Create simple, beautiful & powerful price quotes in minutes!

Fulfilli is a price quoting software for digital agencies and freelancers. Spend less time on non-billable tasks like lead processing and price quoting, and gives agencies a competitive edge.

Kevin William David interviewed Jānis Sprenne, CEO at Fulfilli to know more.

Hi Janis, So tell us about what you are working on?

In the digital agency space, everyone silently is aware that they are in a tough business with lots of work and almost non-existing profits. Our focus is to work with agencies and to automate their administrative processes, which can take up to 40% of their resources.

Fulfilli is the first and only dedicated price quoting software and pricing automation tool for digital agencies. And we are currently also investing in R&D to eliminate the work we waste on non-billable activities like lead acquisition, project briefing, cost estimating.

Tell me more about why you are building this?

Before starting Fulfilli, I and my co-founder Matiss Berzins had been running a digital agency in Europe and we were really good at what we were doing — building products and marketing them. We automated lead acquisition for our own agency and started receiving so many new leads that we got to a point where one-third of our staff were doing lead processing and price quoting. I knew that 90% of that time is wasted as the majority of leads are not following through. We saw the opportunity to automate price quoting and save thousands of dollars per month for our small agency alone.

The research “Agency Pricing & Financials Report” done by HubSpot reveals chilling facts that 54% of agency owners and CEOs are not satisfied with their agency’s positioning, 72% with their sales process and 68% are not satisfied with their financial health. We need to fix this and we are doing that by learning best practices from the industry and building them into a product that everyone can use.

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

Fulfilli’s closest competition is a proposal software and there are a few important reasons why we think Fulfilli is a better solution. Fulfilli quotes are structured to communicate an offer in a simple yet powerful way and are proven to improve client’s ability to understand the proposal that leads to higher conversion rates. You can create a Fulfilli quote much faster than a rich media proposal which saves times thus reducing costs.

Clients can’t easily compare these distinct rich media proposals from different agencies, but comparing offers is the only reason they ask more than one agency for a proposal in the first place. And the main reason why we think that in a near future Fulfilli grid-style price quotes will win rich media proposals is because pricing and quoting automation is possible only with a standardized and well-structured data that can be read, categorized and analysed by a machine.

Who uses Fulfilli? Can you tell us a bit about the different customer segments using Fulfilli?

Fulfilli is used by freelancers and small agency owners from around the world. We see different types of agencies from web development and SEO shops to inbound marketing teams. We are trying to keep up with feature requests from different customer segments because the quote structures and elements can differ a lot from one type of agency to another.

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

As our goal is to save time and reduce costs, we’ve made our quoting software really simple and intuitive. Our customers use Fulfilli to create and distribute quotes and we build features around this simple idea to streamline their quoting and collaboration.

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

We have had some interest from other industries like construction and wholesale and we are glad that these companies find value in our software, but our focus is on IT services outsourcing and digital marketing industries that we aim to disrupt by automating non-billable project management work.

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

Our early success comes from our know-how to create an environment that drives conversions. Then it’s just experimenting with marketing channels that give us the best ROI. At an earlier stage, it was a lot of manual work to connect with agencies and to listen to what are they saying.

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

We built the first quoting automation prototype early on, it was an awesome tool but it wasn’t scalable. It allowed us to automate the price quoting only for the services we used to provide when we used to be an agency ourselves. That’s when we realised we have to develop a self-service software for price quoting so that agencies can use their own wording for services and their own pricing. Now we do custom automation integrations customer after customer while we are building the self-service platform that we’ll be able to roll out to everyone.

What have been some of the most interesting integrations you’ve added? Are there any that have been particularly impactful for you?

Integrations with sales and other productivity tools are still in the pipeline and we see them as an important goal for the coming year that will drive lots of new customers.

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

Segment— one integration to send all analytics tools and CRMs

Intercom — customer messaging and support

Hotjar— heatmaps and user videos

JIRA — project tracking

Gitlab — code versioning

InVision — design prototyping

Mixpanel— user analytics

Databox — dashboards to keep track of KPIs

Rollbar — caching application errors

Slack— team communication

Originally published at siftery.com.