The birth of a software company.

Pain loading…

We sometimes joke in the office - had we known how hard starting Quick Consols would be, we’d never have started it, and I suppose that’s probably true for most companies out there. It was started out of sheer personal frustration as a consumer and not with the desire to make millions of dollars (yes, you read that correctly).

The start of Quick Consols was deliberately and intentionally backed up by virtually no market research or analysis. The term “knee-jerk” probably describes it best! The company I was working for was busy corporatising with a view to an exit by a founder that had built the business from nothing to $200m in 10 short years. The business had been run on gut feel and a relentless pursuit of sales, but desperately needed some structure in the financial reporting space.

Trying to collate our numbers from five different countries in five different currencies from five different systems was like herding kittens. Or whack a mole. Or both, depending on the day. The only “solution” to taming this tiger was every accountant’s go to tool in the toolbelt: my trusty go anywhere, solve anything companion Excel. What could go wrong, right?

So off I set on creating the world’s largest and most complicated spreadsheet with more colour-coded tabs than colours in the rainbow, delicately interwoven with formulas that would make Bill Gates proud. Oh, you need some budgets in there? No problem. You need prior year numbers with that? No sweat. You’d like to report in Quarters? I’m sure there’s a formula for that!?

And so it went on…until it didn’t.

Turns out my spreadsheet had a couple of flaws. I was the only one who knew what was going on (most of the time) and it was more susceptible to corruption than a modern day politician.?

The spreadsheet blues.

After a couple of torturous months, including circular references and #REFs, we knew we needed to get this beast into a purpose built application. So off we trundled, and on the advice of a trusted associate we invested in the “leading solution” from the “market leader” at the time. After dropping a small fortune on the licences and implementation we saw some light at the end of the tunnel. Granted, we were coming off a low base so anything that didn’t require a small prayer to the pivot-table gods before opening the spreadsheet was a great start.

And as the story goes, the happiness was short lived. We knew all good things come to an end. But so soon? We were still in the honeymoon phase, dammit! Turns out the “market leading” solution we’d invested our money (and my reputation) in, didn’t actually do what it said on the box. We eventually ended up binning it after desperately trying to get it working. The company we bought it from just shrugged their shoulders when I presented them with a list of 30 or so items that weren’t actually working. The word refund also didn’t exist in their lexicon.

The world needs another app.

And so, driven mostly by anger (imagine software being so bad you decide to build your own competing product) and partly by ego, Quick Consols was born. Without market research, I called my good friend Freddy and asked him how hard it would be to build a thing like this. I mean, how hard could it be, with every Tom, Dick and Harry launching an app? In my mind there was no need to do any market research either. We’d already paid good money for software from a company that had been around for ages. Just imagine we actually sold something that worked?!

And so in the evenings after work we started building our coveted MVP (minimum viable product), aka the bare minimum you can show a potential customer before they throw you out of the boardroom or fall on the floor laughing at your software.

The launch (to the moon).

In 2019, with three guys working from a shared office space, MVP tucked under our arm, we went out to sell. Unbelievably, we closed the very first deal we pitched for. And so with the second. This software gig looked like it was going to be a cakewalk. We’d all be retired by this time next year sipping champagne from our private jets.?

Yeah right! Turns out making the sale was actually the easy part. The work had only really started and we were in for a very long two years. Two things will make or break a software company. Features and service. If you don’t have the features that solve your customer’s problems you don’t have a product worth paying for. And adding features invariably adds bugs which means features don’t work the way they should or create user frustration which is equally dangerous to a fledgling software company. The only way to plug the gap is with exceptional service, jumping through fiery hoops and moving mountains to make the customer happy, no matter the time of day or night, which is now baked into the culture of the company.

We were in a race against time to build out our MVP into a fully fledged product that would meet most of our target customer’s requirements before we ran out of cash. Every time we’d go into a sales pitch and the customer asked about a feature we didn’t have, we’d build it for them. And as days turned into weeks, and weeks turned into months we slowly started pitching for business with a product that seemed to tick, most, if not all of our prospect’s boxes.

Finding (some) success.

The best feeling in the world was the first time a customer moved over from the software that I’d purchased all those years ago. We realised then that we’d pulled off something special, being able to not only compete against, but win business against established players in the market. It took a long time to stop referring to ourselves internally as a startup and the same mental growth is happening again as the business matures.

We also had a major inferiority complex about being able to compete in overseas markets. How could a software company born in South Africa compete against American or European companies? It took a while to understand and accept that we were just as talented and driven as our overseas competitors and they didn’t possess any superpowers.

Frustratingly, we always knew that what got us out the starting blocks wouldn’t get us over the moon. Just as things would settle, we’d have to reinvent ourselves, from lead generation, to marketing, to sales, to development and support. It seemed that every stage in the business requires its own solutions to keep growing without straying too far from our core mission.

Keeping it real and staying humble.

The one mainstay that hasn’t changed is the passion that the team have for the business and the problems we’re helping our customers solve. There’s a deep understanding that the team have between a happy customer and the company’s success. That if we’re not solving a problem for the customer, we don’t have a business.?

At its core, our journey has been about helping financial staff tell the stories in their business through their numbers. Seeing a customer’s expression when they run their reports for the first time in the app or hearing about how much time we’re saving them is the measure of whether we’re on the right track or not. Our customers remain our biggest inspiration and source of research and development.

As Quick Consols celebrates its fifth birthday this month, we are opening up an office in Europe which will mark another milestone for the company as it spreads its wings into other markets in search of opportunities to drive a positive impact in finance departments and the people that work in them.