Point Nine Capital
Why we invested in Qwilr
Berlin, April 2017
At Point Nine, we are big fans of our portfolio companies' products. We also tend to eat our own dog food. We use Zendesk to manage our deal flow, Typeform to conduct surveys and gather posters orders, and Contentful for our website.
One of our latest SaaS investments is Sydney-based Qwilr.
We could not think of a better way to introduce Qwilr than to use their product to disclose a few elements that got us excited about this company. We hope this post can also help other SaaS founders better understand our way of thinking and what we look for in SaaS businesses.
Hope you'll enjoy the read!
Problem
As David Skok put it during his SaaStr 2017 presentation, the beauty of a sales funnel is that it’s governed by very simple math. It can be summed up to two metrics: 1) a flow of leads at the top of the funnel, 2) a conversion rate throughout this funnel. Any B2B company working on its funnel will want to improve conversion, and thus, will need to optimize every touch point with their future customers. While landing pages are often the first touch points with leads, sales proposals are the next one and are by no mean less important. Think of all the proposals, quotes or pitches companies send throughout the funnel. They are the lifeblood of any new business.
We hence spend a lot of time creating and revising them again and again. But we put in 10x more work in optimizing websites and landing pages than we do on optimizing proposals.
Why?
The content creation phase for proposals can be a cumbersome, time-consuming and frustrating process. It involves collaboration between sales, marketing, and design teams. But these teams often walk in the dark because they don’t get any feedback from their recipients, and thus, aren’t able to make any ROI-driven decisions.
There are now lots of content creation or A/B testing tools to create and optimize websites and landing pages, but what about the ones for proposals?
Introducing Qwilr
Qwilr allows anyone to easily create beautiful documents as web pages - bringing all of the power and beauty of the web to documents that are all too often dumb and ugly. Qwilr does this by utilising a concept of page building that feels like a mixture of Medium, Squarespace and Google Docs. Each block of content is built in a similar way to pages or slides - but they flow as a single simple webpage.
These blocks range from simple text, to beautiful image or video splashes, a deeply functional quote block, as well as the ability to embed videos, maps, spreadsheets, interactive graphs, forms, and anything else from around the web.
Once ready, these documents are made available via a unique secured URL, and are fully mobile responsive. Users can then track how their recipients interact with them. How many times have they opened it? Which block do they spend the most time on (i.e. what you might want to make clearer along with many other KPIs)? Qwilr users can also chat with their recipients directly from their proposals using Qwilr’s integration with Intercom, or collect payments from a Qwilr page integrating with Stripe. In short, Qwilr takes everything that web developers take for granted and makes it easy for sales and marketing people to use in creating thousands of documents on a daily basis.
Our Thesis
Document automation
At Point Nine, we are especially excited by “document 2.0” and the trend towards document automation, as exemplified by our recent investment in Juro and this 4-year old post by Christoph. While Google Docs already added some of the cloud’s possibilities to (old school) Word documents (collaboration, constant availability, integration with third party software), the Qwilr team convinced us that they could do a better job when it comes to creating client-facing documents.
UX as a defensible asset
We also strongly believe in companies that have an obsessive focus on user experience. As we often say, “we look for companies that can provide a ‘10x’ improvement in user experience over the status quo”. Dylan, the founder of Qwilr, is a passionate designer, as well as being an engineer. From day one, he has built his product to ensure Qwilr documents are always beautiful, even though it might go against the flexibility offered to users. Just like Medium does not let me choose any alignment or font sizes here, or Canva does not let me create any design from scratch, Qwilr thoughtfully limits the possibilities made available through its platform. We like this approach and our intuition seems to be confirmed by Medium’s or Canva’s fast user growth (or by seeing an increasing number of people starting to write blog posts).
One-to-many products have an unfair distribution advantage
Abiding by Christoph’s “What we will be looking for in SaaS in 2017”, we look for startups that have net negative churn or strive for viral growth. We’ve seen at Typeform how a nicely designed product that people send to a lot of recipients could virally spread, thus helping the company grow revenues organically while spending almost nothing on paid acquisition. The beauty here is that each user also sends their Qwilr documents to many recipients. This gives exposition to Qwilr’s characteristic design, which we hope will keep on spreading like wildfire!
The new CMS for sales and marketing teams with a single objective “Save time, and win more work”
Proposals or presentations are often stored in many different places and many people work on constantly re-creating them. What if each member of the sales and marketing teams could collaborate on each document, store them in the same place and share their best performing blocks and pieces with their colleagues? This is where we see the potential in Qwilr to create sales and marketing team’s system of records, just like Github was the developer’s one.
To cut a long story short, there are many reasons for us to be excited about backing Dylan, Mark and the entire Qwilr team on their journey.
It is also an exciting opportunity to extend our geographic coverage and do P9’s first investment in Australia. Yes, we have now invested in 20 countries!
Do you think you could do an even better job with your proposals?
Here’s a link to their website, they have a free version, give it a whirl and help us spread Qwilr docs!
Point 9 Capital
A happy investor in Qwilr
made with ♡ in Berlin