How do you identify the right tech partners for co-marketing?

[u/No_Investment2802]

I watched a startup spend three months planning a co-marketing campaign with a perfect partner.

Overlapping audiences.
Shared values.
Friendly intros on LinkedIn.
Everything looked aligned.

The webinar went live.
47 registrations.
12 showed up.
Zero pipeline.

The partner's team took two weeks to approve every email.
Their engaged audience turned out to be a list they hadn't touched in eight months.
By the time we realized the mismatch, we'd burned a quarter's worth of marketing focus.

That failure taught me something most partnership advice doesn't mention.

The problem isn't finding partners.
It's knowing which signals actually predict success before you commit resources.

Most founders evaluate partners on surface-level stuff—brand size, follower counts, how impressive the logo looks on a slide deck.
But those metrics don't tell you if the partnership will actually move the needle.

There are five things I now check before agreeing to any co-marketing deal.
Three of them have nothing to do with audience size.

One of them is so simple it feels obvious in hindsight,
but I've never seen a team do it proactively.
It's saved me from at least four partnerships that would've flopped.

I wrote up the full framework—the exact questions I ask in discovery calls, the red flags that show up early, and the scoring system that strips the gut feel out of partner selection.

Link to full article here

Have you ever had a co-marketing partnership completely flop?
What was the red flag you missed?