Proposify, a software-as-service company that streamlines the proposal process, saw a 1500 percent increase in recurring revenue and 709 per cent increase in customers during 2015.

The Halifax-based company’s software simplifies and enhances the process of writing proposals. It streamlines the process in the cloud with online proposal design templates that can easily be customized with text, images, videos, and charts.

With 1,616 paid customers by the end of 2015, Proposify started to see different kinds of users—not just small businesses or marketing agencies. Bigger corporations have begun to look into Proposify to see how it can work for them.

With new customers came new revenue. Proposify increased its monthly recurring revenue to $66,443 by the end of 2015—making it cashflow positive.

Proposify's Unlikely Partnership Works

Proposify founders Kevin Springer and Kyle Racki owned Headspace Design, a Halifax-based website design firm, before beginning Proposify. Most of the Proposify team come from marketing agency backgrounds, where proposals are the main method of generating new business.

With a background as a designer and in his experience running a marketing agency, Racki found that creating a good-looking, comprehensive proposal could take hours and lots of design and copy work.

Responsible for sales, Springer said that he often wished he already had a seamless, easy-to-use system that created beautifully designed proposals to get them to clients quickly. 

“That’s why we originally created this: to scratch our own itch,” Springer said. “We realized early on that why people hadn’t created a robust, powerful, editor in the browser is because it’s friggin’ hard.”

The Proposify team grew from four to eight in 2015. A full-time customer support person, more developers and a marketing manager means that the company can reach more customers to understand their needs, and in turn constantly improve the product.

The templates allow users to move around text boxes (not easy on other proposal templates) and include sample text within the templates for different service offerings to help users begin thinking about how they can pitch themselves to their potential clients.

“The more the customers use it, the more we understand how they’re using it, what their needs are,” Proposify marketing manager Jennifer Faulkner said. “Where else could we apply this in other places?”

Proposify reacted by creating user roles and permissions, which allow the project manager to lock parts of the proposal for the person or team in charge of creating that specific part of the proposal. At a big company, many people may work on one proposal, but the project manager wouldn’t want all team members to have access to all parts of the proposal because it risks tampering with other people’s work and helps maintain brand standards.

“Our initial focus was [agencies] because we’re all from the agency background and we know the pain point and the market is huge, but we haven’t even scratched the surface,” Springer said.

Proposify customers have three choices for monthly payments, depending on the amount of users and how many proposals they send out: Tall, which is $25 per month; Grande, which is $50 per month; and Venti, which is $100 per month. If the customer signs up for a year, they receive a 20 per cent discount. Custom plans for larger companies are also available.

 “We’re seeing such an uptake in the product, and it doesn’t seem like it’s going to stop,” Springer said.