[patio11]

It is, practically speaking, extraordinarily difficult to get resellers to do the work of building your company for you. After you have sales there will be any number of them trying to insert themselves into sales which you've already won for 20% of the sales price, though.

[angelohuang]

Hi patio,

So you think they are all genuinely bad for startup, correct? The connection we have is a person who has 300+ connections to marketing agencies. He thinks our product can help those reseller's clients. But in reality, those end users will be 3 layers away from us. Again, we have no power right now. What would you recommend? (p.s. I was about to email you, then saw your reply.)

[patio11]

They're probably not going to put huge amounts of work into marketing your product and selling it to their customers until their customers are coming to them saying "I want to buy angelohuang's thing. What do you recommend?", at which point they will recommend "We can certainly do that for you!" and then they'll call you and ask for a discount.

I have, unfortunately, a few dozen experiences of this general type, against one pro-active sale from a reseller.

n.b. My answer for "What is your discount?" is "Nothing for now, but I'm happy to award you a discount retroactive to the first dollar after you hit $100k in volume." This has never blocked a sale from happening because they're not making sales for you, they're inserting themselves into sales that their customer / your end-user has already decided will happen.