From Top Consumer Companies Product Leader to Immigrant Start-up Founder, with Pius Binder

Full YouTube Video podcast here https://youtu.be/v_ypcKHq-Uk ?

How would you introduce yourself as if you were catching up with an old friend?

Thanks for inviting me, first of all. I'm quite humbled. So as you can hear from my accent, I'm from Austria originally, not the US, and I lived abroad for the last 12 years. I lived in Dublin, San Francisco, and now in Sydney. Since I speak like Arnold, technically I'm like also the Terminator to help small companies never be overcharged again. That's what I'm doing now in my business in startup. I worked in product growth for four and a half years in Meta and then four years at Facebook and I'm pretty pumped to work on my new venture.

How did you decide to become a founder after spending good times at Meta then Canva?

You can have many dreams. It was also my dream to work in tech. I loved computers when I was a kid and playing with them. And I was a bit fascinated by it, slightly above average. Then it kind of evolved with my interest from computers to want to start working in tech and also move to America. But my real childhood dream was actually always to become an entrepreneur and create a business because everyone around me was an entrepreneur and was creating businesses. My mom was a single mother raising me and also my uncle and everyone around me were creating businesses all the time so it was kind of normal. So it was always my dream to become an entrepreneur and do something. Here I am now working on my own thing.

At subscribed.fyi, we help small companies, freelancers and individuals never be overcharged again for their subscriptions. We help them by giving them power which they don't know they have at times because it usually takes a lot of time to get better deals and we do it for them. So first we find all those subscriptions that they've forgotten, track them, etc. Nothing new there, you can use other apps for that easily.

But what is really new and innovative of our product is that we create our own AI and model that speaks to the SaaS companies and subscription vendors to get better deals, so we don't have a middle person between the customer and the vendors we enable this conversation. And the reason why it is important now is with the rise of AI, there are more tools that we all subscribe to. And even before, I was already on Netflix, Disney+, and all the streaming services.

Now it's even more, like the tools that we need to have to get our jobs done. So? I'm passionate about helping small businesses. I also saw it firsthand at Canva and Facebook where I worked with small businesses, particularly witnessing how big of a problem it is. So for our target audience, which are the 20 million businesses in the US alone and around 10 million in Europe. We want to help them and do something about the increasing cost and feeling powerless with so many subscriptions.?

What are some entrepreneurial challenges you are facing right now? Things you have to learn v.s. Unlearn coming from Big Tech companies??

I think that being in product and being an entrepreneur is not that much different. The big companies I worked for like Facebook and then Canva and obviously are great innovative, high-growth companies, but also there are a lot of people there. And generally, as you can imagine, like being from Austria, Vienna, and working with Americans in the US or with Australians, there's like a big cultural difference on how we act, how they act, and understanding each other. So that was always tough for me anyhow, you know, like it was not easy fitting in with my Austrian-ness and accent and all of the type of cultural components, but I somehow made it happen. And I think on the one hand you have much fewer resources, but it's not my first company. I already had a company before which I sold. But also the TLDR is you have to get tougher and be okay with those. I think in big companies you spend a lot of time aligning in product, helping the business to figure out what to prioritize, and when to push forward the agenda from the business to the engineering side. But generally, I think you could do an MBA, or a great thing for anyone to start a company. This is now my second company because it teaches you all the things about being okay with NOs, getting tougher, and just as Arnold would say, don't be a baby, just do it. So I love it. It's hard, but it's great.

I think the big difference between Big Tech/any system with a lot of people v.s. starting something new is that you're out of the rules. You have to define your own rules and then everyone is going to look at you. I love it because it just gives me more drive to do more. That's also a big source of my motivation now to make sure I really enjoy being uncomfortable all the time, which I wasn't before. So that's very positive.

In our conversation last time, you mentioned that you had a successful exit from your past company. It was also not your first time starting something, so what was that experience?

Long story short, I’ve always created businesses and I had a food truck business where I worked as a cook for an Israeli family in Vienna, so I was the only white person in this kitchen cooking and not knowing what I'm doing. That was one thing, and then from there, I did a food truck and then I created this community of people, artists in Vienna selling and printing stuff similar to Etsy. However, none of it ever worked. I did it and it didn't work so I pivoted into tech. It's interesting, but a different path than the hustling culture.?

Also, I had this other business, which was called CraftOak. I borrowed this idea from a European company and then we received a lawsuit in the first two weeks of our launching and it went very well and so I learned a lot there.?

In the beginning, the business was doing well. However, I had to free up my mind to work on something new; it was profitable, so I decided at some point, that I had to get rid of it as fast as possible to free up my mind because it's not going anywhere. I don't have the energy to move it anywhere else. I did it for over five years.

I worked on it with my good friend, Humphrey Yang, who stopped working on it and became a famous influencer on YouTube in financial services.I bought him out and then kept working on it for a couple of years. Finally, I sold it to my co-founding team member.

What came out of selling the company is the team I worked on with the previous company now moved to a new company and now we're working together again on a new problem. So it’s a nice reunion. We worked with each other for a long time, having gone through a lot of ups and downs. And in our new company, we're seeing exceptional growth, which I'm pleased about, and strong retention!

How did you get better in speaking in English? What were your methods as a Product Leader, Manager, and Founder?

Unfortunately, I never had any training in my previous job around that. But I'm aware, I have an accent and I always invested my time in getting better. I don't consider myself a good public speaker because I need to learn how to pronounce things better, I also have a deep voice, so sometimes I need to slow down and there are all these things that I, sometimes, even find challenging in German.?

However, one thing I realized about myself is that I'm very authentic, it helps me, no matter the accent, because I'm an No-BS person. So if you pitch a lot, you get better. For example, Mark Zuckerberg, was not a great public speaker at first, everyone was saying he was kind of a robot, even though he's a native English speaker, now he's a great public speaker.?

Now that I’ve spoken with 70 investors, I get much better and I think I still make a lot of mistakes, but my mom, worked in theater and with a lot of actors, and they helped me a bit in my presence and overcome that. One thing they taught me, I was in a play when I was eight and nine, I wondered, what should I do if I miss a line? You just keep talking.

It's important to keep talking and pretending nothing happens. So I do that a lot. I don't stop. Sometimes it sounds really silly, and then after the meeting, it's always think, oh my god, what did you just say? But the reality is it probably doesn't matter too much if people decide to move ahead with you. They do it anyhow because they have confidence in you as a person and will see beyond that language barrier.?

However, I have to say I think I'm getting more reception for my pitches of investors who are themselves migrants. So, people who have an accent themselves, I think you can look at the data. I have about two times the likelihood of getting to the next stage. I think it's much higher because they might have more empathy and understanding. Language doesn't matter too much.

I think it's an advantage because if you moved that far, like you and myself with our accents, we probably found different coping mechanisms to get where we are. So, I think it just shows that we are generally more resilient.?

As a founder, what is your mission for subscribe.fyi? What would success mean to you in three to five years??

I see myself as a servant of small companies, so I want to serve them and consumers as well! I want to serve a significant number of my customers, which are around 20 million people in the US and 50 million globally. For our target audience, globally, there are 300 million small and medium businesses.

When I worked at Facebook we were targeting a fraction of them, but it's still a lot. So I want to serve maybe one to two, three million people globally, particularly focusing on North America and Europe to start with and then moving to the rest of the world.?

I want businesses to have a bit of a say in what's going on around the finances and subscription costs. Everything is moving to subscriptions – it's a great business model, subscriptions. It's very good for businesses, but it also forces people to not have another option. You can subscribe to, Amazon products, as an example, like Head and Shoulders. It's not an ad, but basically, everything is moving towards subscription because it's such a great business model.

But I think it's not always best for consumers. We want to create something to help them with that. I want to cover a lot of these businesses and help them, then automate them with AI, and then move into enterprise later and help bigger organizations with automation capabilities, too.

If our readers want to learn more about Subscribed.FYI, invest, join the team, or learn more about your product, how can they reach out?

Connect with me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Let me know if you want to work with me on the technical side.?

We're still hiring our founding team. Let me know if you are a small business that needs help or a SaaS company that wants to be featured! Or, if you want to fundraise, I can share my thoughts. I'm not particularly good at it. I'm just doing what I think I should be doing based on other people's advice and help.

I had a bit of success and so far, it's also looking very good. So, reach out to me and I’m happy to help.