Partner programs can be a big source of revenue and thats true in rest of world markets. Innovation that happened in US or other markets need local partners in rest of world such as Middle East, AEAN and ANZ to take their offerings to scale. Now a startup called GrowSumo is working to make those programs easier to manage.
GrowSumo is part of the current batch of startups at incubator Y Combinator. Even though that first product didn’t work out, it made Jones who is Co-Founder and his team aware of another opportunity. Apparently they had friends in the web development community who wanted to recommend the collaboration product to their clients, but their efforts were stymied by the lack of tools that would help them build a real partner program. “In order to scale our business, we needed to manage this complicated partner program… and there was nothing on the market that supported that,” Jones said. “There were tons of referral marketing tools, like influencer tools, but there wasn’t anything that somebody could build their business around.”
He added that businesses with a significant partner program will eventually build their own in-house tools, but that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars or more to maintain — a big expense for an early-stage startup. That’s what he and his team offers to simplify in much better way.