From 0 to 2 Million DAU’s: The Guide To Growing Your Startup via Partnerships (opens in new tab)

There are all the obvious public metrics from things like Compete, Alexa, app rankings, twitter following, facebook following, etc etc.

But beyond that I would dig deep into using the product. If I was going to assess the engagement (DAU/MAU) of a social network I would look at how people are commenting. Or maybe send 20 friend requests/messages to random people and see how fast on average they respond. You can get a feel for certain things just by using the product.

Otherwise I would just reach out and start a discussion. Some partners will be shy to give up metrics, but you usually can pull it out of them over time.

Good question. Not to be a pessimist, but in most scenarios I have found partnerships to under perform initial expectations. Part of that can be mitigated with the things I outline in the post. But I think more than anything finding that one key predictor of success is important. For Viximo it was sites that had high DAU/MAU ratio. We'd rather take a company with 1/10 of the total audience, a crappier experience, and worse business terms but a high DAU/MAU ratio. It made a huge difference.

But that key predictor is different for every business. Finding it can be tough. But once you find it you increase partnership success chances by a lot.