Are you paying out your clients’ subscriptions and worrying about not getting paid back? This is the solution you need. | UnNoticed Entrepreneur — public relations for business owners.

Are you paying out your clients’ subscriptions and worrying about not getting paid back? This is the solution you need.

By Jim James, Founder EASTWEST PR and Host of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur.

In the new episode of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur, I was joined by all the way from Toronto, Canada. He has a background in experiential marketing and he is the Chief Executive Officer and Founder of

In the podcast, he talked about AppBind and how he helps agency owners get noticed and manage their businesses. He also discussed how partnerships are essential for an entrepreneur to scale their business.

What is AppBind?

One of the things that has blown Sunir’s mind over the past 20 years seeing how subscriptions have grown is how difficult it has become for agencies, digital consultants, system integrators, and IT consultants among others to serve their clients the way clients are used to doing it.

AppBind is a subscription manager for digital agencies and consultants.

With their services, you get your own digital agency under control. You don’t have to burden your clients by making them sign up for subscriptions, confusing them and wasting their time. You can take care of it for them — but you yourself are not stuck in the middle of their billing and bookkeeping and the financial risk that comes with it.

The subscription manager will automatically expense your clients, giving you the freedom to say, “I’ll take care of it for you.” You can build out the system, deliver more value, and do it in a way that clients actually expect you to do.

Having run myself, I’ve experienced putting my own credit card on the line when clients ask me to manage their advertising or subscriptions to a media buy. Then, I bill them later.

This is a big problem for agency owners. But, according to Sunir, the real problem is: How do you actually buy a subscription?

When you do so, you’d need an email and a credit card. What he realised that you can do is to create a shared virtual credit card and email. And if you use that to buy a subscription, instead of you paying for it, the customer is the one who’s actually paying for it. You can expense the bill to your client and AppBind will be the one to handle the bookkeeping. You can mark it up, add your service retainers, and make your own margin on top of it.

As the virtual mail is shared, when you sign up for it, you can use it and manage the account. Because, in the first place, you’re supposed to take care of it on behalf of your client. However, it’s still clients who own it from the beginning. It’s their data and they should be the ones to own it.

At the end of a project — because it’s all their subscription and they own everything — you can just click on one button and transfer everything to the client. You can do it in one go instead of spending a whole day updating billing.

How Did The Idea Behind AppBind Come To Be?

Sunir considers the issue presented above as only a Tuesday afternoon problem. What’s the bigger problem? Why did he realise that he needed to do AppBind?

One of the things that he’s done in his career is to start the marketing team at FreshBooks , which is an invoice software for consultants, agencies, freelancers, and contractors of all kinds, back in 2007.

He went on sharing that he also started off as a software developer at a Microsoft development studio. And just like any contractor since the age of the pyramids — they’d just quote time and materials. When he was younger, that would include computers, networking cables, licenses. They’d sell the system and then they’d have the maintenance contract.

The president of that consultancy honestly emphasised that they’re not just selling Sunir’s skill as a developer. It’s just the beginning, a hello. What they’re really doing is to sell the system itself. Because then, they’d be able to get a three-year maintenance contract. That means three years’ worth of conversations with the client all about upgrades and maintenance. When they have the opportunity, they’d next sell a new system one after another. The three years becomes a 10-year relationship with the client.

That wasn’t very revelatory because people have been doing these for thousands of years already. This is why he also shared a story that might resonate more with people and it’s about a client who fired him.

When he had his third kid, he quit his work. Then he ventured into consulting. At first, he didn’t want to sign up for anything because no one really wants to. It’s all about data and, more importantly, you have these very expensive subscriptions. He didn’t want to have these on his credit card and become at risk in case the client doesn’t pay him to cover the charges.

There was one instance when he’d persistently talk to a client who’s a fashion retailer. He didn’t know anything about analytics and about what Sunir is doing. He’s making clothes and building brick-and-mortar and online stores. When he asked that fashion retailer to sign up for a subscription, he couldn’t. That person was overwhelmed. Even when Sunir had a video call with him and he instructed the client what to do and what to click, it still didn’t go well.

And that struck Sunir: His plumber is not making him buy his own pipes. The opposite of that is what happened with Sunir and his client.

That fashion retailer client expected Sunir to take care of such things for him. And with what Sunir did, it prompted the client to say that working with him has become 10 times harder than not working with him. In the end, the client fired him.

He caught up with him a month later (they did still have a good rapport and the client was now calmer). When he asked about the client’s experience, the client told Sunir that he wasted his time and slowed down his project. Sunir confused him when all the client wanted was for Sunir to take care of those things himself.

Like what Sunir said, plumbers would never send you to a hardware store and have you buy your own pipe.

The client clarified that when he had the call with Sunir, and Sunir was putting everything back on the client’s plate and those things were things he didn’t understand (it’s like computer science for him — all those A/B testing and data analysis), he realised that Sunir wouldn’t be able to take care of it for him. He needed to hire someone in-house who could take care of it for him.

This is why when he worked at FreshBooks, he saw that in the subscription area, the service is less because they’re doing less valuable work. He saw how the lifetime cycle of clients is much shorter because all they’re doing is labour. All these agencies end up on that labour treadmill, that scalability trap. All you have is human labour and you own nothing. The more payroll you have, the more revenue you need to have — the succeeding month, you have to make more revenue. It’s a trap. Scaling an agency, for him, is actually terrifying.

This is what motivated Sunir to create AppBind.

A shared virtual credit card and email may sound like small things. But it’s actually a big thing because it’s not about just buying that subscription. It’s about saying to the client, “I’ll take care of it for you.” You’re building a system like how a plumber would build a system — complete with pumps, valves, and pipes — and maintain that system month after month.

You need to have such a system to get out of that scalability trap.

It’s All About Trust

To get a client to agree to committing to a monthly spend, Sunir said that it’s all about trust.

Clients are freaking out all the time and they’re freaking out for lots of reasons. They may feel that they failed in solving a problem. They may feel incompetent. Or that they’re behind schedule and that’s costing them money. They don’t know you — they don’t know if you’re capable of delivering results. And when money moves, it does become a trust issue.

Everything points to building trust. But how do you solve this problem? Sunir said that it’s rather simple. You should always start by saying to a client, “I’ll take care of it for you.” Because that’s what they really want: for you to take care of their subscriptions on their behalf.

You have to reiterate to your client that it’s their business and their data. Because they use a subscription manager, everything that you build there is still their data. And they get to control it in one place.

In order to fund it, you can just put money in what’s effectively an escrow account. It’s an expense fund. It’s 100% refundable to the client when the project ends. AppBind works as the guarantor. This gives your clients the security that there’s money available to run the expenses month after month; the security that they can control the amount of spend because they can set spending limits like a Facebook ad budget.

The money is there. It belongs to them and it’s refundable to them.

All this is all about creating a trusted space where they can delegate authority and funds to you so that you can take action on their behalf without them losing control.

AppBind can be used to cover several subscription services — essentially, anything that requires a credit card. These include Facebook Ads , LinkedIn Ads , , Riverside.fm , , Microsoft 365 , , and even the very common things like landing page tools, portfolios, and monitoring tools.

Empowering Agencies and Clients to Do More

AppBind’s service helps clients to overcome a commercial barrier that hinders them to trial a new software. For instance, someone might want to try a video-making software but they don’t have a credit card to pay for a subscription.

Sunir also pointed out that when a client hires an agency, their freakout level is high. If you’re an agency, every time you come back to them and burden them with purchasing something, they believe that it must be a Level 5-fire alarm decision. In reality, all you wanted is for them to buy that video-making software, for instance.

In that case, you’re acting like a plumber who’s making a client buy a sump pump. That client would end up asking questions: Do we need this one? What’s the quality? You’re prompting them to make a decision on things that they don’t know about. And they often end up asking all these meaningless questions.

Keep in mind that when a client is procuring a service, they’re procuring a whole project. For example, if they’re hiring a plumber to fix a leaky basement and they’re paying $5,800, that amount is already inclusive of all the parts. They’re not going to care about what the plumber would be doing or buying. The client only needs to do one procurement.

If they’re buying sales operations, podcast management, or public relations management from you, that’s going to include the software. It’s one procurement, one purchase, and one decision instead of, let’s say, 15.

Agencies typically experience going back to their clients many times to sign up for stuff. Then the clients get exasperated. But with AppBind — because there’s just one authorisation — agencies like yours can strangely do more things for clients. You can create more value because there’s an infinite number of things that you can expand into. Suddenly, you’ll be able to bring things into their projects that they could have never imagined. You’re delivering something interesting and that gets clients out of the trap that Sunir has previously mentioned.

This is really liberating. Because, for instance, if you’re asking a client to verify an email because you have to do a multi-factor authorisation every time you log in to a new service, it can go beyond their comfort level. For them, it will be easier to not do the new thing than keep jumping through these different technological hoops.

On Being a Relationship Marketer

Currently, over 100 agencies are using AppBind’s service. Just listening to their proposition, you can completely see how it can add a huge amount of value to any agency owner. But how does Sunir get AppBind out there and how are they building awareness around their service?

There are different kinds of marketing. But according to him, it all comes down to relationship marketing.

He’s not a digital marketer in a sense that he can’t handle buying ads because it’s just a lot of spreadsheets. He is, however, a relationship marketer.

For one, he runs a trade association which he built and it’s called the Cloud Software Association . It gathers partnership leaders across the Software as a service (SaaS) space. And as a part of that, he has his Agency Connect universe. Then, he has his own Agency Connect podcast . He organises Agency Connect cocktails and he has a lot of these relationships with agencies that he built over time.

If you look at Sunir’s career objective, it is to make “the Internet a more glorious place,” which is not a capital goal. It’s not about making money. It’s about humanity.

Going back to the question about how he got AppBind noticed, he shared that he approached people and agents. And when approaching anybody, he hopes to come through as someone who’s paying attention to them as an individual; someone who’s there to support them, help them with their objectives, and make them more glorious using his tool.

Sunir noted that this is a value principle. The question is how to systematise it as a marketing thing.

The first step is to build a community around yourself. In his case, he has a Slack community. And he has a conference coming up at the end of April, which will gather all the SaaS partnership people that he built relationships with for the past 10 years.

He shared that he’s always trying to get people together and connect them. For him, the most valuable thing that he can offer is the relationship that he has with people that other people can’t otherwise meet themselves. These are adults who would otherwise want to meet with each other but lack the social context to break the ice. And so he tries to create games, organise meetups, and break the ice in many other ways like doing a podcast, a roundtable discussion, or a mentoring session.

It’s basically doing matchmaking. And when you do that and you show that you genuinely care about people, people will also care about you in return.

Winning People’s Hearts

When he was at FreshBooks running the partnership team, their key performance indicator (KPI) was a heart emoji. But why is that?

In Crossing the Chasm , which is his favourite marketing book of all time, it says that the point of marketing is to establish market victory and market lock. Basically, you’re valued as Rank 1. Your positioning is a first-ranked company. Consumers think of you first. And to make them think of you first, you have to view it like dating. You have to do things for them that may not yield a return on investment (ROI) for you but would be ROI-positive for them.

At FreshBooks, Sunir said that they’re very good at delivering results for other people and at organising and project-managing things. They set up cocktail parties. And they kept doing that. They know that they’ve already won people once they bring an opportunity to them not because they asked them but because they thought of them first.

When you do that enough, no one could beat you. There’s no competitor that could come in. Everyone will give you opportunities before anyone else.

However, it doesn’t end with that. It’s also about catching up with them once a month or a quarter and offering them something. It could be a blog post or a webinar — anything that can keep things going.

You know you’ve won their hearts if they start to think of you first because they know that your relationship with them is valuable, they like you, and they think that your solution is good.

Back then at FreshBooks, they had a spreadsheet to monitor things. It may sound lame but it all boils down to having to systematise it.

You have to think tactically, like dating. When you take someone out for a coffee or to whatever event, they’ll organise something for you in return. They’ll start to think of you and try to make you happy. As the relationship goes along, it becomes a trade, a partnership. You’re keeping the relationship going by doing favours for each other.

What Sunir does is to systematically pay it forward and help others. It’s a very long-term commitment but for him, honestly speaking, it’s the only thing that he can do. His goal is to make the world a more glorious place. And he hopes that it just reflects well and that people can see it.

For him, people would want you to succeed if they know that you want them to succeed. It’s not necessarily karma because he’s doing things systematically and it’s operationalised. This principle is simply the foundation beneath it all.

This article is based on a transcript from my podcast The UnNoticed Entrepreneur, you can listen here.

Originally published at https://theunnoticed.cc on May 13, 2022.