July 12, 2025
July 12, 2025
The Hidden Costs of Partnerships
(4/4) How to nail partnerships from Day 1 with Natasha Ratanshi-Stein, Founder and CEO of Surfboard where partnerships drove 55% of revenue early on and contributed to them getting acquired by Dialpad
pascal's notes
"The biggest risk with partnerships is the ownership of the customer relationship.”
Natasha Ratanshi-Stein, Founder and CEO Surfboard, a rare example of a company that was able to nail partnerships from Day 1 and exited successfully to Dialpad after raising a $5M seed round.
Everyone calculates obvious partnership costs - revenue share, integration development, partner management time.
Hidden costs emerge later.
The most dangerous one: Not owning the direct customer relationship.
In that case, partners filter customer needs through their lens. They emphasize problems affecting their platform. They downplay issues misaligned with their roadmap. You receive their interpretation, not raw customer pain.
Distance changes customer perception. Instead of a standalone solution, you become a partner platform feature. Expectations shift. Feedback changes. Loyalty attaches to the partner, not you.
Every insight gets filtered. Every value proposition reinterpreted. Critical nuances disappear. Soon, your roadmap reflects partner needs over market opportunities.
Product distortion follows inevitably.
Next up is the integration tax everyone expects but underestimates.
With only a handful of partnerships, the integration effort is small.
Once you cross 10+ partnerships, there’s a real tax to every feature release though.
Launch a new feature?
Then build for all 10+ integrations (10x the work), build selectively (fragment product experience for some customers), or skip integrations all together (limited value).
Add ongoing maintenance, feature parity updates, change management, customer support complexity, and so on.
Technical maintenance is predictable - API changes, authentication updates, deprecation handling.
Adaptive maintenance is not. Partners add fields. Change models. Expect immediate updates. Rarely give notice.
This impacts your ability to move fast and can outweigh the benefits of partnerships (including faster sales cycles). This is where partner tiers come in.
Finally, partner acquisition risk looms.
Meaning, what happens if they buy a competitor of yours?
In the case of Surfboard - whose Founder Natasha Ratanshi-Stein I discussed this topic with - Zenefits, a partner of theirs, bought one of their competitors. It wasn’t long until Zenefit’s sales reps started aggressively going after Surfboard’s customers.
There’s not much you can do here besides beat them on the product and be aware of the concentration risk when working with partners.
Enjoyed reading this?
Then check out my conversation on the focal podcast with Natasha Ratanshi-Stein, Founder and CEO of Surfboard, a rare example of a company that was able to nail partnerships from Day 1 and exited successfully to Dialpad after raising a $5M seed round.
Youtube | Apple Podcast | Spotify
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