Our Pricing SaaS Has Helped Customers Make $8M+ Since Launch
Our Pricing SaaS Has Helped Customers Make $8M+ Since Launch
Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?
My name is David Peek and I started a business called Estii with my brilliant co-founder Dom De Lorenzo. Estii is an estimation and pricing platform for service providers. We help sales and delivery teams describe the scope of new opportunities, estimate against roles and products, and export highly detailed and always up-to-date commercial proposals.
In the last 12 months, we’ve helped our customers win over USD 8 million in new business while releasing a ton of useful new features. We’re now sitting at just over 50 active workspaces and $20K USD / month in revenue.
What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?
Dom and I worked together for 12 years at Deltatre, a global product and services business that built live and on demand video services across Web, Mobile, and TVs for content owners around the world.
Dom was Senior Vice President of products which included AXIS, an off-the-shelf solution for building and managing video services across devices. I spent seven years on the service delivery team, and five as Director of Solution Engineering.
Estimating projects at Deltare was insanely complex! Some solutions spanned the full video delivery pipeline: from video capture and events management at the stadium to transcoding, packaging, and presentation on the user device. Deltatre had one of those broadcast operations rooms where teams kept a watchful eye on hundreds of live streams year round! Complex customer requirements had to be mapped to our suite of products and services, requiring input from an army of internal and external stakeholders.
Like everyone else, we had our collection of very clever spreadsheets to calculate and validate pricing. Not only was the process of populating these commercial models slow and error prone, but there was a complete disconnect between different parts of the sales and delivery process. We were constantly manually moving data between spreadsheets, pitch documents, and different platforms for finance and delivery.
While there were a couple of players in the Configure Price Quote (CPQ) space, they were all optimized for businesses selling products from a price list. And none were providing tools for rapidly iterating on deals while keeping a close eye on profitability.
I was fortunate to have a great boss who was willing to invest time in improving our internal tools for estimation. Some of the earliest concepts for Estii were built in my evenings and tested on real opportunities. The key insight gained from this period was that improving the interface between Sales, Solutions and Delivery teams was the biggest opportunity for differentiating ourselves.
Dom and I were lucky enough to benefit from some corporate transactions at Deltatre. This gave us the confidence to part ways with the company and focus on Estii full time.
Landing enterprise customers is more about building relationships and trust, navigating your way through the corporate hierarchy until you have identified the people who can make a purchasing decision.
Take us through the process of building the first version of your product.
Building the first version of Estii was some of the hardest, most rewarding work I’ve ever done. Building an enterprise-friendly SaaS these days involves ticking a lot of boxes! On top of designing and building the product itself, we had to create solutions for documentation, emails, support, monitoring, marketing, and much more. And there were some early missteps in the direction of the product too.
The problem solver in me couldn’t help but see Estii as an opportunity to build a better spreadsheet. At its core, a commercial proposal is a large collection of numbers and concepts with connections to each other – known in computer science as a graph. So, a role might be a node in that graph, having properties like name (Developer) and rate ($500 per day). When you estimate 10 days to build your landing page, you are creating a new connection between “10 days” and the “Developer” role node.
I wasted a lot of time down this rabbit hole, trying to build a “natural language” approach to describing complex commercial calculations. But it was a fool's errand – the core problem with estimating in spreadsheets is the complete lack of hierarchy and structure.
In the absence of concrete concepts like “products”, “roles” and “estimates”, users are forced to use the same structures to model everything themselves – rows, columns, and tables. A flexible replacement for a spreadsheet, however clever it was, would simply replace one kind of complexity with another!
Fortunately, Dom understood this problem well from building intuitive solutions to complex video workflow problems at Deltatre. Dom quickly designed a clear, consistent taxonomy for describing both the business model (roles, products, rate cards) and project model (phases, features, tasks, and estimates) of an opportunity.
One decision we did get right during this period was a focus on using relatively new serverless technologies from Cloudflare. One of the key benefits of serverless is that the cost of operating a service scales in a linear fashion with the number of people using it.
With traditional hosting technologies, there is generally a relatively high baseline cost for keeping servers running, and waiting to serve requests. This decision significantly extended our runway.
We weren’t great at building a focused “MVP”, launching with roles, streams, features, tasks, estimates, overheads, proposals, themes, and even real-time multi-user sync! In the end, we spent about 10 months building version one of the platform, with everything designed, specified, and built by Dom and myself at a cost of about $10K – excluding our missing salaries for that period!
Describe the process of launching the business.
We launched Estii in April of 2022 following a three month early access period. Our strategy for the launch centered around leveraging our existing professional networks on social media, with both Dom and myself publishing several posts and longer form articles centered around the specific pain point we were trying to solve with the platform.
An early LinkedIn campaign. Just look how stressed this poor guy is!
On top of this, we launched a cold-outreach campaign using LinkedIn Sales Navigator to identify target customers and build relationships with them. There is a special kind of madness that comes from writing over almost a thousand custom LinkedIn messages to potential customers!
Our biggest lesson from this period is that a product-led growth strategy is not always enough, particularly for a product geared towards the enterprise end of town. Landing enterprise customers is more about building relationships and trust, navigating your way through the corporate hierarchy until you have identified the people who can make a purchasing decision.
It took us six months to sign our first customer – although we were talking to them for most of that time. This long sales cycle has been the most time consuming part of building the business, as we juggle long running conversations with potential customers for months before closing.
Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?
Our primary focus for attracting customers has been targeted marketing campaigns on LinkedIn and Google, along with substantial SEO optimization of our website. This strategy ensures we are highly visible to potential customers actively seeking our solutions.
Beyond digital strategies, attending tech trade shows has been pivotal in directly connecting with decision-makers from tech services businesses, our core customer group. Engaging with vendors at their booths with just an iPad and our pitch has allowed us to effectively reach and connect with our ideal customers, condensing months of outreach into just a few hours.
A notable challenge is that often our primary users aren't the decision-makers, leading to reluctance in changing established commercial processes. To counter this, we've made it easy for users to sign up and explore Estii's capabilities on their own. Trials, first-run guides, importers, sample deals, and data visualizations are all tools that help our champions internally demonstrate the value of our platform.
Customer retention is deeply tied to our responsiveness to feedback, especially regarding repetitive task pain points. We actively encourage customers to share their frustrations and ideas directly with me and my co-founder, Dom. This approach has been instrumental in refining Estii and building a sense of community and investment among our users.
Carefully observing user patterns has also been key in enhancing workflows between teams and boosting user engagement. For example, introducing guest users significantly increased user numbers and activity. This feature met a broad need for improved visibility among business stakeholders regarding commercial proposals, thereby aiding in their forecasting and preparation.
I always assumed that building a business would be exhausting because of all the work you need to get done. But that isn’t the exhausting part – if you’ve picked the right problem to solve, building the product is the fun part!
How are you doing today and what does the future look like?
The financial climate hasn’t been great for startups over the last couple of years, but we’re really happy to have passionate customers who love using Estii to win more profitable business.
We’re 100% bootstrapped and so we’re cautiously growing our ad spend as revenue increases. Our focus right now is on the US, UK, Canadian, and Australian markets and we’re planning to introduce localization later this year to expand further into Europe.
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
One lesson we have learned, a few times in fact, is the importance of choosing what to build and what to buy. When we started Estii, I fought hard against my natural instincts to reinvent every wheel I could. Most advice out there stresses how important it is to maintain focus on the core value of your product and to use off-the-shelf solutions for everything outside of that. But the reality is not so simple.
One example from our technology stack: is our marketing website. As we approached completion of our MVP, I sat down with Dom to figure out how we would build our landing page: either “by hand” or using a visual CMS like Webflow. Following that advice of staying focused on the product, we decided to build our landing page using – a no code solution specifically optimized for SaaS startups.
The result, whilst functional, fell far below the level of quality of our product. To make matters worse, we had to jump through all sorts of hoops just to present information in the way we wanted, and the platform suffered from frequent downtime. We ended up rebuilding the site 18 months later, a process which ironically took less time than building the original! The result is a gorgeous advertisement for the quality of Estii.
What platform/tools do you use for your business?
We try to run a tight ship at Estii, and we’re not against building our tools where it makes sense. But there are a few tools we really can’t live without.
For UX and design we use Figma. There’s nothing else like it on the market right now, and it fits perfectly into our development workflow. Dom is an absolute guru and seems to be able to design faster than I can come up with ideas.
For documents and communication, we use Google Workspaces, Notion, and Slack – although there is some duplication here and I’m not completely convinced that Notion makes sense for the current size of our team!
We also use a lot of amazing open-source software to both build and operate Estii, the amount of generosity and innovation there is truly inspiring!
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
I love reading, but it’s hard to pick out specific books as being more or less influential. I like to think I’m constantly throwing new ideas onto the pile, integrating them into my mental model for running a business over time!
Recently I’ve enjoyed “Thinking in Systems”, “Creativity Inc.” and “The Phoenix Project”.
I’m also a bit of a Twitter addict and follow lots of inspiring entrepreneurs on there – @levelsio, @dannypostmaa, @threepointone, and @jarredsumner to name a few.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?
From the outside, I always assumed that building a business would be exhausting because of all the work you need to get done. But that isn’t the exhausting part – if you’ve picked the right problem to solve, building the product is the fun part!
Exhaustion and burnout, for me, come from all the things you try (product, sales, marketing) that DON’T work out. Dusting yourself off again and again is draining, but that’s what it takes to build a company. Working long hours because things are going well is energizing!
