Put your freelancing business on autopilot

Bonsai is the first all-in-one freelancing solution designed to help with every thing you need for your freelance business.

Bonsai products are deeply integrated so you don’t need to enter the same information again and again. Your client accepts a proposal, Bonsai auto-drafts your contract. Your client signs a contract and Bonsai auto-generates the invoices.

Kevin William David interviewed Matt Brown, Founder of Bonsai to know more.

Hi Matt, Let’s get started!

So tell us about Bonsai?

Bonsai helps creative freelancers run their businesses better, so they can earn more and focus on the work they love. Bonsai covers everything from proposals to freelance contracts to time tracking to invoicing and payment.

We use the data from our 40,000+ freelancers to build best practices and automation into the whole workflow. That’s why our users get paid an average of 13 days faster, and have 3x fewer late payments with Bonsai.

Tell me more about why you are building this?

My co-founder and I both spent a lot of time freelancing in our past lives. We had this realization that the most successful freelancers weren’t necessarily the best designers, developers, writers, etc. The most successful freelancers were great business people: they knew how to create a contract, negotiate with clients, run a payments process, etc.

We also realized that alot of those skills can easily be built into software specifically for freelancers. So we want to make it easier for anyone to become a successful freelancer by allowing them to focus on their core craft as much as possible.

What’s unique about what you are building & why do you think companies should use Bonsai?

Three ways that Bonsai is unique in the market: end-to-end workflow, automation, and focus on freelancers.

Most other products just focus on one element of the workflow (e.g., Freshbooks in invoicing). We think that freelancers benefit a ton if everything they need is baked into one tool.

Having several products in one workflow (proposals, contracts, invoices, etc) allows us to automate a lot of that workflow as well. Once you enter information on your project, such as the client, deadlines, rate, etc, that’s automatically prefilled in everything else.

Lastly, many other products try to go very broad in their userbase (e.g., freelancers and SMB’s, SMB’s to enterprise), whereas Bonsai is specifically focused on the creative freelancer market. This allows us to add features and content aimed specifically at helping our core users, and not dilute the product.

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

Our users are creative and mainly digital freelancers, like designers, developers, writers, translators, consultants, marketers, etc.

75% are English speaking and in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia.

They’re about 60% full time freelancers and 40% part time / moonlighting.

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

We have 40,000+ freelancers on Bonsai. The vast majority of them run their entire business on Bonsai (e.g., proposals to payments). A small portion use only some of our products, e.g., time tracking and invoices only, because we don’t support their country in contracts.

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

We’ve had more and more agencies and studios using Bonsai to manage their projects and pay their subcontractors. This is definitely a more complex use case that we were initially thinking of supporting, but the demand was so great and value to users so clear that we added a Studio plan just for them.

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

We spend a lot of thinking about how we can provide not just tools but also knowledge to help our freelancers level up their businesses.

For example, we compiled the rates that freelancers of different experience levels and geographies charge, and put them into our “Rates Explorer” which continues to be a very helpful resource to the community.

We also compiled a list of the tools used by 10,000+ freelancers and broke them into categories like calendars, email clients, color pickers, etc, and let freelancers vote on them. This “Freelance Stack” helps our community find the resources they need quickly.

We also compiled our learnings being freelancers into what we call the “Freelance MBA”, which focuses on the less glamorous aspects of freelancing, like how to set your rates, negotiate, etc.

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

Starting out it was probably having limited engineering resources and an ever growing list of things we wanted to build. I’m sure that’s a challenge for all early stage companies.

We solved it by being overly transparent with our users about what was on the roadmap and how we were prioritizing. I believe that helped them understand where we were and where we were going, and have confidence investing their time in the platform.

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

• Slack: we have a distributed, 7 person team in 5 time zones, so Slack helps make communication seamless. We also use it as a notification hub for Github issues, error reporting, payments, etc
• Intercom: the easiest way to communicate with our users. We use their chat and FAQ products and love them both
• Mixpanel: all our analytics is done on Mixpanel. Easy to setup and use, with great web and mobile apps
• Stripe: we use Stripe both to process payments between our freelancers and their clients, and to receive payment for Bonsai subscriptions. Great UI and API.
• Baremetrics: makes revenue reporting super easy for subscription businesses like ours.
• Asana: our team task tracker of choice. Simple, intuitive, great UI.

Originally published at siftery.com.