0:00 Introduction

Good afternoon, welcome to Give It A Nudge. Today we have Ryan and Jamie down from the Gold Coast to talk about their business Partnar. Ryan, why don’t you start by explaining who you are and what the business is. Jamie, I’ll come to you after. Partnar is a brand collaboration platform. We match brands together that share a similar customer. If you’re a brand that sells to 18 to 35-year-old females that care about sustainability and wellness, we match you up so you can share customer information, cross-promote products and services, and ultimately win more customers.

4:00 Jamie’s background in e-commerce

I’m originally from Wollongong and moved to the Gold Coast in my early twenties. I played soccer, then ended up doing e-commerce. I’ve started, founded, and sold multiple e-com businesses. I was in the fitness industry, that’s how I met Ryan. We worked together, went our separate ways, he went into software and I went into e-com. We started experiencing the same problem at the same time and came back together for Partnar.

7:00 The problem: iOS tracking and brand partnership friction

With my gym marketplace, the bread and butter was getting gyms on the platform, and I used partnerships to do that. Jamie was always doing brand-to-brand and influencer collaborations. Then iOS app tracking transparency became a real pain point for all marketers. I was at a startup on the Gold Coast growing it through partnerships. Jamie was CMO doing partnerships, and he called me saying there had to be one place where he could say here’s who I am, here’s who I want to partner with, and have people come to him. I checked and that place didn’t exist. So we built it.

10:00 Pre-selling before building

We built a one-page landing page, bought the URL, built a six-page deck, put some designs in Figma, and started pitching to brands. We were still in our day jobs. Every brand was saying yes, when it’s built we’d love to be part of it. They were fine with $200 or $400 per month but that didn’t validate anything. So we created a Stripe account, sent invoices saying pay for 12 months in full and get a discount at $5,000. Two brands paid. We had nothing built. No platform, no developer. Those brands know this now. But that was our validation.

13:00 Finding a developer and building the MVP

We launched on the 6th of July 2022. There were no local developers available; if they were, they wanted $190K a year. We sourced one overseas and hit the gold mine. We’d been through one bad experience with offshore first. But we wanted to make the platform simple and build it in stages: what’s the MVP we can get out there that makes positive results for clients straight away, then make it better every week.

16:00 From launch to term sheet

We launched July 6, signed a term sheet September 6, two months later. We did about 30 presentations. We had three or four serious investors and ended up going with Scalar Ventures in Melbourne. Couldn’t be happier with that choice. We weren’t going in demanding cash, we were just building relationships and saying here’s what we’re doing for future reference. The timing was perfect, couldn’t have been better.

19:00 Narrowing the marketplace and the DTC vertical

We went really wide at first, any business that wanted partnerships. The challenge with that is you miss the opportunity to build verticals, and brands don’t get the experience they want because there aren’t enough matches. So we narrowed to online retail direct-to-consumer brands and SaaS. About 75% of our brands are DTC now. We help them identify their assets, their email list, social following, weekly orders, then understand their objective, and map the process to get there.

25:00 Shopify integration, first-party data, and the long-term vision

We built an integration with Shopify that lets merchants connect their customer list, subscriber list, average order value, and frequency. We anonymise that data and map it with other potential partners so you can see if, say, 10% of our customers overlap with 10% of theirs. That’s the validation for a partnership. Long term, imagine 5,000 DTC brands integrating their data. You log in and in real time see that 10% of your customers are showing interest in travel and leisure, 5% in wellness and beauty. Data that brands can’t get from anywhere else. The brands always own their own data, we don’t.