Moonshot partnerships that can change the game significantly.

There is a big difference between #partnerships that you or your company may have done dozens of times, and 🚀 moonshot partnerships that can change the game significantly.

First type of partnership (could be channel, integrations, etc.) are great, moderately impactful and predictable. If you have partnership experience, you know how to do them well.

🌚 As for moonshot partnerships, you don’t even know if you’ll be able to pull them off. But if they work out, they unlock the entire new line of revenue.

💡 You’re investigating the vertical or the area you're going into very deeply. This is the secret sauce to #businessdevelopment.

While all partnerships are important, in fact in SaaS they contribute close to a quarter of all revenue, moonshot partnerships turn out to be most impactful and memorable long term.

💬 Here is an example how PayPal in the early days unlocked the entire travel space:

“When I joined PayPal, I joined a small team, there were three of us….

Our job was to get PayPal to be accepted anywhere other than eBay…. My remit then was to find people who are willing to accept Paypal and have us process payments for them.

I got obsessed when someone threw up a slide and it showed our percentage of volume. And it said, we do 10% of volume, and then it had a little asterisk at the top, and at the bottom it said “excluding travel”. I raised my hand and I’m like “travel is half of online volume” at the time, this is in 2003-2004. They are like ‘We can't really do travel. They're using OS/400 and COBOL, they are old school and we're using web services API's and we can't do it’.

And I was like there's got to be a way for us to do it’.

I consider myself a commercial person, I took a product guy and an engineer and three of us went and dove into the travel space. We discovered that there was a company that literally every travel provider, airlines, trains, hotels, you name it, processes payments for.

In fact, it was the travel verticals payment type and it's very interesting. You know how American Express starts with 3, Visa is 4, Mastercard is 5, Discover 6? 1 and 2 are from this company. It's called UATP, it stands for Universal Air Travel Plan. They invented the 16 digit bin range that we all use on credit cards now. The reason Amex is 3 is that when Amex launched, they took the next number....

📈 Partnership with UATP was a game changer. It unlocked the entire travel space for PayPal and it changed UATP’s business model.

Watch/read more details in our interview with Roy Vella, who led that partnership. 👇