The following interview is a conversation we had with Ben Goldin, CEO and Founder of Plumery, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $4.5 Million Raised to Power the Future of Digital Engagement for Banks
Ben Goldin
Sure. Thanks for having me.
Brett
Not a problem at all. I’m really looking forward to this conversation. Now, to kick things off, can we just start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background?
Ben Goldin
Yeah, sure. So I was born and raised in Lithuania and spent the first pipe maker year there. I started pretty early when I was around 15 years old. I was always super passionate about everything tech and even had my own bbs running at home. I’m not even sure whether folks would remember what that mean, but this thing was driving my parents crazy with all the nerdy modem sounds coming in all day. I started my professional career straight into banking and was building tech for banks for almost 25 years now. I was super excited about changing the way people experience banking daily and since then been always at the forefront of change in that area. And currently, as you already mentioned, I’m building plumery, which is a company behind the new generation digital engagement platform for banks and other financial companies.
Ben Goldin
And before that I was a first CTPO of Mambo, the leading cloud based core banking platform, working with around 300 or probably more customers today in around 60 plus countries around the world. Ian, I live in Portugal, basically in between Portugal and the Netherlands. Yeah, that’s briefly me.
Brett
What was it about banking that initially attracted your attention and made you say, yep, I’m going to dedicate my career to banking?
Ben Goldin
So honestly, I think it was two parts, right? One part was purely a coincidence where, I mean, it’s not always that people are getting invited to work and do something when they are teenagers, right? And 15 years old. So I got invited to a company that was doing banking. So that was a coincidence, but also more or less at the same time. I had my first experience with banking itself. I opened account. I had to get permission from my parents, obviously, and I experienced a very clunky, slow and unreliable interface of a traditional bank. And I said, gosh, if I would have a chance to change that sometime in the future, that would be awesome. And I don’t know, I just send that to the universe. Right. And that’s basically what I’ve been doing throughout my entire career. That’s awesome.
Brett
What about founders that inspire you? Is there a specific founder that comes to mind that’s really inspired you along the way?
Ben Goldin
Yeah, obviously there’s a number of founders I follow. Some I follow for specific topics, other I follow for general philosophy. If I would call out specific ones, I would probably name Dave, Mike, Janet as CEO of hashicorp. And I specifically admire his CEO systems approach.
Brett
Right.
Ben Goldin
How he approaches company as a set of CEO systems and basically looking at organization as a system. For me being, let’s say, an architect and a techie by background, this makes a lot of sense. And I really like to approach organization as an architecture or a system. And the second one would probably be Jason Fried, who I generally admire for his non conformist approach to doing business and building products and companies.
Brett
I’m a big fan of Jason’s as well. Did you read his recent post or their recent post about the end of.
Ben Goldin
Yeah, yeah, I did. I did. It’s always so much mind provoking and thought provoking. Right. Especially for us. For SaaS businesses, a starting point is, of course, subscriptions.
Ben Goldin
So reading something like this is like, oh, gosh, interesting. What’s going to happen now, right? And prior to that, his partner and co founder was talking all about moving away from cloud.
Brett
Right.
Ben Goldin
So all the things they share are really interesting and thought provoking.
Brett
Yeah. They had a huge influence on my life. I think when I first started my company in 2014, the first year sucks, and then 2015, things were going better. So in my mind, it was like, okay, now it’s time to get an office. And I was looking at office space and was super excited about that. And then one of my friends told me, like, man, maybe you should consider a different option and read this book, remote. And it was by Jason and his partner. And it was so unique at that time to even talk about the idea of a remote company. Like, were embarrassed to be remote, and then ten years later, everyone’s doing it, and now it’s cool to be remote.
Brett
But they were just so far ahead of the times when they were thinking about remote companies that they even had written a book about it long before anyone else was even really talking about it. In a serious.
Ben Goldin
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That’s the reason why I really follow them.
Brett
Yeah. So fascinating. It’s so fun to follow those guys. What about books? So, the way we like to frame this, we got this from an author named Ryan Holiday. He calls them quickbooks. So a quickbook is a book that rocks you to your core, influences how you think about the world and how you approach life. Do any quickbooks come to mind?
Ben Goldin
Yeah, I guess one of them would be antifragile. That doesn’t necessarily talk about something very unique, but the perspective they put around basic things in the world and how we perceive them. Right. And perceive them potentially wrongly. Applying a projection, a perspective of biases, really changed my way of thinking on many aspects. And the second one would be the art of action, which is a little bit more on the business side of the things, but it tries to explain how successful military operations were conducted in old history and what was specific about them. Right. And how this connects to strategies in the company. Strategies that are based on sharing the intent rather than sharing the specific tactics and putting very prescriptive ways of doing things for your teams.
Ben Goldin
So, in terms of business, this changed a lot in my thinking and the way I approach leadership.
Brett
Nice. Love that book. Let’s switch gears and let’s dive a bit deeper into the company. So, at a high level, what problem are you solving?
Ben Goldin
Yeah, sure. So we help banks build delightful customer experiences and stay long term, relevant and innovative. Right. That’s the most simple way to explain what exactly we do.
Brett
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Brett
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Brett
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Brett
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Brett
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Ben Goldin
Yeah, well, first of all, as I already mentioned before, I was super passionate always about that specific part. Right? How to change banking for better. How to change banking. So that regular people would experience it completely differently on a daily basis. And then why now specifically? Well, I’ve spent last five years before funding plummery, I’ve spent at Mambo, and I witnessed how many organizations are still like the first thing, are building the same thing again and again. And the second thing, how many of them are actually failing to build it from the first try and still do not manage to create a proper experience for their end customers. And I decided that, hey, looks like the problem I’ve been solving previously has not been solved completely just yet.
Brett
Right.
Ben Goldin
And there’s a lot to be done, especially in helping traditional banks and potentially banks who do not have the same budgets and the same access top notch talent as the most successful banks in the world. How can we help them really to improve their experience and serve their customers better? All right, so that’s basically thesis.
Brett
When it comes to the ICP of who you’re selling to, what’s an average ICP or the target ICP?
Ben Goldin
Yeah, it’s a good question. So the way we say is that we can help any type of financial company, be it a bank, a digital wallet, a neo bank, a traditional bank, and a top tier traditional bank. But at the same time, of course we cannot focus on all these segments at the same time. Means right now our ideal customer is mid to small size financial institution anywhere in the world trying to modernize their digital experience. Or a neo bank or digital world trying to build a new proposition from scratch and need an acceleration and need some speed.
Brett
And are there limits in terms of the geography that you’re targeting? Are you focused on Europe right now or is this anywhere in the world?
Ben Goldin
No, this is actually anywhere in the world. And we actively pursue opportunities in pretty much every part of the world. Maybe a little bit less so in the United States, but then in all the other parts of the world, you’re.
Brett
About one year in now. How have things been going?
Ben Goldin
We are doing great. We assembled a team of very experienced people, each of them in their own respectful areas, both in product and engineering. We have great conversations with customers and prospects. We are ready to launch our first version of the platform. So, yeah, all in all, doing great.
Brett
What about finding product market fit? Do you feel like you have product market fit yet?
Ben Goldin
Definitely so. Definitely so we are not solving a completely new problem, although we are doing it in a different way. But the market for modernizing customer experience in banking existed there 20 years ago and it exists today even more so.
Brett
Makes a lot of sense. What are you doing to rise above the noise and connect with banks. I’m sure there’s a lot of technology out there right now, and a lot of vendors who are trying to sell to banks try to solve these types of problems. What are you doing to really stand out and rise above all that noise?
Ben Goldin
I guess we try to be authentic, right? We try to be unique in the way how we solve our problem. We are the first headless digital gazer platform out there. We recognize the importance for banks to differentiate themselves and innovate where it matters the most. But we also, at the same time, acknowledge that there are things that banks would better take out of the box. So we are combining a buy plus build approach instead of forcing banks to decide either to buy everything out of the box or build everything from scratch. We call that approach buy for feature parity and build for competitive edge. And as I said before, it’s also based on headless principles that are well established today in ecommerce world, content management world, but are still pretty nonexistent, to be honest, in the banking space.
Brett
When it comes to digital engagement, is that an established category? Like, are there banks out there saying, okay, we have a line item for digital engagement now we’re going to go shop the market and find a digital engagement platform? Or is that more of an emerging line item that they’re just starting to maybe have?
Ben Goldin
I think it’s a relatively new category. Right. And I’m happy to be part of actually introducing that in some other company prior to Mambo. I won’t mention that right now. So before that, this category didn’t quite exist. And when we released our platform for the first time, this is when analysts picked it up and started to call this thing out.
Brett
Right.
Ben Goldin
So today, if you look at Gartner’s magic quadrant, or Forrester Wave reports and similar type of analyst reports, you would actually see explicitly digital engagement called out there. At the same time, there are not too many companies that are focusing specifically on that area because it’s not an easy thing to do. Right. You really have to have specific knowledge and expertise in order to build it as a product rather than just doing bespoke custom implementation for each individual customer.
Brett
That makes a lot of sense. As I mentioned there in the intro, you’ve raised 4.5 million to date. What have you learned about fundraising throughout this journey so far?
Ben Goldin
Yeah, it’s a good question. Well, being someone who did things before, being someone who stayed in the domain for a while, it’s definitely much easier to raise capital. That’s probably one lesson learned. The other lesson learned is that it’s good to connect with some angel investor or some non leading VC who is super well connected and can introduce you with others and create a hype around the product that you are building and the company that you are building. Yeah. And then you start getting a lot of inbound and start having a lot of good conversations with different vcs and investors. So these are kind of two things I probably highlight from the fundraising process itself.
Brett
Now, let’s imagine you were starting again today from scratch. Based on everything you’ve learned in the last year, what would be the number one piece of advice you’d give yourself?
Ben Goldin
Well, number one piece of advice is don’t be too serious. Keep it simple and relaxed. This is a very important thing. We sometimes take things too seriously, right. We sometimes are too afraid of doing things we don’t feel confident about our own instinct and thoughts. I would definitely do it differently this time. Hope that makes sense.
Brett
Makes perfect sense. Now, final question for you. Let’s zoom out three to five years into the future. What’s the big picture vision that you’re building?
Ben Goldin
Well, my vision was always, even before funding plummery, is to change the way how people experience banking and do that for a meaningful number of people globally. Right. So that’s the vision we’re going to follow. How many people we’re going to impact? Will it be 10 million, 50 million, 150,000,000 or a billion? Depends on our success, of course. But that’s more or less the intent, right? To change the way people experience banking, ideally for meaningful number of population globally.
Brett
Love the vision. All right, Ben, we are up on time, so we’re going to wrap here. Before we do, if there’s any founders listening in that want to follow along with your company building journey, where should they go?
Ben Goldin
They should definitely visit our website, which is plumery.com. I’m happy to connect on LinkedIn. You can easily find my profile there as well as Twitter. Feel free to reach out, happy to answer any questions, happy to share insights and advice. If that’s. Yeah, please feel free to connect.
Brett
Awesome. Ben, thank you so much for taking the time to chat. This has been a lot of fun.
Ben Goldin
Likewise. Thank you so much. Appreciate.
Brett
All right, Ben, keep in touch.
Brett
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