Worried about paying out your clients' subscriptions and not getting paid back? Here's a solution...

Welcome to this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur Show. Today I'm delighted to have Sunir Shah joining me all the way from Toronto. Sunir, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me here. Now I feel more unnoticed, but less, less unnoticed. Less unnoticed.

We're gonna make you famous. Although actually looking at your background in experiential marketing and as the CEO and founder of AppBind, you're already pretty famous. Sunir, tell us about AppBind and how you help agency owners, uh, get noticed and to manage their businesses. And then we're gonna talk about how partnerships are essential for an entrepreneur to scale their business. You take it away, tell me what you'd like to tell me.

100%. So one of the things that has blown my mind over the last 20-some years as subscriptions have grown is how difficult it is for agencies, digital consultants, system integrators, VARs, IT consultants, whatever, to serve their clients the way clients are used to doing it. So what Appline does, and I'll get into the real problem later, but what we are, we're a subscription manager for digital agencies and consultants. So you get the digital under control so you can get your own agency under control. So you don't have to burden your clients with them making, making them sign up for subscriptions, confusing them, wasting time. You can take care of it for them, but you yourself are not stuck in the middle of their billing, the financial risk, and the bookkeeping. The subscription manager will automatically expense your clients, giving you the freedom to say, yeah, I'll take care of it for you, build out the system, deliver more value, do it in a way that, you know, clients actually expect you to do it.

So what problem is that trying to solve? Because, you know, having run an agency myself, when clients want us to, for example, manage their advertising or manage subscriptions to a media buy, I end up having to put my own credit card on the line and then billing them later. I know it's insane. So, Sunil, is that what you're solving? And if you are, how, how are you doing that from a practical point of view? Because it's a big problem for agency owners.

Well, yeah, I mean, so just let me just answer that question, but I'll tell you the actual problem. So the Tuesday afternoon problem is how do I actually buy a subscription? I'll answer that. Really, what's a subscription? An email and a credit card. So what I realized you could do was you can create a shared virtual credit card and a shared virtual email. So the credit card, you can buy the subscription, but instead of you paying for it, the customer's paying for it. It just expenses them. We handle all the bookkeeping. You can mark it up. You can add your service retainers. You put your whole, you know, you can make your own margin on top of it. And then second, we create a shared virtual email so that when you sign up, that email is forwarded to you. So you manage the account because you're supposed to take care of it for the client. But forwards emails to the client so they own it. It's like their data and they should own it. It's their contract. So they own it from the beginning. It's very, very simple. And then at the end of the project, of course, uh, because it's all their subscription and they own everything, uh, you can just click one button and transfer everything to the client, you know, in one go instead of having to spend a whole day updating billing, which is a pain. But that's like the Tuesday afternoon problem. Like, what's the bigger problem? Like, why did I realize we needed to do this? And so one of my, one of the things I've done in my career, I started the marketing team at FreshBooks for those who know it, which is invoicing for consultants, agencies, freelancers, contractors of all kinds. And one thing that I, this is 2007 when I started and what we noticed right away, 'cause we had the comparative data, was that those digital agencies around licensed software were rocking and rolling. Just like, you know, honestly, I started off as a software developer in Microsoft Development Studio. It was just like anything, any contractor since the age of the pyramids. We would just quote time and materials. You know, we, you know, when I was younger, it would be like computers, networking cables, Windows licenses, SDKs, plus our time. We'd sell the system, you know, then we have the maintenance contract and the president of that consultancy, I was 18. I was asking a lot of questions. I was curious. She said to me, you know, honestly, we're not selling you your hands on keyboard. That's just the hello. What we're doing is selling the system because then we get the 3-year maintenance contract. That's 3 years of conversations with the client, all the upgrades, the maintenance. You know, plus we have the opportunity to sell the next system, the next system, right? That becomes a 10-year relationship with the client. And honestly, that wasn't very revelatory because I said, you know, people have been doing this for thousands of years. But I finally, you know, it really landed in my mind. And this story, I think people might resonate with more because it's easier to grapple with. I had a client who fired me. So I, you know, I was CMO at Olark. I had my third kid. I quit because I wanted to be You know, we have more freedom with the children. So I was consulting and it had been a long time since I was, you know, now I was in the subscription era and I didn't want to sign up for anything because no one wants to. It's all the data. And more importantly, these are very expensive subscriptions. I didn't want them on my credit card. You know, I didn't want to be at risk in case the client didn't pay me, right, to eat the charges, all these things that comes up. So every week during the sync, I'd ask this guy, he was a fashion retailer making clothes, right? He didn't know anything about cookies. For analytics of what I was doing. You know, he was making clothes, like, you know, he was making a bricks and mortar store and an online store. He wouldn't sign up for anything. He just, he said, yeah, yeah, sure. But he just couldn't, he was overwhelmed. And then finally nothing was done 72 hours from launch. And he just had it out with me. I tried going on a video call, you know, click here, click here, like a child, you know, it did not go well. He said, Sunil, my plumber, my plumber is not making me buy my own pipes. I was like, oh yeah, that's exactly right. You know, working, I expect you to take care of this. for me. Working with you was 10 times harder than not working with you. I did buy this thing. I did do an all-nighter. I did cancel my credit card and he did fire me, but I did catch up with him a month later because we had a good rapport and he was calmer. And he asked me, so what was your experience? Yeah, you wasted my time. You slowed the project down for me and everyone else. You confused me. And frankly, I just expect you to take care of it. And like I said, plumbers, like they would never send you to a hardware store to buy your own pipes in here. I don't know why you're making me do this. Yeah. You know, and then I asked him, okay, that's all true. And that's, I understand that. Uh, and then when did you decide to fire me? I asked him. This is the most interesting thing. He said, the first call. It's still first. What do you mean the first call? I thought you said I was your guy. He's like, yeah, don't get me wrong. I was mad at you at the end, but I was thinking, I'm trying to give you, because I like you, I'm giving you an honest answer. He said, the first call when you started putting things back on my plate that I didn't understand, like computer science, like A/B split testing, Bayesian analysis. Like, what is he, what am I even talking about to a guy who's making clothes?

Right.

It's like, I knew that you couldn't take care of it for me. I needed to hire someone in-house who could take care of it for me. And this is why when we saw at FreshBooks, those around the subscription era were the client, the client, the service was less because they were doing less valuable work. And the lifetime cycle of the clients was much shorter because all you're doing is labor. And all these agencies, as you well know, end up on the labor treadmill, the scalability trap, where all you have is human labor, you own nothing, right? And the more payroll, the more revenue you have, the more payroll you have, which means next month you have to make more revenue. And then you're in this trap, scaling an agency is actually terrifying instead of, you know, success. And that is what motivated me to create Appline. That's the real problem. And I know it sounds like a virtual email and virtual credit card, it sounds like a small thing, but it's a big thing because it's not about buying that subscription. It's about saying to the client, yeah, I'll take care of it for you. And then building a system like a plumber would build, you know, they don't make the pipes, but they build the system, the pumps, the valves, the pipes, and then they maintain that system. You know, month after month for these industrial factories. And you should be doing that too, because that is actually the way out of the scalability trap.

Sunil, I can completely associate with that. And just tell me then, so from an agency perspective, when I've subscribed to things for clients and I've had to put my credit card down, for example, for a media monitoring service, for example, for a client, the client doesn't want to give me their credit card. You know, I have to put my own down and then I bill them afterwards. How are you getting the client to agree to, in effect, be committing to a monthly spend without using their credit card, but it may be an open-ended, because this is the roundabout that we get on with clients. They say, well, I won't put the money down until I've seen the end of the month. How are you solving that? Just practical problem.

Well, that's it. It's all about trust. I mean, clients are freaking out all the time. I mean, and they're freaking out for lots of reasons. One, they already failed to solve the problem internally. They feel incompetent. They're behind schedule. They're like, they're costing money. They don't know you. They don't know if you're going to deliver. They're putting a lot of trust in you. And then when money moves, it becomes a trust issue. So everything about App Finds is about building trust, but how do we solve this problem? It's very simple. You would say to the client, yeah, I'll take care of it for you. Always start with that because that's all they really want. I'll take care of it for you because it's your business and your data. I'm going to use a subscription manager. So everything I build for you, you'll own and control in one place. And in order to fund it, you know, You can put money in it, in, it's effectively an escrow account. It's an expense fund. It's 100% refundable to the client at the end of the project. We're the guarantor. It says so clearly to the client, this money is refundable. It works like Starbucks. It just, you know, once it goes below minimum, it re-ups itself, it re-tops itself back up. So that handles the recurring charges, but it gives you the security that there's money available to run the expenses month after month. It gives them the security that they have a controlled amount of spend because you set spending limits. on it, like a Facebook ad budget, you know, there's a budget on it. And that money is theirs, it belongs to them, and it's refundable to them. So it's all about creating a trusted space where they can delegate authority to you and can delegate the funds so you can take action on their behalf without them losing control of it.

So yeah, that sounds really clever. You mentioned Facebook, can you just give us a list of some of the top subscription services that someone could use AppBind for with their client?

Yeah, I mean, you can use anything that takes a credit card, but Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads are like the big ones. Zoom, strangely, a lot of people buying Zoom, a lot of Riverside, actually Squarespace, ActiveCampaign, HubSpot are big ones, Microsoft Office 365, Outlook, that kind of thing, G Suite. These are all very common things, landing page tools. Klipfolio, Supermetrics, monitoring tools, those things, very common.

Well, yes, because I've found that clients like something like, for example, like Vidyard, you know, the video delivery service you can use for marketing, but they can't get it signed off internally and they don't have a credit card. So this overcomes what has actually just been a commercial barrier to clients trialing new software.

Well, it's just the thing too, is like when a client hires an agency, Right? Their freakout level is very high. So every time you come back to them and burden them with purchasing something, they believe this must be a 5-alarm fire decision when you're just like, could you just shut up and buy Vidyard? Because it doesn't make a difference. It's part of what I need. It's like a plumber making you buy a sump pump. You're like, oh, do we need this one? What is the, what's the quality? You're making all these things you have no basis to make a decision on, but because you're being asked to make a decision, it's your, your, it's your butt on the line, right? So you have to ask meaningless questions.

Yeah.

But procurement, if you do it properly, is that you procure the project. So if I'm hiring someone to, like a plumber to fix my leaky basement, it's going to be $5,800. And that's include all the parts. I mean, I'm not going to care what they're doing. One procurement. So if they're buying from you sales operations or podcast management or PR management, you know, that's going to include the software. It's one procurement and one purchase, you know, one decision instead of 15 decisions. Right. And then actually what you'll find, as you probably know, as an agency, you're actually There's only so many times you can go back to the client to sign up stuff before they get, they get exasperated because it's so painful every single time that you kind of limit yourself to this universe of like just HubSpot and Facebook or whatever it is. What we find with AppBind is because the authorization is a one-time, you can get one-time authorization to do anything that obviously you should tell your client what you're doing, but you can get the authorization one time if you ask for it. And then these agencies actually strangely, like, oh, I can do more things for my client and create more value because marketing or IT, there's infinite number of things you could expand into. Only you can bring the tools into, right? And then suddenly you're bringing in like StreamYard into the projects that you, that people could never imagine have done doing before. And they're delivering more interesting projects, you know, it gets you out of the trap.

Yeah, that's really liberating because also, as you say, if you're asking a client to, you know, verify the email and they have to maybe do a MFA, you know, multiple factor authorization every time you log in to a new service. In the end, you go beyond, beyond their comfort level, right? They, they say, actually, it's easier for me not to do the new thing than to keep jumping through these different technological hoops. You're asking them to be the expert by signing up. So, Sunil, I can really see how AppBind is solving that. It's fantastic. What a great idea.

Took me 10 years and all my hair to figure it out.

Well, I don't know what my excuse is. I've been doing it for longer and have less hair than you, and I haven't thought of something as brilliant as AppBind. So look, I think you paid a fair price. So tell us though, how are you getting AppBind out there? You've told me you've got over 100 agencies already using it and just listening to the proposition, I can completely see how it could add a huge amount of value to an agency owner and to a client, by the way. I can see a client mandating an agency to use this too. How are you building awareness? of AppBind?

Given the context of this podcast, I'll give you a more generic framework of thought for how I think about— because I've done lots of different kinds of marketing, mentioned experiential marketing, which is quite different, partnership marketing, direct marketing, politics as well. Strangely, it all comes down to relationship marketing to me. I mean, I'm not a digital marketer in the sense that I buy ads, I can't handle that. It's just a lot of spreadsheets, I can't deal with it. But I'm a relationship marketer. So how do I do it? For one, I run the trade association, which I built over some a decade now, the Cloud Software Association of all the SaaS partnership people. And then I have part of that, the Agency Connect universe, and I have my own podcast, Agency Connect. I have the Agency Connect Cocktails, and I have a, I have all these relationships with agencies that I've built over time. And the, so the first thing I do is I just know a lot of people, but how do I do that? And I think I want to give you like, like real answers to these things. Even sounds like hand waving. I mean, you can see on my wall who's here, like Gandhi, right?

Yeah.

Gandhi G. And I bought that at the end of the pandemic 'cause I was getting a little bit depressed and I was trying to remind myself about why I do what I do. If you look at my career objective, it's to make the internet a more glorious place, which is not a capital goal. It's not about making money. It's about humanity. It's about help. 'Cause I believe, although maybe less so over the last 2 decades since I kind of stopped doing it, 'cause I had kids, I blame my children. The world has gone sideways 'cause of me and I had kids and I can't focus on saving the world.

I'm sorry. It's It saves the world one child at a time, right? That's a good ambition.

That's true. That's true. That's actually a good point. Uh, I should just make myself feel better. So here's what I mean. Like when I, when I, how do I get noticed? When I approach people, agents, anybody, I hope it comes through that I sincerely am paying attention to you as an individual and I'm here to support you and help you with your objectives and make you more glorious using my tool. And, and that's a, Value principle, but then how do you systematize that as a marketing thing? So let's go from the principle, the value, the system. So step 1, I have an online community, like build a community around yourself, right? So I have the Slack community. I have a conference coming up in April, end of April for all the SaaS partnership people. I've been building that for 10 years. I buy drinks for people as I, I mean, I have an open bar as a service, OBaaS, I like to say, where if I fly in, I'm always like trying to like get people together, trying to connect them. 'Cause the most valuable thing I can offer is not a relationship to me, but relationship to other people that they otherwise couldn't meet. And I view, I view community building, and this again sounds like hand waving, but hear what I'm saying, is square dances. Like I'm, I'm basically doing a square dance. And what does that mean? These are adults who would otherwise wanna meet with each other, but lack the social context to break the ice.

Yeah.

And so I try to create games, games to make them break the ice. And that, you know, it could be as simple as, you know, a meetup, it could be, uh, podcasts, it could be, A roundtable, it could be a mentor session, it could be direct integration— introduction, just literally doing the matchmaking. But I try to come up with a lot of these things. But when you do that and you show you genuinely care about people, people actually care about you in return. And when I was at FreshBooks running the partnership team, this was actually our KPIs. And I, I, I got into trouble with it, but I don't care. I do whatever I want. And so our KPI was a, was a heart emoji. And it's like, it's like, that's not a thing. Like you can't have a heart emoji as a KPI. It's like, no, I can. The KPI was hearts won. It's like, what the hell does that mean? How do you, how do you run a business on hearts won? And I'll tell you, if you believe in marketing, if like, if you do Cross— you've read Crossing the Chasm, which is my favorite marketing book of all time.

Yeah, of course.

Okay. So what is a, what is the point of marketing is to establish market victory or market lock by having most of the market basically value as rank one. I mean, that's also an Al Ries, Jack Trout thing. Positioning as the first-ranked company. And what does that mean? Like they think of you first. And to make you think of you first in a relationship marketing way is it's just like dating. You, you, we had a whole pipeline like target, handshake, spec, act, you know, committed, action 1, action 2, action 3, hearts won. So we would try to run tactics to do things for other people that were not actually ROI positive for us, but ROI positive for them. You know, helping them with their objectives. We were very, very good at FreshBooks at delivering results for other people, organizing things, project managing things. A lot of people don't know how to do things. We set up the cocktail parties. I got really good at that. People didn't know how to do event marketing. I'd do that for people. And we kept doing that, but then we knew we won them. But when they, when they bring an opportunity to us, not because we asked them to, right? But because they thought of us first and we knew we were, we had won their hearts. And when you do that, Enough, right? Then no one could beat you because no competitor can come in because everyone's going to value giving you the opportunity before anyone else. You know, and that, you know, it's not just about doing things for other people. It's just also like catching up with people once a month or once a quarter and just say, hey, what's up? Do you have a blog post we could do together? Or do you have a webinar? It's anything. Just keep things going. Right? And then when they start thinking of you first, because they know your relationship is valuable. Uh, and give it to you, or they like you, or they think your solution is good, then you've won their heart. And when you, you, and we had this whole spreadsheet. I wish it was the CRM that was like at that time that was this, but we, we did it on a spreadsheet. And that, it, it sounds lame, but if you systematize it and you think, okay, tactically it's just like dating. You take, you take someone out for coffee, you take 'em out to an event, maybe a horse show or something or whatever, and then they organize something for you, right? Like then the relationship's working.

Yeah.

They're starting to think of you and try to make you happy. And then as relationships going along, it's a trade, right? It's a partnership. You're trying to, you want to keep the relationship going by doing favors for each other. That's when you won them in the market. You cannot be dispositioned from someone who loves you in their heart, right?

That's absolutely fantastic. So this idea of sort of systematically paying it forward and helping others, there's a very long-term and generous way to view your work, isn't it?

Yeah. And for me, that's the only thing I can do honestly, because there's a lot more extractive ways of viewing the market of give it, Like, give it to me. I'm like, okay, well, people could be fine with that. If your product is so good and compelling, fine. But I don't care enough to do that because I'm going to die eventually and then I can't take any of that with me. So what I'd rather do with my life is, like I said, make the world a more glorious place. And so I get, and I think it reflects well, people see that, I hope. And I've never been not successful, like, by doing that. People want you to succeed if they know you want them to succeed. Turns out that works. It's not karma necessarily, because I'm doing systematically, like it's not, it is operationalized, but that is the foundation of it all.

Sunir Shah joining me from Toronto, CEO of AppBind, which I think is a fabulous tool, but also some really wonderful emotional guidance as well. If you want to find out more about you, where can they do that, Sunir?

I'm on LinkedIn, Sunir Shah, S-U-N-I-R S-H-A-H. You can email me sunir@appbind.com and AppBind is, you know, A-P-P-B as bravoind.com and the Cloud Partners Association. If you're a SaaS partner, come join that too.

Perfect. And I'll put all those links, of course, in the show notes. Sunil Shah, thank you so much for sharing with me both your innovation, but also your insights on the Unnoticed Entrepreneur Show. Thank you so much for sharing today.

Well, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. It was fun.

It's been my pleasure. Thank you so much. You've been listening to Sunil Shah, CEO and founder of AppBind over there in Toronto, Canada. Thank you so much for listening to this. Episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur.