If I may provide some unsolicited feedback, if you are targeting the United States you may want to check the use of the word quotations in this context. I’ve not personally heard “quotation” used this way, so I wasn’t sure what the software is for. Maybe proposal or quote or RFP process would resonate more? (I googled “salesforce quotations” to check myself on this and indeed do not see any results using it that way)
Could you explain on the marketing site what type of business this would be best for? Are there other workflow tracking features?
For grammar, there are only a handful of things which don’t ring quite true for me as a native speaker, like “stop losing your time” which for its prominence on the page seemed worth mentioning. Others might think it sounds fine, but that felt awkward to me compared with “stop wasting time”, for example.
Oh god. Please keep 'em coming. These are all great feedback.
To be honest we, two cofounders, didn't spend days to decide on the words. We both are not native speakers. Google'd some keywords, took a look at dictionary websites and decided quotation was fine. We will do further research on that. Would "offer" work in this context?
We are decided on targeting freelancers and businesses that sell services, like software or advertisement agencies. But to be fair anyone doing business negotiations via sending an offer to a client could possibly use the app. Right now the app is pretty basic as this is a product of 2-nights worth of time and we only went live this week.
"Stop wasting time". Noted.
Again, if you have any more feedback, I'd really appreciate it. You can also contact me on Twitter if you'd prefer. My username is hkanaktas.
> To be honest we, two cofounders, didn't spend days to decide on the words. We both are not native speakers.
I think you also should find a few 'bookish' native speakers to proof-read your blog posts before you publish them. While it's impressive that you're speaking another language, the casual reader likely won't know that and so your writing will seem amateurish - which might not reflect well on your product.
It's looking really nice so far - although as someone who pulls together quotes there is some way you have to go for it to be an MVP for me personally. A little feedback if you want:
* Autocomplete of customer name does not seem to work. If I put in part of the customer name and then click the name, it seems to complete but will then not allow me to save the quote. In fact, I do not seem to be able to make a quote at the moment without going through 'customers'.
* Unsure what Active / Passive is. No obvious way to change a quote between the two, or set a quote to be in either.
* Would be good to change the unit rather than everything be in 'items' - i.e. 5 m2, $32 per m2.
* There is no single workflow for creating an invoice for a customer. I would expect to be able to create the customer & invoice in 'one shot'. I made an invoice first, then couldn't save it without adding a customer - so I had to go and open a new tab so as to not loose the quote. This is a bit unintuitive.
* There is no way to reorder items. If I have 4 items for installing a door (cost of door, cost of handle, cost of frame, labour) and want to add 'cost of hinges', it will either appear after labour which doesn't make sense from a flow perspective, or have to delete labour and then put it in.
* No way to provide subtotals - in the example above I would like to subtotal parts vs installation labour.
* There is no way to edit a line item in an existing quote without deleting the line and creating a new one. This is particularly problematic if I want it on the top line of the quote, as it means you have to delete all line items to make sure it is the first (no reordering)
* Would be good to write the email to the customer rather than it look like a generic mailshot - like "Hi Dave, As discussed during our phone call please see the quotation attached. Cheers, Barry".
* No way to apply charges at the final line level (i.e. 5% payment processing for above lines)
Thanks a ton for the detailed feedback. You are right about all of the feature expectations. This app is a product of 2-nights worth of work. We'll keep on progressing it further.
- Active/passive filters mean "still ongoing offers" and "responded offers" but I see why that might not be obvious.
- Can you elaborate that subtotal part? I'm not sure what you mean.
- We are thinking of payment processing, but that's not an MVP-level feature in my mind, so that feature needs to wait a little.
For subtotals, if I sent a quote to a customer and was a PC builder I might want it to be sorted into subtotals like:
Parts (processor, RAM, case)
Software (OS, AV)
Labour (base build labour, any up sell labour for software)
Accessories (Mouse, Keyboard, Webcam)
Shipping
Where each of these have line items, but are totalled separately (e.g. immediately after a group of line items). I guess it could be a big long list of randomly sorted line items, but for more complex invoices it gives much more clarity if you can categorise the cost into buckets.
FYI for further feedback if useful, I believe you calculate tax slightly incorrectly (off by a few pennies sometimes) by not counting half pennies correctly after saving the invoice. Aware it's only a small bug but thought I would flag!
Ahh, okay, I see. I think I can implement subtotals easily. Gotta check with my partner first though.
I'm aware of the tax calculation problems. It's a somewhat fragile topic, at least in my country. It's on my list and I'll work on it soon. Thanks for the heads up.
Hey, I'm the co-founder of Dytto and would like to thank you for your constructive feedback.
As a business developer, I have a bit concern about a lot of CRM solutions have an offer management feature. As you said, I'm looking deeply at other markets to target. Otherwise, we'll be really weak on competitive advantages.
If you have more feedback about the target market or any other business decisions, I'm looking forward to listening to them.
"All these employments and hourly works are means to make some money, but it doesn't worth much when you want to take a trip for a few days/weeks but your "boss" says no."
When success hits you might have less time for travel compared to scheduling a vacation at work. The more important you are the more important your business is can create longer hours.
I'm aware that owning a business means much more work and I'm willing to put in the necessary effort. Maybe I will go nomadic, work in part of the day and travel in the remaining hours. Possibilities are endless.
Go-go-go man!
An idea seems interesting, having a simple product just to store all quotes should be a cool thing for small businesses.
What I would personally add:
- Use GIF/carousel instead of an image on the landing page so I can use what exactly the product does
- Add some kind of API (really basics) to integrate a product into other solutions
Thanks a lot for your feedback. It seriously means a lot to me that people take their time to check out something I built and say what they think about it.
The landing page is literally 5 days old. I am constantly tweaking it with new ideas and I will definitely apply your feedback. I was thinking of a speed-up video to show various pages.
API sounds so good. I was thinking of Zapier integration but why not both, right?
I’d recommend both; folks who want to use the API natively can, but those who are going to use Zapier can rely on the integration. You’ll need the API endpoint regardless for the Zapier integration.
I propose that having the ability to manage clients and quotes through an API would be a powerful feature. If you’re worried about rapid iteration and backwards compatibility, remember to version your API route(s), and use a sub domain so you can scale out the API easily in the future independently of other app components. Consider firing off web hooks for any events that your customers would want action taken on faster than polling your API could support.
Thanks a lot for the ideas, too. If you want to hear about the progress you can simply just register (we'll probably send a weekly mail) or follow me (@hkanaktas) or Dytto's account (@dyttoco) on Twitter.
Thanks! To be honest this isn't even a launch lol. I was just trying to find a few potential customers and ask for feedback. Now I have a lot of potential customers, and a lot of conversations to make.
1.) Why only four currencies? Now I can't use it. Netflix has helped normalize credit card usage all across the world, so your potential market is huge, but you've only targeted four countries. I don't get that.
2.) All price/currency fields have placeholders in the format 0.00. When I click on one of these fields, I expect it to go blank so that I can enter my own price. So I just click anywhere on that field and start typing. If I happen to have clicked after the decimal point, and try to type in 2000 (meaning $2000), the value I end up with is "0.200". This is unexpected behaviour for a form field, at least for me.
3.) In your quote entry form, you need to widen the tax % field. When I enter 0.09, the 9 is half cut off.
Thanks for taking your time and the compliments. It means a lot!
1- The app is like in alpha/beta stage right now. I planned to put currencies in the database but it was too much work for an MVP so I literally typed them into the template lol. Which currency do you need? I can add it manually now and be sure to have it in the database when I make the transition.
2- Agreed. Number inputs are funky. Tried to have custom Javascript for the minimal asset size but I didn't do well. I'll use some 3rd party plugin for those.
3- Noted. One question though. Why do you type 0.09 in a percentage field? Is it just a test or do you really have 0.09% (9 in ten thousand) tax rate?
I created quotations with OpenOffice / Google Docs for the last 10 years. It doesn't matter whether the quotation is beautiful or not. Talking about branding, the portfolio of the company is more important.
My company was providing design and development services. The quotation is just a document to confirm a deal from the customer. The content should fully cover the service scope, deliverables, the price & terms very clear.
I just set up a template from OpenOffice writer & google docs and create a quotation from there.
Hey, just as a heads up I found a vuln that exposes all customer email addresses and contacts for all users. I'll responsibly disclose using the 'contact us' feature.
Good luck from me as well. Although I am not looking for a quotation solution, there would be 2 things which would concern me (if I were):
- There is no example how a 'beautiful quotation' looks.
- Pricing would be a concern. You say it is free, so why should it be of concern: if I change my business process now to use your interface and then I am locked in, I would really like to know how much I have to pay next year.
Congratulations on your launch. Not really feedback but I realized when I clicked through that I would have signed up if I could use one of the federated login services (Google most likely, GitHub maybe, Facebook probably wouldn't have helped) and I didn't want to go through the mail, password, confirm cycle so much I actually just hit back.
I think you can still get someone's email for follow up if you use them.
There are two ads in the emails clients receive. One by you (Powered by Dytto), and one for something called Elastic Email. I clicked to find out what it was and Gmail gave me a scary message. This isn't a warning I'd ever want a potential client to get: https://i.imgur.com/ZGKWNav.png
Oh, damn. Thanks for the heads up. I don't know why Google thinks Elastic Email is suspicious. They have been in business for years. I'll take a look though.
Some feedback:
- found the image on landing page confusing, expected to be able to click the items in it
- pricing 'free until we launch'. This would scare me off - if people are going to start using your platform they need some idea of pricing levels / tiered plans. No point joining up to something and using in action to find you are priced out
Not sure what that is but if you're talking about the colors on the landing page, a designer friend of mine made the logo and chose the colors. I just used them. Don't know if he knows about Cividis.
If you're talking about the colors in the app, they are the default color palette of Tailwind CSS. Most components are also exactly copied from Tailwind UI examples.
- Basically a lot of CRMs handle the offer/quote stuff. Some have partial support, some have more functionality then we do.
- There is quoter[dot]com as a direct competitor. I'm not sure how well they do. My co-founder is more aware of this topic.
- There are some old desktop softwares doing the same thing offline. I don't think users of these would convert much to online solutions.
- And of course there are users that do everything manually. Keeping the records in an Excel file and exporting Word documents as PDFs to email to clients.
Could you explain on the marketing site what type of business this would be best for? Are there other workflow tracking features?
For grammar, there are only a handful of things which don’t ring quite true for me as a native speaker, like “stop losing your time” which for its prominence on the page seemed worth mentioning. Others might think it sounds fine, but that felt awkward to me compared with “stop wasting time”, for example.