How to approach partnerships in Web3?

Partnerships are a fundamental aspect of your go-to-market strategy. Let’s begin with a quick recap of GTM.

What is go-to-market? Your GTM is your plan for how to bring a product to market.

Typically this process looks like this:

1. Build your product

2. Define the target market you are selling to

3. Set pricing strategy

4. Determine the appropriate messaging

5. Decided where and how to reach stakeholders. 

The last is typically where most protocols struggle - how do you acquire and retain new stakeholders? In web2 your acquisition funnel looks something like 

Fundamentally, forming strong partnerships is a crucial part of any project’s go-to-market strategy. So what framework can help us achieve this?

Framework

1. Stakeholders & Need/Purpose:

Start by defining your stakeholders and understanding their needs.

Who are the stakeholders?:

• This should be easy to articulate. If you can’t articulate what you’re building and who it is for, perhaps it is time for product introspection.

• Being able to articulate in detail your stakeholders opens an aperture of stakeholder purpose pairs and more partnership opportunities.

• But at a very high level, these could be

  • Existing users of your platform.

  • Potential users who could benefit from your product.

  • Partners with complementary products/services.

  • Web3 influencers, streamers, and creators.

Need & Purpose:

• Who are you building for? Why are you building for them?

• If you are building for existing users you should look to: Increase the product's utility, improve UX, and ensure their needs are met.

• For potential users: Offer a unique selling proposition, help further the use of their capital.

• For partners: Find areas of mutual benefit. A partnership should enhance both parties' value propositions.

2. Types of Partnerships:

There are two main types of partnerships: Product and Distribution. Decide which type aligns with your growth objectives.

Product Partnerships:

• Integrate complementary solutions that enhance your product's capabilities.

• Identify platforms, dApps, or services that would benefit from an integration with your solution.

Distribution Partnerships:

• Find mediums that can distribute your solution to their user base.

• Target platforms where your potential audience spends significant time, like Twitter and Discord.

Co-marketing Partnerships:

• Combine efforts with partners to run joint marketing campaigns.

• Ensure the joint solution brings tangible value to users, avoiding partnerships for the sake of it.

3. How to Establish Partnerships:

Work back from growth objectives

• Decide on key performance indicators (KPIs) for partnerships.

• For instance is it user acquisition rate, engagement levels, etc.

Prioritise partnerships by value

• Prioritize partnerships based on potential ROI, mutual value, brand alignment, and audience overlap.

Plot partnership targets

• List potential partners that align with your strategy.

• Prioritise based on how they can help you achieve your growth objectives.

Identify personas & outreach

• Determine the key decision-makers in potential partner organizations.

• Tailor your outreach strategy based on their personas, focusing on mutual value.

Examples

NFTPerp

NFTPerp are a perpetual futures decentralised exchange for NFTs on Arbitrum.

NFTPerp recently partnered with insrt finance who are an aggregator for NFTFinance. Their product allows you to deploy capital into passive strategies within NFTfi, for instance, one being able to borrow against your NFTs.

How does this benefit NFTPerp/users?

• Financial strategies for any NFTs they may own

• Leverage each other’s products, user bases and strengths

• Benefits

  • Co-marketing

  • Product and user acquisition

Caviar AMM

• Nft AMM that unlocks liquidity for different rarities of NFTs

• Traditional AMMs have focused on floor-tier NFTs within collections. This makes liquidity sourcing and pricing rare NFTs permissionlessly extremely difficult. 

• Put rare NFTs into AMMs so there is liquidity for them at scale  > would also allow NFTPerp to price rare NFTs but currently not offered as there is little demand for the product.

Camelot DEX

Camelot is an Arbitrum native DEX. As part of their launch strategy, they announced a series of Round Table partnerships to launch liquidity for many top DeFi protocols such as GMX, Redacted Cartel and Equilibria.

What are the synergies between such a partnership?

• For Camelot - they can list and support a broad range of tokens, including ones with high amounts of attention, garnering greater attention to the crypto community.

• It also increases liquidity > better price execution > more traders. Partners bring in high amounts of liquidity, they can also help to seed initial liquidity on the platform too.

• DeFi composability - more interaction between protocols helping to grow respective user bases.

• Word-of-mouth marketing - the customisability of Camelot’s DEX mechanism can help to attract other projects that may benefit from such features too.

• User acquisition - Camelot received an allocation of $vlEQB which was airdropped to $xGRAIL holders.

Maker & Maple

MakerDAO are the builders of DAI, a decentralised stablecoin. They ran into the issue of scaling DAI in a long-term sustainable way. As DAI was predominantly backed by volatile assets, during market downturns they needed more stability which is why they looked toward centralised assets such as USDC and other collateral sources including real-world assets.

Maple Finance are the provider of capital markets infrastructure that enables credit experts to underwrite large amounts of capital to institutional borrowers. Capital is aggregated by DeFi users into liquidity pools with legal backing. At a high level, Maker’s D3M module can directly mint DAI into another DeFi protocol that requires liquidity, and back the issued DAI with LP tokens issued by that protocol.

• As Maple deals with institutional loans backed by enforceable agreements, its LP tokens symbolize a lending portfolio backed by real assets, Maple can issue LP tokens, which can be integrated into Maker through D3M. 

• Maker can then onboard multiple Maple pools within each sector with experienced fund managers for sector specialization.

• Direct minting via D3M helps to grow DAI’s supply into other protocols that require liquidity. When integrated with Maple, this means that MakerDAO can instantly mint and supply DAI to Maple's liquidity pools as needed.