I ran an agency for a large part of my career called Right 2 Revenue where we focused on setting up user and client acquisition funnels for various verticals. From there, I ran growth as a Vice President and early team member for platforms like Carlease.com, Curiosity.com and Younity.
In those roles, I relied on Partners to quickly ramp up my brands presence in a new space (i.e. car leasing - we were not auto industry veterans, so we had to learn, build a platform, and market simultaneously). I was always known for being able to do a lot with a little. And partners were a huge reason for that. I still had never heard the term “Channel.”After those platforms came and went, I launched my own called Automated.af - focused on linking top marketing and sales automators with companies who needed them. I built a large Slack station with agencies and thought leaders. I also built a Slack application that deployed pre-built automations for teams. But, I knew I wasn’t thinking big enough.
After writing a GTM strategy for a SaaS client that included a partnerships strategy as the key pillar, and hearing the founder question “Why not SEO or sales as the key pillar?” I realized how little most founders knew about the power of partnerships. That night, I bought the domain Partnerprograms.io and set out to educate and build the platform for partner-led growth.
Nic at Recart said: "Partnerprograms has been our #1 agency provider..."
Shruti at Chargebee said: "Partnerprograms gives me the confidence to speak to upper management and tell them that agencies need more than just commissions."
Maddy at Smith.ai said: ""The tone is set from the top, and it's action-oriented."
Alex founded his first agency called Right 2 Revenue in 2006 with the intention of creating full transparency marketing programs to help his clients learn to operate the strategies without him. While this was successful - the agency secured dozens of $5K+ retainers, the unique model of training the clients while executing was too altruistic and not scalable. Eventually, the agency morphed into a directory called Automated.af which helped match marketing automation experts to businesses who needed them. In operating this marketplace, Alex discovered how few of these saas platforms in the automations actually enabled the agency experts to sell services on top of their solutions. This was the genesis oof the research which inevitably became Partnerprograms.io.
Along this line, Alex found Advisor's Clodagh Higgins and Rachel Jacobs to help ensure this organization was built with an agency culture and not a saas culture so the product would benefit the agencies we work with.
Alex began working on two-sided marketplaces in 2010 on the team of a home service marketplace that competed with Thumbtack. After that, Alex helped launch a daily deal management marketplace to help businesses manage their daily deal channel. Then in Chicago, Alex ran growth for Curiosity.com and FactoryFix.com. This experience of working between experts and org's looking to use their expertise was necessary to Alex's understanding of how alignments work.
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