Ecosystem development w/ Stripe and partner Aptitude 8 / A8 Labs

Today, my guests are Tim Tsao, Head of Partner Programs at Stripe, and Connor Jeffers, Founder + CEO at Aptitude 8 and A8 Labs.

I get to speak to these two at a very unique stage in both of their businesses.

Aptitude8 launched A8 Labs recently to create products to bridge technical gaps between two products or inside HubSpot specifically.

Stripe has gone all in on ecosystem development.

A little about Stripe’s size for those who aren’t familiar:

• 11 yo. Financial infra, from payments. $640B volume, up 60% yoy.
• 500M API calls daily, 10K per second
• And over 100 people on their partnerships team alone!

The two are 6 months invested in their very strong partnership - Aptitude 8 being a solutions partner of Stripe while A8 Labs is simultaneously an ecosystem partner of Stripe.

Very cool stuff to get into…

• How Stripe won the commitment from Connor to become an early partner of theirs
• What role do solutions partners play in Stripe’s ecosystem
• How stripe buckets partner types
• This unique partner type of service providers who are also ISVs
• The challenge for Tim and the team to sell the ecosystem play internally
• What it means to enable a partner to build a product that solves a pain point vs building a feature to solve it
• How Connor envisions the Stripe partnership to bring in 30% of their gross revenue next year
• How Tim’s partner program will enable Connor to hit that goal
• And we end with some advice on certifications - to ensure ROI

This episode will be great for CEO’s, CRO’s, solutions partners, agencies deciding whether or not to build products… or any partnership team involved in an ecosystem strategy…

Resources:Reveal - A free account mapping solution.

Partnerstack - Partner tracking and payouts.

‍Partnerhub® - for finding and managing your partnerships.

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