How Rept gave a pre-seed fintech a partnerships channel: merchants, banks and finance leaders reached with the research behind each email, and 53 meetings booked for a two-person partnerships team.
Stoa is a two-sided business. Savers lock cash away for twelve months and get the reward on day one as perks from brands they already pay for. For that to work Stoa needs three kinds of partner at once: merchants whose products become the perks, banks and lenders that hold the deposits, and finance leaders at companies with idle cash.
With a team of under ten and a partnerships lead working alone, there was no outbound function, no sending infrastructure and no list beyond the brands Jo already knew. The ask was never a sale. It was a pilot conversation with the right person at each company.
Rept split the work into tracks, each with its own Target Market and its own angle:
Jo’s own list of 176 merchants was expanded with 480 further partnership contacts, several per large brand, each with a verified email. Every company was researched before the first send, the emails were written from that research and reviewed by a person, and replies were answered and booked straight into the calendar.
Across 19 campaigns Stoa sent 87,078 emails and received 494 replies, of which 125 were positive. Merchant partnerships did the heavy lifting: UK merchants returned one positive reply for every three replies, US merchants one in four. Stoa’s partnerships lead logged 53 meetings from Rept campaigns by October 2026.
Every email asked for a pilot conversation with the right person, never a sign-up. The reply rate followed.
Large brands got partnerships, growth and commercial contacts, not one guess at the right name.
Jo’s contacts stayed in. Rept added the people around them and verified every address before sending.
Stoa works in its own console with its own inboxes and signatures, on the same engine as every Rept client.
Stoa now has a partnerships channel that runs without an outbound team: three tracks, each researched and written from the signal, with replies handled and meetings landing in the calendar.
Partnerships. Merchants join Stoa so their products become the perks savers unlock; banks hold the deposits; companies with idle cash use it to cover software costs. None of the emails sold the consumer app.
They ran as separate campaigns with their own inboxes and copy. The UK track had the higher positive share, which is why the later campaigns concentrated on the UK.
From the sheet Stoa’s partnerships lead keeps of every booked meeting, tagged by source. The 53 are the ones tagged to Rept campaigns as at October 2026.
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