About Wingback

Wingback provided tools and APIs for SaaS pricing and packaging. The idea was simple to state: a SaaS company should be able to ship any set of features of its product under any pricing model, and changing pricing should not require engineering work. Yann and I started Wingback in 2021.

After 1aim was acquired, I was not really sure what to do next. I helped a few founder friends with their companies and traveled for a while, but I wanted to build something myself again. In late 2020 I joined On Deck, which was a genuinely outstanding program. Through it I met a lot of founders, most of them building software. I spent months talking with them about what was actually hard in their businesses, and pricing and packaging kept coming up. Everyone had a view on what their pricing should be. Almost nobody had a way to implement it without pulling engineers off the roadmap for weeks. It was an interesting, unsolved, and massive problem, and that is why I started Wingback.

What we built was a pricing plan editor, entitlement management, usage metering, quoting, self-serve signup components and billing, all on one data model, with APIs underneath. Someone non-technical could build a feature-based plan out of a flat fee, per-seat pricing, usage components or any combination of them, assign it to a specific customer, and have the invoice come out correct at the line-item level. Feature definition all the way through to accurate invoicing, in one place, is what did not exist when we went looking for it.

Wingback was founded during COVID, so we were sort of forced to build it remote first. That was a bigger shift than it sounds. At 1aim we had been in the office 100 percent of the time and we considered that essential to how we worked. We worked with Marissa Goldberg, who knew remote challenges well, and rebuilt the way we worked around it. The team ended up spread across five continents. We hired most of them without having met in person. It worked much better than expected.

Timing was not our friend. When we started, pricing and packaging was near the top of the list for SaaS companies, because getting more out of every existing customer was where growth had to come from. Then the market turned. The funding environment tightened in 2022, and our customers went into survival mode. Some of them did not make it. We had built a product for a market that looked very different by the time the product was ready. For a startup to work, a lot of things have to come together at the same time.