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by hkanaktas 2229 days ago
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.

5 comments

> 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.

Yeah, agreed. We don't want to give that impression.
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.

Maybe this link clarifies: https://members.tinshingle.com/category/accounting/top-5-rea...

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.

Ah, no problem!

It seems like the tax logic is different in the edit sheet from when it is saved on the page. The below test case will produce you a 0.01 penny tax pre-save, and a 0.00 penny tax post-save. If you click between them the value changes:

Line item 1: £10, tax @ 0.04%

Line item 2: £10, tax @ 0.04%

Result pre-save (correct) is 1p

Result post-save (incorrect) is 0p

It took way too long for me to realize that this isn't a product where one stores/sends famous words from smart people.

Otherwise, looks great!

Haha sorry to confuse you. We'll work on the keywords.
I'm from a european context and I'd say quote or quotation works fine: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/251563/get-a-quo...
Must be a regional difference, I've never heard quotation from an American.
As an additional point - you might want to look at a different target market than people doing business negotiations.

If you are doing business negotiations, you are probably using a CRM which allows for proper pipeline and offer tracking (e.g. hubspot, salesforce).

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.