Six Sites

About a year ago, while at Blue Flavor, Garrett and I started to try and solve a very old problem: Request for Proposals otherwise known as RFPs. The RFP is a blight on professional services, it is a poor investment, taking far too much time to create just to get your foot in the door for a meeting, which is where any real decisions will be made any way. And even though most corporation don’t know it, RFPs are a terrible and costly process that only pronounces their ignorance and/or cheapness and invites vendors to gauge them for any services rendered.

Which is why we made a little product we call Estimatr.

At Blue Flavor, each time we responded to an RFP it just cost us time and money for projects that we didn’t get. At the same time I honed a sales and estimate process that proved to be really successful during my time there.

The problem is it just didn’t scale. Sales takes up a lot of time, often doing mundane and repetitive tasks. Any monkey can walk through some defined steps, but to do sales well you need the right intuition to know how and when to get your message through.

For the professional or small agency, balancing time spent doing sales and time spent helping the clients you have is very hard balancing act. You have to do both equally well. At a large agency you need to light and agile for today’s customer and look for ways to more cost-effectively bring in great projects to increase your margin. And for the client, large or small, you need to see accurate comparisons of each vendor, how your project is going to executed on and ultimately how much it will cost you.

I learned a lot about how clients look for work and compare firms and how vendors try and solve them. So I started to wonder, could we take what I know about RFPs and the estimate process and apply that to a web-based tool helping both client and vendor forge the beginnings of successful projects?

Estimatr 1.0 Alpha

Garrett and I locked ourselves in the Blue Flavor War Room, surrounded by whiteboards, and hashed out what would become Estimatr. Over the winter of 2007-2008, Garrett started to write the core application, initially designed as a RFP tool for Blue Flavor, though we had plans to scale it out to include other agencies. Garrett was able to get the majority of features for Estimatr 1.0 completed, but conflicting client work prevented us getting it an alpha ready.

When we left Blue Flavor to set out on our own companies, we were able to take Estimatr with us. Our goal is to turn it into a web-based product of its own. But like Leaflets, it sat on a shelf for nine months, while Garrett and I tended to client work of our own. We planned to revisit it, in fact it has always been one the planned six products I intend to build here, but it would just have to wait until our plates a bit more clear.

When Greg Storey posted about the RFP tool they created, Garrett and I quickly got on the phone with Greg. We talked about the RFP process and quickly realized that we had been trying to solve the same problem. We talked about collaboration and how we could help each other solve this problem once and for all.

While Estimatr is already built, it just needs to support registration, multiple agency accounts and some design work. Garrett and I made a little headway before I left the country for a month and Garrett returned back to getting a big project launched.

And that pretty much brings us up to date. Estimatr is written, it just needs a little work. We initially had planned to finalize and ship it right about now, but then I had the idea for Signal something we both felt personally compelled to create.

So the plan right now is to finish Estimatr once we have Signal in beta.