Treating Your Proposals as a Conversion Funnel | Ep. 10

Hello and welcome to another episode of.

The Beyond Business podcast.

My name is Charles Mackay. Today I had the absolute pleasure of speaking with Mark Tanner who is the CEO and co founder of a business called Quilla. Mark has had a really, really interesting career and some would say, you know, potentially a lot of people in the tech world would be quite jealous that he actually got to work in the rocket ship of Google. But Mark started his career in pretty much building platforms to build the ebook and make the ebook sort of nearly what it is today. And obviously as the ebook evolved and.

Grew that went from a paid product to pretty much a free product overnight.

But that's where Mark started his career and then that led him into the Google rocket ship where Mark worked on a series of projects which he talks about and it's just fascinating to just how he dug into what he was doing at Google and how some of those products, what they are today and.

The ones that failed as well.

And the next phase was Mark came back from New York from when he was at Google and got into and met his co founder of Qwilr. And at the end of the day it's really fascinating how Mark, where he started his career, where he was trying to build PDFs and build books into PDFs and reality is now he's turning PDFs into the web obviously within proposals. It was a fascinating conversation, some really great takeaways through the proposal process and some good tips for you. So without further ado, I'm going to hand over to Mark and myself. Enjoy. Mark Tanner, what a pleasure it is mate. So tell me where about are you situated in this current environment?

Mate, I'm at home, I'm in my second bedroom. I've been isolated from my child who is currently having a nap in my office. As is often the case around the middle of the day. I'm in lovely Sydney, it's a sunny day. Life is feeling, you know, we're sort of, life is feeling very surreal right now but I feel we're feeling pretty lucky to be in Australia.

Yeah, 100%. 100%. What's your, in this current environment, what's the biggest you've got? You said you had a two year old. What's been the biggest parent learning you've had?

Mate, I, I mean to be honest, we're in that stage of the young one being either incredibly cute and lovely and sweet and learning new words and then just being a complete monster. So we're sort of, sort of learning how to sort of de escalate and sort of get better at that and play distractions. I will say that the funniest one of this variety was I was doing, I was doing actually a sort of more startupy, techie focused podcast a little while back. Middle of the podcast, sun runs past, just absolutely screaming fart, fart, fart. Which was a strong move fart. And sort of did cause a minor disruption on this side, which of course was a podcast where they also have like a. They do it via Zoom and have a live audience. So it was a nightmare. It was a nightmare. So that part wasn't great. But to be honest, everyone is. It's actually been such a nice leveling moment in a way, I think having everyone be at home and have kids be around and sort of. It's been quite human and I think like across the sales part of it as well, it sort of is a nice way to sort of take us out of our sort of corporate, corporate zone sometimes and sort of make everyone sort of a bit more of a level playing field.

Yeah, I was going to say that word, a level playing field where there's a little less ego in the room of look at my office or look at this or look at that and reality. We're all human and we're all just trying to make things a bit easier for each other so that we can get through the weeks and months and years ahead.

Strong. Agree.

Yeah, super interesting. So let's go back a bit, Mark. I'm really interested, you know, your background and how you've got to where you are with Qwilr today. But let's go back to what got you into, you know, what first got you into business and, you know, what did you study to get to where you are today? But what were those sort of, you know, those journeys? What it looked like.

Yeah, sure. So I'll go a bit back. So I went to a selective school and had a bunch of smart mates and I sort of very quickly realized that they were all going to do like law and like banking and stuff like this. And I was just like, I'm not going to compete with you smart like, you know, bastards the rest of my life. That's a terrible idea. So I sort of. The one thing I knew was I wasn't going to end up going down that path because they were all. That'd be far too challenging. So I think my, you know, really, when I went to uni, I did history at my major, so I did arts, I did history, a little bit of politics, some philosophy and stuff like that. But it was mainly stuff that I loved. I was lucky enough through that period. I did an internship at one of the big consulting firms and I sort of, I enjoyed that. But really I kind of knew I wanted to be like a businessman in a sense. Like my dad had had an architectural practice and been like really quite successful. It's like, you know, pretty big. So in their area of focus, which is like heritage architecture, they like very well known. And so I didn't want to be an architect. I didn't really know what I wanted, but I sort of was like I kind of knew I wanted to be involved in business to some degree. And honestly, consulting was like a path where I was like, I don't want to be a consultant, but at least I'll get some exposure to some different corporates and sort of, sort of by process of elimination figure out what sucks and what doesn't. Thankfully for me though, I was very lucky in that. Really very lucky. Because my uncle was involved in a startup just as I was sort of leaving uni. This is around 2008. And so yeah, so basically had this, had this space where I was like ebooks. So he had this ebook startup and this was when the Kindle had come out in 2007. The iPhone had come out in 2007. Ebooks had been talked about since the early 2000s, but kind of nothing had really happened. And all of a sudden they were finding their moment. And yeah, it was just this very lucky thing that he was involved in this company. There really weren't that many startups in Sydney or Australia in like 2008 time. Like it wasn't like a thing that you were thinking, oh, I'm going to leave uni and sort of join a startup. Even like really leaving uni and joining a tech company was not a super common path either. Which very thankful that that has changed. But, but so like he had this thing and so I went and joined and started basically as a, as a sales, like doing a sales sort of role there and absolutely loved it. The business was exploding. We grew like 5x in the first year and then the second year came and like the core thing that they made money off, it was just becoming incredibly clear. They had like other sort of things they did and they're still around as businesses today. But the core thing that had been driving this huge growth was just increasingly being commoditized and like the price per unit of it basically was like how you do ebook conversions and things like that on a per book basis and whatever else. Anyway, the price that was being driven was basically being driven down to zero. And it is zero today. Effectively, it's offered for free by a whole bunch of other companies. And so there was this sort of interesting moment where I sort of had this first wild ride. And then this second year where you're like, okay, like, what's sort of happening here? And sort of understand the macro, that thing. And look, I was very lucky because I've been doing endless deals with book publishers in Australia and New Zealand around this sort of, this startup stuff. I got asked to speak at a bunch of conferences about, like, the future of publishing and digital and all this sort of stuff. And at one of them I met someone from Google and they were looking to hire someone to work on their team. So they'd had a. They were basically gearing up to launch an ebook offering, sort of compete with Apple and Amazon and whatever else, which was the first product offering in what became Google Play. And so they were looking to hire. I got along with the guy who was out in town. We sort of. We sort of had a few beers and it was like one of those complete serendipitous moments of a sort of, you know, got to meet this person and got along very well with them. But then, baby, I had. I'd been doing the thing that they were sort of looking for, which was like, someone to sort of, you know, in an ebook sense, be doing a sales role across Australia and New Zealand. So incredibly lucky. But joined them and then sort of, you know, built out, did all the contract negotiations for Google, that sort of thing, which was very fun because all the. Google had started this library project back in the day where they were going to scan every book in the world into Google Books. Because you can't just index the Internet. You need to index all, you know, books and magazines and whatever else. Not entirely clear how valuable that's been to Google, but it was a noble project. And anyway, all the publishers were like, you're violating our copyright, and then went to sue them. So we were in active lawsuits with all the people I was negotiating with at Penguin and whatever else. But that was fun and sort of did that for a few years, then took it. Once we did. That was one of those very fun jobs where once the product was launched, you basically moved on to the next one. So we launched in Australia, then we launched in New Zealand, then we launched in Southeast Asia. Then we were doing. At the same time in Southeast Asia, we were starting to roll magazines and newsstand, like, you know, those sort of early versions of that and spending a lot of time, you know, at Fairfax and News Corp trying to get them to commit to Android as a platform and build apps for it. Everyone was like, oh, Android, like, you know, we've already got an iOS, like, why do we need this thing? And it's this amazing thing where I'd go back every, like eight weeks with a new chart of being like, in the last eight weeks, we've sold like 40 million Android phones in Australia. We've sold like 300,000. And it's just like, you know, this is. This is a market that's getting Wheeler. And like that rocket ship was just unbelievable to be a part of. I mean, I left, you know, Google Play didn't exist when I joined and like, I left, you know, I mean, this. It would have been let, you know, maybe three, three and a half years later, it was doing $5 billion in total. In total rev, which obviously, like, you know, Google only, you know, all that was through the App Store and whatever else. And obviously Google was giving away cuts to Samsung and back to the creators and all that sort of stuff. But still, it was like a completely insane experience. And so, you know, anyway, moved with Google to New York and it sort of did a similar job over there, just with bigger publishers and a little bit more money and many more lawyers. But, yeah, that basically takes us up until the time I bailed from there and came into Qwilr.

Yeah. Right. So I think it's fascinating how you're working on ebooks and now, like, with what Qwila does is making things not an ebook in a nutshell.

Yeah.

So explain to the audience what, you know, the core problem was with Qwilr. When you started it, you know, what was the challenge you kept seeing in that marketplace to why you went and, you know, started the Qwilr journey.

Yeah, So I was very lucky with Qwilr. So I had. So Qwila wasn't my idea, it was my co founder Dylan's idea. And so Dylan had been running this agency for a while and he had this sort of micro agency with him and a couple of others, but largely sort of him being the main player. And so he was a software engineer and a designer. And so he was doing a lot of. He was doing like some level of brand work, but he would sort of do back end stuff, he'd do front end stuff, he'd do some design stuff, but he was more commonly doing some sort of full stack workaround. So he did work for, like, he started off with all the small things. And he sort of grew and grew, and he ended up doing work for Ogilvy and Saatchi, and Saatchi and Victorian Government Belvoir, which is a theater in Sydney. And constantly throughout that process, he just, like, hated the process of pitching because he was like, well, you know, I do my words in. I do my copy in Word. I then go do my pricing in Excel. I then take both of them into InDesign because I want it to look nice. I design, I care about how I look. But then I'm, like, sending a PDF, which is like, I'm working digitally in the web. Like, it's this sort of kind of clunky thing. The client then invariably has, like, man, I want to change this and that. Now that's a good, like, rip it all apart and then, like, remake it again. It was just very clunky, slow process. And, you know, there's times where you really want to get a proposal out quickly. And there's this real choice between, like, you either have to be. You either can do it very fast and have it be ugly and kind of crappy, or you can do it take the time and have it look good. But, like, you know, there's a real time cost there. So Dylan's insane solution to this was like, well, I'll just hand code websites for every proposal I make. And so every. This was in 2011, 2012, every proposal he made, he was like, building a website as the proposal and also as examples of previous work, whatever else, which was pretty insane, except that his hit rate for, like, converting the deals went from. Went from being like, you had a normal ish one or whatever to like, being over 50%. So you'd usually get the deal, I think, but so he was sort of going through on this side and doing this. And of course, that's a pain in the ass. But. So the first. You could even say the first version of Quila was just a way for him to automate some parts of this process so he could do it a little bit faster, a little bit quicker, a little bit easier, a few little bash scripts, et cetera. And it got to a stage where he was pitching Saatchi and Saatchi New Zealand for some work they were doing on this campaign they were running. And. And he spoke to them in the morning and he sent me something in the afternoon website, a proposal. And the MD of Saatchi and Saatchi called him, like it was like nighttime in New Zealand. And called him, was like, how the hell have you like have you done. This is a product. Like how did you do this? This is a thing we can use. And so Dylan, Dylan actually been involved in a product business when he was earlier and was like oh no way, that is going to be impossible. Absolutely not. That just sounds like a terrible idea. And so totally ran away from it. Then the more he started thinking about it the more he was just like why is it that like documents are still files? Like why isn't it that you can create things quickly and easily on the web and you know, the web is so powerful. He's a developer, he's a designer, the web is so powerful, you know you can do like, you can do interest. All this interesting stuff happening in E commerce. There's all this interesting stuff happening in sort of different online flows around optimizations and stuff. Obviously files look crap on mobile, blah blah, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So we started sort of building a product and building a first version of it. I arrive on the scene about this time when he was looking for a co founder to come in and wonderfully so I was looking to leave Google and come back to leave New York and back to Sydney for a girl which mother of the toddler. So all went wonderfully well there but. But basically I was pretty unclear of what I wanted to do other than I knew I wanted to be in tech and ideally at a startup and so I'd come back for a friend's wedding and then was going to spend the rest of the week just meeting startup people what little there were like some angel investors, some VCs, couple of founders I'd been intro to via friends just be like who do you think is interesting, who's doing good work, blah blah blah. At the wedding I bump into Dylan. Dylan and I have been mates since we were teenagers. He was always in bands so I've been like, you know, we weren't like super close or anything but like, you know, we'd been at house parties and whatnot and I'd seen him his band play a bunch of times and I sort of got chatting to him about that and he's like oh actually, you know you make no money in music. I've been doing this sort of agency stuff on the side really is the main gig for the last while and. And I'm like oh, that's cool. And he ends up saying oh, do you know this guy Gary? And I was like I don't know Gary but I'm meeting him this week. He's one of the angel Investors. And then Dylan's like I've been talking to him, getting some advice and he's like this is guy from Google who he says I should speak to about being a co founder. I'm like anyway, so Gary was trying to matchmake us before we, you know, I'd even met him. And then like you know, funnily enough Gary was the person who came and wrote us our first check way back in the day. Just a little, a little one for 100 grand. I think Gary now cuts first checks at more like a million at Right Click Capital. But anyway we were ecstatic at the time. And look, so when I came in, came on board to see what Dylan had built, there was like my background. This side is like I spent a bunch of time in ebooks and so I'd been thinking very much around like I had been thinking a lot about what is the future of digital, what is the future of communication, how does that side work? But actually to be honest and look there'd been some really interesting like companies in that space. So in the ebook side like there's this company called Inkling which is like a textbook based one and so they had like interactive textbooks and you know, what is the future of communication outside and sort of doing. And Apple had built out a platform to allow you to do some other cool stuff. And so I was aware of these different forms but actually the main one that sort of came to me was like in Google Sydney when I joined there it was a pretty small for what Google is now it's like maybe 150 to 180 people of which about like 40 to 50 working on this project called Google Wave. Do you remember Wave? No worries if not because it was a bit of a random one. Yeah, no, no, it's all good. So look, it was this so Lars who had been the founder of Google Maps, it was his like next product idea. And so Lars. So Maps is obviously built out of Sydney. And so Wave was meant to be the future of communication and a future sort of collaboration. And if you wanted to be they had a whole bunch of really clever techniques about like threading and chats and live typing and whatever else. And if you wanted to be super generous you might say it was kind of protean slack but it was sort of never really found its niche. It kind of never quite figured out what it was. And so anyway Google went through a whole wave of killing off products that didn't have any sort of level of product market fit and they killed Wave and everyone got moved onto Google Docs, right? There was this big conversation going on at the time of like, okay, what is the future of Docs and communication? And okay, it's not wave, but it's kind of also not Docs. Like, Google Docs was a Microsoft clone that was kind of done in a sort of petty way of like, well, if you're going to have Bing, we're going to come for your stuff. And this sort of funny sort of. I think it was definitely a step in the right direction. And we have this whole thing of like, you know, with Quila, that files suck on the Internet. And then there's been many steps on that journey of trying to make files suck less on the Internet. Whether it's, you know, Dropbox and Box, or whether it's tool like wrappers like DocuSign or Clear Slide or DocSend, where it's like, it's still a file, but you can kind of wrap it in the Internet to give it a tiny bit like E sign or a little bit of analytics. And our whole thing has just been like, you know, when I saw what Dylan did, I'm like, oh, it's just the web. If you make it easy for anyone to build this sort of Lego block form simple, functional web pages. And as I'm sure you're aware, there's still a million miles of cool stuff we can do in the future. But as soon as you do that, it's like, oh, you can have analytics out of the box. Oh, you want to put a retargeting pixel in your every single proposal. So you can sort of have. Sure, it's a webpage. You can just plug that in. Oh, you'd like to be, you know, you'd like to have any sort of content that lives in the web. Like, one of the most popular ones for us is, you know, the HubSpot meetings widget or calendly or whatever else. Right. Cause it's just like if your goal as a sales rep, it's the book that really, it's not about closing right now, it's about booking the next meeting. Yeah, well, just don't have a link to it. Just embed the thing they can see. Oh, you know, free on Tuesday. And so as we sort of go down that path, I just. It just became very clear to me like, oh, this could be a huge idea and could be a really exciting thing to work on. So I came home pretty shortly thereafter. Dylan and I worked together for a month to sort of test the waters and see if this was a terrible idea or not. And we both had a great time and we've been doing it ever since.

It's fascinating just how also a lot of your touch points and points through your career have ended up in doing what you're doing. And like, even the Google experiences, like, it's just I find that fascinating how you ended up trying to rip PDFs out of books to then now get rid of PDFs on the Internet from proposals in a nutshell. So I just think that's really interesting and thanks for sharing. So now that you, you know, you're cooking with gas with Quiller and you know, you're starting to see that, you know, you're trying to replace the PDF, what are the bigger challenges? And as you know, businesses are adopting these smarter ways of sending documents and stuff like that. What are the challenges you're starting to come across now that you're starting to, you know, dive into?

Yeah, so it's a, it's a great question. I think like one of the funny ones for us is, Look, first of.

All.

This is an obvious one to say, but a classic challenge for us is just inertia. The Microsoft monopoly is very powerful. Everyone knows what a word doc is, what a PDF is, et cetera, et cetera. And so having a move away from that is a little bit of a challenge. I suppose the second challenge for us is as you move to the web and I think this is a thing I always love talking with people like you who are very thoughtful on marketing stuff around is like one of the lovely things with DocuSign is it's like it's just a PDF with eSign now. Like that's actually not true because they've got clever stuff around workflows and they've also got deep integrations with CRMs and they've got a clever contract management storage solution. Although it's really just like a nice Dropbox but anyway, but like, but you know, it is like a relatively simple value prop. And I think one of the things we struggle with a little bit of qwilr is like we do analytics, we look great on mobile. You can embed video or calendar or whatever. You also when you do pricing, you can do accept E sign and payment. You know, on any advice when you're doing pricing, you can have that pricing be as configurable to your customer as it would be on an E commerce experience. You can say like, hey, you know, here's our packages are gold, silver, bronze. Okay, I want silver. I actually don't want this optional extra. I'm going to uncheck that box. But I do want this one and I check that box and I want four of them. And like, that updates the price in real time. There's like all these sort of interesting things you can do around analytics and optimization and blah, blah, blah. I can go on like. And the other part I would say like as well is like, obviously files are like islands that is like just completely removed from the rest of the cloud world. Like everything lives in the cloud. We're all in SAS tools. Except files don't like speak to any of them. So obviously making qwilr be able to pull in data from say HubSpot or Salesforce. Once that deal is won, push data back to HubSpot and Salesforce. Say like, hey Mark, this deal is closed. One, notify this person, trigger this workflow, etc. Or ping, hey, ping this data about pricing into Xero so we can create a draft invoice, whatever that is on ping Slack so you can have a celebration in the sales channel, all of that sort of stuff. I think one of the challenges for us is like, how do we message that? Because I've just spoken to you for three bloody minutes and there's no USP here. I think there's a degree of, there's a challenge on that side. There's also a challenge of people just being like, oh, it's a web page, it'll be hard. Which is I think another sort of issue on that side. So look, I think like, as we sort of go through here, it's sort of trying to be thoughtful around. Like I think some of the core challenges, I think as we go from, you know, still early adopter ish like, you know, we've got like thousands and thousands of customers, companies as customers around the world. But like that one's sort of qwilr like we're still so early. Like we just closed a series A. Like we're very early in our journey and so how do we sort of make that move from like the early adopter land into that sort of more into the sort of later stage?

I think you're spot on there. And the points you're making about some of those other platforms you've talked about because they got in sort of nearly pre SASS or before SAS really existed and they just solved a really micro problem that was a huge problem. But now what's obviously going on, we're going to a collaborative, more best of breed technology take away from, you know, owning one Technology, the whole stack, it's going to evolve and you know, this is only just starting the way I'm looking at that too. So I can understand bit of your frustration there. But also I think there's time because people are going to be like, oh, I need this or I need that. And then it's like, oh, but now I don't need that, that and that. And I can have all of that in four platforms instead of 19. So you start looking at best of breed. So I think that that'll be really interesting how some of those big guys either acquire or, or adopt new ways. But when you've got so many customers, I'm assuming it's going to be really hard for them to innovate and change too much as well. So how that plays out will be really interesting. You commented on the journey of how it's been. So what is the vision for Qwilr? Where are you heading to date compared to what you thought it was going to be like? Obviously the SaaS world in sales and martech. You know, if you look at Scott Brinker's diagram, I think what was it, six or seven years ago there was a couple of thousand platforms, now there's 10,000. So tell us a little bit about that.

Yeah, so I mean, I think look, man, I think look, speak to the vision for Qwilr. I mean like our whole piece here is that like, and like I've drunk the Kool Aid. But the vision we have is that, you know, in the future everyone will create all of their documents as web pages and we'll move away from this idea of the PDF and the file, which is really quite by design quite restrictive as to what you can do and move into a world that is web first and supportive of that. And from our point of view, that's the long term vision. We split this into simplistic way of doing it, but it's internal and external. And so intern, like we're not really a tool for internal documents. I mean people do use us for a whole bunch of internal stuff. But like really, you know, the companies that we admire and you know, who we're friendly with in this space are like Notion and Coda and Airtable and others. Like they do an amazing job at saying what if you built a web first version, like a version that's not designed to be printed out and PDFable, etc. What if you build an awesome sort of tool that was like really truly, you know, web first. And I think like what notion is doing like what all those companies are doing is kick ass on that side. And I think that that's like, there's a very interesting space there that's really about like, how does sales and marketing and like, you know, product or ops, like, how do they all like collaborate and work on stuff together? Qwila's whole focus is how do you, how do you do that to the external world? Like, how do you do that around, like communicating to your customers? And so really, you know, most companies end up having this beautiful website if they're lucky, you know, a really nice website and sort of, sort of like their shop front, you know, it's this beautiful sort of portal to their stuff. But then you look at their, if they're B2B based, their sales collateral is this incredibly clunky, ugly, dumb sort of, sort of, you know, PDFs or Word docs or whatever. And so how do you sort of bring that to Qwila really is our sort of vision on that side to talk about the journey. And look, we've got a long way to go on that side, which is exciting for us. So I think how do we sort of get there, talk about the journey? I mean, look, I will say that I thought we would get everywhere faster. I'm sort of like impatient. I can see the next stage. I can be like, here's where we're going to be. And I feel like we should be there in six to nine months and it always invariably takes 12 to 18. Um, but you know, I think that's fine because so far we've already, we've always gotten to that next phase. And I think that that somewhat is how it goes. It doesn't mean there haven't been occasional moments. I remember early on it was actually fun enough just the time that Qwila was starting to actually properly get some traction and start to sort of grow a little bit on its own accord rather than like the first bunch of sales are just like so manual and so hard. And it was just starting to like, just start to ease up on that side. I had this like huge sort of thing of just being like this sort of crisis of faith really, where I was just walking around being like, I had this great job at Google, I was paid well and I like, it was back in the day when Google was still a high status job and I think like all that sort of stuff. And so I was like, look, I think that's sort of part of the journey of going through this stuff. And I think there can be some challenging times, but to be Honest, like we've been enjoying it. And I think the funny thing with the Martech landscape is like it is, it's sort of this interesting sort of space that I think it's really. It's quite easy to start a product company these days. You know, the cost to build a startup are getting cheaper and cheaper all the time and the, I'd say like the quality bar of products is getting higher all the time. Like, you know, a bunch of these new products coming out. Like, certainly designs taken seriously, UX is taken seriously. There's been a lot of thinking and sharing in the startup community around like different frameworks of thinking about things. And I really do think that like all the stuff that comes out is actually quite good and I think that that's sort of interesting. But I do think that you have to be thoughtful about distribution and be thoughtful about what your moat is. And for me I just keep coming back to this sort of truism, I think, which is like moats are hard and like it's not meant to be easy. Anything that's easy that is like quite doable, kind of by definition won't really give you a moat. Now like, there might be some particularly great insight you have that gives you some advantage here, but like, generally speaking it's just like, you know, and whether it's building a brand and by building a brand, that part of that is just like doing good quality work for every customer day in, day out for years. Like, you know, I mean there are other parts of brand obviously, but like that is, you know, a part of it and then other stuff of like, I think as you sort of go into like. For us, we made the choice not to build a PDF editor that sits in the cloud. So you could build a PDF in the cloud and then have it be hosted there. And so you could do a kind of couple of cool things or you could either thing where you could upload a PDF into it and then like have a wrapper solution. Like we thought about that, but like that's crap. It's not the vision we see building like a WYSIWYG web page builder, like really hard, like very, very technically challenging path. Even today it's not an easy sort of path and there are very few companies that do it, let alone do it well, let alone have like interesting design and sort of, you know, good guardrails around that sort of stuff. But like that's good. Like that is actually I've kind of more and more been like embracing that as being like actually that is the moat, because it, it's not something you can just turn on in like a month or two. It's actually, that's like real hard work. And there's, you know, even for us, like, we're constantly working on, like reinvesting in that platform to try to keep that.

That makes a lot of sense. And also too, you know, you know, you said it's easier to start than ever, but, you know, I think a comment that Brian Halligan made inbound a couple of years ago, it's easier than ever to start, but it's harder than ever to scale. And to get into these ecosystems that you can scale with, I think is also not that easy. You can't just say, I'm going to connect to that anymore. You need to have some runs on the road. You've got to have some stuff in the background. So I think that is pretty true and pretty relevant. So the next question I like to ask or go on with is how we're trying to make the world a better place. And I can already think of. So the theme of this podcast is around, you know, it's Covid. It's a classic or not classic example, but we're trying to make things better and we're trying to be a bit more humane around what is going on. And I actually love the fact that you guys haven't made it a PDF and you can't actually make it a PDF because you can't print it. So that's like one, one amazing thing you can't do because, you know, think of how many times a manager or boss has said, I just print off that proposal for me, you've erased that line. But without me talking, what are some things that Qwilr are trying to do to obviously make lives better, business better, especially in this current environment. How's that been amplified?

That is a huge and awesome question. So let me try and break down a few things. First thing I'm going to say is that just to clarify, you can still export QWILA pages to PDF. This is like, this is one of it, but it's like a thing that we had a huge debate about a few years ago because we initially didn't allow it and then we spent a lot of time and let me tell you, taking HTML into PDF is like a deeply unpleasant experience for all the engineers working on that. But it's important to be backwards compatible to some degree. And so we do try to be thoughtful on that side. The wonderful thing at the moment, and like, you know, I will Be honest, like there's not too many wonderful things at the moment. But in this working from home world, our PDF exporter has never been quieter. Like, you know, it's sort of, it's, you know, because it's the idea of printing stuff out and the idea of this, it's kind of in large parts of our customer base, it's sort of gone away. Like, you know, we looked at the numbers of that and look, we always find this like the most PDF export is ever used in a customer's life cycle is in the first quarter, right? Because they still, they've got a few people on the team who are still like, I just want to print this out or whatever else. And like that usage doesn't go to zero because you know, there'll sometimes be some old school customers that like, just like, I just want to print it out. And you're like, cool, here you go, here's a PDF. But like, but you know, I think that is sort of going away at the moment. I think that people being very open to that sort of thought because obviously like, okay, if I send you this link, if you print this out, well, it can't be interactive and you can't like, you can't choose what package you want and you can't like, you know, accept, sign and pay online and you can't watch the video and you can't book in the calendly and all that sort of magic of the web does go away. But so I think like as far as making the world a better place, like we, I mean, I think that we, there's few lenses on that. I suppose, like I'll start with the company lens which is like internally at Qwila, like we feel lucky that great people take a chance on us. Like we're still a startup, there's real risk in joining us. You know, hopefully there's real reward too. But like, you know, I think and, but also like there's this other side of it which is like anybody choosing to spend your time on to some degree your project, like that's awesome, like, thank you. And like, you know, we only get one go round on the world. Like you want to have it be a good one, like you want to have it feel fulfilling and enjoyable. And look, I'm not saying we're the most perfect employer ever, but we try and I think like you want to try to have it be a place where people can learn and grow and sort of have a good time on the customer front. Like, you know, we have this, this is lovely thing in SaaS which is like, you know, you need to be long term greedy, like to make it work. Like nobody. I make no money off you in month one. Right? Like it's, you know, that the reality is maybe, maybe if you've come through a very efficient channel and you buy an annual plan, maybe I'm making some money then. But like if, you know, generally speaking, if you're buying a month to month thing, it's, you know, I've got a payback period that's in the months, you know, it's less than a year, but it's a while. And so the entire purpose of SaaS is to like to be long term greedy and to have customers who stick around for many years. And how do you get them to stick around for many years? You have a good product that you invest in to make better. You take customer service really seriously and you help them have a great time. And like that's it, that's all it is. It's just help them have a great time. And so like, you know, it's kind of clarifying in moments like now with COVID where you know, we went look, look through our customer list and we sort of had about 100 customers a little bit over in like events, sort of in a bucket that you would call like advanced hospitality, you know, sort of zone and another, another sort of, you know, hundred or so in like retail sort of zone and then maybe 50 to 80 in like not for profit area, then a bunch in freelancer zone. We just sort of looked at these sort of different segments and sort of said, who's going to be really slammed by this? And so everyone got a proactive note, reach out for me. It came from my personal email just being like, hey, if you're having a hard time with COVID we've got a bunch of options available. Just reply this email, let me know how you're doing and we'll sort it out. And basically our offers were like, you know, if you need Qwila to be, you know, half price for the next few months, we'll do that. If you need, if you need, if you want us to hibernate your account, which we've got this sort of plan structure we have internally where it's like you're not able to create new documents but everything in the account is viewable. It's documents that are still live or editable, blah, blah. So you can do a bunch of stuff but you can't create new proposals. We'll do that, we'll Hibernate your account for X months and then we'll touch base. And so right now we're actually the first wave of those offers of, you know, three months sort of, we're sort of touching base with people and some are saying, actually, can we keep it hydrated for, you know, two more months or hey, you know, would be possible to like, you know, whatever. And so like, because, like, what's my, what's our goal there? It's like, you know, my goal is to keep you and it'd be long term greedy and to help them have a great time. And like, if I, you know, my hope is like, let's say someone's been with us for a year and then they go, they don't pay us anything for four months. Sorry, there's a bird just outside making incredibly loud, strange sounds. So that's our sort of toddler moment for the episode. But yes, I think, you know, I think I've totally lost my train of thought.

No, you were just saying around the long term thinking and, you know, customers being long term greedy. And I think it's a really nice thing to hear too. So many people have been short term thinking for so long and this is a bit of a wake up call for that. So I think that's amazing. And the fact that you are trying to help customers and help your staff and do those little things because those little things over a long term become big things. So I think that's pretty fascinating and good on you guys for having that mindset as well. I'd love to get you to share a tip on proposal proposals with our audience. So you see a lot of data. I've seen a lot of other stats coming out on proposals. But if you were to sit down and you know, to give a business, let's say super experience, but also a startup, for example, not pitch decks or anything like that. But what would the one tip you would be, would be about a proposal to get at least the most traction you've seen in your experience with Qwila.

To be honest, the best thing, and I think like your audience is the perfect one for this. And so I'll just speak plainly, which is like you should be approaching proposals as you approach landing pages because it's just a conversion, it's a conversion funnel, it's farther down and you really want to have a super high conversion rate. But like when you think about what building a great landing page is like, there's a whole bunch of sort of psychology of how you put things in there. A It shouldn't be too long. B. If you need to have like relevant bits of content there, you know, you should say within a proposal you might want to have a whole bunch of legalese, but within Qwila you might fold that away behind a button or like link to it on a separate page. Or again like you want to have easy access to all the things they might want to learn but not have necessarily distract from the main flow of the page because there is an outcome on that page. And that is the button that says accept. And so like I think you sort of want to be driving towards that. And again, you know, look, there's a very simple thing that we sort of know which is like if you embed trust before and after the price. So typically what we've sort of shown with data is like you want to have some level of trust just before you see the price, then you have. It can kind of vary but you kind of want to have another piece of trust. And then the accept button, you know, you might have like price, then accept, then another piece of trust just below that. What you're sort of trying to do is sort of say like let's imagine you come down and then you see like just a short little testimonial or a bunch of logos or the companies that are on there or like, you know, HubSpot diamond partner. Yep, yeah, there we go. So like you know, the HubSpot diamond, whatever the trust is, it's just sort of, you know again for us it might be like G2 Crowd, you know, you know, top, top proposal tool for SMBs, you know, to globally in this quarter. But it's like that you want to have that thing of like prime me for trust is the price is how to accept. And then you have the second bit of trust just below there so that you sort of, you're sort of building confidence. Again you would do something similar on a landing page. Like you sort of have these moments of like how you build in credibility, how you being clear on that side and so. And then obviously you want to end at the bottom with like another classic thing is like if they don't choose that main conversion point of the accept button at the bottom of the page you have that contact block where it's like hey, here's our website, here's how to get in touch, here's my phone number, here's my email, blah, blah. And for a lot of people there's also another little button on the folded section at bottom there of like still have more questions book in a time for a chat. And so again, you press that button, it folds out and there's a calendly or a HubSpot meeting calendar or whatever else. And so I think, like, if you think about all of the stuff that everyone takes landing pages and that whole thing bloody seriously, it's a real science. You think about what proposals are like. It's just like very little rigor has been applied to them now, like with our larger customers. I would then go to say, like, if you've got a templated sales process, especially if you're using a tool like HubSpot or Salesforce where you, you have a number of templates that are embedded in there, we can then pull in data from HubSpot into sort of creating them. You don't need to have that large a volume of those going through to be able to start doing some simple A B testing. So you'd be like, you know what, we're going to include a video in the proposal or not. And it's like, do you know what, the one with the video, it has worse conversion, so let's get rid of that idea. But again, very simple things around which also you would bring into landing pages now, landing pages, it's easier to get higher numbers of views on that, so it's statistically significant. Blah, blah. But like, that same process and thoughtfulness should be brought into this part of the funnel too.

I think that's a fascinating tip and I think a lot of people will take that out. And I also love the fact that about breaking up a proposal or having like click away quick, hidden, hidden information, which you can't do in a traditional PDF or a traditional puzzle as well. It's like, it's there if you want it, but if you don't need it, don't click it totally.

You don't need to get in their way. And I think that one of the things that we, you can see very easily on a lot of proposals is like, people just want to jump to the price. So don't make it, you don't need to give it to them straight away, but don't make it hard to scroll down there. Like you sort of, you know, find where that is and, and look, you know, some documents need to be longer than others, but if that's the case, why not have like again, where the website like a web page. Why don't have navigation so you can jump straight to it and then jump around and whatever else. But I would also say that like, we know this empirically. Like you don't want to have like a too long to like. It's like the short, shorter proposals convert more and convert faster as well because the more words you have, the more processing power your brain needs to get through it all and blah, blah, blah. But again, if you can just be clear on the offer, into some trust, clear on the pricing, clear call to action with regards to acceptance flow and accept e sign payment if you want to use that. Or maybe like pay deposit or something like that, which again, even pay deposit part, such a powerful part of loss aversion. Maybe they've only paid 500 bucks out of an engagement that might be worth 50 grand, but once they paid that 500, like, it's really, you know, there's a real, incredibly high likelihood of them following through on that path. Yeah.

So, yeah, 100%. What would be a, you know, you can brag here or something you can be pretty, pretty proud of and excited for. What's something that if you were to start a new hire or a new person, if you, the business that you were just like, here's a story of, you know, someone that's used qwil or a success story that, you know, has been dinged around the office a few times. What would. What's that one?

I think we have a feedback channel in Slack of just people who, you know, it's like NPS scores and whatever else and things like that that just. And other sort of other bits of feedback that come in, including negative feedback, like, you know, churn reasons or whatever else, to be honest. Like, there are some large companies we have where they've like, you know, increased their conversion rate a lot or decreased their sales cycle a lot of both or what, blah, blah, blah. It's always the ones where it's like some guy who's a sole operator who comes in or like a small team. And like one of the biggest bits of feedback we get about Quiller is because again, you're creating these web pages. There's a lot of design thinking put into it. So it's not guaranteed it'll be beautiful, but we make it. We try to make it as easy as possible. Make a very beautiful looking page. We also like give away free document design services and whatever else as well. But like, it's just like when you get someone who comes in. And I remember there was this guy, this is from ages ago, but we had a similar one recently, but one I remember ages ago was there was this guy who as a hobby made unbelievable tree houses. Like just the fanciest, most Epic sort of tree houses you've ever seen. But he'd just been doing it as like a sort of hobby. Done a couple here and there. But he wanted to sort of quit his day job, which was. I can't remember, it was incredibly mundane day job. It was like one of those sort of like impressively mundane day jobs to sort of go and do this full time. And he just had never been able to get traction on it. But then he signed up for Quiller and did this and did a few things here and he basically said, like, I felt like I wasn't just a one man band. Sort of, you know, kind of like, I shouldn't be there. I felt incredibly proud of what I'd done. And I also felt like I could price it properly for the first time and sort of actually charge price that I felt I was at. This was actually worth. But actually, to be honest, it was really the price that he needed it to be for him to be able.

To quit his job and sustain.

Yeah. And so which was like, you know, I think these tree houses were like £40,000. Like, it was. I mean, they were unbelievable. But like, yeah, it was like a real bit of work. And I think. And he. And he's like, I closed. We got this note from him which was like, I closed. You know, I'd been trying this for ages and ages and ages. And since using Qwilr the last two months, I've closed four jobs. So he's like, I'm really sorry, Qwila. I actually won't be around for a little while because I have to go build these four tree houses. Do you know what I mean? Like, he's sort of won too much work in a way. But he was like, thank you so much. He's still a customer today. They've now got like a small team. So, like, they've got a team of like, it's not, not that many, but like 15 people who work on this and it's all across. It's all up and down sort of the main British, British isle. And it's just awesome. It's just like. It's true.

That's very cool. And to enable someone that had a hobby that became really passionate obviously about it and then has been able to build it into a business and you can be part of that journey. I think that's pretty special. I love it. I love it. Mark, we better start bringing this to ground. I really appreciate you taking the time out to have a chat to us. How do people get in touch with you or Qwilr, like, what's obviously Qwilr.com, but. Yeah, what's the best channel?

We should spell it out because, you know, it's a brutal name. So Q, W, I L, R. But I'm like, so qwilr.com so I'm arketanner on Twitter. You can find me on LinkedIn. I'm just. I'm also just via email. I'm markquiller.com to be honest. Like, you know, love to look, you know, love to work with people who are doing interesting stuff. We're growing. We just closed a Series A recently, so we've got a. We're still hiring. So if you're interested in Qwilr, if you head to qwila.com jobs, you know, there's always new stuff going up there, but I think we're hoping to bring on board about 10 people in the next sort of four to six months. We've got, you know, obviously we're deeply involved in the HubSpot community. I know you are as well. So, like, always happy to work with people on the HubSpot side. So, look, please, if you have any questions or whatever else about Qwila, please feel free to reach out.

Awesome. I love it. Michael, thank you very much. And I look forward to seeing where the journey takes you and we'll chat to you soon.

Thank you very much, mate.