It’s a good thing Corry Flatt was getting annoyed with the lengthy, paper-heavy process for filing Requests for Proposal, or RFPs. That annoyance—and the desire to get past it—enabled the marketer to create Waterloo-based Bonfire, a paperless RFP tool.

The product has been on the market for about a year and a half, and Flatt now plans to expand internationally by opening a Silicon Valley office in the next year.

Bonfire allows suppliers to send all necessary RFP documents via the platform to purchasers, who often need to read through hundreds of documents to decide who will become their newest supplier.

As well as providing a paperless tool for suppliers, Bonfire can also be used by purchasers, who often work in teams with strict criteria to choose the right client. With Bonfire, purchasers and their teams can compile their thoughts in one document instead of each person having his or her own copy of each file.  

“Your average purchaser is on Facebook and LinkedIn and has an iPad at home, and yet they’re forced to use paper and these horribly complex Excel sheets in their office jobs,” Flatt said. “We saw this as an opportunity to bring a modern tool to a very important and very complex workflow.”

Flatt and his team received lots of industry input before releasing Bonfire. These discovery sessions were conducted with universities, whose staff showed Flatt and the Bonfire team how they, as purchasers, dealt with the RFP process. Flatt and his team would then tweak the tool according to the universities’ suggestions, then return with improvements and ask them for their thoughts on them.

Flatt, who previously worked as a marketer focusing on startups, said universities were the perfect group to create the product with. Despite being public institutions, they operate like private sector businesses. Thanks to this product testing, both private and public sector purchasers needn’t customize Bonfire for it to suit their RFP needs.

“The best procurement teams are these huge value acts to the company, who are out there helping make huge spending decisions as well as possible,” Flatt said. “They’re the unsung heroes of a company or an organization, and we want to make their work lives effortless—but also impactful—so that they are recognized by the organization.”

Bonfire sales only started around January, 2014, but the company has more than 60 public sector clients, including the Chicago Public School Board and the University of Alberta. Bonfire doesn’t disclose the number or names of its private sector clients.

Though Flatt said Bonfire could be turning a profit at this point, he decided to spend the money to hire more talent. He has fewer than 10 people on his team, but is starting to rapidly hire salespeople and marketers in Waterloo.

One of his reasons for moving in to Silicon Valley is to take advantage of the great technological talent there.

“We see this massive opportunity, where these workflows are going to abruptly shift into the new world, and it’s bit of a land-grab out there,” Flatt said. “And we want to be first—we want to be planting the flag.”

Eye on KW is a regular feature in Entrevestor that focuses on the startup community in Kitchener-Waterloo.