Here is the back-up story from one of the founders:
“We are small design shop that employs close to 20 people. Instead for working with 2 or 3 big clients monthly, we work with around 30 small clients weekly. We receive tons of new client inquiry emails every day and lion share of it are questions like: where they can see examples of our WordPress work, what are the payment options, do we have a standardized contract, have we done any work for Japanese clients in the past and so on.
We have only one guy working full time on estimates, one guy spending half a day doing phone calls with clients and one more guy working around 2-3 hours daily solving more complex estimates. How we resolve all those emails with limited resources? It’s called automation. When you catch yourself writing the same reply to an email 3rd time in the row for one day, you naturally start thinking about automation.
Early, when I started the shop and still did estimates for work myself, I stored predefined answers to repeating client questions as Notepad files on my desktop: portfolio.txt, payment methods.txt, WP examples.txt and so on. When you get close to 20 files, it becomes hard to browse through the files.
A Gmail Canned Responses was a relief. But, the same problem here. When the number of notes gets close to 20, it’s hard to maintain them in a huge dropdown. Out of nowhere, a friend introduces me to cult following Mac app called Notational Velocity, later forked as nVALT. You need 10 minutes to figure it and after that, you cannot live without it. The problem with Notational Velocity was it’s single user Mac app. So I cannot share notes with the guy I employee to do estimates instead of me, myself I was using 3 different devices at the moment, so we need some app with sync. I read there are hacks for Notational Velocity with Dropbox sync, but as I am designer and not a hacker/developer myself, so I passed that option.
Evernote was too bloated and SimpleNote was okay, but in the sense of speed, it was ages behind speed I get used with Notational Velocity. Se we build our solution in cloud.
App has been in development since 2011 and unfortunately there are no users beside us and a few of our freelance friends. It has a strange UI and people cannot figure how to use it or have they could benefit from it.
We redesigned our landing page to initially target only people like us - designers. But this app could be used by every person and every industry.
A benefit for design or development agency is huge! If you have people working full time on estimates, or just emails (as support staff or so), they cannot work without Voogla in other tab anymore. It’s so useful and addictive.
We asked some of our super busy freelance friends that are using it. They save around 10 hours weekly.
If you still don’t figure and you are interesting how your team could benefit from out, we are happy to give you a free demo and consulting and explain how much you could save yearly. Drop us mail at support@voogla.com
We have 400+ notes in our Voogla account, containing almost every answer to any client question. Also we store there templates for estimates. Last time we checked we have around 40 unique services (i.e. business card, powerpoint presentation, responsive coding,…) and we have template for each of them with estimate and examples of work.
