Simon is currently CEO at Frenzoo. He was previously APAC head of emerging technology at Juniper Networks. He is an angel investor in startups, and a writer on startups and gaming. Follow his blog or on Twitter.
“If you’re doing a startup, there’s an allure to big brand partnerships.”
You might think: close a deal in a couple months and then prestige, validation, press, growth, new opportunities, and lots more all await. “If I get this deal we’ll be up in bright lights.” Except it doesn’t usually work that way.
The reality is that it’s so hard getting a foot in the door, then signing a contract is grindingly tough. Next, getting a successful partnership that delivers real mutual value is the real challenge, and then you have to do all this without getting sidetracked and accidentally burning your precious funds.
Successes and failures
My startup has worked with a few large brands in the past year. One failed, draining precious cycles. A couple turned out much better, including a successful collaboration with media giant Condé Nast on the new game Teen Vogue Me Girl, launched after months of hard work.
Here are 8 of the startup lessons we learned:
Lesson #1 – Press is the icing, not the cake.
If your main goal is buzz that will lead to more downloads or users or revenue for your startup, brace for disappointment.
Even a mention in major media such as Wired translates to only a temporary spike – we’ve seen this happen. A friend even got a top-tier celeb to promote his new startup, resulting in far fewer returning users than he’d hoped.
We all remember glitzy press launches for projects that end up failing a year later. And those that rose to success without PR. Our new game got only a handful of media mentions but has still grown well despite that.
Whilst press can help for other reasons, such as fundraising, a partnership is a pretty risky and resource-grabbing way to try and achieve those goals.
Press is icing on the cake, rather than the cake itself.
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