Best Proposals Home Page.
Best Proposals Home Page.
How did you come up with this idea?
Like most, it was a “scratch an itch” scenario. The first version of this software has been around since 2012. At the time we were doing business automation consulting and software development and spent days on these proposals. You’d send it out aa ...
How long did you work on it before you launched it?
When did you see your first dollar? We didn’t have a big launch with champagne and strippers and party poppers – by that point, we had already built our CRM oman phone number library company and integrated it into it. The thing was, our CRM wasn’t very good, but the fact that it was connected to this proposal system was the real selling point, so we randomly created a landing page on betterproposals.io in January of 2015, I think, and got more leads in 24 hours than we had in the previous 12 months for the other business. I started sending out emails in February and someone called me on the phone and bought it the same day I sent the email. They’re still with us today.
Total number of clients: 5,800 clients.
Who are your customers? What is their target market?
Mainly web/marketer/digital/freelance types, but we are seeing other industries emerging that are really good for us and that we will look to focus on in the future.
How did you get your first 100 clients?
Cold emailing, Facebook ads, Twitter marketing, and reaching out to influencers
What are the top 2-3 distribution channels that work best for you? Which channel didn’t work for you?
The best channel by far was joining a community. It’s not even remotely scalable because the best communities are small, tight-knit groups, but if you can find just 2-3 that you can really dig deep with, then you’re onto a winner.
What didn’t work? Content marketing. It’s a complete waste of time unless you’re going to go all-out.
Tell us 2-3 growth challenges you have encountered recently and if you have a strategy, how to solve them.
One thing I am quickly realizing is that what works today will not work tomorrow. If you find a great combination with Facebook ads, great, double it, but don't think you've found a magic pill. Keep working and creating new things because in about 3 weeks it will dwindle to nothing. The most important lesson though is that once you've reached a certain point where some money is coming in, you have activity, the growth sort of takes care of itself.
Some of the tasks aren’t worth doing in-house. What do you outsource?
SEO, some development, video creation, template writing (in our case). I think the problem with outsourcing is that it’s actually really hard to find good marketing people because they’re all 21-year-old “millionaire rock stars” who haven’t spent a dime on ads in their lives, but want a 3k a month retainer from you. So the people who can actually help are so fucking expensive that it’s impossible to hire them without taking serious risk. The way we’ve done it is keep all the design/marketing/branding/content/support in-house and outsource other parts that we’re not good at. Chris Howard once said, “Never outsource your core competency,” which in our case is helping people send better proposals to their clients. For us, that means any client interaction and marketing is always done in-house.
What are 3 tools that you and your team can’t live without?
Obviously certain things built into the product like Stripe, GoCardless, SendGrid, etc., but in terms of running the business itself, for us, Intercom and Basecamp are the two keys.
The last one would be our internal Dashboard, which we’ve built to show us all the stats and metrics about the business.
What was the biggest thing that helped you reduce churn?
I think we can do a lot better in this department and it will be a focus going forward, but I think going for bigger accounts and fewer freelancers is the way to go here. Our pricing model is based on people sending a set number of proposals per month. If they don't send anything, it's a waste of money for them, so churn . This will be a constant headache until this business is no more, but it will be a matter of mitigating it as much as possible.
Tell us what was the biggest mistake you made when creating and promoting your SaaS and what you learned from it.
We haven't made any major mistakes, so there's nothing to report on that front. For me personally, maybe not working hard enough at key moments, but it's a small thing. If I had to pick something, I would choose not giving SEO the attention it deserves early enough.
If you were to start Better Proposals today, what would you do differently?
Seriously, nothing. Everything we’ve done in the past has gotten us to this incredible point. Any other combination of things might not have done it. Even an obvious answer like “start earlier” – I wouldn’t even say that because everything we did between 2012 and 2015 when we launched taught us a lot about the proposal process for 50/60k deals over the previous 8 years of being in business, we had only been making 5 websites.
We also learned how to address client requests on a deeper level, their demands, etc. It also gave us the funding to start Better Proposals. If we had started 3 years earlier, I suspect we would have screwed up in some ways. Timing is everything and I really don’t think the world would have been ready for our product so soon. I still think it’s too early for the proposal business. Many people still do things in Word/Email and we (our market) still have tens of millions of potential customers. That's why I don't really see Bidsketch/Proposify/PandaDoc as competition. Of course they are, but I consider Microsoft Word more as our competition.
