IAM1425 – CEO Develops Software to Help Businesses Reduce Challenges with Finding Files

Michelle Eichner is the founder and CEO of Digitile. She works with businesses to reduce the challenges employees have finding files. Eichner is a seasoned marketer and SaaS software veteran with a deep understanding of the marketplace. Her more than 25 years of in-depth B2B experience driving product marketing and strategy helps identify market challenges, gaps, and solutions.

• CEO Story: Michelle was the head of the marketing department of a start-up creating content for the stakeholders. She had a pain point concerning the storage of files where it was stored in different locations and had a hard time accessing them. She figured it out by building her system that could search the file across the cloud platform.
• Business Service: Sync your Google Drive, Gmail, Slack, etc. After the authentication, you can search for the file you need from the different platforms.
• Secret Sauce: Instead of logging in to a different platform, they wanted to unify the experience by working one way.
• CEO Hack: Notion,  LinkedInHelper helping with LinkedIn Sales Navigator
• CEO Nugget: You need to be able to network. Also, find mentors that can help provide an outside perspective (e.g. Small Business Development Center)
• CEO Defined: Wearing a lot of hats and being flexible to play different roles. Make good educational decisions.

Website: https://digitile.io/
Free Trial at Digitile: https://digitile.io/#
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michelleeichner/
Resources: https://digitile.io/resources/

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Transcription

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00:02 – Intro

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkness values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO podcast.

00:27 – Gresham Harkless

Hello, hello, hello, this is Gresham Harkless from I Am CEO Podcast and I have a guest on the show today. I have Michelle Eichner of Digitile. Michelle, it's awesome to have you on the show.

00:37 – Michelle Eichner

Hey, thank you, Gresham. It's a pleasure to be with you.

00:39 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome, awesome, awesome. What I want to do is just read a little bit more about Michelle so you can learn a little bit more about her and hear about all the awesome things that she's doing. Michelle is the founder and CEO of Digitile. She works with businesses to reduce the challenges employees have. Finding files.

Eichner is a seasoned marketer and SaaS software veteran with a deep understanding of the marketplace. With more than 25 years of in-depth B2B experience driving product marketing and strategy helps identify market challenges, gaps, and solutions. Michelle, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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01:12 – Michelle Eichner

Absolutely.

01:14 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Let's do it. So first question I have was just to hear a little bit more about your CEO story and what led you to kind of start your business.

01:20 – Michelle Eichner

Sure. So probably like many other CEOs, I had a pain point. So I was the head of marketing at a startup in New York. I had about 10 people on my team and we created content for the internal stakeholders and external stakeholders. What I found is we would store things in Google Drive, we'd have some things in Dropbox, we had files living in Salesforce, we had files living in HubSpot, all sorts of different places. Inevitably, someone would slack me or someone on my team or email us and say, hey, where's the latest data sheet? Where's the latest client presentation? And we would have to stop.

We'd be disrupted and we'd have to help, you know, them get to the link of the file. And I figured at some point there's got to be a method to the madness to help people find files faster. And ultimately I didn't find a lot out there. I set out to build something that could conveniently help you search across cloud platforms for your file, irrespective of where it resides, to just quickly have a very sophisticated search engine that goes and finds what you Need.

02:24 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. That's a genius idea. And as always, as any entrepreneur says, there has to be a better way. And you found that better way. So I wanted to drill a little bit deeper and hear a little bit more about how your service works, how exactly it works, and what platforms it might work with.

02:38 – Michelle Eichner

It's very simple. It takes about 30 seconds to set up your account. With digital, we do have a free trial. Once you do that, we then ask you to connect or sync your Google Drive, your Dropbox, your Slack account, your Gmail. Those are things you authorize. Once you do that, and then it's a two-way authentication through the APIs of these other companies.

And from there we then we never take possession of the file. We merely can search across these different platforms to then find the file you need. So if you're looking for the latest case study that you might have done for your clients and you type in something specific, we check not just the title of the file but also have natural language processing that will go through and identify any of the text related to your search. We have image recognition.

So if you have an image in there and we've got image recognition to be able to identify files that have relevant images. So we built a sophisticated engine that just goes across these different platforms and simply finds the files for you.

03:36 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, I love that. And like you said, you know, where exactly is it, what's the latest file, and how exactly do I find access to it? But to be able to kind of sign into a platform that allows you to synchronize all those different software and services is pretty incredible.

03:49 – Michelle Eichner

Great. Yeah, it is. So far we had a great response to the service.

03:53 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome, awesome, awesome. Now I wanted to ask you for what I call your secret sauce. This is what differentiates you or makes you or your organization unique. Could you give us an example of your secret sauce?

04:03 – Michelle Eichner

Yeah. So from a company perspective, each of these platforms has different behaviors and different elements when you go search for a file in Dropbox, some nuances make finding a file hard. Their search engines are not very robust. They don't check within the context of that file, whereas Google does. Salesforce does not, HubSpot does not. So some of these guys do something different and unique. Then also how you search, and how you share files is unique by platform. And you have to log into all these platforms.

We wanted to unify this experience so that even though each of these had its nuances, you didn't have to worry about Those you could do it however, you know one way and have a consistent experience across these. So a good example is sharing. When you want to share a file, let's say you've got a new employee starting and you've got five different 10 different documents that you want to give that new employee.

Some live in Google Drive, some might live in Slack because you happen to Slack to a channel and you don't want to log into each of these platforms separately. To go, here are the two files that are here, here are the three files. So what we did is we made sharing possible across platforms. So you just literally say, here are the files, 10 files I want to share. And I want to make the experience very simple so that you're not logging in to all these locations. We'll go through the process of pulling from each of these locations, but you have to just go through this process once.

So we unified your experience across all these different platforms. And that's part of the secret sauce. The other secret sauce is the search engine that makes finding files fast. It's seamless to you, but there's a big heavy-lifting algorithm on the back end that's doing all these processes to give you the pop file that is most relevant to what you're looking for.

05:54 – Gresham Harkless

That makes perfect sense. And I think that's pretty awesome just because it's kind of like you're able to tap into the secret sauces of all these different platforms and then you're able to make your secret recipe or secret sauce based on that because you understand the strengths and weaknesses for all these different platforms.

So I think that's a great idea and a great company that you're building. So I want to switch gears a little bit and ask you for what I call a CEO hack. And the CEO hack could be an app like yourself, or it could be a book or something that you use or lean on on a regular, everyday basis that makes you effective and efficient as a business owner.

06:26 – Michelle Eichner

So I've got a couple of different things that we use app-wise, that we find helpful at Digitiles, not a lot of people know about a project management tool called Notion. And I think of Notion as a mashup of Trello, Asana, Slack, and Evernote. I could probably go on even maybe a Gmail and a Sort. And it's like the perfect tool that has, that offers the most flexibility for you to manage your just everyday life at work, even at home if you wanted, but and manage all the projects and all the tasks and have communications going back and forth and it's, it truly is a mashup of about 10 different products in one.

And so its flexibility just really helps the team come together, focus, and just understand exactly who is doing what, where things are in stages, and lets us easily communicate with one another. As far as what we need to do what the pass-off is or what have you from a product or an application, I would say that has been a good hack. I wouldn't call that a hack. It is just a good, valuable app. As far as hacks, interestingly enough, I think one of the hacks that I've come to appreciate is that we're a business-to-business company, we sell to other businesses and we use LinkedIn Sales Navigator quite a bit.

And LinkedIn has a tool called LinkedIn Helper. LinkedIn Helper allows you to take essentially a download of all the profile information so you can start to build a targeted list. And then from there, there are other hacks that allow you to essentially communicate an email with these people, not through InMail. And so there's lots of little hacks that have helped us kind of communicate, target, and hone in on our potential customer audience.

08:13 – Gresham Harkless

I love those two hacks and especially obviously LinkedIn and I haven't heard of the other one. What was it called one more time?

08:19 – Michelle Eichner

The app or the LinkedIn helper? So the app is called Notion.

08:23 – Gresham Harkless

Notion, yeah. I actually have not heard of that, so I would love to check that out. But again, being able to kind of pull from the greatness of Evernote and all these other platforms and be able to kind of mash it up, like you said, into one is a great CEO hack that we can definitely check out. So now I want to switch gears a little bit and ask you for what I call a CEO nugget. This might be a word of wisdom or piece of advice or something you might tell your younger business self.

08:45 – Michelle Eichner

Yeah, so when you become a CEO, I think it's important to. I mean this is not news, right? You need to be able to network and depending on where you are in your career, you've built up probably a fairly large network of people that you've worked with and met over the years. And what I'm finding is if you've done a good job of building those relationships over time, networking when it counts, and when you need to call upon people, whether it's just for advice to brainstorm, to ask for, opinions to ask for, do you want to participate in a beta program?

Would you consider being a client, whatever that ask is, is a lot easier when you've had relationships or you've cemented relationships in a way that allows you to pick up the phone five years later, frankly, even 10 years later, and not skip a beat and not feel awkward about making that call, because it's tough sometimes to start calling on people you haven't spoken to in a long time. And so I think probably one of the most important things for me was just recognizing a. I did just naturally a good job of kind of keeping in touch and cementing relationships where I felt comfortable, but then there's cases where I didn't.

And then there was like, okay, how do I break that ice and try to not make this such an awkward approach when I wanted to ask that individual, you know, for advice or get their thoughts for market trends or frankly, join our beta. And so I think there's, you know, we tend to, you know, you get ideas, you think that sales will just come, but there's a lot of hard work in building the business and networking that I think entrepreneurs probably underestimate.

10:27 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. And it helps out a ton if you have relationships that you've already built to be able to pull on. As you said, sometimes you might even have a relationship, and it might not be in the same sphere as what you're asking about or what you're doing. So still, there's some type of kind of, I guess, awkwardness or something, or it's a little bit different.

So you have to be able to kind of navigate that. And there are a lot of other things you have to juggle as a CEO. So definitely, you know, networking is a big part of that. So now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is kind of the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're having different CEOs on this podcast. But I wanted to ask you specifically, what being a CEO means to you.

11:03 – Michelle Eichner

So, to me, it's wearing a lot of hats and being flexible to play different roles, especially when you're small and you don't have a big set of resources to rely on. I think it's also around being able to make good educational decisions. I think everybody's going to make mistakes. If you made the mistake based on foundational information that helped you make the decision, you know, it is what it is.

But, you know, I think it's kind of a. You've got to be prepared to play every hat and recognize you may have strengths and certainly weaknesses you need to understand those strengths, and certainly play on those strengths where you have weaknesses. Don't be afraid to outsource, don't be afraid to delegate, and at the same time recognize, you know, kind of how far you can take some of these weaknesses to overcome some of them too. So there are things that we early on may have outsourced that over time we realized we had skills that we could do if we just put a little time and effort into it.

And now we do some of these things we used to outsource. Conversely, there are probably things now that we recognize we don't want to spend and waste our time on. There is an expert who can get us from point A to point B a lot quicker. And even though we're trying to be mindful of dollars, we sort of have to go, is that dollar worth? Is it worth my time at this point in where we are in the business versus spending a few bucks that we may not have considered all these things just, you know, play into the CEO being flexible, making decisions, and honestly being really in tune with your business?

12:35 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, that makes perfect sense, and understand, like, where you are in your business. Like you said, the dollars versus the time. If it makes sense, when does it make sense? Does it make sense, you know, later years down the line, or does it make sense today? So trying to figure out and put all those puzzle pieces together is always a fun thing about being a CEO.

So I love that definition, Michelle, and I appreciate you for taking some time out. What I wanted to do was pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there was anything additional you wanted to let our readers and our listeners know and how best people can get ahold of you.

13:03 – Michelle Eichner

Sure. So thing that I think everyone should be aware of is finding mentors. Right. I think I personally have been able to reach out to people when I've had questions and not appreciated, perhaps having been through something before, either anticipate what something might look like or be like when you get there. There are times when you're in the thick of stuff and you need someone that you can contact and, you know, don't be afraid. Don't be afraid to, like, take on some assistance and, you know, free or otherwise. It can help clarify. I think sometimes we tend to eat our dog food so much that we forget to look beyond our four walls.

And having an outside perspective, in my opinion, has been very helpful. And from time to time I do have a really good plug for, you know, CEOs out there. Depending on where they are in their business, which is early on, I discovered the Small Business Development Center, which is an arm of the SBA. And there's no cost to businesses, and they are consultants, and you get an advisor who essentially you can go in and talk to from there. If you have questions about legal, if you have accounting questions, if you have questions about marketing, they bring experts in to speak with you.

It has been a great resource. I meet with them at least, probably quarterly, sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on what our needs are. So I want to share that because I think it's a service that a lot of entrepreneurs aren't familiar with. The Small Business Development Center, an arm of the SBA can, you know, have a team of experts and advisors that they can access at no cost.

You just have to sign up and get going. So that's probably my biggest leave behind as far as those entrepreneurs out there who are either early on or just kind of getting going and want to find some mentors. But I think getting mentors is very important, you know, recognize that. I think it's an important component of helping you grow and seeing past your four walls.

14:58 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, that's huge. And especially the SBDC as well, too. There are local SBDCs all across the United States. And now I wanted to see if somebody wants to reach out to you and they want to take advantage of that trial, what's the best way for them to do that as well?

15:12 – Michelle Eichner

Sure. So our website is digitile.io. We have a free trial on that site. If anyone wants to contact me, they can either just do it right through the form online, or they can LinkedIn with me. I'm happy to chat and kind of chat with people who are interested in entrepreneurship or want to bounce ideas. We're in the SaaS business, so if you have questions about starting a SaaS business, by all means, feel free to reach out, even through LinkedIn. And I'm happy to chat.

15:41 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome, awesome. Well, I truly appreciate you, Michelle, for taking some time out and all the great advice and the great things that you're doing and you and your team. So I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

15:49 – Michelle Eichner

Thank you, Gresham. Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

15:52 – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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