Invoice Quick

Challenges

The first challenge we had to overcome was growing our own team so we can actually build a full SaaS product. Before working on InvoiceQuick, our expertise was top shelf regarding UI and UX design, as well as front-end development, but that could get us only two thirds of the way.To build a proper SaaS backend, we needed to hire an experienced as well as available back-end developer, in the country where most developers where already employed and not really looking for new challenges.We were lucky enough to find the right person, and to assemble a strong team where everyone involved felt they were working towards the same goal!

Our second, and probably most important challenge came after the MVP was successfully launched. We were onboarding users, they were happy, but our value to them was short-term - they only used InvoiceQuick during those couple of minutes needed to create an invoice and than moved on.

This is when why needed to decide to focus on a specific market segment - freelancers and small businesses - who just wouldn’t use and couldn’t pay for full, enterprise-grade invoicing solutions, and also didn’t need most of those features. But at the same time needed something more than just an invoice maker.

So we developed a long-term plan to add features that our users need and will find useful, like making recurring invoices and tracking PNL.

Approach

When we started developing InvoiceQuick, our first goal was to build an MPV. And to create it so it is flexible and easily expandable, we decided to use VUE.js and Laravel. This is an excellent pair in which VUE.js is cherished by many frontend developers, and it fits in prefectly with Laravel in the backend.In a fiercely competitive industry we needed to be nimble and think hard about each feature we wanted to add, so we can launch quickly and expand from there. For our MVP we focused on essentials: company settings, customer info, and invoices. Nothing more!Once these features were functional, we organized design and development sprints, and started expanding our product with accounting, taxes, reporting, dashboard, and estimates. In February 2019 we had a version we were satisfied with and could differentiate between a free and a paid version.We are using the same, nimble approach to this day. And our next sprints (at the time of writing) are related to creating InvoiceQuick mobile applications and features that will help small businesses streamline their accounting and billing processes.

Results

Looking from the business perspective, the most important goal has been achieved. The product is profitable and has its own dedicated team working hard on future changes as well as customer support and marketing.Looking at our users, we started small and now have over 700 paying customers, with more than 7,000 monthly active users. They created over 20,000 invoices using our product, and are a big part of our decision making process - as we still want to build the product they will continue using.