Billwire

Our decision of choosing VuetifyJs and RubyOnRails helped us. We were able to develop Billwire with all the features we decided, so that any business can onboard and use the web app without any training or support.

We created support videos and linked the same with each screen, as a Plan B, in order to educate the users.

We are a lean team of 4 Co-founders, 2 of them part time. It wont be scalable if we were to provide training to all the customers who are onboarding, so the decisions mentioned above helped us in piloting with 3 customers without much support.

What is Billwire?

At Billwire, our aim is to help businesses convert their Invoices to cash faster, easier and smarter. We achieve this by intelligently automating the customer communications and smarter follow ups. Our platform allows businesses to create customized workflows to track customer payments and take them to closure at the earliest.
How was Billwire conceptualized?

We understand the pain a business has to go through in managing their cashflow. We experienced this firsthand in our roles as Accountants, Salesmen and business owners.

This is when we decided to convert our pain to a painless product that can help businesses collect their cash quicker. We came up with a best practice manual that we had ourselves used to follow up on our customers. One of our co-founders is a chartered accountant who had to set up a very detailed and nerve-wracking follow up mechanism within his organization to make sure his business was not left stranded for want of working capital.

This manual along with best practices is what we automated using our product.
Tech Stack

We built Billwire using RubyOnRails for the Backedn and VuetifyJs for Frontend. Our public-facing website was created using Wix. We plan to use Segment by Twilio for integration with various customer systems to get the invoice when it is generated (looking for serious feedback here). Additionally, we use AI to extract data from invoices and in future, we plan to use it to clear disputes and have conversations with customers over email.
Current Status

At present, we have released an alpha version and are seeking feedback. We are also actively looking to acquire new customers and are in the process of planning to raise funding. If you're interested in trying our product, please visit our website at https://www.billwire.ai/sneakpreview to schedule a demo with us.

While deciding to build MVP, we had few things in mind:

1. Customers should be able to onbaord into Billwire easily.
2. Billwire should grow exponentially, hence we need to have a scalable solution.
3. Customers should realize the outcome and the Value added by Billwire.

In order to achieve these, we carved out features so that we can build a Minimum Usable Product.

Me being a polyglot full stack developer, I was comfortable in more than 3 programming languages and framework. But for the benefit of going to market soon, validate our Idea and iterate over the product, I chose RubyOnRails for Backend and VueJS (VuetifyJS) for the Frontend

Reasons for the decisions:

1. SPA over ServerSide rendered:
   In the very near future, we can clearly have a Frontend and a Backend team.

2. RubyOnRails: This is a framework which is built over the concept of convention over configuration. This reduces the time spent in decision making very much and helps us create a product in very less time. Given the security aspects, ORM, Mailing abilities RoR was a clear winner

3. Vuetify: We weren't very specific on UI/UX from design perspective. We wanted to make sure that users will understand the UI and the UI isn't complicated. In order to fast forward the development we decided to stick with using material design components and Vuetify came in as a component based development framework for us.

One of my friend who is an Accountant, and provides Consulting to Enterprise clients was venting out his frustration saying: how by disciplined follow ups, was able to bring the credit days to 45 days from 180 days and once he left, the team without following what he did let the DSO to go back to 180.

He was very empathetic for so many businesses who cant afford a good Accountant. It was that newton apple moment, that we decided to create a saas product out of it, so as to help businesses bring their DSO down.