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Sunir Shah, How the Subscription Economy Helps Businesses Grow Sustainably – InnovaBuzz 515
Sunir Shah, AppBind
In this episode, I’m really excited to have as my guest, Sunir Shah, the founder and CEO of AppBind which lets digital agencies manage subscriptions to software and ads for the clients without getting stuck in the middle of the billing. He formerly ran partnerships at FreshBooks, marketing at Olark live chat, and founded the Cloud Software Association, the 4,000+ SaaS partnership network. AppBind helps digital agencies deliver projects faster by taking care of their clients’ entire marketing system.
In our conversation, Sunir talked to me about
- Creating a solution by building a system
- Making things easy for your customers
- How the subscription economy helps businesses grow sustainably
Listen to the podcast to find out more.
Listen to the Podcast
Subscriptions allow you to move from just producing content to owning the overall goal of the content. @Sunir on #InnovaBuzz podcast Click To TweetShow Notes from this episode with Sunir Shah of AppBind
Key points and takeaways from this episode include:
- In order to build a sustainable business, you have to build a product that is scalable, otherwise, every day of your business starts at zero.
- Subscriptions allow you to move from just producing content to owning the overall goal of the content.
- Businesses are there to serve people.
- Every contractor sells the same thing which is to bring calm and control back to the client. Clients have huge anxiety and they just want their lives back. They want you to take care of it for them because they don’t have any idea how to do it.
- The opportunity for any agency is to be that reliable person who will not give clients a hard time – take care of things for them, get things done, and do it in a pleasant way.
- Clients don’t care about the content. What they care about is for the content to deliver the result.
- Wherever you look is where you are going to drive. If you want to gain more revenue, get more business. Your bank account already has your money. If you’re only looking at your bank account for more revenue, you are never going to find it.
- Market placing should be the goal of any organisation. You have to be making changes in the market outside of your own if you want to generate more revenue.
- Think about what your client is freaking out about, that you can repeatedly solve.
- Clients will fire you the moment you make them feel anxious. The moment you put things back on their plate, you are risking increasing their anxiety working with you.
- You are building a solution that is a system, not a product.
- AppBind allows you to create a shared virtual email and a shared virtual credit card that allows you to sign up on behalf of clients for anything they need.
- AppBind is all about providing a transparent and trustworthy way of telling your clients that you’ll take care of things for them.
- 3 ways to earn money on AppBind – a mark up on subscriptions, service revenue, and commission program for partners.
- Commissions matter because they are sustainable recurring revenue.
- When you start building relationships with vendors, they’ll be sending referrals your way.
The Buzz – Our Innovation Round
Here are Sunir’s answers to the questions of our innovation round. Listen to the conversation to get the full scoop.
- #1 thing to be more innovative – Get yourself in trouble. Make a glorious mess and fix it. Assume you don’t know anything.
- Best thing for new ideas – Getting yelled at all the time. No one can understand anyone else’s pitch except from the concept that’s already in their own mind. So whatever your message is to the market, it can only be constructed from ideas that are already in the market.
- Favourite tool for innovation – Trade associations and conferences.
- Keep project/client on track – Keep a simple bullet list of the 5 things you are working on.
- Differentiate – Just be YOU! Be a better and more honest person with yourself.
Action
Spend some time with yourself every Sunday evening and write your thoughts down.
Reach Out
You can reach out and thank Sunir through their website.
Suggested Guest
Sunir suggested we have conversations with Noah Kagan of OKDork and AppSumo and Clodagh Higgins of Growit Group on future InnovaBuzz Podcast episodes.
Links
Cool Things About Sunir
- He loves making the Internet a more glorious place.
- He’s President of the Cloud Software Association.
- He’s also the Founder of Bibdex, a software that allows groups of scholars and professionals to collaborate to build annotated bibliographies.