90-Day Channel Partnership Test | Tage VC Partner

Most channel deals die in a shared slide. Tage VC structures Partner-path tests around one ICP, one owner, one metric, and a kill date.

A partnership without a kill date is a hobby

Growth-stage decks love logos. Revenue does not. On the Partner path, Tage Venture Capital treats a channel as an experiment: one ICP, one motion, one success metric, ninety days. If you cannot write that on a page, you are not ready to announce anything.

This is the operating version of our growth-stage partnership thesis. The failure is usually design, not effort.

Write the hypothesis before the intro email

A useful hypothesis has four parts:

Who — a specific buyer, not “their whole book”
Why they win — your product makes their offer stronger, or their access changes your curve
How it is sold — referral, resale, or co-sell. Pick one for the test.
What good looks like — meetings, qualified pipeline, or closed revenue. Pick one number.

If the other side wants “brand alignment” and a joint webinar as the proof, you are in marketing, not distribution. That can still be useful. It is not a Partner thesis.

Name a single owner on each side

Zombie deals live between sales and product. For ninety days, one person at each company is accountable for:

A weekly 30-minute working session
A shared pipeline view (even a spreadsheet)
The decision to continue, re-scope, or stop

No owner, no test. Capital and legal paper will not create an owner after the fact.

Economics before brand decks

Write the split, the discount authority, and who pays for implementation before the logo slide. Referral, resale, and co-sell have different failure modes:

Referral dies when the referrer is paid too little to care
Resale dies when their reps can sell something easier
Co-sell dies when neither AE owns the close

We would rather see a narrow, paid motion than a “strategic alliance” with unlimited timeline. If capital should sit next to the partnership, it should be tied to those outcomes — not a generic growth round. That is the difference between Partner and a default raise. Sometimes you should not raise at all.

What “done” looks like on day 90

You should be able to say one of three things:

Continue — the metric cleared, expand ICP or territory
Re-scope — the buyer was wrong, the motion was right (or the reverse)
Stop — mutual, documented, no hard feelings and no zombie Slack

Stopping is a success if you learned. Continuing without a number is how partnerships consume a year.

Fit with Tage

We look for repeatable sales and reference customers before we introduce leverage from our network or portfolio. Legal tech, HR, and recruiting are sectors we know from companies we launched — Instant NDA, Signent HR, Recruit 619 — but the test design is the same in any vertical.

If you already have a partnership hypothesis, start a Partner conversation. Bring the one-pager, not a hope.

How to Run a 90-Day Channel Partnership Test