Hey everyone, welcome to Stacking Growth. This is Megan Bowen, CEO of Refine Labs, and I am here with my friend, Corey Kosak, CEO of AspireShift. Hi, Corey. Hey Megan, thanks for having me.
I'm so excited to have this conversation with you. We are going to talk about a pretty hot topic, especially in LinkedIn land and in the B2V ecosystem right now. Everyone is talking about partnerships or nearbound or ecosystem-led growth. All of these phrases effectively, you know, talking about honestly kind of an old school go-to-market motion where you partner up, you know, two companies partner up in a co-market or they help each other acquire customers.
So kind of what's old is new again. A lot of these things have existed but sort of fell out of fashion and now, you know, all the gurus on LinkedIn are saying this is how B2V companies need to go to market in the future. They need to figure out what their partnership strategy is. And so we're going to have a conversation about that.
I'm really excited about it. A good way to tee this up and I've been kind of reflecting on this and I'm curious to get your take as well is like, why is this the new hot topic? Like why is this kind of coming back as another, you know, big recommendation that businesses and companies should be considering when they think about developing their go-to-market strategy? And it's interesting when we think about like the last four years with the pandemic and the rise in digital marketing across social media, a lot of people adopting these new strategies.
For me, like, I don't know where my head kind of goes is they're just more and more noise in all of these channels. And I think leading to potentially some type of saturation and not being potentially as effective as they were before. So now there's this sort of motivation, like what's the next thing? How are we going to keep developing strategies to grow?
But the other thing that's interesting to me is like the core of it is really, I think it's really around how do you feel more word of mount referrals? That's basically what it is, right? And we talk about that a lot here at Refine Labs. You know, that Board of Mouth is probably one of the best sources of marketing, if you will.
I'm using air quotes. But anyway, I'd love your take on this. Like why is this such a hot topic now? Like what's your POV on this?
Yeah, so I definitely think that all the things you said are accurate. I have a slightly banded point of view on it and that is that it's financially moving. So huge thing that a lot of us live through, especially those in the tech industry, but really it's kind of across a bunch of industries is that the finances around how to grow companies have changed dramatically in the last few. So as soon as interest rates got up and inflation went crazy, all of that stuff, capital became expensive relatively speaking, for people that have lived through the last 20 years or so, venture capital dried up, like all of these things, right?
And so it used to be that the metric was just gross as fast as you can. We don't care if you're profitable. There'll always be an extra out of funding, just poor money. Like let's go rocket ship, go, go, go, go.
And buy billboards, I do whatever you got to do. Just get it and make it happen, right? And now all of that has changed to the point of like forget about even just layoffs and like all these different things of quote unquote right sizing companies, but companies generally if they either want to raise funding or ever go public or do other things, sell the business, whatever, they have to be a lot more efficient, do more with less, and there's just different goals around profitability and all that stuff. And so what are partnerships?
Partnerships are the perfect way to, if you can pull it off, to scale a company without spending a ton of money upfront and know that with every dollar you spend, you're going to get more than that back, right? Again, if you do it right, that's what a partnership is. And so if you sort of look at that in the context of everything going on, it's like, well, that makes perfect sense. And then so everyone will just pivot to like, great, I have the solution.
I don't need to do any marketing anymore. I don't need to hire as big sales team. I don't need to do any of those things. And they're just going to just sell the crap out of my stuff and we're just going to go.
And that is, that's my POV on why it's on. Yeah, so it's been an interesting year so far. So we made the CEO change at the beginning of the year and naturally I got a lot of inbound messages from people. And one cohort of those messages was, we love refined labs.
We want to be a referral partner for refined labs. We want to send you business. Can we have a conversation? Can we form a partnership?
And I was like, okay, yeah, I want you to refer to your business. So honestly, I took about 10 calls with 10 different companies. And interestingly, these are all companies that mostly serve the same type of customer, like the B2B's Ask Customer. And they're kind of all complimentary or adjacent services to us.
So we're a B2B digital marketing, demand generation agency. I got outreach from a sales ops agency, a creative agency, marketing ops, all of these other types of agencies that thought, hey, I sell to the same customer, they might need demand services, I could refer them to you. So I have all these conversations. Conversations are great.
They're great people. They have some great services. They say they want to send me business. And what I kind of told all of them was like, cool, like I'm in.
What do you do? Let me tell you what we do? Let's share pricing and what the offers are so that you can speak. You have enough information to know who you should refer over to us.
And basically what I told everyone was like, look, I don't want to spend all this time negotiating commercial terms. And if we can actually refer each other some customers, then let's hit that milestone. And then if there's traction, we can discuss what that might mean if there's a referral fee or this and that. Interesting.
A lot of people didn't even want to refer. I don't want to refer. I just want to send each other customers. Okay, interesting.
How many referrals have I gotten from any of these conversations? Zero, right? Zero. Zero.
I'm like, so this sounds great in theory, but in practice, nothing's happening. And so I'm an operator. I'm a realist. I'm a pragmatist.
I love this and I get some of these messages now and I'm kind of like, yo, here's what we do. Here's how much it costs. If you can send me a referral, then we can have a conversation because I don't have time for this. And so I don't know if you've seen the same thing, but I feel like everyone's gravitating towards this partnership structure where let's refer each other in new business.
And it feels like, honestly, it feels like the, to use another cliché, but like the spray and pray of like a sales team or an SDR. I'm like, I don't know. It just feels like it's not working. So I don't know.
Have you had that type of an experience or different ones? Sure. My whole life, right? So I focused a lot.
I actually reflected on this. As much heading in to the conversation, but I focused a lot of my companies and my things on partnerships. My last company that got acquired, the entire business was built on integrating with other systems and then using them as a channel to reach the customer. And so like I have spent a lot of time thinking about this.
I think the challenge is like, is very similar to how we think about sales and what a lot of the sales advice is, where they say, hey, you need to focus on your customer, not on you. You spend too much time working about your sales process and your deal done and like, you know, all of this stuff about what does the customer need, right? And it's very similar. And so for me, the way I approach things a little bit differently, I think, is I think about how can I actually get this partner to take this really seriously?
Right? And it's not, here's my amazing pitch to you. It's what is going on in your business. What's going on with you?
What are you trying to do this year? What's up? And when I understand that, if there's something which most of us have that's like, I'm trying to do this, but I have this gap or I have this problem, I need to do this, I'm looking for a way to do that, probably never would have conceived of the fact that a partnership between the two of us could do that. That's the moment where it's like, hey, this might sound a little crazy, but I have an idea.
And then you fit into that. And that is the biggest, that's the biggest differentiator between what you see out of the market, which is it would be so great if I could just give a 10% cut of everything we do to a gazillion partners and they just flood us with business. Like, my life is made, I don't even need to worry about going to market anymore. I just take inbound inquiries from partners that just want to send us business and like problem-solved, right?
And so a lot of companies approach it that way. And then they find out what you've seen and what you're talking about, which is that, hey, most of these result in nothing, and then the ones that result in something, they don't result in a lot. And so, we got to go back to like, what's higher than we say? We're like, this doesn't actually work in theory.
Well, and I want to talk about kind of, I mean, it's two sides of the same coin, but I want to talk about the factors of what makes a good partnership. You kind of already touched on one of these points. Like, my take on this is like, there are three requirements for a partnership to work. Number one, and I think this is the point that you were making earlier.
The partnership itself has to provide a better customer experience or outcome, right? Or something that can't be true from just one or the other company, right? Like, it has to really, there has to be like a true connection to the market and a customer need. I think, and to your point, you, this, you also just made it, that's often like an afterthought of like, oh, how can this other company help me make more sales?
So I feel like that is number one for me. I think number two, I do think there has to be like financial, like there needs to be a financial benefit to honestly everyone involved. The customer and both of the companies that are in the partnership. And third, those financial gains, however the commercial terms are structured, it has to be worthwhile enough to actually do something.
I'm guilty of this too. I haven't, I maybe I've sent a handful of introductions to companies, but I have no idea if they turned to business, right? So like, I'm sort of criticizing the other partners, but I'm criticizing myself too. Like, I haven't even really done it in reality as like I have a set of priorities, and that kind of is on the bottom of my list, you know, unless it was structured in a way where I was like, oh, this is now a priority for me, because this is, this is going to be like the incentive or the potential financial gain is worth it, right?
So I feel like those three things really need to be true in a very, very compelling way, like not just true a little bit, like true a lot. Yeah, and I think we could dig into each, but I want to really hone in on the financial piece for a second. And so there's a lot of ways you could look at that and you could say, well, of course this is significant. Like, let's say we're talking about driving a million dollars in revenue through the partner, like the partner gets a million dollars from doing the stuff that they're doing.
You would look at that and go, yeah, how is that like they're gonna make a million bucks. And it's all margin like this is amazing. Like, who wouldn't want to do this? And you know who wouldn't want to do it?
A multi-billion dollar company. Because they don't, that's not enough. They don't care, right? And it feels crazy to say that, but that's real, right?
So it's all about context, whereas you look at a company that, you know, I'll just use fake numbers, but like they're doing a few million bucks a year in revenue. They're not profitable. And you're like, hey, I'm going to give you a way to generate a million bucks. It's going to go straight to your bottom line minus whoever is like managing this partnership and the time they need to contribute to that.
Like, how does that sound? Yeah, that's huge for me, right? So context matters. And it's not just big and small.
And how it really fits into that. Because there are many, I'm sure many people after watching this could say, all right, Corey, I have a way for you all to generate a million bucks this year. You said a million bucks and maybe you owe me a million bucks and maybe you owe me a million bucks and maybe you owe me a million bucks. But if it's just something completely unrelated that's difficult for us to focus on and think about how to like weave it in, do what we think about every day, then it gets really hard.
So the context really. Yeah. I mean, I totally agree. I think, you know, and if you look at sort of the other side of the coin, like why do partnerships fail or why do partnerships fail or not work?
I feel like it's just, if you can't achieve those three things in a really compelling way, I feel like it just doesn't work or it falls apart. Yeah. Any different, I know what's your take on that? Well, so whether or not it's all of those three have to be there, I think probably that's right.
And you can maybe wait them differently. But one thing that I'll add to the financial piece of it is if you're watching that ask yourself, when you've been in a partnership conversation, how much have you thought about what kind of deal you could get away with closing, right? Like, could I get away with only giving them this much? Would they do it?
And then you do that? Yes, when I got the great, I negotiated a great deal for us. It's not a great deal if it doesn't fail and don't actually do it. And the partner doesn't care, right?
And it actually ended up being a terrible deal. And so the better thing, and I don't want to say it's better. I'm going to speak from my own perspective on this. The way I approach it is I try to go to the high end of what I'm able to do and have it say, if I did this and we knocked it out of the park as a partnership, would I feel good about the partnership?
And if the answer is yes, that's the deal I want to present, not the lower one to see if they'll push it up and whatever. I want to go on the high end, which is the inverse of what we think about when negotiating, because I want to know that if I think this partner's going to be impactful, which isn't everyone, that if I think it's going to be an impactful partnership, I want to know that I've put my best foot forward to provide enough for the partner that when it gets sticky, because it's going to get sticky somewhere, something's going to go wrong, it's going to be slow, it's, you know, we're going to have the thoughts of, do we even do this thing? Like, I got this other thing over here and whatever. You want them to feel like, no, I see the big picture and this is a really good deal.
Like, I don't get deals like this every day. Like, I mean, let's figure this out. That's what you want. Or at least that's my question.
Yeah. And it's almost like, I really believe you maybe you only have one or two partnerships. I don't think this is like a quantity game, right? It's like, oh, we have 15 partners and like, I don't even know how you would manage something like that.
And that's the other piece of this, like a lot of the stuff that I read about is like creating this whole ecosystem and having this huge partner network. I see some fringe benefits to that, but I don't know, my instinct and based on my experience, it feels like going really deep on one partnership and figuring out how to really make that successful is really the approach I would want to take versus trying to like establish and manage 10 plus different partnerships. It also like, is that even realistic? Are there even enough partner connections that could be made that are going to check off all the boxes that we just went through?
So I don't know. Like, that's the other piece of this I think is really interesting. Like, I feel like the, you know, the classic partnership model I feel like is in like the, like the tech in the IT world. If you have like a managed service provider and some type of technology, right?
They're a reseller of that technology. Like, that's a classic example of a partnership working really well. And maybe they have a few, but they're very embedded. And I think that, I don't know, that feels pretty important for it to be successful.
I think that's right. I think there's, there are plays for a scaled approach, like a marketplace, you know, API integrations and products and there's a percentage kind of like, there's things like that that can happen and can work very difficult to execute, but like the really big great company to do this stuff for everybody else. Yeah. It's, you may not sign one or two partnerships.
You might sign 10, but one or two are going to actually work. It's the unfortunate reality. Now, one thing that I've also found is helpful in sort of improving the odds here is if you're someone who has a great network that you've built over time, if you can finally use a work with people that you already like know to some degree in trust, that raises the probability that it's going to be successful partnership because you know, like both sides have weighed like, okay, can this actually work? Or can I deliver to this?
And all of that stuff, you know, that's another way. But I completely agree. And all my experiences usually know more than a handful of partners that really make a meaningful impact and everything else ends up being like, yeah, we have like these 50 partners, but like, I don't even know if they still think we're partners, but like, you know, you know, I haven't heard from them in a while. What's your take on?
So when you think about like partner selection, like who based, you know, obviously it depends on your business. So there's nuances and dependencies there, but like when you're thinking about partner selection, like how do you think about how do you think about that? Like in the context of, okay, what are the things I need to be considering to identify who I even want to approach and potentially pitch an idea to? I'd love to get your take on this.
Sure. So I think the most important first question is what's the purpose of the partner? Right? So there's different ways to look at it.
The classic one, which is most of what we're talking about is I want someone who's going to bring me customers. How do we do that? Right? And so in that regard, you'd have to ask yourself like how many customers do they have access to?
Are they the kind of customers that we want our solution or our stuff? And then also you have to ask the question that we've been sort of dancing around these last 10 minutes, which is how motivated they're going to be to do that. Right? I've been in partnerships with enormous companies that have all the access in the world and they just need to do a tiny little bit to like completely make our year and they just don't do.
And no matter how many meetings you have, whatever, you just can't activate. Right? And it speaks to this whole thing around motivation and structure to deliver it. So kind of thinking about those things that those are some of the things I think about.
So I tend to lean towards, depending on what the partnership is, smaller-ish companies that have more of the ability to mobilize and say like, hey, we're going to decide to care about this and we're going to go like, fear the ship in this direction. But there's other types of partnerships, right? You might do like something that enhances your product or something like that, in which case it's who has the best product. Can I trust them?
Do I have access to them in some way? Will they take us seriously? Have they done this type of work before? You know, those are the questions that I ask.
And then sometimes it's just totally serendipitous about how it comes to them. Yeah. Those are the most successful too. I'm sorry.
I don't know. I'm sorry. So we've been building up to this. I want to actually break down basically what you and I have been working on along with a few other key people at Refine Labs over the last couple of months.
But we're about to announce externally that a spy ship and Refine Labs have a formal partnership and I want to kind of talk about the process that we've been working on together to kind of break down this real case study of how we've decided to put it into action in case it can be helpful to others as a roadmap as they're thinking about this for their own business. And so, you know, and I'll have to give a lot of credit to you, Corey, because you came to me and pitched this idea and I loved it. And so I know this was kind of your brainchild. And so why don't you kind of break down, walk through how you came up with this idea of how our companies could partner together and how you pitched it to me initially.
Because it was a very compelling pitch. And after we spoke about it initially, we basically were like, let's do this. And we've been working hard to get everything ready before we make the formal announcement. And I know it kind of walked through how, like, what was your thought process before you even reached out to me, how did the idea come to you and then how did you kind of formulate your pitch to me?
It was pretty compelling. I have to stop. Thank you. Well, let's see.
This is going to be a bit of a technical level. I'll try and see if I can stream live. Yeah, plenty of time. So just some quick context on the spirorship.
So, spirorship is an up-scaling and resaling platform, primarily for technology companies. And we specifically target the individual contributors, salespeople, customer successpeople, anyone in post sales, basically we're trying to help people accelerate their careers by learning and then putting it into practice with either the current roles or roles that they're aspiring to get into. And so, as you know, I've known about you and Refine for pretty much Refine's entire existence. I had this really wild idea, like right before COVID, to hop on a plane to LA to see Chris Walker and Justin Walsh do this live event they were doing.
It was like March or February 2020, right before COVID, like officially became a thing that Chaka World, or at least Chaka Me. And basically, I just had this instinct about it. This philosophy, this whole thing that Chris is talking about just so resonates with me. And I don't know why, I never do this, but I'm just getting on a plane and I'm just going here and I'm going to see this thing and beat him and whatever.
And long story short, as we've evolved as a company and we focus more on up-skilling individuals within companies and that sort of thing, I've held off on producing marketing content. So B2B marketing content that companies could use to improve the way of marketing. And I always thought, I mean, for probably two years, I thought to myself, if I were ever to do this with a partner, which we usually don't do with partners ourselves, if I were to ever do this with a partner, we'd be refined less. And so I already had that in my mind.
And the marketing thing just kept getting pushed off, kept getting pushed off. So do you primarily have sales and customer success with the primary courses, right? Sales was kind of the initial. Yeah.
And we have more as well, but like those are the two big ones, for sure. And so anyway, the other thing that happened, which made this part of why it's compelling, is we were able to become an approved training provider for something they called registered apprenticeship through the Department of Labor. And we're participating in the RFP process for something called the Good Jobs Challenge, through the Department of Commerce, it's all kind of related. And basically, it's all the help Americans get in and keep better jobs.
And they're paying for training. And so if you're an approved training provider and you have companies that are signed on and say, hey, I want to invest in our people, I want to train them to the fullest extent, give them the best chance of doing well in their role and moving to new roles in the company over time with their new skills, that's something that we can get paid for. And so because of all that, and we started doing really well with this over the last year, ourselves, where we're just selling it, I had to think about the same thing that everyone's thinking about this year and what's the best way to grow. And the number one thing I thought of was partnerships, because if I can create incentives that are strong enough for companies with a product and offering to their customers and individuals that's very compelling, both from a cost perspective, because it's free for them, and from a value perspective, because it's incredibly valuable to a company's individuals, if I can do that and I pick the right partners, that could be a really successful strategy.
And so when you and I were just catching up and I did what I said earlier in the podcast, I said, what's up? What's going on with you? Okay, now it's the, you know, awesome. Like, what's going on?
What are you trying to do? Whatever. And you told me some of those things. And I was like, I swear I did not have a specific thought about pitching the partnership in this meeting.
It was just touching up. Well, and I basically said, like, okay, we need to, it's been a rough 18 months as everybody sort of dealt with in SaaS. We need to kind of get back to predictable revenue growth, you know, I want to work on improving operational excellence and efficiency. And I need to figure out what I'm doing with the vault.
That's basically what I told you. It's like, we have this great, like, this great content product and we, we've initially, we tried to go in a lot of different directions with it. And now that I'm in my new role, you know, it's up to me to figure out what is the go forward strategy. So it's basically what I said when we were catching up.
And so, sounds like after that was when your brain, your brain got flowing on these, these partnership ideas. Yeah, I mean, there has to be a reason. It's not just, hey, we can both make money or hey, our customers might like this. It has to be a really compelling reason to do something.
And the reason, it's not just that it's compelling, it's timely. And so for you, and I once before you, but my perspective was that you had some critical decisions to make about how to utilize this wealth of content and information that you all have produced over these years. You are looking at ways to improve both the profitability and revenue growth of the company without spending a ton of money to do it. And like, and these are normal things, right?
But like these things were coinciding at the same time. And I was able to come go, hmm, well, what if we took vault content, transformed it into a scholarship courses that we pushed through these apprenticeship programs with department labor and all of that stuff. And we were able to pay you for the contribution and you help us bring it to market since you have all these followers and whatever. And it might even be people that would love to have refined on their side, but they're not in a position for the price tag, even though it's a phenomenal investment, as I know.
And now here's another way, like you think you have to access this way, like this could be really good. And you're like, yeah, I'm interested in all of those things. How do we have a conversation about that? I'm like, OK, let's have a conversation about that.
Well, and I think for my perspective on everything that we've done with the vault to date, and you've been in there, you've seen it, it is an immense library of our intellectual property. Basically, theoretically, instead of hiring us to be your agency, you could just subscribe to the vault and you would have everything you would need to know to implement our philosophy and our strategies and our tactics on your own. And I think the whole vision that we have at Refine Labs is we're trying to change the way every B2B company measures and executes marketing. But not every B2B company is going to hire us to be their agency of record, to run their campaigns and define the strategy, et cetera.
So the vault is a way for us to really achieve our mission and expand our reach. We have over 5,000 people that have signed up for the vault, either a free version or a paid version. And looking ahead, I'd love to double that. I'd love to have 10,000 B2B marketers, B2B professionals have exposure to the vault.
Number one, it's good for them. It's good for their careers. Number two, it's good for Refine Labs because we're more broadly communicating our philosophy and getting people aligned to that. And then sure, the expectation and what we've seen over and over again is someone will be in the vault and really use it.
And then they'll eventually end up at a company where it does make sense for them to hire Refine Labs as an agency. And you stripping all of that away, it's effectively the ultimate content marketing strategy. We're just building all of this content and just getting it out there. And so one of the things I was most excited about with your pitch to me was, wow, we can probably give 5,000 more people access to this.
And it's actually free to the B2B company or the marketer. So they don't have to, yes, they have to go through a process to be approved for this program. But how amazing is that? That we can offer this as a free alternative for those that are interested, right?
So that really felt like we're doing right by our customers, our potential customers. We're doing right by the B2B community. And it's going to be a win for a fire ship, a win for Refine Labs, and a win for the customer. That is absolutely right.
Why don't you break down? We don't have to sort of say specific terms and you kind of mentioned it a little bit, but why don't you kind of break down a little bit more details about how it works and the mechanics? So if a B2B company is interested in, for example, getting their marketing team set up with access to the vault marketing course through a fire ship, or maybe not only that, also the sales course for the sales team and the customer success course for the customer success team, what's the process that the company has to go through in order to get those free courses for their employees? Yeah, so there is a process, but it is pretty simple.
Basically the company has to raise their hand and say, hey, we want to do this. We understand that this is a program that's funded through these other channels for the purpose of retaining our workforce and helping them improve and all of that stuff. And we want to do that. So they have to raise their hand and they raise their hand by effectively signing some paperwork, officially enrolling as a partner in this.
And so that really is like, that could be done in a day. If it's a small company and they're like, great, it's awesome, let's go. When it's a much larger company, which we've signed publicly traded companies onto this as well, you know, we've got legal and HR and this and that just poops and ways and stuff. It's all fine, like this is normal stuff, but that's really what the process is to get going.
And then from there, we typically introduce it through info sessions to specific teams or groups of people that might be right for participating. And then each individual kind of hops into it because they're providing their own, you know, their own hand raise of saying like, hey, here's who I am. I'm doing this. I'm investing in myself like I'm committing to doing the program and that sort of stuff.
That's really what the process is. And then from there, they get access to the most extensive training that we have through the Sysorship platform for the individual, you know, kind of groups. And as you pointed out, the cool thing about this is that you may start with, hey, I want, I have like two marketers and I want them to think this way. I want them to level up and learn these skills because there isn't great modern training out there for beating the market.
Like, sorry, there isn't. There's lots of good content, content creators will snippets and stuff that like horses like, I don't, I can't think of really like really solid like, like refined out of stuff. And you may start with that and say like, Hey, I got a couple of marketers. I want to get access to this thing.
And you realize, Oh, wow, there's training for the sales team, the customer success team, all of like post sales. So like my customer support people can think about leveling up to customer success or even just having that mindset and how they sort of approach, you know, their day to day. I got DevOps people. I got this.
I got that. We now have, we actually do this in large part as like employee development in the boss for companies, where HR departments will come in and go, wow, this is really great. So I can, for no cause I can come in and I can actually make progression, pathing more of a reality for people. I can give them the resources and know that it's, they learn to the type of business they're in.
Like, this is awesome. And so that's, yeah, it ends up being a good thing. Yeah. And I think, you know, one of the biggest pieces of feedback that we've received from our current users of the vault is that there's so much information in there, that it's hard for someone to come in and really learn because it, there's no course mechanism or sort of testing or certification.
It's really just a library of content, right? So, you know, today we have a, you know, a free trial, essentially, people can sign up for the vault for free to get access to just, you know, about 12 assets today and then they have to upgrade to a paid version to get access to everything. One of the things that became obvious is we were discussing this was, well, for this to work, there should really be only one free path and it should be through the aspireship option. So we're actually going to deprecate our free access.
Anyone that wants free access has to go through the aspireship route. And I'm excited about that because I really believe, and I know you're in the final stages of putting the final touches on the course in the aspireship platform, but I'm so excited for this option because your platform is effectively designed to take a ton of information, but introduce it in pieces and segments and take people through a process to learn it, right? And then test, test their comprehension, the retention of those concepts. And so, I think that's the other piece of a couple of points I was making there.
I think one is just like, we're adjusting our go-to-market strategy for the vault to align with this so that it can be successful. We're still going to have some paid options, but I'm actually going to be reducing the pricing of those options for those that for whatever reason might not go through the aspireship option. Okay, you can still get access, you know, as an individual or as a company. You know, there's what those monthly and annual prices look like.
What I'd love to kind of have you touch on last is we're wrapping this up is talk a little bit more about how the core structure works in aspireship. I think that's something very unique that you all bring to the table that I think actually activates the content. Right? It's not just content sitting on a digital product.
You're actually able to take that and get people to learn it. Yeah, so these are full-on certification programs. So basically, what we do is we break everything down. So as you pointed out, the vault has a tremendous amount of content.
And I personally hear these things and think about what content is going to go in and how it flows and what should go first and second and all of this stuff. And it's really important to me because I've found that when you can get that right, it's the difference between people just not doing it at all and having a magical experience where like, this is the best course I've ever taken. I just can't believe it. And so basically the way Aspireship works is a combination of video content.
Actually, we never did slides until this. So we built a new slide capability to support this because we liked the way some of that was broken down. And we think the delivery of it makes sense to do that. So give me slide decks, give me videos, quizzes to reinforce the knowledge and projects.
So all kind of in line that you can skip around if you want to, but it's designed to go kind of front to back. And one of the things that we've done that is very unusual is we've made really all of our courses simultaneously approachable to someone that doesn't know anything about any of it. They're not even in that line of work. It made it approachable enough for them to get it and understand it and not feel like, I'm way behind the curve here.
I need all these three requisites while also being applicable to people that are experienced. And it's a really hard thing to do, but we believe we've been able to do that in the data kind of reinforces that we have. And this one, I mean, I'm so excited about this one. I really think this is, I mean this and I'm not just saying this for the podcast, instead of to Meg and before we started, I'm actually taking the course myself as a affiliate.
Because even as a CEO, everyone wants to be better at marketing. And the stuff that you all have put together around not just ideas for doing it, how to spread word about how to do certain things, but how to measure it, how to think differently, how to allocate resources differently. It's so needed and it's just not out there. And so I think this will be for someone who wants to start a marketing career all the way through like an actual executive that's like, okay, I've heard about, I've heard about some of the stuff, I need to learn this and see how we can apply it inside our company.
Yeah, I love it. Well, this is the partnership that I'm placing in 2024. So I'm really optimistic. I think it's going to work well.
Maybe in six months, we should do a part two and report back on our success, the results that we were able to produce. As we're wrapping up, let me kind of ask a closing question. When we think about the future of this partnership go to market strategy, how do you see this playing out over the next few years, right? Everyone's talking about this, not many people are figuring out how to make it work.
What's your take? What's your hot take on the future of partnerships as a good market? Yeah, I don't think it's going to change all that much, except there's going to be a lot more noise and a lot more unsuccessful partnerships in the next few years. All I can say is like, as a founder, I've been through the ringer and back like so many times with things that like, I just, I'm so practical and what I at least think I am sometimes, there's going to be some pain for companies that think this is their new golden ticket and don't actually invest in figuring out how to do it really, really effectively.
And even if you're great at it, you're still going to fail more than you succeed. That's just the nature of it, right? But I do think there will be a minority of companies that figure out how to really embrace it. And when they do, they will, it will end up being like two thirds of their revenue will come up with this.
And the other stuff, paid stuff, direct outbound sales, all that stuff, that's going to be the, all right, we're struggling to get to this next milestone. How do we like tip it over the edge? It's going to be with that stuff for those few companies, I figure it out. And for everybody else, they're going to still set it like 0% or 1% for partners and get a little bit distracted and probably have their other numbers dip in the process.
So proceed with caution. Well said. I have nothing to add. Well, thanks so much for this conversation.
This was great. And cheers for the Aspire Shippen Rekon Labs. Thanks for your faith.