Alex Taub

Alex helps you better understand and activate their audience on social media.

Alex is active in the NY tech scene as the creator of the BD Meetup and an advisor to early-stage companies. He has been featured in Business Insider as one of the “Top 20 Under 25” in the NY tech scene.

He writes a popular blog called Alex’s Tech Thoughts, has been published in Fast Company, The New York Observer, The Next Web and VentureBeat, teaches Business Development classes, and has been quoted on many tech websites including TechCrunch, GigaOm, The New York Times, Business Insider, Mashable, and PC Magazine. He is also a contributor for the Forbes Entrepreneur section.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Alex’s success

Choosing the right partners that will support you and your business

Result if you follow the steps in Alex’s session

Have the right partners with the same goal and drive

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

So I mean, you know, using real life examples, you know, at Aviary we launched these AP, you know, these API’s, and we had, you know, 30 partners, and within six months our integrations blew up by, you know, 30, 40 fold because people saw it, they saw legitimate companies using it. The inbound was off the charts, we literally couldn’t handle it.

And that led to more products, more features, and bleeding to integrations from Twitter and Photobucket and MailChimp and Flickr and just insane growth. You know, we’re growing, you know, easily in terms of photos being edited in integrations, easily 20% a month, you know, month over month.

And you know that I left to join the Wallah to do something very similar but for payments, but it ended up being that, you know, Aviary got sold to Adobe. And, you know, that whole team there, you know, works with the whole creative cloud now. And they’re a really big part of the Adobe suite of apps.

So, you know, in terms of putting it all together, I mean, we sort of went through all the different highlights of how you go through, you know, figuring out, you know, in terms of figuring out who you should be partnering, you think about what it is you’re offering, what is the feature set, what is the partnership to be had, and then you just make a hit list of people you want to reach out to. It’s that’s very, fairly straightforward.

You can use like, you know, Google Doc, just put that together and, you know, figure out, all right, we need, you know, here’s all the big companies and figure out what metric you think of big, maybe its market cap company, maybe it’s size of you know.

For us, it was like, how many photos are edited or how many photos are uploaded. That was the number you know, the biggest was Facebook.

But you know, there were small company. There’s a company called Pic Collage. They were small at the time, seven years ago they were really small app, but they had a lot of photos being uploaded and edit and can use an editor.

So for us that was you know, it wasn’t a Facebook but it was a pic, allows us doing as many uploads like, you know, a more popular app like you know, maybe Instagram at the time.

So, you know, while we couldn’t get Instagram we got picked our growth, was, you know, taken off so, you know, this is a really useful strategy to have. Like, this is a good you know, or to have in your toolkit, and really just, you know, it doesn’t work for us.

Everything that you’re going to launch, but there are some things that it really works for. So it’s something to just keep in mind. And something to evaluate when you’re about to put a launch together, you also need to give yourself some time when you have launch partners.

One of the things that is a common theme is pushing the launch off by, you know, two, three weeks a month to get a few more of these launch partners. Especially if you start gaining momentum, and you get, you know, 1,2,3,4,7 your 10, you’re like, oh, wow, I have a lot and you can be like, alright, let’s just go.

But then you’re like having some meetings with some big companies that you think might be involved. You push it off two weeks, three weeks, and that’s not a bad thing. Don’t be afraid to push back the launch to get some decent size partners.