How to Partner With Me: Typeform’s Francois Grenier

“How to partner with me” is a new series where we ask leading partnership managers about the inner workings of their partnership programs and what makes for a successful partnership with them. 

Younger readers may not remember, but building HTML forms on the internet used to be bad. Like, really bad.

Now, we have products like Typeform. Founded in 2012, Typeform enables users to create impeccably designed forms with no coding needed—making the company an ideal integration partner for any service that needs data capture.

“I like to tell everyone we’re open for business,” says head of tech partnerships Francois Grenier. As Typeform focuses on building out its partner ecosystem, we asked Grenier what he’s looking for: 

This discussion was edited for length and clarity.

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We’re looking for… technology partnerships. We have four APIs depending on what you’re trying to do, and generally, try to be as language agnostic as possible — although people usually build with Javascript. We also strongly recommend OAuth 2.0. The customer of these integrations is mostly small businesses and no one wants to figure out where to find an API key.

The benefit to our partners is… exposure, and the opportunity to give their customers a better data collection experience for their product. We’ll list their integration on our marketplace and help our partners launch and grow. That means messaging to our audience, writing some content that helps to communicate the value of the new integration.

One type of partner we’re looking for is … all CRMs and marketing platforms, especially ones that appeal to small businesses. There are a wealth of marketing tools out there, and we want to make it super easy for partners to build with us. We also see a lot of interest in tools that analyze or enrich the responses, like adding sentiment analysis to open-text responses for instance. And we have more players like Zendesk, Zoho, and Freshworks that are more than just CRMs. So we are always interested in expanded ecosystems.

A successful partner for Typeform is … one that will reach out to us with ideas. We want partners to start on their own, and we love to hear the ideas and feedback on our API. Oftentimes, partners are trying to solve a problem others have solved before. Our product partnerships and development teams see a lot of use cases and we can always help.

One thing that we do that is unique is … we make forms beautiful. The most valuable part of Typeform is the responses that our customers collect. We put a lot of focus on enabling a smooth and interactive experience, as it improves the people give you information your users will share — and that helps you serve them better. Depending on the circumstance, Typeforms have 3-5x the completion rate of other types of forms and survey tools.

I wish more people in the partnership space cared about… alignment on metrics. We try to get to a super-transparent conversation about our needs as we think that leads to a better partnership. In other industries, partnerships can be much more difficult because of the lack of transparency.

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You can partner with Typeform by visiting its partner program portal.