How to Get a Business Development Job at a Startup

To get a business development job at a startup, first work out which BD the company means: outbound sales under another name, or partnerships with other companies. Then show the matching proof. For sales-style BD, that's pipeline and closing. For partnerships, it's a partner map for their product and a clear idea of what each side gets.

Definition: Business development (BD or bizdev) at a startup is the work of creating growth through other companies and new channels: integration and technology partners, resellers, marketplaces, distribution deals and, at some startups, outbound sales. It differs from sales mainly in who sits across the table.

The title is one of the vaguest in tech. That's the first thing to know, and it's also an opening: a candidate who can explain what the role should be often stands out.

What business development means at a startup

When a startup posts a business development job, it usually means one of three things.

1. BD as sales. "Business development representative" or "business development manager" often means outbound prospecting or closing deals with customers. These seats are usually measured like sales development: The Bridge Group's 2025 SDR research (351 B2B companies) found a median quota of 10 meetings held per month. If the posting talks about meetings booked, quota and pipeline, it's a sales job.
2. BD as partnerships. Building relationships with companies that can help you reach or serve customers: software you integrate with, resellers and agencies, cloud marketplaces, platforms with app stores. Titles include partnerships manager, partner manager, alliances or ecosystem lead.
3. BD as strategic deals. Distribution agreements, data licensing, co-development with a large company, sometimes early corporate development. At a young startup this is often the founder's job, with a BD hire supporting.

A quick test: ask who the counterparty is and what you're measured on. Where partners fit in a company's plan usually shows up in its go-to-market strategy, which is worth reading up on before interviews. Customers and closed revenue mean sales. Other companies, and the revenue or users those companies bring, mean partnerships. Our guide to startup job titles shows how these labels shift with company stage.

Partnerships vs sales: how a business development job differs

The overlap is real. Both involve prospecting, discovery, negotiation and persistence. The differences sit in the shape of the work:

The partner is not buying anything. They're agreeing to spend their own time, engineering and reputation on you. So the core BD question isn't "how do I close?" but "what does the other side get, and who inside their company will fight for it?"

That's also why partnerships work tends to need internal selling. Your own product team has to build the integration, marketing has to co-promote, sales has to work partner leads. A BD person who can't move their own company rarely moves anyone else's.

Examples of startup business development deals

What does the work look like in practice? A few common deal types, described from the partner programs themselves:

• App marketplace integrations. HubSpot's Technology Partner Program, for example, asks for at least three active customer installs before an app can be submitted to its marketplace, and runs tiers (Partner, Rising, Leading, Premier) based on customer value, revenue influence and quality. A BD hire might own the listing, the reviews and the co-marketing plan.
• Cloud co-selling. Amazon describes its ISV Accelerate program as a co-sell program for software that runs on or integrates with AWS. Eligibility includes a listing in AWS Marketplace and a minimum number of launched and qualified opportunities. Startups selling to enterprises often hire BD people to run that motion with the cloud provider's sales teams.
• Platform ecosystems. Shopify says it paid partners $1.3 billion in 2025, and lists apps, themes, store builds and referrals among the ways partners earn. For a startup building on a platform like that, BD might mean agency relationships and referral deals.
• Distribution and reseller deals. A larger company bundles or resells your product to its customers. Higher stakes, longer negotiation, often led by a founder.

An illustrative partner campaign, with the arithmetic. Say a startup signs a co-marketing deal with a software partner that has 5,000 customers matching its profile. A joint webinar invite gets 3 percent to register (150 people), 40 percent of those attend (60), 10 attendees book demos, and 3 close at $12,000 a year each. That's $36,000 of new annual revenue from one campaign. Real rates vary widely; the useful skill is building this funnel before the deal is signed, so both sides know what they're agreeing to.

What a startup BD job looks like at each stage

Pre-seed and seed. BD is usually a founder activity. If a startup this early hires for BD, it may really need a first salesperson.

Series A. The first dedicated partnerships hire tends to appear once the product has an integration story and a few customers asking for it. Expect to do everything: pick partners, write the pitch, coordinate engineering, run launches. A first partnerships hire is usually not an entry-level seat, so on the startup jobs track try the Mid and Senior level filters.

Series B and later. Teams split by partner type (technology, channel, cloud, agencies), and you may manage a portfolio of existing partners rather than sign new ones.

Hiring is lean across the board. Carta's H1 2025 State of Startup Compensation report found 16.6 percent of new hires on its platform were in sales, and in our view partnerships roles are a much smaller group than that. Fewer seats means founders are picky, which is why a sharp, specific application matters.

Business development skills startups hire for

What we'd expect a startup to screen for, roughly in order:

• Commercial judgment. Spotting which partners could move a metric that matters, and which would just generate a press release.
• Writing. A one-page deal memo: what each side gives, what each gets, how you'll measure it.
• Product fluency. Enough to understand an API, an integration and a data flow, and to talk with engineers without wasting their time.
• Negotiation. Revenue shares, exclusivity, referral fees, who owns the customer.
• Internal influence. Getting your own product, marketing and sales teams to commit.
• Patience and follow-through. Partner deals can stall for weeks inside a bigger company.

Elad Gil's High Growth Handbook draws a similar line between strong and weak BD hires: the weak ones are charming but never finish the deal, or give away value trying to be fair to the partner, while the strong ones run a disciplined process and catch the contract details. Expect interviewers to probe your follow-through and ask what a past deal actually changed.

Pay varies widely by stage, city and how sales-like the role is, and the BLS has no separate business development occupation. One longer-run comparison: BLS data put median pay for sales managers at $148,270 in May 2025. For role-level benchmarks, the 1752vc careers salary guide is a place to start.

How to get into business development (from any starting point)

There are several common routes in, and none of them require a BD title first.

• From an SDR or BDR seat. You learn prospecting and the product, and many teams move strong reps into partner-sourced pipeline. Our guide on getting an SDR job covers that first step.
• From an account executive role. Closers who like longer, multi-party deals often move into partnerships. See how to get a sales job at a startup for the sales side.
• From customer success or solutions. You already know how integrations get used and break.
• From consulting, banking or operations. Deal structuring and modeling transfer well; BizOps is a nearby path, covered in breaking into BizOps.
• From the partner side. People at agencies, resellers or platform companies already know how partnerships look from the other chair.

How to get into business development with no experience: start in the role closest to it (often SDR, customer success or an ops generalist role at a startup with partners), volunteer for partner work, and build one public piece of proof, such as the partner map below.

A partner map you can copy

Before you apply, build this for your target company. It makes a strong attachment to a short note to the founder or head of growth.

Add a sentence on why each partner might say no. That one line shows more BD judgment than a page of enthusiasm.

To find openings, search "Partnerships", "Business Development" or "Alliances" on the startup track of the 1752vc careers board, filter by level and Past 30 days, and read each posting for the counterparty and the metric. That tells you which kind of BD it is before you write a word.

"Partnerships are a distraction for an early startup"

Plenty of founders and investors think so, and they have a point. Paul Graham wrote in his 2013 essay Do Things That Don't Scale that partnerships usually don't work for startups, especially as a way to get growth started. A big partner's interest can feel like progress while nothing ships. A popular statistic says most alliances fail: Jonathan Hughes and Jeff Weiss wrote in Harvard Business Review in 2007 that "some 60% to 70%" of corporate alliances fail. That figure is worth reading carefully, though. It's an estimate about large-company alliances, from 2007, with failure loosely defined, and it's often repeated as if it were a current, startup-specific number.

But.

The same distraction argument applies to bad sales hires and bad ad campaigns. Our view is that partnerships work when they're tied to a specific metric and a clear give-and-get. Outbound channels also wear out over time, which we've argued in why channels decay rather than die, and partners can be one way to reach buyers who've stopped answering cold email. As a candidate, a strong answer to this objection is a plan that names the metric.

Common mistakes in a BD job search

• Applying without knowing which BD they mean. Read for the counterparty and the metric.
• Pitching relationships, not results. "I know people at X" matters less than how you'd structure a deal with X.
• Ignoring the integration work. Many partnerships live or die on engineering time you'll have to win.
• Treating it as a non-quota sales job. Partnerships still get measured. Ask how.

Where we land

We think startup BD is one of the more interesting commercial roles in tech, and one of the easiest to misread. Some BD jobs are sales jobs with a nicer title. Some are genuine partnership roles that need patience, product sense and internal clout.

If you want the partnerships version, it helps to earn sales or customer experience first, then move toward deals with other companies. If a startup can't tell you what its BD hire should achieve in the first six months, we'd be cautious. That's our view, and plenty of good BD careers have started in messier places.

The bottom line

Read the posting for the counterparty. Then show you've thought about what the other side gets.

Sales asks a buyer for a yes.

Partnerships ask a company to bet on you.

Key takeaways

• A business development job at a startup can mean outbound sales, partnerships or strategic deals, so check the counterparty and the metric in the posting.
• Partnerships BD differs from sales mainly in who's across the table: another company with its own goals, longer cycles and more internal coordination.
• Real deal types include marketplace integrations, cloud co-selling, platform ecosystems and distribution or reseller deals, each with published partner program rules.
• Startups tend to hire BD people for commercial judgment, writing, product fluency, negotiation and internal influence.
• Common routes in are SDR, account executive, customer success, consulting or operations, and partner-side roles; a partner map makes a strong application.

Frequently asked questions

What does a business development person do at a startup?

It depends on the company. In some startups, business development means outbound sales: booking meetings and closing customers. In others, it means partnerships: integrations, resellers, marketplaces and distribution deals with other companies. Early on, BD people often pick partners, negotiate terms, coordinate the product work and run launch campaigns, measured by partner-driven revenue or users.

Is business development the same as sales at a startup?

Sometimes. Titles like business development representative usually describe sales roles that book meetings for account executives. Partnership-focused BD is different: the counterparty is another company rather than a buyer, deals take longer and involve product and legal work, and pay often has a bigger base share. Reading what the role is measured on usually settles it.

How do you get into business development with no experience?

Many people start in a nearby role, such as sales development, customer success or an operations generalist job, then volunteer for partner projects. Building a short partner map for a target company (likely partners, why each would care, a first step) shows business development judgment before you have the title, and makes a strong attachment to an application.

What skills does a startup business development job need?

Startups tend to look for commercial judgment about which partners matter, clear writing for deal memos, enough product fluency to discuss integrations and APIs, negotiation on terms such as revenue share and exclusivity, and the ability to win support from your own product, marketing and sales teams. Patience matters too, since partner deals often stall inside larger companies.

What is the difference between partnerships and business development?

The terms overlap. Partnerships usually refers to ongoing relationships with other companies, such as integration, reseller or marketplace partners. Business development is broader and can include partnerships, strategic deals and, at some companies, outbound sales. At many startups, a partnerships manager and a business development manager do much the same job.

Sources

• The Bridge Group: SDR Models, Motions and Metrics, 2025 Research Report
• Carta: State of Startup Compensation, H1 2025
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: Sales Managers
• HubSpot: Technology Partner Program
• Amazon Web Services: AWS ISV Accelerate Program
• Shopify: Shopify Partner Program
• Harvard Business Review: Simple Rules for Making Alliances Work (Jonathan Hughes and Jeff Weiss)
• Paul Graham: Do Things That Don't Scale
• Elad Gil, High Growth Handbook: How to Hire Great Business Development People