Interesting. There's definitely a need for sales/pipeline tracking tools in small businesses, though I'm not sure the focus on freelancers is quite right.
We're currently using Pipedrive for this, and it's a more mature and slicker product, but that's not to say there isn't room for another player (in fact, there are many!). I'm just not 100% sure that the focus on freelancers is right. Has this been validated with actual freelancers? Are any freelancers on HN willing to come out and say that this is a hair-on-fire problem for them that they'd be willing to pay $7/m for this?
For me, it's something that would have served me (and I would have paid for) in my freelancing days, and it's something that has been working great for me as a small business owner as I've been using the early builds.
I'm obviously incredibly biased (I'm one of the creators), but I agree small business will be a large potential market in addition to freelancers. There will be some freelancers who won't want to put down $7/month, but most busy freelancers would certainly get $7/month of value out of the service.
Aha. Reading your blog post, I notice that you developed this for yourself while you were running a web design shop with 3 other people. That counts as small business rather than "freelancer", in my book. If I were you I'd go and furiously hunt down bona fide freelancers (who have no interest in hiring more people) and corner them as to whether they'd find something like this useful.
I don't think the price is an issue - in fact, $7 is too low, if anything - but whether or not this is worth paying for at all, for a freelancer. It's definitely worth it for a web design shop - but then you need to market to those rather than to freelancers, and make sure you build your product for the right market.
Absolutely--I think I was a bit unclear on that. I'm absolutely in the small biz bucket now, but I think my past freelancer self would have paid for it. But you're right, we have some work to do around finding whether our target is freelance and small biz or only one of those.
I spend more than $7/month on Highrise (from 37signals) to pretty much do what this does. Highrise doesn't directly support a sales 'pipeline' metaphor so I use tags on customers for each stage ("WarmLead", "ColdLead", "FirstContact"...etc). It's definitely cumbersome to do the pipeline with tags but the contact management and email integration is pretty good.
As a freelancer, I really only use it when seeking out the next contract, which is every few weeks or months. So Highrise is overkill and just slightly too expensive to justify. (But switching to something else never really becomes my top priority.)
One last note: a sales pipeline is useful for many types of relationships... finding customers, hiring employees, getting investors, etc. They all have the same first few steps.
I've been using Highrise for a long time, too, and think it's good at what it does, but the heavy contact focus doesn't fit well with my process. The lack of a real overview is also really limiting factor for me, too. It's really a solving a different problem, I think.
Great point about the pipeline concept being useful for different things. We have one early tester using it to track conference sponsorships.
This looks really promising from what I see in the screenshot.
Since you're in private beta, why not add a mailing list signup? That way, those that don't get an invite code will still get reminders of this tool and a notification when they can finally get in.
Everyone pays the same price whether they're a 100 person firm or just two people? So you can have five clients per server or fifty? I think that you need to give some consideration to those using more resources paying more.
Looks nice. Do you think lead generation and management is the sole problem of Freelancers? Or are you planning to move into the rest of the freelancing lifecycle?
It's clear that the problem extends to small businesses and the like, we just want to make it clear that we didn't build Stride for salespeople. The app is too simple for their use, and that's what we wanted.
The idea is to tie in Freshbooks, Mailchimp, Rapportive and other integrations as we move forward, to help round out what small business and freelancers need.
Having tried it out for just a few moments, I certainly see the value. Good work.
That said, I do have a couple of snap judgements that I hope you don't mind me sharing.
1. The interface is simple to use, but when I closed a deal it immediately disappeared from the list. While it makes sense for a non-active deal to leave the list, it is a hinderance to me using the platform. In my business, "closing" a deal means receiving a purchase order. But the deal isn't done until I've completed my end of things (bringing in the product, shipping it, receiving payment). It would be nice if closed deals didn't disappear from the list for a day or week or month or whatever. It's nice to see the team's successes as well as the stuff still open.
2. It would be AWESOME if there were a way to add/edit the progress bar. In my business it would be useful to have "lead" "pitch/quotation", "negotiation", "closed", "processed" "shipped and invoiced" and "payment received." Tracking the whole process linearly from start to finish is something I would certainly pay for.
2. Piggy backing #1, it would be super helpful to be able to attach files to deals. Most of my company's projects take place via quotes that come via XLS and PO's that come via PDF. Being able to attach the files along the way would mean my GMAIL account wouldn't have to be the repository for quotes and orders.
2a. Tagging deals would be super useful. If I could tag a deal with the salesperson's name or "new customer" or whatever and search/sort by tag, that would be a great feature.
3. The reporting is nice, but I hope that a lot more filters come in the future. It would be nice to search/sort by customer, $ value, deal status, etc. and then run reports on that information as well. For example, it would be nice to pull all the deals we lost from customer XYZ between $5k and $10k and compare that number to the deals won in that range. Were are margins too high on the lost deals? Is there something else we could have done?
4. I don't know if you guys are enabling multi-user accounts but I'd gladly pay 5x your current monthly cost (or more) if would allow my account to have 4 user logins where each user could modify/edit a deal. We have a salesperson, a quoter, a purchaser, and a processer. If each person could access the same dashboard and update their part of a deal that would be fantastic and would no doubt improve our work flow.
5. I'd pay even more if I could add checkbox/lists to each piece of the status bar. So "Pitch" would have a checkbox for "emailed quote" and "2 day follow up" and 4 day follow up"...whereas Won might have a checkbox for "received PO" and "created invoice" and stuff like that. I realize that is sort of moving away from the simplicity that the app delivers on right now, but once again it is something I would pay a lot more $$ for. Aside from improving our current work, having checklists would help standardize our processes to make it easier to train new people.
My team of four is CONSTANTLY in the dark about where everyone else is on a certain project. Task lists and project managers don't work because they are either complicated to use or don't have a linear flow like your tool has.
Yes, a lot of these things can be addressed through other CRM systems and Quickbooks, but the opportunity I see here is for dead simple deal tracking and data extraction. Highrise, Salesforce, etc. are good tools in their own way, but a STRICT focus on pipeline, tracking, and highly/quickly customizable reporting would be great.
I realize that I've broken the cardinal rule by suggesting you add MORE stuff when the goal is simplicity. But the things I've posted are the things that occurred to me right away when I signed up, started using it, and started saying "would I pay for this? How much would I pay? And if it had x, y, and z, how much more would I pay?"
Thanks for the feedback, super helpful -- it's exactly the reason why we wanted to roll out in a private beta.
The short of it is that we're sacrificing a lot of this to save simplicity right off the bat. Frankly, it's the main competitive advantage to all of the many other tools out there, we believe. That said, there are a few of your requests that we're actively working on.
In particular, points 2 (add/edit progress bar), 2 (we're working on file attachements now), and 3.
Stuff like multi-user accounts and deal checkboxes are unlikely. We are looking to add reminders, however.
We're currently using Pipedrive for this, and it's a more mature and slicker product, but that's not to say there isn't room for another player (in fact, there are many!). I'm just not 100% sure that the focus on freelancers is right. Has this been validated with actual freelancers? Are any freelancers on HN willing to come out and say that this is a hair-on-fire problem for them that they'd be willing to pay $7/m for this?