Create, find and use your content when you need it

Published in

The Startup

6 min readFeb 15, 2018

Bynder is the fastest way to professionally manage creative files. Teams get on the same page for real-time collaborative edits and approvals, easy file sharing and storage, auto-formatting for channels and file types — it provides one central hub for all company materials and messaging.

Kevin William David interviewed Lidia Lüttin, CMO at Bynder to know more.

Hi Lidia, Let’s get started!

So tell us about Bynder?

Bynder is a 100% cloud-based platform for management of digital files, or Digital Asset Management (DAM), that allows users to find, organize and share thousands of photos, videos, documents and PDF’s at a moment’s notice. Marketers and branding professionals are creating more digital content than ever befoyere and use Bynder as one central hub for all company materials and messaging, for real-time collaborative edits and approvals on digital files, and for easy file sharing and storage. Our mission is to provide companies with a future-proof way to organize and share their digital files, and protect the financial investments put into them.

Tell me more about why you are building this?

We’ve always been inspired by the needs of our clients, back to the day it was founded. Bynder was originally born as a client solution at Chris Hall’s web development agency, Label A. Chris Hall (CEO and Founder of Bynder) saw the evolving needs of his clients, who needed a quick and easy-to-use way to organize and share the rapidly increasing amount of digital files.

A simple idea, but the lack of such a tool was causing problems for entire departments as they were unable to find and share huge files to the right people on time and securely. This is where Bynder was born. From there, Chris discovered the field of DAM and knew that Bynder could be of help to countless marketing and branding professionals that needed a simple, intuitive and centralized hub to easily organize, create, store and share digital content anytime, anywhere.

How is Bynder different from what already exists in the market?

Bynder offers the ease of use like other storage platforms like Google Drive, DropBox and Box, but with additional file management functionality that marketers and creatives need to get more use from their work. This is all possible in our a SaaS model, which is supported by the security, scalability and reliability that AWS offers.

We have a close relationship with AWS — we’re the largest AWS user in Europe, in fact — and that’s enabled us to include some unique features in our platform. Our platform uses artificial intelligence to automatically identify and tag objects in photos when they are uploaded to Bynder. For example, if a user uploads a picture of a beach, keywords like “beach” or “ocean” will be automatically attached to the photo, making it easy for an individual to search for all of a company’s “beach” photos in the future.

We recognize the need for a solution like this to integrate with other software — i.e. CMS platforms, social media management tools, chat tools, the Adobe Suite, etc. — and strive to constantly update our platform to work hand-in-hand with the other valuable tools our users work with on a daily basis. Users can also develop their own custom applications, plugins, and integrations with Bynder too.

Who uses Bynder?

Bynder has been the most popular with large marketing teams at global brands that work with a lot of digital images — like Spotify, Puma and Lacoste. These companies are handling thousands of files every single day and need a central location where everyone at their company can easily go to access and find the content they need, whether it’s a case study or the most up-to-date logo.

With the recent rollout of our free product Bynder Orbit, we’re extending Bynder’s reach to a new audience — marketers looking to organize their files immediately without a long sales process. It differs from our enterprise product in that it is a bit more streamlined and there’s a limit to how many files an Orbit user can store — 100GB worth of total storage, and 10GB of traffic each month, but it serves the same purpose as a scaled central hub.

How are your customers using Bynder? Could you share a few different use cases?

Some of our top customers include Icelandair, Puma and Spotify, just to name a few. With Icelandair, for example, Bynder’s DAM module allows the company to store, share and manage all valuable assets within one user-friendly portal. When using other portal systems, Icelandair discovered that they had a problem controlling the expiration dates of images that were circulated internally and externally, meaning outdated images were being used even though they had lost the usage rights to those materials. Thanks to Bynder’s detailed searching, all users are now able to find the correct, up-to-date asset easily, which can then be shared directly with third parties, such as external travel agencies or press. And usage rights are no longer an issue. With Bynder, the correct image is always accessible so there’s no second guessing.

Puma is another customer that faced a number of challenges before using Bynder. The sportswear company was facing everything from low upload/download speeds, limited access from external partners to collaborate on digital assets, along with difficulties updating assets outside of the office. Bynder’s metadata tagging and smart filtering now allows teams can now access images, photos and logos instantly, fostering faster delivery of assets, greater collaboration and increased efficiency across teams.

Have there been unique use cases for Bynder that you hadn’t thought of or expected?

We developed Bynder Express which is a secure way of transferring large files, created on a specific client request. Immediately after that was released, a lot of our clients started using it as the need for securely transferring large files directly from portals was much higher than anticipated. This wasn’t a use case we had foreseen. This transfer functionality now is more often a USP to be able to also distribute files securely that don’t necessarily need to be available within the DAM. In short, listen to your users!

Were there any early ‘growth hacks’ or tactics that have contributed to your current success?

Not sure if we would classify this as a technical growth hack per say, but for us it was extremely important to keep a pulse on both how our customers were engaging with different media types each day, and how the needs of the entire workforce were quickly evolving. Think about how many different types of files an organization works with on a daily basis. Organizations are creating more images, videos and other types of files than ever before. This work can also happen anytime and anywhere, so understanding and anticipating these evolving needs helps us provide technical solutions to today’s workforce needs while keeping an eye on what an organization might need in the future.

What were some of the biggest challenges while building the product early on and how did you solve them?

There was a challenge in avoiding the pitfall of developing our SaaS solution too specific and narrow based on our first clients, because we wanted to offer generic use cases to truly be an out of the box solution. We made sure that Bynder became highly configurable without the need of development so that the onboarding was still quick, Bynder can still be adapted to different ways of working but all within the same code base and SaaS offering

What have been some of the most interesting integrations you’ve added?

Adobe Creative Cloud, Salesforce Commerce Cloud (Demandware), Slack, Hootsuite, Drupal 8, Adobe Experience Manager, inRiver PIM, Templafy, Workfront and Shutterstock.

Finally, What are the top products that you depend on to run the company & how do you use them?

Besides Bynder,

- Slack— Messaging internally.

- Salesforce— Sales Automation.

- HubSpot — Marketing Automation.

- G-Suite — Collaboration.

- Asana— Task management.

Originally published at siftery.com.