Top of the lyne - ‘Cause this is Qwilr 🕺
‘Cause this is Qwilr 🕺A start-up from sunny Sydney is changing business comms forever with its gorgeous, customizable, and fully web-based business proposal generatorBack in 1477, Archduke Maximilian - of Austrian royalty - made history by orchestrating the first-ever wedding proposal and putting a ring on it. This was the first betrothal in recorded history where the gent went down on one knee with a diamond ring in hand. Maximilian may have not known it at the time, but his fancy little proposal set off a chain of events that would change much of the world forever: Mary (the sweetheart in question and French royalty herself) said yes. Max became the Holy Emperor of Rome. The couple had a boy who eventually became King of France (the popular Philip the Fair). Their union enabled the passage of territories like the Netherlands and Spain into the Hapsburg dynasty and centuries later, helped the Tiffanys of the world to rake in huge profits. Archduke Maximilian proved that a well-conceived and executed proposal can take you places, be it in marriage, business, or world domination. Centuries later, in 2014, the same principle prompted two Aussie gents – Dylan Baskind and Mark Tanner – to launch Qwilr, an online web document builder that changed the art, craft, and experience of the business proposal forever. License to Qwil 🖋️The Qwilr story has some interesting and serendipitous roots: 90s Sydney, a music band, and an Aussie teen fresh out of high school with big ideas and talents. Unlike his friends whose school breaks were spent hitting the beach, Dylan Baskind was booked and busy starting his own online rostering business and performing gigs as the lead band member of The Winter People. Dylan’s rostering business shut doors in a year, and he took on an advertising gig. That lasted nine months. “Consulting, then, seemed like a viable alternative path. A middle road between creative freedom and a reliable income,” he wrote, recounting what first got him thinking of business proposals. Working first with local businesses and then bigger ticket clients like product companies, agencies, multinationals, and government projects, Dylan got to experience the full gamut of digital design and coding. Behind his beautiful design and efficient coding, however, was the endless drone of InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, Excel, Microsoft Word, and PDF upon PDF. He would frame the pricing in Excel, the copy in Word, and move them both into InDesign. His clients would then request changes and he’d have to tear it all apart and start from scratch again. Dylan realized, then, that he simply had to come up with a solution.
He started building his proposals as web pages and structured a system where he could push out these websites in hours rather than days. He knew he was on to something when the MD of Saatchi & Saatchi, New Zealand called him one fine afternoon to ask how the hell he had put together a beautiful proposal for them just hours after they had spoken earlier that morning. Around the same time, Dylan’s childhood friend and long-term follower of The Winter People, Mark Tanner was looking to move back to Australia from his job at Google in NYC, and dive into the world of start-ups. While catching up with Dylan at a wedding, Mark, who came from a world of Sales could immediately sense how much better the alternative that Dylan was building could be to the incumbents. Mark was sold. The duo teamed up and set out to build a tool that they hoped would make the existing approach to document creation obsolete, the same way the printing press made the Quill obsolete. Hence Qwilr. Today, Qwilr is a way for sales and marketing teams to create all of their customer-facing collateral - proposals, quotes, pitch decks, presentations, and contracts - as web pages, rather than PDFs or PowerPoint decks. With Qwilr, S&M teams are empowered to build responsive bleeding-edge webpages per modern design tropes that sync to all their sources of truth. After launching in 2014, the Aussie company raised $2M in seed funding in 2017 and went on to double Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) YoY consistently while starting to scale in Europe and the US. After hitting just under $10 million in ARR in May 2020, they closed on a $7.25 million Series A funding round led by AirTree Ventures, as well as Skip Capital and Typeform’s co-founder Robert Muñoz. Mission: Kill The Files 🔪File systems built pre-web aren’t interoperable with how the rest of the web works and are not designed for today. Qwillr aims to kill file-based proposals by offering a product suite that offers building blocks to construct webpages. Moving to webpages unlocks a lot of possibilities within this realm - mobile optimizations, analytics, video embeds, pricing & ROI calculators, integrations to CRMs, and payment platforms like Stripe. As of today, deals worth more than $1B have been closed on Qwilr by teams at HP, ZenDesk, TikTok, MorningStar, Dropbox, and thousands of other businesses across the globe. Let’s look at their drivers of growth, starting from the very beginning. The Murdered Darling ⚰️Co-founder Mark Tanner says that the secret to Qwilr’s early success was a marriage of excellent engineering and design plus a “Murder Your Darlings” mindset. After Qwilr v1.0 was released to the early customers, Dylan realized that he had put together a prototype that was more WordPress and less design tool. The editing experience wasn’t WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) - unless you were a developer.
And so the team killed their darling v1.0 and built Qwilr v2.0 from scratch. It was the best product decision the team would ever make. Qwilr 2.0 offered the flexibility of customizations to anyone with a computer and an internet connection. And 0 reliance on internal engineering teams. Finding Qwilr’s product-market fit 🔎Qwilr was originally built as a single-player tool targeted at SMB customers. Mark calls this decision to not build ‘Qwilr for teams; the “original sin” that them down 100s of product and Go-To-Market (GTM) decisions. They found themselves selling to micro-businesses, freelancers, and the S of the SMBs.
As the momentum started building with strong word-of-mouth and viral drivers among sales teams, the team slowly started “turning the tanker.” The decisions to kill freemium, the cheap plan, double the price bar of the top-tier plan and invest more in Sales soon followed. The target audience was now clear: it was Sales and Marketing teams.
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