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The nearbound mindset is bigger than B2B SaaS. I was reminded about this a few weeks ago when I hosted a meetup with some friends in my hometown, Saint Petersburg, Florida. We enjoyed the sunny beaches, ate some tasty food, and, of course, talked business.
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A REFLECTION FROM ALEX
What prisoner’s dilemma teaches us about partnerships
The nearbound mindset is bigger than B2B SaaS.
I was reminded about this a few weeks ago when I hosted a meetup with some friends in my hometown, Saint Petersburg, Florida. We enjoyed the sunny beaches, ate some tasty food, and, of course, talked business.
Turns out, several of them have bought and read Jared’s book Nearbound and the Rise of the Who Economy and have implemented the learnings in their own roles and businesses.
For example, one of my friends is spinning up a coaching business, and to build a target audience list, he created a list of influencers that already have trust in the space. Another friend is building a college athlete agency business and using nearbound to figure out which businesses would be best to partner with to better serve his current clients and also tap into a broader market. They’re thinking partner first.
Why? Because first principles are universal.
After a week of closing the laptop, shutting down LinkedIn, and getting some sand between the toes I was reminded of the nearbound mindset and why it works.
Two years ago when I first joined PartnerHacker and nearbound.com, the idea was to build a world where everyone can win, together.
In the last two decades of B2B it was easy to tap into a flush market, spin up some automation software, hire an army of sellers, and scale in silos. But I think the past two decades were just a blip in the 300,000-year history of humanity.
Built into the very fabric of our being is the urge to work together. To lean on each other when things get hard.
Maybe this was necessitated by how hard life was for our early ancestors—when everything from the weather, to wildlife, to the ground, to your fellow man was out to get you.
Today, we don’t think we need to work together, so a lot of times we don’t.
Why, then, do partnerships make success more likely? Why does working together allow for more robust ecosystems? From SaaS to Grasslands, the more cooperation in a given system the more life it can support.
Jared recently told me about this Game Theory experiment called the Prisoner’s Dilemma and I think it points to a long history and science behind the benefit of partnering up.
The prisoner’s dilemma is a simple game you and a partner play in rounds. Each round, you’re both given new information and you have two choices; to cooperate or defect.
If you both choose to cooperate you each get 3 points. If you defect and your opponent cooperates you get 5 points and they get 0. If you both defect you each get 1 point. (If you want to watch the full video check it out here.)
Game theorists were allowed to submit a strategy with different ranges of friendliness or hostility. Over several different experiments, the most successful strategy was “Tit for Tat.” Which follows this basic formula: cooperate first and only defect if your opponent defects but if they cooperate again then there’s a clean slate, and you cooperate again.
Put another way, it’s better to partner up than work against each other.
The results surprised me, but they shouldn’t have. If it paid more to defect, then the ecosystem wouldn’t be able to survive, especially for any length of time.
So if you’re interested in winning and you want to go it alone, well… it just doesn’t pay.
To the continued effort of partnering up,
—Alex Hernandez, The OG PH CoS
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