Meet Felix Eichler, co-founder of Userlane
Felix Eichler is an entrepreneur from Munich, Germany who co-founded Userlane, a B2B SaaS company in the Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) space. By the age of ten he was writing his first code, and got admitted into Technical University Munich, one of the leading tech universities in Europe, at the age of 15.
He then went on to start his own company at the age of 20. Userlane has since grown to more than 100 employees and hundreds of customers, among them Hitachi, DPD and Audi. Felix was also featured on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list at the age of 25.
Do you have a morning routine or ritual to get your day started on the right foot?
I just have a coffee and get started. If you’re worried about getting your morning routine right, you’re worrying about the wrong thing.
What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learnt so far as an entrepreneur?
That you have to enjoy what you’re doing, while you’re doing it. There is no point in waiting for an ambiguous “later in life”, waiting for the weekends, or worse – retirement – to follow your dream. If there is something you want to do, go and do it now. Don’t wait.
What keeps you motivated as an entrepreneur when you hit bumps in the road?
I once heard the saying that a life without ups and downs is not worth living. I have learned to enjoy the bad feelings, be thankful for them, and thankful for the experience. I have now developed a pride in overcoming challenging situations. It has become second nature to me, so my excitement around “bumps” can almost irritate other people. The high amplitude of emotions is part of the journey.
What are your thoughts on failure?
It’s inevitable. The challenge is how you react to it. If something difficult is going to happen, I want to make sure I harness the power of it. I believe in forming a habit to learn from your own reflections.
What’s the most common problem your customers approach you with?
Dealing with an overwhelming amount of technology change is a common challenge for today’s businesses. Employees are using a variety of (often complex) business applications to get work done, but instead of being updated or enhanced every few years, these products are being changed every few days.
This sense of ‘app overload’ is making people stressed, which is in turn hurting productivity and creating all kinds of IT headaches. Our mission is to solve this challenge by making it easier for employees to accept, use and maximise software – improving what we call ‘digital adoption’. After all, no one is hoping we go back to working on typewriters, so this is the only real way forward.
We do this through our Digital Adoption Platform, which provides embedded, real-time and context-sensitive guides to employees as and when they’re navigating through their business applications. In other words, they can learn how to use software in a way that is truly helpful and productive – as opposed to spending hours in an instructor-led training course or, even worse, trying to figure it out on their own.
What are your thoughts on automation and how it could impact our economy?
It’s simultaneously one of the greatest opportunities and greatest challenges we’ve ever seen. It’s Userlane’s purpose to make people feel empowered by technology, not frustrated or intimidated. We’re focused on helping people to navigate the ever-faster-moving world of technology with confidence.
A key part of this is getting people to view automation as an enabler, rather than a threat – and to be willing to accept its benefits. Let computers do what they’re best at: repetitive, well-defined, mundane tasks, and let humans utilise their innate creativity, ingenuity, and compassion. If we can just make a small contribution to shift perspectives positively towards this new reality, we can be proud of ourselves.
Describe your business in three words.
Learning by doing.
Why do you think your business has had such a positive impact across your industry?
We often forget that technology should serve the people, not the other way around. It’s refreshing to many modern organisations that we put people first, both in our product and in our own culture. We understand that digital adoption is not just a business or IT issue, but fundamentally an employee experience issue – and this sense of perspective keeps us at the forefront of innovation in our space.
How important is company culture and what is your top tip to get it right?
One of our investors once said that in his portfolio, if he was to rank the companies by the best culture and by best performance, it would be the same list. There is a strong correlation between the two.
Culture has to come first, and for me it’s often about answering “why?”. Why do we do things the way we do them? Why should you, as an employee, care to contribute to this company? Find an answer that is not only referenced in the company’s vision, but in the goals and ambitions of your individual team members. In doing so, you can tap into the most valuable form of all motivations: intrinsic motivation. People will work for themselves, rather than for a job.
What are your top tips for entrepreneurs wanting to get their business out there?
Engage with the problem, not the solution. You’ll have an easier time acquiring customers if you think and talk about how you can address their problems, rather than how your solution works.
What’s the most important question entrepreneurs should be asking themselves?
What do you really want to work on for potentially the rest of your life? You’re going to be much more effective at doing something you really want. Think about what the world will be like in 10 or 20 years from now, and start building for it today.
