Julian: Everyone, thank you so much for joining the Behind Company Lines podcast. Today we have Torben Friehe CEO of Wingback. Wingback provides a tool and, and APIs for SAS pricing and packaging by building an infrastructure that allows SAS startups to deploy any set of features of their product with. Any pricing model.

Torben, thank you so much for joining the show. I'm really excited to chat with you and learn more about your background and what you're building and also kind of the creation and concept of, of everything. And, and we'll get into some interesting topics as you're an international founder, which, you know, we have some of, but not a lot of 'em.

So it's, it'll be an interesting topic to, to kind of dive into. But before we get into all that, what were you doing before you started Wingback? .  

Torben: I founded another company before. Yeah. And that was actually in a completely different field, but it also had a SARS component. It was basically an iot company, like access control systems, like physical, kind of like I would say the European version of Latch is maybe a good way to describe it.

Julian: Gotcha. What, what caused a transition from starting that company into this one? Did you go through an acquisition? What was the, what was kind of the end note of that company?

Torben: Yeah, so we went through an acquisition, but it was a really bad one. So basically got screwed over by our own investors. We worked together with an industrial company, like old fashioned, European industrial company.

And yeah, they basically screwed us really well, Let's say. ,  

Julian: What, what, if you don't mind diving into that. What, what was kind of the, the resolution and, and what was the scenario? What was the, with the situation?  

Torben: I mean, they basically promised further financing and you know basically at a point when contracts were about to be signed and they basically didn't want to sign the contracts anymore, and we're like, Wow.

Hey, yeah. You know, no, it's ours. And we've been working on this for. The better part of eight years. So it was pretty painful. And, you know yeah, the, the whole aftermath of that was really bad too because, I mean, you know, they continued running the company but basically had us you know, standing there laying off half of our people and yeah.

It was, it was really awful. It was, yeah, a really bad experience and, I mean, I know a lot of founders who have similar stories and, you know, it's maybe something that's like not often talked about. Yeah. But yeah, it's, you know, these things can be really painful. Yeah.  

Julian: Yeah. What, what was the conversation around, you know, when, when you have to make those tough decisions how, how do you, what did you lean on to, to go through that experience? Or, or did you just kind of learn as you went?

Torben: I mean, I think in retrospect we, you know, we could have seen that the partner we were working with was basically, you know, let's say they didn't have the best intentions in, in mind, right from the get go. But, you know back in the day we were super excited about working with them.

And I think, you know, we basically we, we didn't take some of the wet flags we were actually seeing very seriously.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. What, what were those flags?  

Torben: It was basically just the people, honestly, in the end of the day, always the people. Mm-hmm. , and that was certainly to, with those folks, especially their managing director on.

Yeah, it was like I don't know. It it just like this worry, like old fashioned, I mean like you imagine like an old fashioned, like 60 year old German business dude and, you know Yeah, cliche really. Yeah.  

Julian: What now, coming from that experience, obviously it was, you know, a tough experience and, and, but a lot of lessons learned.

I'm, I'm sure. How do you go about evaluating partners? Now? Do you have kind of certain criteria? Do you kind of listen to your gut a little bit more? What are some ways that, that you've learned that other founders can learn from, from your experience on how to evaluate who you partner with? Cause I think a lot of founders under, under appreciate the, and, and maybe maybe wanna move too quickly.

And, and so sometimes they find themselves in similar situations. I'm not saying you know, that that was your motivation behind the partnership, but. Yeah. How do you go about evaluating partners now that, that you've learned from that experience or building a new product and, and now or seeing success and, and the partners that you have kind of aligned yourself with?

Torben: That's a, a tough question because, you know, again, like in hindsight it's super easy to see. But I think back then, you know, we did a lot to, let's. You know, tell us that, that these things are different and, you know, we saw the good things and we basically disregarded these, these wet flags.

And I think, yeah, I mean we definitely look much more at, you know, let's say I would say at it like people in general, we were both my co-founder and I, we know each other since we're 15 years old. And we've been, you know, working together on projects ever since high. and we just love technology and we love building products.

And I think the biggest learning from this whole experience was actually, you know, that even though we love technology and you know, we love building technology that in the end, you know, everything's a people game. And we, we looked way too much at this, you know, from like a pure, pure a text stand.

and from that standpoint it made sense. But yeah, I think taking, you know, your gut level feeling into consideration. When, you know, you meet someone even just like for the first time and have a first impression, it's just something, I mean that we, I think continuously learn to listen to more and more.

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. No, I, I, I heard that, you know, being more in tune with, with your intuition comes with experience. And, and it, and it, you know, it comes with that experience because it's like the different. It's like almost like a product. The different versions, different iterations, the different testing that you do kind of gives you the data and the feedback that allows you to kind of you know, set your compass into a, a stronger course.

Now that you've kind of, you know, gone through and, and you're working on this, This product Wingback, what was the inspiration behind building something like Wingback and, and then going through YC where you kind of went through the startup school to, to reaffirm maybe even some teachings or some lessons or build it kind of in a very structured way.

What inspired you to build Wingback and, and where is the current company now?  

Torben: Yeah, so first off, I mean at Wingback at one aim my previous. We were actually struggling with pricing and packaging quite a bit. So I remember in the very early days our salespeople basically had to go to the engineers to ask them how many users signed up for the product.

You know, like how many basically new access rights were given so that, you know, the states people could actually send an invoice. And when I started, wingback actually started when I joined. Met someone there with whom I like, did some customer discovery then basically like didn't work very well with this guy.

So I joined forces together with my co-founder from, you know, one aim times. And we just spoke to a lot of people at first. So wingback was really like super, super customer driven in that sense that we, I think, spoke to more. 100 founders without even, you know, basically having a proper like product definition or we only, you know, defined the product properly after talking tomorrow than 100 founders.

And after that, yeah, like things went pretty quickly. We was the round hired, an initial team and also when fully remote, which was first time for us, our previous company was fully in. And yeah, then we, we got into yc and I have to say it was really fantastic learning experience for us.

And I don't know, it, it like completely changes. Like the way you, you think, but in a very positive way. Yeah.  

Julian: Yeah. That, that's incredible to see. And, and you know, I think you've echoed a lot of different founders I've had, which is this customer journey and, and really learning the pain points that, you know, you're like, I think they're there for my.

Experience and then you iterate on, on this product so much so around the feedback you get that it becomes something that, that people want to pay for. And, and that you wanna start building and you think is, is a big enough product. Do, how did you go about you know, chatting with customers and, and going through that process?

Are there specific questions you asked them or do you have examples of specific questions that you asked them that helped kind of guide the vision of, of the product you were?  

Torben: Absolutely. Yeah. And I think, you know, on deck was like really, really super helpful there in the early days because you know, we were able to reach out to, to people and you know, basically yeah, people wanted to talk to us and that was great.

You know, so we, yeah, we find those questions that we were asking and actually. . We just like recently had let's say another bigger round of, you know, more like deeper down customer discovery conversations because actually I learned from another guy from On Deck, you know how valuable customer discovery cards can even be.

You already have the first version of your product out and how much they can, you know, not just like influence your thinking and influence your roadmap. But also how much it can really give you, you know, these like like 10%, like, you know, thinking like the customer and how much they can also influence.

Yeah. You know, what you put on your landing page, you know, how you talk to, to cu to other customers on a say it's call and. I'm actually really grateful to him. His name is Mario. Hi, Mario. Yeah because he shared like his customer discovery framework with me, and there's some like, really super interesting questions in there.

Like to give you one specific example, you know imagine in our case, you know, pricing and packaging and, and billing. Imagine all of your, the, the problems around pricing and packaging. feeling that you just told me about were solved tomorrow? What would still keep you up at night? It's one of my favorites.

Julian: Yeah? Yeah. What, what do you remember any, some, any answers that you're, that really kind of were inspiring to you?  

Torben: I don't have a specific one in mind right now, but what I found interesting about the responses to this discussion in general was that, you know, you could clearly see. . Yeah. There are still some things on my mind, even if, you know, even at the point when like, you know, all the problems that are top of mind right now are solved.

Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, that's of course super helpful when you think through, you know like how to basically, you know, map out your roadmap. It's also super helpful when you think about how to talk to your customers, you know? Mm-hmm. Maybe you shouldn't just talk about the immediate problem that you know you're solving, but also.

What lays ahead further down the road and yeah, I think yeah, such questions are really helpful for, for that. .  

Julian: Yeah, no, I, I can see how that kinda leads to you understanding the customer and building a better product and and, and kind of gives you the answers you need when, when you're thinking about, you know, road mapping and, and building.

When, when you think about or, or I guess before I ask this question, tell us a little bit more about Wingback. What's the particular problem that you're solving? I know from, from what we discussed already, it's, it's, you know, pricing and packaging around APIs that SAS companies and, and kind of helping sales teams, you know, package those for their customers.

But what in particular is, is difficult about that that, that, that allows. Or, or that creates a problem that, that your company needs to solve? What is, what is difficult about that experience? And, and what are some of the issues that come with not having, you know, flexible packaging or pricing that, that, that you know, is the problem that you need to solve?

Torben: I mean, to start off, you know, it just takes a lot of effort to, you know, even implement your first version of pricing, you know, and it's like let's say pretty low value work. So, you know, if you ask, you know, your developer, even if it's just, you know, you and, and your co-founder. Working on it, you, you don't really want to work on it.

And we have with that, but where our product really comes in is when you are, you know, much bigger and when you ask yourself different questions around pricing and packaging. Like, let's say for example, you know, your, a company like, like Dropbox and you know, it's August, September, kids are going back to school and you want to send out a campaign.

You know, for like a Dropbox for teachers and, you know, you know who the teachers are in your, you know, customer database or in whatever database you have, you know, which usage limits they want, you know, you know, which features they should have access to and which features not. But you know, now, like how do you make it possible that you basically, you know, give those folks exactly like the access to those features that they need, you know?

Mm-hmm. uh, That's you know, one of the use cases where our product really comes. . Yeah.  

Julian: Yeah. I, I, you, you mentioned this piece about APIs and, and and how companies kind of integrate with within you know, the certain specific packaged APIs. Just outta curiosity, what are some of like the most common APIs that you see clients using?

How do you mean that? Yeah. In terms of the integrations that that, and maybe I understand the product not clearly, but from what I read, it was, it was about packaged APIs that you allow your sales team to kind of toggle right, and, and turn on different levers. To create kind of a customized experience for your customer or their customer?

Excuse me. Is, is it very specific to the business or is it kind of, is there anything that's common amongst most startups?  

Torben: I mean, we, we provide infrastructure, so, you know, we basically make it possible so that you can, you know, In essence to whatever you want in, in terms of pricing and packaging. And of course, you know, we connect to existing products too.

So, you know, I mean, yeah, we are not a payment processor or, you know, if you want to use, I mean, you know, something like for, let's say. I mean, we are not an authentic authentication provider. You know, we do the things we, we really focus on pricing and packaging itself, and then of course, you know, connect to whatever else you have.

Yeah. And one thing that's, for example, super import there is, you know, let's say your CRM. You know all the pricing and packaging data that sits with us Yeah. Can also feed into your CRM so that, you know, for example, you can contact just like, you know, very specific customer groups or things like that.

Julian: Yeah, yeah. No, that makes sense. I was reading somewhere that. Wingback is, is kind of uses a low code platform or infrastructure to build. This is particularly fascinating to me because the company that I run with, my co-founder, we use Airtable as our kind of low, low to no code platform. That helps us.

Just really kind of build as we go and not necessarily need a back end team, a front end team at the moment. What are you using for, for your low-code technology?

Torben: I mean, what we basically make possible is that, you know, you don't have to spend engineering hours on pricing and packaging, you know, usually.

Yeah. I mean, this can take, you know, a few days. It can, if you have, you know, more complex pricing logic, it can actually even take a month in some cases. And we wanna make it possible for non-technical people to go in, you know, put a plan together and deploy it to a. Without any engineering involvement.

And so, you know that's like for us really actually the, the corner piece of what we do, because you know what, engineers hate working on pricing and packaging, you know, and it's say someone, you know, some sales guy comes along and, and says, Hey, you know, please put like this and this together for super important enterprise customer.

You know, like nobody wants to work on that. And you know, we make it possible that they don't.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. What now that you're, you're, I think you mentioned that you're working with mainly larger teams, kind of is where the better use cases of your product coming into play. Are you particularly working with like enterprise company, mid-level companies, s and b startups?

What's kind of your ideal customer right now?  

Torben: So the idea customer right now is basically you know, the startup that just wants to get going. I mean, that's the com the people that we, you know, still learn with. But we are working with quite a few. Design partners to basically, you know, make our product more and more enterprise ready.

Meaning that, yeah, you know, it's great to have companies getting going with us starting and, you know, going with us, but at the same time we, you know, want to move into a, a field where, you know, we can basically support those customers that benefit the most from our product. And that's clearly in the, you know, late stage slash enterprise.

Julian: Yeah. When you think about building for enterprise, where, where do you go? Is, is it still kind of customer interviews and, and research along, along those lines or and, and if so, how is it different? And what are the things that make it different from, you know, building it at smaller scales?

Torben: I think, you know, there are always different stakeholders involved, you know, in every step of the decision making process.

And, you know, they have different, you know, interests and different, you know, KPIs that they you know that they use to measure their own success. And I think it's really important to understand basically, you know, what each of the, the stakeholders want wants. You know let's say a major pricing and packaging change has, you know, variety of different stakeholders involved.

And of course, you know, managing that is very different than let's say, you know selling to, to founders and, you know, just asking them, Hey, you know, wanna set up your, your fight your plans super quickly. And I mean, I think for us, what has been really super helpful there are, or. Really, you know, support us a lot with, you know basically yeah, just like you know, difficult decisions and you know, those bits where sometimes just like, you know you don't come to the conclusion yourself, and they have seen it all and it's really, really great to, you know, be able to, to yeah, have their support for these kinds of.

Yeah. Yeah.  

Julian: It's, it's, it's crazy and most founders I think value this, but I don't know if a lot of just non founders know this. It's just the community that you bring around, you, both the angel investors, the mentors, the, the accelerator groups, they help kind of expedite the learning process for you by anecdotal experience and, and you're able to translate what, what they've done before to your product.

It might not be the same, but it's, it's, it's similar enough to go in a certain direction and, and do so very quickly and efficiently, which, which is, you know, the bread and butter for startup. You need to move fast and, and you need to fix things that are broken fast as well. When you think about building a remote team, cuz you mentioned now that your team, or not now, but you, you've kind of conceived and, and built this team as fully remote which my startup is as well.

So, so I have a little insight in here, but I don't know if a lot of companies you know, know kind of the experience of it. How did you go about building a remote team culture and how. Continue to kind of like maintain a strong culture when your team is fully dispersed across whether it's continents or cities you're not in a centralized location.

Torben: Actually my co-founder, Ya and I had no experience whatsoever wanting a remote company , with our last company one aim. We actually made it a point that everyone had to be in office, but I mean, it also, you know, had a hardware component. So there were, you know, some reasons for this. But yeah, we, we frankly had no idea how to wanna remote companies.

So actually another great person and great supporter. I I met through OnDeck is Marisa Goldberg, who became our first employee as a fractional head of remote. and she basically helped us to set up, you know, the wide processes for remote, but also, you know, think about the things that, let's say you know, if you've always worked in an office that you really just don't think about.

And I think the most important learning there for us was that. In office and we mold a really, like completely different words. You know, the way you communicate is different. The way that you interact with your, you know, with, with everyone on the team is completely different. The way that you, you know, should document is completely different.

The way that you basically have to you know, hire is completely different. And at the same. It also gives you access to a much, much broader talent pool because all of a sudden you're not focused on, you know like, you know, a single big city all of a sudden, you know, you can also hire someone who's, you know, maybe living on like a farm somewhere in, you know, rural Argentina.

And, you know, it's, it's just great to bring, let's say people with very different backgrounds together and to yeah, basically just let's. Not be like tied in, in any way to, you know, physical office. Yeah. And at the same time, you know, I can very, very clearly say for myself it made me much more productive too.

And it also, you know, fleet up like lots of, you know, time. Okay. I mean, it just, you know, the water cooler conversation or like, you know, the coffee you make in the morning. I mean, yeah, it's nice to have this conversation, but, you know, I'm actually happy right now that you know, I can basically decide purposefully to spend my time, you know, Differe.

Yeah.  

Julian: Yeah. What would you, what advice would you give founders that are thinking about building a remote culture?  

Torben: I think you really have to, I mean, if you, you know, haven't worked remotely before you kind of have to understand this major difference. You know, that it's not just, you know, sitting in an office or not.

I mean, you don't have this, you know like conversation in between that you, you know, have while walking to a meeting room or, you know, you don't hear something that, you know, someone at the table next to you says. It's also much more challenging when it comes to, to training. You know, junior employees when it comes to also, you know, mentoring others on the team.

And of course, that's also something to think through because Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's, it's not like, you know, someone can like sit next to you and, you know like work together with you in that way. Of course there are always tools to support that, but, you know let's say. All the tours that are there are like fantastic and we are great and, you know, fantastic remote tours.

But it's, it's like not like you can, you know, replicate, for example, this like training experience that you can in an office. And it's also something that you, you know, have to be aware of when putting together, you know, your team. Yeah.  

Julian: Yeah. Is there any. , is there anything you fundamentally like whether it's a vision or values that you communicate to your team to, to create almost That, that environment with communication is really highly effective because you're right, when you're not talking between meetings or on the way to an office you lose some, some pieces in translation and it's like there's certain active steps that you have to take to, to make sure that that communication doesn't get lost.

Is there anything that you do structurally or, or within your value statements that, that help kind of overcome that challenge?  

Torben: Yeah, I think Melissa really helped us a lot to figure out, you know, how to structure our knowledge. And I think that's, that's really, really crucial. And also, you know, how to design your onboarding process in a way that you make sure that, you know, basically like everyone on the team has access to, you know, certain pieces of information.

And I think the strategy that was super impactful for us there as well is basically, Purposeful over communication and by over communication, I don't mean, you know, repeating things, but I mean basically communicating the same thing through different channels. You know, have like update videos, but also have written updates and, you know, let's say have a team event, but also, you know, share the recording of the team event and have a transcript of the team event and things like that.

Because, I mean, People we are, we are all different and we prefer to, you know, consume information in different ways. And I think yeah. You know, keeping that in mind when building remote team is super, super important so that basically, you know, everyone can consume information in the way, you know, they prefer to.

Yeah.  

Julian: Yeah. What are some of the biggest risks for Wingback today?  

Torben: Biggest risks. , you always bid for, you know, let's say certain customer profiles and mm-hmm. I think, you know we can easily get lost and, you know, just like bid for one very particular use case. So we always have to make sure that, and, you know, that's why these additional customer discovery cards are also so important that, you know, we, we, we did build for.

You know, a a cross section of, of customers and, you know, focus of course is really important there too. We, you know, have like tons of requests, Oh, we need this, we need that, we need this, we need that. And, you know, it's still, I mean, I know it's, it's kind of an old cliche to say, you know, you have to, you know, be great at saying no, but it's honestly something that's still pretty tough for me sometimes, because, you know, there's a problem, we can solve it.

So, Let's solve it. And sometimes you, you have to say, Hey, no, this is something we, we, we don't do. And I think yeah, keeping yourself in check there is definitely always a challenge. Yeah,  

Julian: Yeah. No, that, that definitely true. What's the, if everything goes well, what's the long term vision of Wingback?

Torben: I mean, we basically see that, you know, SAS is changing. . And by that I mean you know, imagine you go to go to Target and you, you just find three shopping carts there, you know? Mm-hmm. one is like basic one is premium, one is gold. You wouldn't be really satisfied with your target one. Right. And we think, you know, with sas it's somewhat the same, you know and in the future, Or let's say today if I, you know, want to buy a certain SaaS product and I don't find myself in those like three tiers on a pricing page, there's probably kind of a similar product, you know, with a different pricing structure and I just get this one, you know?

Yeah. And I think that if you think that through, it's just like you know, we have basically vertical sars where, you know, everything becomes like more, more specialized towards certain use cases, but that also means that the value that customers receive out of a SAS product is very different from customer to customer.

And what I can see changing there is that, you know, SaaS companies basically have to provide the wide product to the wide customer. At the right price and you know, yeah. That's basically what in the end, maximizes value for the customer. And that's where we see wingback going, you know, making this future a reality.

That's where we are, you know? That's where we are headed for the future.  

Julian: Yeah, no, that, that's super exciting and, and it makes a lot of sense. You know, a lot of companies leave customers on the table because, you know, they try to create these predefined conditions to, to use a product, but in reality, you know, your customer's so dynamic, their experiences are so different that.

You have to really, you know, be active in, in creating a customized or semi customized solution, something in between structure and, and customized customization that allows them to, you know, really find value in, in what you're, what you're offering to, to be able to spend. Because, you know, most companies are, are very cost conscious.

I, you know, we could dive into so many other topics, but I, I know we're coming at the end of the show here, but I wanted to ask before and, and well, I always like to ask this question for all my founders, one for selfish research, but, but two for my audience research as well. But what books or, or people have influenced you the most?

Torben: Oh, there are plenty of books and, and plenty of people. One person that influenced me a lot was basically like a, a college professor. I mean, I actually quit my studies. But when we were kids, you know, my co-founder and I were participating in this student competition and, you know, he just like gave us access to like the whole university facilities and, you know, basically a lot of scientific researchers were always angry at like, you know, these like 14, 15 year olds, kids that were running around and were allowed to use everything

But you know, he like taught us so much, just play, you know, having us like sit in meetings and. Like, I, I can't, Yeah. Like put put it in words or like describe it well enough, how much that influenced us in terms of books. Plenty. Which one stands out? I, I think when we just like got going, you know, I mean, English is not our first language.

When we just started presenting you know, to like border audiences this guy called Jerry Wiseman, who wrote a book called Presenting to Win, and it was like, it, it's super simple, but like the framework of thinking, the framework of like structuring. We still use it, you know, to this day, like over and over to, Yeah.

Basically, you know, communicate, summarize ideas and yeah, make sure that, you know, what we want to put into words is also, you know, well understood by the audience.  

Julian: Yeah, that's incredible. And, and not, not a book that's been recommended yet, so, so I'm excited to, to share out with the audience.

Torben: Oh, so very basically last little bit I was like, it's like, you know, was just like, in terms of what influenced me, it's definitely one of those that influenced me most.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah, some of the best books are ones that you could take action with, and I think that is super valuable because, you know, there's, there's a time cost to everything.

And, but when you can have something that you can take action with quickly, I think it expedites a lot of, of, you know, progression and experience and, and and a lot of things along that nature. So, no, I, I think it's, it's a fantastic recommendation. Last little bit here. I'd like to, I'd like to give my founders time to share.

Where can we support you? What give us your LinkedIns, give us your, your your Twitters, your website. Where can we find and support link back and become part of the, the journey?  

Torben: Yeah. Look us up on, on Twitter and LinkedIn. Especially on Twitter you know, where yeah, you know, we have other priorities at the moment, let's say like this.

And yeah, I mean, I love to share, you know, a lot of stuff on LinkedIn you know, from time to time, just like about pricing models, about, you know what pricing works best for you. We also have a pricing model recommendation to, for early stage founder. So definitely, you know, can also share link to that with you.

And yeah, I think that's pretty much it.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Torben. I hope you enjoyed yourself. I, I love, you know, you sharing your experience, kind of going from one startup to the next. And, and not only the lessons that you learned, but how, you know, this startup is kind of building off of the success you had and, but creating a product that you felt not only was a need for yourself at the time, but for other customers and clients that you're working with.

So excited to see where the progress goes. And like I said, thanks for joining the show.  

Torben: Thank you.  

Julian: Of course

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