If I had to choose between owning the sales relationship or the technology I know which I'd choose. Enjoy it while it lasts.

We have our own customers, too. In addition, the folks white-labelling use us in-house. We aren't strangers to the companies receiving our white-labelled SaaS; we do the initial customer on-boarding and provide all the higher-tier support.

Eleven years and counting....

But hey, you do you! I will be long retired by the time anyone gains traction with a competing offering. See you on the beach!

I think it comes down to who is the most easy to replace.

If the sellers kind of have a big chunk of the market, and can choose between vendors, you're indeed in a difficult spot.

On the other hand, if the market has multiple sellers, and you offer a unique technology, I wouldn't worry too much.

Pretty much any on-prem software vendor is some mix of direct sales, partner sales, and through distribution. And in the case of, say, a product primarily for SMBs, the mix is probably going to tilt pretty heavily to partners. There's a lot of leverage to using partners and many of them will know and be connected to some market a lot better than you do.

There are differences with SaaS but they may not be as big as you think. For example, AWS mostly started as a go online with your credit card sale. Now? They have a big enterprise sales force and lots of partner relationships.

I bumped into a friend on the street a year ago he and told me about the business he had recently co-founded and taken through YC: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/partnered. I told my co-founder about it and it became a significant part of his sales toolbox. I saw my friend last week and shared the single criticism my co-founder had. My friend told me they had recently been acquired by a competitor whose core functionality resolved our pain-point.

Strategic partnerships and white-labelling seem to be critical tools for growth in the current climate.

Whether or not there's any white-labeling involved, partnerships (VARs, SIs, now often public cloud providers, etc.) have been a key part of sales strategy for many types of products for decades.

Why white-label instead of affiliate-selling without the brand dishonesty?

In our case, there is no "brand dishonesty". In some cases, the front-end is co-branded, in others the front-end is white-label while the resulting product, if used, has our branding. And sometimes the end-user gets the raw data without a need for our branded artifact. In the absolute best-case, the customer automates their interactions and never sees any branding. (I know the marketing people on here blanched when they read that.) Our concern is utility for the customer, growing that utility, retaining existing customers regardless of how we acquired them and who got the generous sales commission, while growing the number of customers and the volume of product used year-over-year.

Affiliate sales have always seemed more dishonest to me than working with a vendor who adds value to our product for our shared customers.