A quick recap of the PhD from this week:
Recently published:
- PartnerUp Podcast #78 - Marketing as the First Mover in Partner Led Everything, with Mark Kilens
- The Path to Partner Centricity: How to Boost Partner Loyalty by Rob Rebholz
- Using Composable Ecosystem Management To Break Down Market Silos by Allan Adler
- Howdy Partners #5 - Partner Qualification
- Measuring Training and Enablement by Jessie Shipman
- The Official 2022 Nominees for Partner Led Startup of the Year
- The Official 2022 Nominees for Partner Led Product Leader of the Year
- The Official 2022 Nominees for Partner Led Marketer of the Year
- The Official 2022 Nominees for Partner Led Sales Leader of the Year
- The Official 2022 Nominees for Partner Led Success Leader of the Year
Happenings
- October 19 - 21, 2022 - ImpartnerCON - Our CEO Jared Fuller will be speaking.
- November 3, 2022 - Crossbeam Connector Summit
- November 7 -11, 2022 - PL[X] Summit, the world’s largest B2B SaaS partnerships event ever!
Layers and layers of influence and affiliation
I came across this interesting app (oddly called Reveel, no relation to PL[X] sponsor Reveal) for doing instant payout splits to multiple parties on digital goods.
Right now, it's mostly for NFTs and web3 stuff, a lot of which is pretty wild and has an unknown future.
But the payment tech underneath this and the basic functionality is a big deal.
This is where things can go when digital money protocols unlock the power of instant very low-cost payments down to fractions of a penny.
This has the potential for a major impact on partner ecosystems.
Consider the way the long tail of affiliate partners get paid today. They typically have to wait for monthly batched payments and face days-long bank delays. They also have no way of transferring or splitting these payments with others except to get it in their bank, then run a whole new set of transactions, all of which take time, cost money, and have to be of a minimum size to be worth it.
Imagine an influencer in your partner ecosystem. They've got a podcast in your market. They love your product and want to get it in front of their audience in some unique ways.
What if you could set up a revenue share agreement that instantly pays them out a percentage of a sale at the time of purchase, or after a specified retention period? On every individual sale? What if your accounting team never had to touch it, but it was programmed in at the point of sale to hit their wallet, streaming in real-time?
What if they had the power to further split that payment any way they wanted? Maybe the audio editor would get 5% of that revenue. The graphics person 10%. The host 50%. They could offer their guest or even listeners who shared it a cut of their revenue share.
Let's get crazier.
What if their revenue share was liquid? What if it was tokenized such that they could sell it, or part of it, for upfront capital to someone who wanted to hold it as a longer-term stream of income? A full secondary market could emerge.
You can imagine building a portfolio. For example, 1% shares of the affiliate revenues from 100 different podcasters, all automatically streaming to the token holder's wallet in real-time.
This may sound fantastical, but the tech is already there. Most of it just needs to be assembled and arranged in a way that plays nice with business ops. I have experimented with and used many early apps and platforms that do just this, and seen payments down to the hundredth of a cent be streamed to multiple wallets instantly from a single input.
Why does this matter to you?
Maybe it doesn't.
But if you're thinking about the role of community, influencers, affiliates, and partner ecosystems in general, consider what could be unleashed if the headache of payouts was solved, if those payouts could be split infinitely down to very small amounts, and if they could be owned and traded by anyone.
How might the waterfall of influence and value exchange evolve?
Sometimes it pays to live in the future that's being built on the fringes.
