A quick recap of the PhD from this week:
- Find a Balance
- Curiosity Wins Partnerships
- Partner Ecosystems Are Diverse
- Share the Signal
- Creative Destruction
Recently published:
- PartnerUP Podcast #75 - Bootstrapping a Partner Led Business, with Andrew Gazdecki
- Announcing the First Ever PL[X] Summit!
- Sunday Stories: Turning Support Request Lead into Service Partner Gold by Isaac Morehouse
- What PRM Can Learn from CRM by Rob Rebholz
- Howdy Partners - Welcome! Episode 01
- Howdy Partners - Why You Need (Or Don't Need) A Partner Program - Episode 02
- Q & A With a True Hacker by Aaron Olson & Mauricio Rojas Hacker
- The Power In GoToEco Bundles by Allan Adler
- New Podcast Added To PartnerHacker Network: Howdy Partners
- What Agencies Want (Hint: It's not Revenue Share) - Upcoming event with PartnerHacker & PartnerPage
Liebig’s law of the minimum and finding your 'Herbie'
So you've got a really broad, diverse, complex ecosystem.
It feeds on many different inputs. Companies. Ideas. Time. Money. Meetings. Transactions. Relationships. Events. Content. Integrations. Users. Support. Sales. Marketing. Product. C-Suite.
While it's true that the more complex an ecosystem, the more stable generally, there's something to watch out for.
Let's peek into the world of agriculture and explore Liebig's Law:
A plant’s growth is limited by the single scarcest nutrient, not total nutrients.
If you have everything except nitrogen, a plant goes nowhere. Liebig wrote, “The availability of the most abundant nutrient in the soil is only as good as the availability of the least abundant nutrient in the soil.”
Most complex systems are the same, which makes them more fragile than we assume. One bad bank, one stuck container ship, or one broken supply line can ruin an entire system’s trajectory.
From The Collaborative Fund
Not every input in an ecosystem is a necessary nutrient, mind you. You can have a lot of ancillary stuff that benefits your ecosystem without being required for its survival.
For example, there may be an influential podcaster who gives friendly mentions of your product. This is a great contributor to your success in the ecosystem, but if it stopped, you wouldn't likely die.
But for the inputs that are necessary nutrients, they aren't all interchangeable, nor can you only look at the most abundant.
Instead, look for the least abundant. What's the single most scarce necessary ingredient to your ecosystem's success? How can you unlock that supply of that?
Find it. Put it out front. Once it's no longer the constraint, find the next one. You're never done. Stable equilibrium isn't possible. But stable enough growth is.
