Our founder, Paulina Budzoń, joined Andrew Morris on Beyond Co-Sell, a podcast about the people and machinery behind AWS partnerships. Most of its guests run alliances at software companies. This episode is the view from a boutique services partner: how we use the AWS partner programme, what we hand to a machine, and where our customers actually come from.
What the conversation covers
- How we got here (00:39). From PHP developer to the only engineer in a three-person startup with the keys to an AWS account, then contracting, then customers who wanted to work with us directly. We have been an AWS partner since 2016, when the partner network gave you a badge and a listing and not much else.
- Co-sell as a side effect (04:59). We were never “noticed” through the partner network and we don’t plan around it. Co-sell is a side effect of having customers, not a way of getting them. It gets a machine and as few human hours as we can manage.
- Claude feeding ACE (05:44). AWS assumes a CRM feeds your opportunity pipeline. Ours is fed by a Claude skill that writes the records and reads the score back through the API. The first version scored 80 to 85 out of the box, and two or three iterations got it to 90. Above that the reviewing agent starts asking for wording and paperwork that don’t exist in the deal, so the rule is to stop there and only ever answer with what is true.
- Lead enrichment. It matches on the company name, and about a third of the leads we fed in came back as the wrong company. The one signal we found worth having is the greenfield flag.
- What agents can and can’t replace (09:40). Machine-to-machine work such as scoring and paperwork, gladly. Finding the pain point a customer doesn’t want to talk about, no.
- Look at who pays you (11:56). This year we ran a campaign at the companies the partner playbook says we should target. Good conversations, no customers. Every customer who stayed with us came in at a product’s first production run, in a tiny company. The pattern was in front of us for ten years.
- Boutique versus the Big Four (13:40). We don’t compete with them. We work with customers they don’t look at, and by the time those customers grow, they have a platform they don’t want to hand over.
The episode is about fifteen minutes. Watch it above, or on YouTube. Thank you to Andrew for the invitation.
If you are the AWS partner whose customer is too small for your bench, or the software company whose small customers keep asking who should run their AWS, that is the work we do. We contract with the customer directly and register our own slice in ACE. Drop us a message.
