I'm a founder of a one-year-old SaaS startup. When should I start looking for partnership opportunities?

I belive it's important to have partnerships early on along with the early sales team. If you don't launch both around the same time it can end up causing friction between the 2 teams. For partnerships to succeed they need to work very closely with sales.

It's never too early though I would say being mindful of the effort needed to partner well is very important. You should check out this content I did with the VC Heavybit on what I call "Minimum Viable Partnerships" which provides frameworks on how to think about an initial strategy, setting priorities, and actions that pre-Series A founders should be taking. https://www.heavybit.com/library/video/test-learn-and-scale-with-minimum-viable-partnerships

Shortly, it depends. 🤷 Some startups adopt a partner strategy early on, but I think most of the time, you need to figure out your direct sales first, before thinking about your partner strategy. Here’s why I think that. When you’re very early in your journey / you’re a small startup, it’s inevitably harder to get the attention of bigger partners. You’ll only be able to partner with similarly small partners. Unless there’s a significant / important reason to do so, or unbelievable synergy between you two, I think it’s wiser to wait with going after partners when you’re at a later stage. It’s hard to put a headcount or revenue number on it, so I’d put it more like: once you have a revenue engine that stable (meaning you put more money / resources into it, it scales in a relatively predictable way) then you can start thinking about your partner strategy.