
Show HN: A Sales Tracking App Built For Freelancers and Small Businesses - andrewdumont
http://strideapp.com/
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swombat
Interesting. There's definitely a need for sales/pipeline tracking tools in
small businesses, though I'm not sure the focus on freelancers is quite right.

We're currently using Pipedrive for this, and it's a more mature and slicker
product, but that's not to say there isn't room for another player (in fact,
there are many!). I'm just not 100% sure that the focus on freelancers is
right. Has this been validated with actual freelancers? Are any freelancers on
HN willing to come out and say that this is a hair-on-fire problem for them
that they'd be willing to pay $7/m for this?

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nathancarnes
For me, it's something that would have served me (and I would have paid for)
in my freelancing days, and it's something that has been working great for me
as a small business owner as I've been using the early builds.

I'm obviously incredibly biased (I'm one of the creators), but I agree small
business will be a large potential market in addition to freelancers. There
will be some freelancers who won't want to put down $7/month, but most busy
freelancers would certainly get $7/month of value out of the service.

Here's my blog post about how Stride came about, which has a bit more:
<http://blog.strideapp.com/post/18976926872/origin-story>

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swombat
Aha. Reading your blog post, I notice that you developed this for yourself
while you were running a web design shop with 3 other people. That counts as
small business rather than "freelancer", in my book. If I were you I'd go and
furiously hunt down bona fide freelancers (who have no interest in hiring more
people) and corner them as to whether they'd find something like this useful.

I don't think the price is an issue - in fact, $7 is too low, if anything -
but whether or not this is worth paying for at all, for a _freelancer_. It's
definitely worth it for a web design shop - but then you need to market to
those rather than to freelancers, and make sure you build your product for the
right market.

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nathancarnes
Absolutely--I think I was a bit unclear on that. I'm absolutely in the small
biz bucket now, but I think my past freelancer self would have paid for it.
But you're right, we have some work to do around finding whether our target is
freelance and small biz or only one of those.

I really appreciate the thoughtful feedback.

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nathancarnes
We've just added the beta code hackernews to let all of you fine ladies and
gentlemen in.

Give it a shot -- we're looking forward to your feedback.

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w33ble
This looks really promising from what I see in the screenshot.

Since you're in _private_ beta, why not add a mailing list signup? That way,
those that don't get an invite code will still get reminders of this tool and
a notification when they can finally get in.

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andrewdumont
We just set up a beta invite for all the HN folks, go ahead and use hackernews
when signing up.

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w33ble
Already did. Put some problems and suggestions up on getsatisfaction too. This
looks like it could be quite a useful service.

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rmason
Everyone pays the same price whether they're a 100 person firm or just two
people? So you can have five clients per server or fifty? I think that you
need to give some consideration to those using more resources paying more.

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csytan
It doesn't look like it supports multiple users on one account. So a 100
person firm would need to use 100 individual accounts.

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adrianpike
Correct - that's obviously something we need to support in the future, but we
want to roll it in based on user feedback & demand. :)

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mmcnickle
Looks great. It seems to have the coarse level of detail that's great for my
simple sales process. Anything more is just noise for me.

Not a deal-breaker, but does it support other currencies, namely GBP(£)?

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adrianpike
There's no way to change the currency symbol right now. That's definitely
something we should add to the list, I'll add it to our backlog! :)

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ivyirwin
Looks nice. Do you have a beta code for HN we could use to try it out?

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nathancarnes
Give the beta code hackernews a shot.

(Creative, I know.)

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j45
Looks nice. Do you think lead generation and management is the sole problem of
Freelancers? Or are you planning to move into the rest of the freelancing
lifecycle?

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andrewdumont
Nathan did a fine job of summing up why we built Stride in this post --
<http://blog.strideapp.com/post/18976926872/origin-story>

It's clear that the problem extends to small businesses and the like, we just
want to make it clear that we didn't build Stride for salespeople. The app is
too simple for their use, and that's what we wanted.

The idea is to tie in Freshbooks, Mailchimp, Rapportive and other integrations
as we move forward, to help round out what small business and freelancers
need.

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ColinD
Having tried it out for just a few moments, I certainly see the value. Good
work.

That said, I do have a couple of _snap_ judgements that I hope you don't mind
me sharing.

1\. The interface is simple to use, but when I closed a deal it immediately
disappeared from the list. While it makes sense for a non-active deal to leave
the list, it is a hinderance to me using the platform. In my business,
"closing" a deal means receiving a purchase order. But the deal isn't done
until I've completed my end of things (bringing in the product, shipping it,
receiving payment). It would be nice if closed deals didn't disappear from the
list for a day or week or month or whatever. It's nice to see the team's
successes as well as the stuff still open.

2\. It would be AWESOME if there were a way to add/edit the progress bar. In
my business it would be useful to have "lead" "pitch/quotation",
"negotiation", "closed", "processed" "shipped and invoiced" and "payment
received." Tracking the whole process linearly from start to finish is
something I would certainly pay for.

2\. Piggy backing #1, it would be super helpful to be able to attach files to
deals. Most of my company's projects take place via quotes that come via XLS
and PO's that come via PDF. Being able to attach the files along the way would
mean my GMAIL account wouldn't have to be the repository for quotes and
orders.

2a. Tagging deals would be super useful. If I could tag a deal with the
salesperson's name or "new customer" or whatever and search/sort by tag, that
would be a great feature.

3\. The reporting is nice, but I hope that a lot more filters come in the
future. It would be nice to search/sort by customer, $ value, deal status,
etc. and then run reports on that information as well. For example, it would
be nice to pull all the deals we lost from customer XYZ between $5k and $10k
and compare that number to the deals won in that range. Were are margins too
high on the lost deals? Is there something else we could have done?

4\. I don't know if you guys are enabling multi-user accounts but I'd gladly
pay 5x your current monthly cost (or more) if would allow my account to have 4
user logins where each user could modify/edit a deal. We have a salesperson, a
quoter, a purchaser, and a processer. If each person could access the same
dashboard and update their part of a deal that would be fantastic and would no
doubt improve our work flow.

5\. I'd pay even more if I could add checkbox/lists to each piece of the
status bar. So "Pitch" would have a checkbox for "emailed quote" and "2 day
follow up" and 4 day follow up"...whereas Won might have a checkbox for
"received PO" and "created invoice" and stuff like that. I realize that is
sort of moving away from the simplicity that the app delivers on right now,
but once again it is something I would pay a lot more $$ for. Aside from
improving our current work, having checklists would help standardize our
processes to make it easier to train new people.

My team of four is CONSTANTLY in the dark about where everyone else is on a
certain project. Task lists and project managers don't work because they are
either complicated to use or don't have a linear flow like your tool has.

Yes, a lot of these things can be addressed through other CRM systems and
Quickbooks, but the opportunity I see here is for dead simple deal tracking
and data extraction. Highrise, Salesforce, etc. are good tools in their own
way, but a STRICT focus on pipeline, tracking, and highly/quickly customizable
reporting would be great.

I realize that I've broken the cardinal rule by suggesting you add MORE stuff
when the goal is simplicity. But the things I've posted are the things that
occurred to me right away when I signed up, started using it, and started
saying "would I pay for this? How much would I pay? And if it had x, y, and z,
how much more would I pay?"

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andrewdumont
Thanks for the feedback, super helpful -- it's exactly the reason why we
wanted to roll out in a private beta.

The short of it is that we're sacrificing a lot of this to save simplicity
right off the bat. Frankly, it's the main competitive advantage to all of the
many other tools out there, we believe. That said, there are a few of your
requests that we're actively working on.

In particular, points 2 (add/edit progress bar), 2 (we're working on file
attachements now), and 3.

Stuff like multi-user accounts and deal checkboxes are unlikely. We are
looking to add reminders, however.

Again, thanks for the awesome feedback.

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m21
need a code so that we can try.

