Strong Opinions @marksbirch

soundboy:

A few months back, someone on the YC email list asked the question “What tips do you have for becoming better at BD”. I tried to summarise some of the things that I’ve learned doing much of Songkick’s BD over the years, and thought I’d publish them here too.

When we started Songkick I’d never done any BD before and had an engineering background. Since then we’ve had some successes with medium to big deals (Foursquare, Spotify, Yahoo!, YouTube etc) as well as building a self-serve API that services hundreds of other partners. Here’s a few lessons I’ve learned. This mainly focuses on BD as distribution for consumer products…

Business Development.  Both the word and thought brings up cold sweats for most tech startup founders.  Simply put, there are no easy answers for how to best do business development, but these tips by Songkick’s founder Ian Hogarth are an excellent starting point.  But the single most useful tip is learning to do business development yourself first BEFORE you bring someone else on board to be the “BD person”.