My Offline Business Had a Problem, and I built a SaaS to tackle it.

In 2009, while I was still in school, my dad decided to take the plunge and launch his company. He was a master craftsman, a true expert in building beautiful, bespoke fireplaces. But as we later figured out, online marketing and digital proposals were a foreign language to him.

I was watching Him creating business quotes for his first customers, which was basically a struggle with clunky Word documents and tedious Excel spreadsheets, full of formatting issues and human error, I had an idea. At that point I had no knowledge in programing or whatsoever, but I wanted to help Him out somehow with his quoting process.

After I finished school I joined his company and first of all dived into his customer aqusition process. I saw the hours lost to manual data entry, the frustration of inconsistent branding and the occasional cringe-worthy mistake in customer information. I knew there had to be a better way.

First I started looking for solutions that would fit our needs. I tried most of the “Top 5 quoting software” options but my problem was that all these platforms were mainly designed for large enterprises. The focus and features our small business needed were completely missing. I didn’t care about customer lifetime value and the many sales-focused tools. I needed software to:

1. Send quotes to the customer in the shortest time possible.

2. Create beautiful PDFs that looked professional.

3. Automate quote requests, as calling customers one by one was a real hassle. Spending 30 minutes of our precious time telling the customer everything they needed to know, only for them to disappear when the price came up, was not sustainable.

4. Help me keep track of our deadlines.

5. Help me remember who to call or where to go for personal site visits.

My first attempt was a Microsoft Access application, a hobby project that consumed many evenings and weekends for over a year as I was learning to code. The result? A system we called “Ultra Export” that could automatically generate professional-looking PDFs, receive customer quote requests from our website, pre-populate the email subject & body and attach the necessary documents, creating a seamless workflow that saved us hours. It was a game-changer!

Demand for our fireplaces went through the roof in 2022 when the war in Ukraine started. People worried about gas shortages turned to alternative heating solutions and fireplaces became hot property. Our small business was flooded with over 400 quote requests in one month!

“Ultra Export” worked a charm and we managed to cope with the demand but a new problem emerged: the system was tied to one computer. We couldn’t access the generated PDFs from any other device and one day he asked “Can you make some quotes?” I was overwhelmed with requests. “Sorry Dad,” I’d reply, “I can’t access the system here.”

That’s when I realized the limitations of a locally-installed application. We needed a solution that was accessible anytime, anywhere, by both of us. This marked the genesis of Quoteingo.

We took everything great about “Ultra Export” and made it even better. We added cloud-based access so we could manage quotes from any device, anywhere in the world. The system could write and send personalised emails with scheduled sending for maximum customer engagement.

But that wasn’t all. Quoteingo was designed with user-friendliness at its heart. The drag-and-drop embedable form & document editor and form builder was a world away from the old formatting headaches. We also introduced dynamic variables, pulling data from embedable forms to automatically calculate & populate quotes with things like lawn size for landscaping services or construction area for building projects.

And as the icing on the cake, Quoteingo added a distance calculation feature, using geolocation data to calculate travel distances for on-site work. This meant we could factor in travel costs automatically, saving us time and ensuring accurate quotes.

Going from messy spreadsheets to Quoteingo was a game changer. It streamlined our workflow, reduced errors and allowed us to focus on what really mattered: customer service and building beautiful fireplaces. And it all started with a desire to help my dad with his business.

And the best part? It’s not just for Us only. Quoteingo’s user friendly platform is for businesses of all sizes and industries, with multi user access and controls built in.

Anyone can create their own group for FREE on Quoteingo and see the same results that we saw in our own family business.