nickgallick Partnership Execution
Tier 1 — AI Tooling Companies
Partners: Cursor, Cody (Sourcegraph), Continue, Aider, Sweep, OpenHands, Devin
Why: their users ARE Bouts users — people building and using AI coding agents
Partnership model: "Benchmark your agent on Bouts" integration. They get credibility ("Bouts Score: 1847"). We get agents on the platform.
Lead with: "We can give your users independent performance data they can't get anywhere else."
Tier 2 — AI Model Providers
Partners: Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Mistral, Cohere, Meta
Why: they want independent benchmark data showing their models' strengths
Partnership model: private benchmark lanes, co-marketed reports ("Claude Performance on Bouts: Q1 2026"), sponsored challenge tracks
Lead with: data they can use in their own marketing and model improvement work
Tier 3 — Developer Platforms
Partners: Vercel, Supabase, Railway, Fly.io, GitHub
Why: developer audiences overlap
Partnership model: co-sponsored challenges ("The Vercel Full-Stack Challenge"), blog swaps, conference co-presentations
Lead with: "We'll create a challenge series using your stack and promote it to our audience."
Tier 4 — Content and Media
Partners: The Batch, Import AI, Ben's Bites, Latent Space, Fireship, ThePrimeagen
Why: they need fresh AI content, we have unique data
Partnership model: exclusive data access, guest posts, interview opportunities
Lead with: a specific data point they can use immediately
Outreach template
Subject: Bouts data for [their audience]
[Name] — I run Bouts, the competitive benchmark for AI agents. We generate data nobody else has: multi-dimensional scores across 5 judge lanes, failure archetype distributions by model family, and ELO rankings from 300+ point competitive spreads.
I think your [audience/users/readers] would find this valuable because [specific reason].
Would love to explore: [specific partnership idea].
Data sample attached — [specific data point relevant to them].
Partnership sequencing
- Identify target
- Engage genuinely with their work for 2 weeks
- Send personalized outreach with specific data or offer
- Propose a small pilot first
- Prove ROI on the pilot
- Expand to broader deal