#172 - Gordian Braun, CEO of onetool - On how taking a contrarian approach helps create defensible differentiation

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that enables small & medium businesses around the world escape the chaos of managing their software subscriptions. My guest is Gordian Braun, CEO and Co-founder of onetool

Gordian is bilingual, analytical, and a highly creative leader experienced in entrepreneurship & innovation. He’s got a strong passion for product marketing, performance marketing, product management & development, and business development.

He started his career as a financial analyst, and quickly after that became the co-founder of a music record label startup in 2010. In 2015, he co-founded his second startup, Locana. He went back into the financial world in by joining G51 Amplify Venture Capital, after which he became the director of growth and business acceleration at CleverShuttle in 2017.

In 2019, he then co-founded onetool – where he acts as CEO. onetool is on a mission to solve the daily chaos and outrageous fees small & medium sized businesses encountering when it comes to managing SaaS subscriptions, software usage and access rights.

This inspired me, and hence I invited Gordian to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in the SaaS market when it comes to managing subscriptions, usage and access. The sheer simplicity of adopting SaaS solutions is growing the problem every day. We discuss what’s missing, and what’s required to solve the problem. We dig deep on what it took to create a solution that stands out from the pack, and what mindset tech-entrepreneurs need to embrace to shape a software business that creates products their customers cannot live without.

Here are some of his quotes:

The first strategic choice that we had to do is: “Do we do long sales cycles with a lot of consulting effort, or do we do, what I call, funnel automation?”

A lot of people will say, especially in the VC industry, if you are a b2b Enterprise product, then do Enterprise Sales. Whereas we decided to do the opposite – saying “No, we want the more customer centric approach around this. We want to make it so easy that people can start using the whole thing in 10 minutes.”

That's obviously a very challenging decision. Because on the one side, you spend endless hours optimizing your product, and you cannot really sell something if it's not perfect. On the other side, you have the highest demands on yourself, and you know what you would like to be using, rather than what our competition is offering.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. Why approaching things differently gives you powers that are hard to beat by competitors
2. That becoming a great entrepreneur is about shipping fast (not perfect), being open-minded, and not worrying too much.
3. That just because you spend five years on something, trying to make it perfect, doesn’t mean it’s going to be perfect eventually
4. Why it’s essential for every CEO to not have one mentor, but to surround themselves with a lot of the right people around key aspect

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Gordian Braun
• Website onetool