Running a Successful Design Partner Program

Tips, tricks, and best practices as you navigate early product development

As an early-stage founder, getting your first set of customers can seem like a daunting task. Is the product ready yet? Who should we reach out to? What is our ICP? How do we know if they are really interested, or just doing us a favor? The list of open items is seemingly endless.

We at Garuda Ventures are big proponents of companies setting up a structured Design Partner Program to help arrive at feedback-driven answers to some of these more important questions. Now, you may be asking yourself, “What is a design partner program and how do I set one up?”

With the help and input from a few founders, and following a working session for founders in our portfolio, we have come up with a collection of a few tips, tricks, and best practices to help navigate early product development. After initially distributing this to Garuda founders, we wanted to share it more broadly in the hopes that it can help you think through how to engage with early prospective customers and iterate to product-market fit.

A few points of note:

• This advice is generally applicable to B2B companies, particularly those with a top-down GTM motion (though general principles are certainly applicable to other categories)

• Don’t wait to talk to customers until after you’ve built an MVP! Customer discovery and validating pain points can and should happen well before you’ve even committed to starting a new company

• The advice here is intended to be more tactical in nature, to help navigate from “design partners” to “happy paying customers”

• This is by no means a complete list of things to do! We welcome feedback and contrasting perspectives

Special thanks to Adam Corey, Alex Bovee, Chris Dorsey, Jay Srinivasan, Jeff Schwartz, Pratap Ranade, Srinath Sridhar, Stephanie Soderberg, and Steven Khuong for their input and feedback.

Let’s jump in! See below, or click this link for a Google Doc. And click the below button to share this post with a founder who might benefit from the information!

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How do you define a "design partner program" and a "design partner"?

• A design partner is someone who is likely within your hypothesized ICP and is willing to try your product and collaborate with you, to give you feedback on if and how your MVP brings value and possibly early revenue.

• In exchange, they get a product well-tailored to their needs + either a free product or a discount on the purchase price

• Potential design partners have patience and understand that the product is being built with them as opposed to a product that is readily available.

• Design partner programs can be highly structured/formalized (shared timelines, deliverables, and expectations), or more informal/unstructured (customer doesn’t realize they are in a design partner program). We recommend hewing to the “formal program” approach

• If successful, generally result in a paid customer at its successful conclusion.

Tactical Tips and Tricks 

• Take comfort that nobody really knows what they’re doing at this stage 😊

• It’s ok to be a bit broad in your early definition of “ICP” 

What are the key goals for a founder when running a design partner program?

• Ensure you’re building the right things and ensuring the customer is happy with the product

• Seek out and receive critical feedback. Friends who are prospective customers “sugarcoating” their responses are not helpful!

• Battle test and strengthen key assumptions about the features and functionality valuable to a specific audience

• Validate technical feasibility (quality, performance, availability, access to source data, etc)

Tactical Tips and Tricks

Qualitative Metrics (examples):

• Frequency of use (one-time use vs. consistently useful)

• ID use cases, pain points, and benefits 

• Feature requests (“must have” vs. “nice to have”)

• Pricing feedback 

• Ensure ROI for the customer (savings, time/efficiency, security, other)

• Refine/revise definition of ICP

• # of testimonials/case studies

• NPS

Quantitative Metrics (examples):

• # of customers willing to provide access to their systems or data

• # of customers/seats/users onboarded (or degree of adoption within a customer, if a consumption or usage-based model)

• Conversion % from pilot-commit to pilot-started

• Conversion % from unpaid pilot to paid pilot

• Conversion % from paid pilot to subscription / recurring revenue

• $ pilot/non-recurring revenue; 

• $ ARR/recurring revenue

• ACV (near-term during the pilot, and longer-term at scale)

How do you find / recruit design partners?

• Warm introductions and “friendly” pre-existing relationships – investors, advisors, prior customers, or colleagues from past employers are always going to be helpful

• Cold/outbound prospecting is another path

  • Advantages: 

    • Will help you determine if you have “Pitch-Market Fit”, i.e. “is this an important problem and authentic pain (irrespective of whether it’s feasible to solve or not)

    • If (when) it’s time to scale, engaging your warm network may go more smoothly and help you preserve warm leads that otherwise might not have become customers in your design phase, helping you hit your targets

  • Disadvantage: no “warm” intro, so no patience in the relationship for the prospect to go the “extra mile” to make you successful

• Adwords, landing pages, referral incentives, trade shows, etc.

• By any means necessary! There's no shortcut.

Tactical Tips and Tricks 

• Make it as easy as possible for investors/network to make intros (tee up requested intros for them via a spreadsheet; pull names from their LinkedIn via a Linkedin scraper, ask them to share a download of their LinkedIn database etc)

• Set up a simple CRM (e.g. Hubspot) to track your leads

• Treat prospects like a sales funnel (send follow-up emails; regular personalized updates, etc)

What incentives should you offer a design partner, and what are you asking for in return?

• Anything is on the table, but generally, even for a design partner, they should pay you something at the end of the process.

• For the first wave of pilots, offering a high-touch free trial for 45-60 days (and longer if needed) is something that has proven successful. This allows you to maximize your learning of who your ICP is and what benefit you provide, what features are important, and to inform your roadmap

• Offering discounted ongoing pricing if they choose to use you after the pilot is an example of a great incentive

• Another example incentive is a discounted monthly fee x 12 months or less

• In some cases, not offering any incentive, just discounted pricing on a simple product is ok too. You can grow the product and pricing with them or you may have to churn them if they are the wrong fit/ICP as the product grows

Tactical Tips and Tricks 

• At some point you will want people to turn into your champions. Ask for a testimonial, a commitment to be a reference, and a referral to their network of peers upfront

How many "design partners" do you think is the right amount?

• Somewhere between 10-20 (or a bit more) is the right number of active participants in a design partner program, especially given the high-touch, “white glove” approach required.

• The key is to make them successful and to be on the same product

• You want the group to be small enough to be super responsive to feedback, needs, and ideas, but large enough to make sure you are building at an abstract enough level to satisfy a large market

What steps should you take to make your design partners successful?

• Customer Success needs to be as important as the product during this phase. It can “fill the gaps” in your product

• Be maniacal about the “process” for each customer - have checklists for each step for each design partner (“pre-onboarding”, “onboarding”, “post-onboarding”, “conversion to paid”, “ongoing”).

• Communicate frequently – get ‘credit’ for features you’ve said you’ve shipped that you delivered on; share your ongoing/real-time roadmap; etc

• Measure your progress - look at your metrics frequently (both qualitative and quantitative), and make changes within Eng/Product/Design and CS as needed

Tactical Tips and Tricks 

• If it’s not you, then whoever is the “process guru” on your team should be a key part of managing this process

• Make your early adopters feel like heroes - do things like making them part of a “Pioneers” program (mail them swag, etc), so they are emotionally invested in your success

• Slack channels with each design partner can be an effective way to have an ongoing dialogue in-between scheduled syncs

How long does a design partner phase typically last? How often are you speaking with your design partners during this phase?

• Based on feedback we received, the typical design partner program was in the few months range – “no more than 6 months”, “months if not a year”, “six months”

• The approach can also be more open-ended (“As long as it takes to build the right product”)

Tactical Tips and Tricks 

• Set a meeting cadence with each design partner! Typical meeting cadence with the design partner varies between weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly

• Have criteria for success, and be open to shutting things down with a partner that doesn’t seem to be working out

How do you know when a design partner program has been successful? How do you "transition" to the next phase and convert to paid?

• The “transition” is when the product addresses their needs (the customer is happy and using the product) and there is a willingness to pay.

  • For a given customer, the transition moment happens when you ask for the business! 

• You want to see some degree of consistency

  • Eg. if you can consistently convert sales conversations to paying customers at a reasonable rate.

• Ultimately they need to pay real money and go through the troubles of buying the product.

• Be upfront about your goals (to build something valuable enough to pay for), projected timing (“our goal is to start charging you in February”), and ask for potential pricing feedback (“how much would it be worth if we could solve this problem for you?”).

• Adding interim steps between pilot to paid annual contract (for example, an “LOI”) may be too complicate, but also can be a necessary “interim” step to a paid customer if needed (e.g. customer has willingness to pay, but doesn’t have budget in the near-term)

Tactical Tips and Tricks 

• Discuss expectations for the post-pilot period up front

• Once you’ve delivered value throughout the pilot, don’t be shy - ask for the business! 

• Typical terms are to offer a discount to list pricing (which you are probably still figuring out) after completing the design program

Some Parting Thoughts

• Maximize learning in your design partnership program. Strive for quality over quantity.

• Think of this program as a pre-sales marketing effort. Keep your word on timelines and deliverables

• There is a spectrum for design partners: super casual (not even telling people they are design partners and just asking for feedback) to super formal (signed contracts, paid upfront, clear engagement minimums). Based on your relationship with these prospective customers, the stage of the business, and other factors like your own experience as a founder and in the category, figure out where you are on the spectrum; more often than not you should push towards the “formal program” end of the spectrum as much as possible

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Garuda Ventures is a B2B-focused, pre-seed and seed-stage venture firm. Subscribe below to get more tips and tricks from us, and visit garuda.vc to learn more.