Quolum in 2022: A Spectacular Update

2022 has been an incredible year at Quolum. From revamping our product suite, to scaling out go-to-market and even having a ton of fun at the end. 

Now we aren’t cool enough to do a Spotify wrapped style wrap up (though we’ve tried!) with the visuals. That said, here’s a roundup of some incredible achievements, the highs, some lows and lessons from what has been a crazy year. The list is long!

Product Evolution in 2022

SaaS Card Launch

In early 2022, our SaaS Card went from beta to release. We built our own ledger to keep track of dollars and cents. We authorize an incoming Visa transaction. A hi-fidelity Spend control for Tech spend than anyone else in the industry. 

Creating a hyper-optimized card for SaaS, which is (a) ring-fenced to select vendors, (b) allows people to block specific merchants and has the most advanced rule engine in the market today was a hell of a challenge, but has outsized rewards. 

Utilization Tracking and SaaS Management

As we approached Q2, we hit a number of new milestones. For one, we finished scaling our product catalog. This meta-data expansion enables discovery of new tools, helps us find duplicates, and creates the basis for a holistic solution connecting tools with spend and ROI. 

We also scaled our usage tracking abilities significantly. Alongside the discovery of apps using Okta, Google IAM, and Microsoft Azure, we also hit a landmark of 100 integrations i.e tools with which we connect very deeply, and provide feature level insights. 

So for Zoom, we analyze users based on how many meetings they host. Whereas for Figma, we analyse this based on how many designs they create or edit. In some cases, this also helps us find accidental users. Detecting that alone saves thousands of dollars, as we saw with Mega Games.

We also made giant technical strides in improving our homegrown iPaaS infrastructure. This allows us to build out custom integrations for high-spend customers in a very short turnaround time. 

All in all, the launch of feature wise Utilization tracking has seen us: 

• Identify over 30% Miro seats unused for a Series D Company 
• Save over 28% in Salesforce costs for a Series E company 
• Identify over half a million dollars of wasted SaaS in a Proof-of-Concept for a Decacorn across just three tools. 

SaaS Buying

At the end of Q2, we also launched a first-of-its kind SaaS buying platform. We quickly realised that services became table stakes. CFOs wanted the rush of instant savings, even if our system was the most efficient long term. They also found it hard to track nuances of SaaS due to rapid growth of new apps and rapid iteration of pricing by SaaS vendors. 

We already had two distinct advantages: (a) utilization data and (b) price benchmarking from our payments module. 

When we added a layer of expertise (a team of buyers who have bought over 2 Billion dollars of software!), and some fantastic tech, the savings were inevitable. 

Along the way, we also streamlined processes with (a) our contracts dashboard that’s the first in the industry to summarize and streamline key terms (b) our automated renewals and reminders engine and (c) our invoice to contract mapping. 

FinOps 

Here’s the back office stuff that no one wants to know, but is crucial for success of a company. Financial operations. 

We spent much of the second half of the year building these features. This includes tagging of GL codes to better track expenses downstream. We also automatically aggregate all invoices and receipts. These are automatically tagged to any spend and available for preview and bulk download.

We’ve only just scratched the surface here, and there is a lot more coming from a budgeting, forecasting and workflow perspective but you can read that in our sneak peek to the roadmap below!

That said, if you really want to drill down into these features, and put your SaaS Savings on autopilot, talk to a savings expert today.   

Team 

Launch of Go To Market

We started the year by coming out of beta (Sales and Marketing), and formally launching our sales motion in January of this year. As we scaled outreach, we kept modifying our value proposition and started to convert prospects. The rapid product changes made the messaging evolve equally quick.

As the product evolved, we also saw some real innovation on the pricing front. From starting with pricing linked to total spend managed, to moving onto a tiered-subscription model, and even experimenting with outcome-based pricing, we’ve been testing the waters significantly. 

Most of our early experiments told us one thing, and one thing alone. Our fees were too low, and were not proportionate to the value we offered. 

But as we had more interactions with finance, IT and procurement leaders we started having greater clarity on this front. 

Expansion 

In anticipation of the customer growth we expanded the team across Growth, Sales, Customer Success, and Procurement. That’s not to say that we didn’t grow too fast at times, but those were good problems to have. 

We also scaled our Product, Design and Engineering teams. These became particularly crucial as we soon started getting a large amount of useful customer feedback.  

We will continue to expand in Q1/Q2 of 2023. Our customer-facing headcount will grow significantly (Marketing, Sales). We also have a number of product and engineering roles which are opening up soon. 

If you consider yourself to be in the top 1% of sales talent, write in to Joyson and keep an eye out on the open roles. The Quolum Linkedin page continues to feature these (alongside with some amazing memes) so that’s worth keeping an eye on too! 

Campaigns, Awards and Recognition 

Along the way, we ran some pretty amazing campaigns, which won us lots of love, attention and a whole lot more. 

Product Hunt: SaaS Product of the Week

When we launched on ProductHunt in December this year, we were blown away by the responses. We were the SaaS app of the week! We also featured in the amazing Product Hunt Newsletter, and were top of the race for Product of the Day for the longest time before finishing a narrow second. 

Here’s the lovely snippet: 

G2 High Performers

Along the way, our customers also showed us a ton of love. This resulted in us getting the G2 High-Performer badge. Our personal favorite review was all about the product, team and everything else from an incredibly fast-growing company. 

SaaStr Annual

We had a great time at SaaStr annual too. The world’s largest SaaS and cloud conference, SaaStr is where the best in the business come to interact. 

Our booth at SaaStr drew a ton of CFOs, founders, salespeople and just SaaS enthusiasts. But how did we get that? 

Well in part it was due to our dollar-bill campaign. What’s that? Well most companies lose 30% of their SaaS bills on unused seats and bad pricing. What better way to show that, than by visually showing a dollar bill reduced in size by 30% 🙀(we didn’t actually cut it–but tucked that part inside)

Here’s what that looked like:

People who came to the booth were also surprised with a fun game of SaaS trivia. For all the tools people used, they didn’t know the history of that many. That said, we did have over 60 people winning Apple Airtags. 

If you want to attempt questions,we will host a special edition just for you on Zoom! All you have to do is request for this, here.

Whitepaper on SaaS Upsizing

Remember how I told you that over 70% of companies overpay for SaaS. Oh wait, I didn’t. Well turns out they do. 

The worst part? Some of the biggest crimes happen on renewals. 

We analyzed 1000s of contracts, added expertise from people who have bought over 500 million dollars of software, all to get you the best whitepaper on SaaS contracts and how to avoid getting upsized. 

Here’s a sneak peak of the response:

Acting on this advice can save you thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of dollars. You can also download this here. 

Putting our website to sleep 

Yes, you read that right. During International Sleep Week, we put our website to sleep. Why? Because tech has a sleep problem. Remote work made it worse. Add to that the Caffeine, energy drinks, and sprints and it’s a recipe to ruin your health. 

Sleep is the single best way for your body to heal and recover, yet most people, and especially Americans are woefully short on this. 

So we partnered with some incredible brands like Ultrahuman (who build the future of metabolic health) to launch this campaign. For a detailed breakdown, read our blog here.  

Launching the Chief Future Officer Podcast 

As we scaled our Go-To-Market, we also noticed a fairly large white-space. There was very little content for aspiring finance leaders looking for advice to take it to the next level. 

We were privileged to have with us an incredible roster of opening guests in season one of the podcast. While a few episodes are coming soon, you can catch interviews with some amazing guests like: 

• Giridhar Premsingh, CFO, DOIT International 
• Wailun Chan, CFO, Grafana
• Kurtis Hanni, CFO and Prolific Writer with over 120K followers on Twitter
• Malvin Hoxhallari, CFO, Apollo 
• Robert Bendetti, CFO, Life Cycle Engineering

In fact, here’s one of our favorite snippets from the podcast 

If you want to join the podcast, or recommend a guest let us know! Just reach out to any one of us on the team, and we can make it happen 🙂

What to expect in 2023

Product Roadmap 

We are adding a whole lot more to transform the software buying process. Some of these are customer requests like workflows, and automated onboarding. As our systems mature, we are also generating better insights, and more timely recommendations. 

As our catalog and benchmarking data scales, we are also able to do more on that front, and there’s plenty of exciting features coming up. Hit me up and I will secretly share a few.

Follow the Ride 

In 2023, we are adding a lot more fuel to our marketing machinery. We are soon building a massive community for finance leaders, sharing even more incredible content and doing a whole lot more on the educational front. 

You can follow our journey on Twitter or Linkedin. For finance professionals, you can always subscribe to the podcast on your platform of choice. 

But the best way to follow this journey is up close and personal. Get the VIP treatment as we help you navigate tough times with the best and most cost-efficient SaaS buying models. If nothing else, our SaaS savings experts can guide you on best practices, and guide you on your savings journey. You can talk to them here. 

Wish you a fantastic year ahead!