How did you guys come up for the idea for Tallyfy?
I spent over 10 years in the city of London doing collaboration and process improvement projects for large companies like the BBC, Bank of England, Vodafone etc. There I observed that routine business processes were being done through emails, documents, Excel and Word files; it was impossible to track the status of something at any given time. Critical routine processes often suffered from errors, inconsistencies and delays – having a direct impact on the brand. It needed a better way. So we came up with Tallyfy – a simple and intuitive solution that enables people to execute, track and collaborate on processes and would help companies ensure accuracy, consistency and efficiency.
How did you make the leap from Corporate to Entrepreneur?
Tallyfy blossomed into something real when it was funded, not just once, but twice, by 2 grant programs, both of which are extremely difficult to get. Within two years we won both StartupChile & Arch Grants, of which there’s a 1% chance of winning a grant from any one of these programs. So winning both was enough proof to us that there’s definitely something huge here and were not the only ones seeing it, other people see it too.
Tell us about how you acquired your first customer.
Within two weeks of arriving in St. Louis, Arch Grants introduced us to Emerson. Upon meeting them we simply presented the tool. We are not salespeople; we didn’t make any pitch. We just said here is the premise and to our amazement they said ‘We see value in this and we’d like to try it’. We won them as a customer, which was a very strong validation here in St. Louis from a Fortune 200 company. They are currently live, using Tallyfy to run their IT processes.
Did you go in specifically thinking that you were going to win the IT process problem?
So Emerson is using Tallyfy for IT processes and we know that all Fortune 500 companies have an IT department that needs it for the same purpose, but it seems every person we talk to has a different process problem. Which is fine because we built a platform that works for any process. So, our strategy for the last year has been to keep the door wide open. We simply put it out there and the market decided, ‘I will pay this much for this problem’. (As time has gone on we’ve seen patterns in our customers, e.g. Nestle Purina who’s our second customer is using it to track important sales processes and this certainly is something that all heads of sales managers would like to have.) Tallyfy can bring benefit to any collaborative process that is currently done manually by email, Excel and documents.
What’s your ideal customer look like?
Small-medium size companies who never had processes before now they realize they need to have them and they do not want to rely on the IT department to configure it. That’s a perfect fit for us. They have no other tools and they are looking for people to build, share, run, track, measure and improve the process all in one place, we can do all of that – without any help from IT.
Why is Tallyfy worth it?
People often think, ‘Why do I need a process management tool? I’m coping fine with email, spreadsheets and documents’. We find that people are simply not aware of some of the shocking findings surrounding routine work. In our research, we found that 30% of all your working time is wasted on tracking routine business processes. Tallyfy can cut this.
Let’s say an employee that does many routine processes wage is $100,000 per annum. If we take 30% of the average time that’s being wasted fighting email and tracking routine processes and doing wasteful meetings just to catch up on ‘Hey, where are you on this?’, that’s $30,000 from their total salary if we extrapolate time they work.
Tallyfy costs an average $49 per user per month. That is $600/year. So you pay $600 to save $30,000.
Why should a company act now?
Yes, we can save you time and money, but we can also offer you a strong competitive advantage through productivity and efficiency. There are certain sectors of businesses where there is not much differentiating one business from the other, so improved efficiency and providing visibility by involving clients in a bit of the processes is a competitive advantage for you. It’s not just about you becoming faster, it’s about you being better than your competitors.
There’s three levels to this:
- Compliance – Are you sure that important processes are in place and are being followed, accurately and consistently? Are there steps in place to prevent errors and delays and handle problems?
- Productivity and Efficiency – Are you okay with wasting 30% of each person’s time per annum which may cost you up to $20,000 (per person)?
- Competitive Advantage – Are you able to even have a USP (unique selling proposition) in what you do?
What if a company is using something else right now (like Basecamp, Asana, Citrix, etc.)? What’s your answer to that?
So let’s put all these apps you’re talking about in 3 buckets.
- The first bucket is to-do apps, just simple individual productivity tools. Examples of these are Todoist, Wonderlist, Evernote etc. They’re great for reminding yourself to buy milk tomorrow and do this project by next Thursday. But they have no or very light collaboration features. They are for individuals, not for 1,000 people.
- The second is project management tools like Basecamp, Trello, Mavenlink and so forth. Projects are not processes. Projects have a start date and an end date and often they are unique. They’re not designed for repetitiveness.
- The third is Business Process Management (BPM) platforms, which were created 20 years ago and only IT people can use these because you actually have to write code to implement it. It creates a big complex flow chart showing people what the process is and was designed for production lines back in the 1920’s, not for the modern worker who needs to collaborate.
So how does Tallyfy become ingrained in daily work activity?
So you can have the world’s most beautiful elaborate and expensive and amazing processes. You can write them up and say to your 500 employees: “Hey everybody follow this process,” but the next morning people are going to wake up and forget all about it and just keep doing it the way they used to.
They key is integration into tools you already use, things you’re familiar with. From a product point of view we’re going to integrate with every app that people already use, things like Dropbox or Salesforce. Things you are already comfortable using. We’ve already seen dramatic success with our customers so far and we’ve got a lot more coming.
Since every startup needs a customer, check out Tallyfy for your company
