Partner with us › Ambassadorships
Ambassadorships
The deepest way we work with anybody, and the one we have with the fewest people.
It is by application, and most of the time the honest answer is not yet.
What it is
Everything else on this site is a piece of work with an end: an article, a send, an hour, an introduction. An ambassadorship is not a piece of work. It is a year of representing each other in public.
In practice, representing you means some mixture of:
- Speaking on your behalf. At events, conferences and meetups, on panels and from stages, as somebody who uses what you do rather than somebody reading your messaging back.
- Appearing in your own content. Video, podcasts, webinars, campaigns – whatever you are making, with a real customer in it instead of a stock one.
- Naming you when people ask who to trust. Which they do, constantly, in our communities and our inbox. This is the quietest item on the list and probably the most valuable.
- Writing about the problem you solve, in our own voice, across the year rather than once.
And you do the same for us. That reciprocity is what separates this from a sponsorship, and it is the reason the arrangement is worth more to both sides than the money moving through it.
What goes into a given year is built around the two businesses rather than taken off a list, because at this level the useful things are specific: an event, a piece of original research, a product designed together, an introduction neither of us could have made alone.
What one of these actually looks like
Maya is an ambassador for Xolo Spain, and it is the only arrangement of this kind we have.
She has been associated with Xolo for more than eight years, running her Estonian company through Xolo Leap, and she now files her Spanish self-employed taxes through Xolo Spain as well. The ambassadorship came long after the first invoice, and it came because the relationship had already proved itself.
She recommends them because she files her own taxes through them. That is a different thing from being paid to say so, and the difference is the whole point of this page.
Why there are so few of them
When we represent you to our readers, we are spending the trust they have in us. So we have to know how a business actually behaves – not how it presents itself, but what it does when something goes wrong, when a client is difficult, when the answer is inconvenient.
Sometimes we already know that. We have worked together, or we have watched your work for years, or people whose judgement we trust vouch for you without being asked.
We turn down far more of these than we take on. Where we do not know a business well enough yet, the answer is not yet rather than no – and "not yet" means a conversation, not a rejection.
If you want to apply
Do. There is no particular route in: some of these grow out of a referral partnership that has been running for a while, and others start cold because somebody is clearly the right fit and says so.
Tell us three things:
- What you want to achieve over the next year – the business outcome, not the activity.
- What you would do for us, in concrete terms. This runs both ways and that is the whole point.
- Who you already work with, so we can go and ask them how it has been.
We will give you a straight answer, including when that answer is no. We would rather be useful about why than vague about it.
Apply for an ambassadorship
Answer the three questions above in your own words. We will give you a straight answer, including when that answer is no.
Most people should start with a referral partnership instead – there is no cost to it and nothing to commit to. Want to help run one of our country communities? That is a different thing entirely.