Really appreciated this one. We've been guilty of spending too much time on stupid things, mostly business related to date. Time spent building features, building tools to measure user engagement, revenue, and ways to optimize conversions, all good uses of time. Talking to a potential synergistic partner about a cross promotion and significantly disrupting workflow for a day or two? Not worth it. Actually, I would add to this and say that if you are just starting out, avoid partnering if you can, especially with bigger companies. It takes forever, and what you really need to answer isn't something they can offer up front and that is: will the partnership make us money soon? At this point we still get partnership offers from folks but instead of having big discussions about it anymore, we tend to just shoot back and say "That sounds cool, why don't we try something out next week and do X, measure results and see from there." It weeds out people who want to discuss their six sigma with you and selects for people who want to make money and get stuff done.

Boy, we wasted a lot time. Thanks for sharing the Snaptalent lessons.