Business Partnerships for Software Developers

Step 2: Look outwards

Now you have a list of things that you can bring to the table and a list of things that are potentially holding you back. When you’re assessing a partner, you should also try to take inventory of what they’re good at and what they need. The best partnerships come from situations where both partners can strengthen or augment each other’s offerings.

An Example

Finding the right partner takes a long time! To give you encouragement along the process, Kyle Richter, CEO of MartianCraft shares some of the lessons he’s learned when it comes to finding and working with different partners over the span of his career:

“The partners that work best, at least in my experience, are the ones you know well enough to want to work with but not so well as their is an existing relationship that needs to be worked around. First its important to figure out what you are bringing to the table, technical expertise, leadership, vision, financing, marketing and sales, or something else.

Additionally you need to figure out what skills you are lacking and look for someone who can compliment them. I often see two very technically minded people partner up and butt heads over best coding practices while having absolutely no idea how to deal with money or marketing. A good partner should fill in the gaps.

Making sure you partner with people who have the same values and goals is also vital. If you partner wants to build something quick to sell it and you want to build something you can pass on to your kids you are going to have a rough time working together. Likewise if you believe in building the best possible product with the best people and they believe in hiring quick and cheap to maximize profit or growth it will be hard to grow together. Before entering into any agreement with a partner make sure to talk about what each persons objectives are. Its better to be honest here and bail then to find yourself entangled a year down the road arguing about what path to take.”

Where To Go From Here?

If you’ve read this article all the way through, then you’re either in the process of striking out on your own or are interested in doing so. You probably also come from a technical background, and some of these business concepts may be new to you.

Take a second and think back to the time when you were first learning how to code. Think of that first “Hello World” or the first time you compiled a program or printed something out to the console.

For me, that marked the moment when I started to see computers differently. Suddenly I knew that I could do make computers do practically anything I wanted instead of being limited to the things you can do with pre-packaged software. What a rush of adrenaline. The possibilities were endless! They still are.

If business development is new for you, I hope this article gives you a small glimpse into the world of possibilities of partnering up with different people and companies. If, like me, you’ve mostly worked for companies for most of your career, you may have a tendency to think that there are only a few types of arrangements to choose from: full-time, part-time, freelance etc.

However, in business development as in software development, you are only limited by your imagination. I hope you go out there and build something great :]