like you know I had this thought that people would share you don't know like we weren't paying them we weren't really incentivizing them but sure enough people do share they can help if they can and that's really exciting so that Community aspect of it I think was the exciting Story part it also was a

15:47little less technical than diving into the mapping aspects of it it's easier to write about than yeah yeah and so really sort of focusing on that part of the solution was what was getting picked up I mean I think that highlights like we try press stuff here you know it's all about us pitching like you said making their job easy right like come up with a story that's compelling and don't be too Shish right like don't just be like show my product you know I got 15 more horsepower whatever right and there's a ton of these in these Niche anywhere there's like a high spend Niche Aviation

16:18has these like boating has these any sort of sports activity there's trade that people get they go out you know I get several for like random organizations I'm a part of and things like this and I imagine probably in terms of like you compare in Tech Broad tech Publications which really aren't even that like Niche anymore they're just Publications compared to like something that's not Tech but it's specifically for your customers like that's a really high Roi Place probably in terms of how much it costs to actually address that also people selling boat motors they've got like manufacturing margins you've got software margins right you can afford

16:54you can afford probably when it comes to like spending into those things and things like that you have margin advantage AG to reaching that audience which is the nice part about building apps right absolutely so skipping ahead a bit some influential people started picking up on that press so tell me about seu and them reaching out to you after seeing some press around wave yeah and I think that ties into one of the main learnings from that press Outreach was initially when I kicked it off I thought it would be a main push from straight user acquisition and it did add value I probably at the time thought it

17:30was going to make this big hockey stick growth once we get this one article published that wasn't the case but like it obviously helped bring you know yeah exactly you know first time found here with this company right so always leading with optimism what I did see come out of that aside from yes some user acquisition was this is how we were getting recognized within the space and getting some Outreach and so this big break happened here where bombard Recreational Products they the largest manufacturer and personal watercraft seu reached out and wanted to talk about an integration and so the story that I've heard from them is that we got a PR hit

18:10in province of Quebec bombard recreational prods is based in Montreal and I guess their chief engineer had used the app that weekend and liked it like the map again and thought it would be a good fit for their target market and they were looking at doing essentially like a carplay Android auto like solution for some future models of cuu so creating an integration where an app could actually run on their units so Rider connects their phone and then it renders versions of the application on like an LCD screen just ahead of the handlebars so BRP reaches out and says hey we would love you to be the nav

18:49Solution on this platform I'm still running this company out of the basement of the house that I'm renting that's when you CC your assistant that doesn't exist right let me let me reach out to my assistant and schedule a call I'm both excited and terrified for anyone from BRB to listen to this podcast but it's all in already right yeah exactly this is just a fun story so extremely excited by that Outreach and so at the time yeah the pitch was hey like we want you to use our software development kit to make this integration possible technically what we had to do was the inter face is controlled by like

19:29like your TV remote like a four-way controller with a okay button in the middle so you had to like rethink how the app works with that sort of human machine interface which had its own set of challenges related to it so we had to integrate onto that and of course they wanted it for IOS and Android didn't have an Android app at this point in time is it actually using carplay or is it it's it's no it's their own solution so tell me about negotiating this step me through the process because I think there's an opportunity for a lot of apps to make their own own way with

19:59Partnerships not just get press and wait for somebody to reach out to you but actually reach out to folks and try and do things like this but okay you reach out to this huge Behemoth in the field or they reach out to you but now you got to step through like how do we arrange this financially like do I bring lawyers on like tell me that stepbystep process of how you went from them having some level of interest to then actually inking a deal the biggest thing that was over arching in the whole negotiation process that I learned was like for BRP looking at us like we are a risk I think

20:35for any big company to say hey I want to partner with you and I would imagine for a lot of people in the app space r was listening like you're going to be probably considered as a risk for these organizations so my goal throughout the entire process was just to mitigate that risk as much as possible someone had stuck their neck out and was being a cheerleader to you have a champion it's just like an like somebody internally has to be your Champion or it just not never going to happen yeah and so I wanted to support that person and I wanted to drisk us as much as possible

21:06and so it really was just some basic like one-on-one stuff like being extremely responsive overd delivering whatever was asked of us making sure everything was timely just as we're going through that process so that they're kind of feeling a little more relaxed feel like you're on it right subtle language the body language of reliability right yeah so I think that was one of the biggest things for sure with that I think also so I recognized the importance of that partnership for us as a company at that point in time like again as a highlight like we early early days I was in the basement of the

21:36house that we renting knowing that Landing this partnership would just add a ton of credibility for the business user acquisition aside like it was going to help put the company on the map and that has a lot of value that like you put a dollar value to that there's a lot of like if this doesn't happen we die scenarios in like early startups right so it's like how do you put a dollar value on that right like an Roi versus this versus not right yeah so I mean I just kind of took approach not trying to be particularly greedy with anything making sure we could commit to something

22:05that I feel could be executed on that being said you know after sign the contract of like here's what we're going to build and when to do it you know there's some minor panic attacks of like okay now this needs to be done yeah but yeah I think drisking not being greedy recognizing the value building relationship when things came from more of a legal standpoint I was bringing in a guy I went to school with who you say you got have cheap legal somewhere you get absolutely that's when you're tapping your friends on the shoulder and he was really instrumental in terms of walking me through like what does this

22:38legal LE mean what do I have to be concerned about and so thankfully that partnership was fairly smooth I think bombard recordal products came from a very collaborative mindset and they were excited to work with us and we were able to sort of facilitate that and ultimately deliver on that partnership for what you can share what was the structure of the arrangement the way it works there is a rider on the COO itself still has to get a subscription to our service to be able to use it on their cuu so they're not paying you per usage no so the consumers there now we've since then

23:15have generated like a discounted type offering for anyone who buys AUM my pitch was like they're buying a $20,000 cuu let's give them a $45 app let's facilitate that that was the main thing there and then they helped a bit with some of the integration costs up front so that helped actually bring in a little bit of essentially first investment into the company oh yeah I mean I think sometimes people don't think about these deals as creatively as they can be built like I've Heard lots of different ones and it depends on the stage you're at and things like this right but yeah sometimes it can be a

23:47Strategic investment for Equity or sometimes it can just be like hey we'll help offset the cost of development along with this I think your point about not being greedy is really important just being self-aware about who stands to gain from what here you don't want to be taken advantage of obviously you don't want to be run over but like being very flexible especially if it's something you're experimenting with I think there's deals that I mean as a Founder I think you can just kind of smell like uh I don't think this is goingon to be worth the squeeze and you should be careful just because some

24:12company you look up to is trying to talk to you about that we've had that here where I think the biggest one for us is people always want to like partner and buy like data sets and stuff from us and these really big companies and like we have like a moral obligation not to do that but you're like who got in touch with us they want to part you almost want to be like how much and you're like no like no can't do that right but I think it is possible as like a small company to get Star Struck talking to big companies and then you can end up so

24:37there's a balance there but yeah you got to be flexible and assume it's not your last contract you know potentially with them and potentially with the next partner and stuff like that right reminds me very much of how we were doing our very first contracts with customers here it's like well legal I just read contracts right like it's in English right like use a good template like they want to change something I'm like it's probably harmless is this going to be what kills us you know there's a limit to that obviously but again if your company's worth nothing what's the risk to signing a contract you probably don't have any personal

25:08liability right if you're coming at it in good faith and using your head things tend to work out but yeah you really do just gotta make it happen right you got to figure it out and where' you go from there so you signed the contract with cidu and they pay you something but you're still in your basement did you raise money at that point and build a team around you to deliver this was there anybody working with you when you were going through this deal or was it just you there was one the iOS contractor yeah when you go to meet the team I have this moment we were pitching

25:39a company that was like 300 people at Revenue cat like very early days it was like 2018 Miguel and I went and it was me and Miguel and like 10 other people in the room and it was like o and then they asked how many people on our team and I lied and said five even though it was like two what is the reasonable sounding number yeah EX I was like but you think five makes him feel any better when you're two I guess it does yeah yeah there's others that's what I should have said there's others oh yeah yeah Jim is sick today Sarah couldn't

26:11make it yeah sorry I had to share that story no totally relatable and that was the position I was in ultimately like I said there was totally like a oh my goodness Panic moment but excitement at the same time so the advantage I had now at this point was the IOS app application was in the store I had proven that people would actually pay for it and then I had a contract with BRP to do something really cool so with that I was able to go out to the local Angel Network here to raise some capital and wasn't anything crazy less than half a million dollars but that was enough to

26:46get things going build up a bit more of a team get the Android application deliver on BRP and grow and go from there and then since partnering with brpc do you've had other partnership so let's talk through that next partnership with Freedom Boat Club and this was another they reached out to you so tell me the story of that yeah this is another fun one so Freedom Boat Club is like an alternative to owning a vessel so you pay a monthly due to into a club and you can take their boats from groups of locations what had happened was one of their team members at their largest

27:19Club in Tampa Bay had read about us in one of the largest Marine industry magazines and was like this is really cool I'm going to reach out and so I was like okay great opportunity I wanted to get in touch with freedom B Club side note the guy who reached out to us is now actually on our team as our director of marketing so this can also work as a talent acquisition tool everything's a talent acquisition tool this podcast is a talent acquisition tool depends on the time you know yeah yeah so multiple benefits going on so with them again what I wanted to do was come from the

27:48mindset of like well how can we help and I think that's another main point is like come from a position of like how can you help first and then go from there and does your solution support support that and then in some cases there may be a thing where it's like I really don't think we can help you as well as another solution possibly could and then you carry on from there but with freedom they wanted to prevent their members from running a ground and having the best time on the water and the vessels are their assets so they're incentivized to keep them in the water

28:15so okay excellent let's provide licenses to this solution to all of your members and cut down on incident rates and maximize their time on the water so they continue to be a free and bow Club member and so that was essentially the deal that we set up with them and was my first fora into I guess more direct B2B sales where we were then selling licenses to wave directly to the club so that their members could use it so from the members perspective it was like they were getting a free app from the club's perspective it was a much cheaper solution than like outfitting the vessels with multi thousand chart

28:50plotters which are like the right preapp solution saving money for them it's not just some like tack on I think that's I mean we Heard lots of customers there's a lot of companies doing these B2B side motions and it has some challenges contractually like building the deals it's a very different motion than building an app in terms of go to market motion it's just a very different beast but ultimately yeah you're right it's like selling a per license thing how much pain was there in making the flows and stuff work did you guys have to invest a lot there was it the first time you've done that in terms of like making

29:22sure that your members have access and things like that yeah it was an extra challenge so I think architecturally I think we ended up going with like a deep linking solution so that we could actually get them past our traditional payall as possible exactly and that was one of the things I learned there was like at least with these early Partnerships like you can kind of go nuts thinking about how people could gamify it and everything else like that oh people hate being stolen from it makes people crazy you know what I mean like you're going to create all this like crazy rub Goldberg machine of

29:48authentication and whatever when it's like just figure out a way to make sure that all the people that are actually paying have the best experience possible and accept the little spillage Maybe right exactly and then my thought was well if that's a problem we'll make sure we've got mechanisms for self- policing after the fact and we can go in and clean things up but let's make sure we make it as easy for people to get activated and that was probably one of the biggest learnings there was in this process we were talking about this sort of activation type and everything else like that the biggest thing was it's

30:14most important just to make it super easy for that person to actually use this application that was the biggest hurdle there is like there's a behavior change that we have to create for these members which is here's this new app they've never heard about that's now offering to them as a club how do you actually get them to click on that email and do that activation remind know they even have access to it right that's the biggest challenge than any of the technical aspects of it and were you getting paid per Activation so you were incentivized to activate them versus getting paid like a flat fee per

30:46250 members in the club and you would get a fee on all 250 or only the ones that would activate we've done experimentation with both for that particular one it was based on a per activation rate I mean it's smart like you guys are going to know more how to get people to open an app and things like that but yeah I think that's you know you talk about renewals are these Partners going to renew on this I think they're going to want to see data they're going to want to know like our customers actually and so this is classic B Tob sit right you don't want

31:12to sell a deal you put a lot of work into a deal if it CHS after it's first period like that's a waste you probably just spend that first period of the deal making back all your investment cost to like get the deal going right if you're lucky you only have a onee payback period it's really important to think about that in the structure of the deal think about how in this deal can we structure it that like we're incentivized to make it successful and they're incentivized as well to make it successful because you know organizations are big you lose track of stuff I think that's been my biggest

31:39learning with Partnerships we've tried a few on and off and unless like there are champions on both sides like highly motivated and you know for you guys it's a growth channel it's never been a huge growth channel for us at least when I was in the early days when somebody approached me I'd just be like ah I'd have to put a lot of energy into this and I think it does not rise above like the other opportunities I have so it's almost as important to know when not to do them because they can like pull you in if you're not ready to commit I can totally relate to and we got burned by

32:07that too there's a couple successes there but there's definitely been some lessons learned don't if call them failures but one of the examples was this was foring with a partnership with a bow rental company and they wanted some webbased solution to manage their members that were using the application as well and at the time I was like okay let's you know I've had a couple wins here I'm going to continue down this Avenue again and then at the end of the day what sort of happening was I just felt like we end up becoming almost like really cheap Dev op company solution for them we're building a custom solution

32:41for them and I'm proud of what we build they happy that's great but then you know I built something for addressable Market of one and maybe I actually could have gone and taken that solution and maybe sold it to other B rental companies but then I don't know that business that's a different business and as I think you're High Jacob like there's a million and three things to do every day you got to be careful it can absolutely be a distraction and that happened to us where it was like hm I wonder how much straight consumer at product development we might have lost during that perod of time counterfactual

33:11like whatever you didn't do because you were doing that instead yeah and like you know we're small team growing there's tradeoffs so hard to say no to anybody to that point right you're like just trying to scrap I always say like anybody who cares about my stupid app meaning Revenue cat in this case like anybody who cares about Revenue cat like I want to talk to and I want to make happy right Partnerships can be a classic trap there where you end up it same with investors too like it's really easy I think to be flattered sometimes as a Founder just because you're used to everybody ignoring you so it's like it's

33:40like it could be a bit of a email right but like you said too it's the you know and I think with especially in like niches I think if you're building a mass consumer product unless you're going to do a partnership with Pepsi or something insane then that's going to be very hard to like pull off at a small scale we've seen it work with some other I mean we talked to I don't know if Alex mcgreg talked about this on the podcast or not they make an app for plant owners plant parents you know they've done some Partnerships with plant Sellers and things like this that had some success

34:07which outside of niches you never would have talked about this 10 years ago right it's just kind of the state of maturation penetration like willingness for Consumer to try these things and it's a strategy I think a lot of people should be considering yeah Alex did share that on the podcast and then I've followed up with him since and they've continued to expand those and are rolling out even bigger Partnerships and it's been a huge success and a huge driver for them of user acquisition getting these little QR codes put in every plant that's sold at these nurseries and now they've rolled that into bigger and bigger plant sellers so

34:41I'm curious for you how these Partnerships have worked out from an actual user acquisition standpoint has it really driven user acquisition and helped Drive revenue or has it been more about that recognition and press and other things that have driven it from a end around I think honestly a bit of both so straight user acquisition probably we're looking at 25% of our total user acquisition is coming through like our partnering facilitation now we also know that a lot of people who are coming from our organic channels I.E like untracked I guess is what we probably call it I've also heard about us from these other things as well the virality and the

35:25influence of those users right and then probably some who just aren't tracked properly right exactly yeah there's that knock on value that's kind of hard to sttion especially I think with Marine space and with boating like there's a natural viral element to yeah I mean that's the niche element Advantage too right if you have a smaller more dense niche of hobbyists like there's a better K factor or whatever in in virality I think than in the general population yeah so there's been a direct and positive benefit and it's clearly part of our continued user acquisition strategy and then the other hard to measure benefit is absolutely The

35:58credibility piece when we're looking at other potential Partnerships people aren't familiar with us they know about bombard recreational prodcts they know about Freedom Boat Club they know about some of our other partners that we work in the boat education and Licensing spaces so there's certainly credibility there that can open those doors and maybe it's not a partnership but it's maybe just some other sort of thing that's getting facilitated yeah it's very interesting I think how you took it from the Press stuff and use that to trade up into Partnerships and then trade those up into bigger Partnerships and it's a whole game of aside from just

36:27different growth mechanisms but like in building something you're always taking what you have and leveraging it into the next thing it's like that gift with the little Domino into the bigger bigger bigger Domino right that's leverage right that's a perfect illustration of how to like take advantage of Leverage and so it's good to have a balanced approach and be like we don't just look at the dollars and sense of a partnership right like it's the dollars and sense of it but then there's also like the Priceless aspect of it of like what does this create for us and I feel like as a Founder you kind of know like

36:53you kind of know when you did a Founders ship or something and it was like yeah it doesn't really seem like this move the needle for US versus one where you're like bringing it up it's coming up people BR mention it to you may not be perfectly measurable but you're like I feel like this did something right and I think that's okay we don't have to have perfect attribution to these things right have you leveraged those Partnerships in Social proof so I was actually surprised not to see any mention of the CDU partnership like in your app store screenshots or anything like that do you feel like those kind of

37:23Partnerships help with consumers to see that your real app with these big Partnerships and stuff I think first off one there's probably a bit of a missed opportunity for us to actually have that on our product pages um you got to go back and get logo rights in that deal you know I made that mistake to the early days yeah yeah that's where legal gets back involved so I think there's definitely value there where I kind of saw this interesting flywheel happen is then you land the partnership and then there becomes another press release right oh yeah yeah and then you just kind of get back into their press team

37:56is like motivated to share it too right it's like something they can put on their social ideally is bigger than your social right yeah and so then there's this other harder untangle benefit of that partnership spinning your PR again to then hopefully facilitate another opportunity we do need to wrap up any other top lessons anything you would advise other app Founders in thinking about how to leverage strategic Partnerships in their business yeah I think just consider how you can help start with that what's the advantage of them working with you and how can you make a difference in their business at the end of the day and even thinking of

38:32it from like a p&l standpoint like it needs to be something that they see real value or it's part of maybe their brand Mission at the time try to drisk the situation as much as possible overd deliver be timely don't be greedy and then just make sure you can deliver on it and have fun and go from there and as we're wrapping up anything else you wanted to share with our esteemed audience here always looking to work with awesome people I know we didn't talk too much about team stuff but all of this is so much easier if you're working with good people and it takes a

39:02while so boats and apps don't temp it's right in my current wheelhouse so perfect so yeah don't be shy reach out I love chat with various people in the space start there and then certainly you know interested in any sort of Partnerships with other applications in the outdoor space that'd be a fun one so that's you please reach out yeah that's another kind of underleveraged opportunity as well like partnering with other apps in the space or other bigger apps who have ad inventory that they're not making good use of Affiliates we talked with cardpointers about finding influencers in the space like there's just a lot of opportunities to partner

39:42with folks and get attention through that so yeah reach out to Adam and thanks so much for joining us on the podcast Adam this was a lot of fun thanks so much for having me thanks so much for listening if you have a minute please leave a review in your favorite podcast player you can also stop by chat. sub club.com to join our private [Music] community