Bizzey
Sell, invoice and organise your work in one place
Managing a business is time consuming, especially when it comes to tracking expenses. That's why we're excited to announce our new fully automated expense management tool in Bizzey.
Our AI is able to extract key elements like vendor name, data of purchase, payment method, total amount spent and even go as far as extracting the category of the expense in seconds, completely eliminating the tedious task of manual data entry.
Through this automation we are now providing an unparalleled level of detail and transparency for tracking and managing your business expenses for the "little guy".
The ability to drill down into particular expenses based on supplier or category are invaluable to gain key insights into your spending habits.
One other benefit of this automation is that we index and classify all your expenses and allow you to view the data in real time, afterwards we sync them to the software of your accountant, further decreasing the manual time spent on providing the documents for your administration to your accountant.
View the full demo on our blog:
https://www.bizzey.com/en/blog/ai-powered-expense-management
With the new years resolution we promised users something big was going to be released and backwards compatible with all the data they already had inside our systems.
We've introduced 3 new billing options aswel as budgeting on the go which allows business owners to have more control on finances and spending habits in general.
Business owners are now able to choose how they would like to bill the end customer.
- Time & Materials
- Fixed Fee
- Non-billable
Both have their pros and cons and one will be picked over the over depending on your business.
As for the budgeting solution we've introduced 2 budget options (extending with more in the future)
- Budget by total costs
- Budget by total hours
We use the budgeting option internally and its super useful to see where the money is being allocated to.
We're big time users of our own platform and we already noticed how these tools "correct" some of the behaviour of spending money on stuff that doesn't move the money needle.
Having it so easily accessible in real time is just the cherry on the cake.
Currently we're collecting feedback from our user base to improve the solution and create solution that really matter.
Hi everyone!
At Bizzey we're all about automation and that also counts for our own work. My previous post about Bizzey was about the stalling word of mouth, resulting in no organic users signing up anymore without paid acquisition.
The product handles 90% of what most businesses need in their day to day actions so I decided to focus on making valuable partnerships that enrich the user experience and essentially sell the product through the partnership.
We're currently doubling down on accountants in Belgium since we automatically sync bookkeeping records to their invoice software. This way we are offering a free solution to them resulting in better working experience for both business owner and accountant.
Accountants are essentially selling Bizzey for me. I handle the onboarding of users and offer a first line of support so the accountant doesn't have too.
Lets see what it brings in a couple of months. Fingers crossed!
It's been a wild few months managing everything from customer support & development to onboarding some users who aren't that tech savy.
People are loving the product, but it seems word of mouth has pretty much stalled, I'm not getting anymore leads through existing customers. I'm thinking of trying to get this word of mouth back by introducing a referral program for users.
I'm also looking into paid acquisition methods like google ads and advertising in general, but competition is fierce.
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Can you use sales or more deliberate methods of finding customers than relying on word-of-mouth? Especially early on, talking to potential new customers one-on-one to try to sell them on your product is not only very persuasive, but also a great way for you to learn important lessons about your customers lives and their opinions of what you're doing.
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I personally talk to every lead as I feel I'm not a stage yet where I feel confident they can navigate through all the different kinds of functionality.
I'm trying to fix this by introducing a knowledge base where users can find whatever they are looking for, get a feel of what the platform is capable off.
This knowledge base is also paired with my customer support software for a first line of support before they get to talk to a real person.
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I believe that being able to engineer viral loops is somewhat of an art. I think the easiest way to get exposure is to make sure your brand is in every piece of outgoing content (emails, pdfs, public-facing pages, etc...).
I don't see anything wrong with a referral program, if you have enough customers, then you should definitely experiment with that. Keep in mind that it can be hard to make it work.
As @csallen mentioned, I wouldn't entirely rely on it though.
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I'm not expecting big wins from the referral program, but I want to integrate it in a way where users get reminded occasionally to share Bizzey. If they share and a user happens to signup they get awarded for that effort.
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Consider landing the first 50 customers in 1-1 chats. This number is enough to get word of mouth going and gives just enough cash to effectively run ads. Can help you hit $36K ARR with your product by nailing user acquisition and marketing, let's connect on Twitter.
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That's a great idea! I haven't though of that yet! I'm going to configure my chat widget to send people a message from the chat widget. So if they want some help I'm there at their fingertips!
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Very cool! Congrats on getting some word of mouth even if it's started to stall!
Another thing to think about could be affiliates. It might be a bit early for the product, but it's another great way to have other people do the marketing of your product for you.
P.S. The twitter link on your website is broken - it points to your facebook page. twitter.com/bizzey is a Dutch guy, but I guess it's not you 😅
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Before investing too much in adverts/referrals etc I would try and talk with users a bit more and find out why they are not recommending it.
Have you exhausted your passionate early adopters and now need to develop the product to hit more users?
Is the service not quite pressing their buttons?
Are they struggling to articulate to others the value you provide?
Are they finding it difficult to share practically?There are loads of possible reasons and I would try and find that out and then experiment with solutions before throwing too much cash at the problem.
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Hi Phil
I talked to some of them personally and they told me it pushes most of their needs from a business perspective. I asked them if they would recommend it to their colleagues and they said definitely but it's just a subject that is not often talked about.
"What invoicing solution do you use?"
"What do you use to manage your business"These questions are mostly asked at the start of a business and once you are happy with the product you are using it for the long term.
That's why I would like to remind them to share and benefit from the sharing.
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Ah that is a challenge!
My 2 cents on that:
Your referral program would need to be really strong to get this to work. People will know it is hard to move people off their existing process so for it to be worth their time needs to be of high value to them. One way around that may be to centre the referral process around a pain point you deal with better than anyone else. Sort of "you found that easy but anyone using [competitor] is struggling with that, why not refer us to them and get X months free" or something along those lines.
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Something that we started at Notik is to provide free 1 on 1 coaching to product managers. They get better and that in turn makes them want to talk more about us. Maybe you can create something which they can talk about on a regular basis outside of the fixed feature set of your app? Maybe a newsletter or tips etc.
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What's a feature you could add to your product that people could not NOT talk about?
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Oh that's a good one! I've recently added recurring expenses. It's also one of the features requested the most by users.
I already supported recurring invoices which gives you financial forecasting of your revenue as a business owner. I'm now complementing this with recurring expenses which gives you a broad view of everything going in and out of your business.
It's one of those features you think hey why would I need that until you use it. You segment those expenses and get a birds-eye view of your biggest expenses.
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Competition is fierce, but 100 active users shows that you've got something!
If you do go the advertising route, those 100 users should give you a good profile of their pain points, commonalities, what they were using before, why they use Bizzey and where they hang out - which will make it much easier to target your advertising along similar lines. Speak to your customers and use what you learn!
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Ask your clients and users if they would recommend your product to their friends.
I took at look at your product, it's an invoicing administration tool and it's pretty cool. There are plenty of applications like yours, and as someone who freelances I'm hesitant to spend money on a product like this. Frankly, I create invoices via PayPal or I just use a free invoice generator from a Google search.
That doesn't mean your product is necessarily face headwinds. It's already at 1K+ so there is definitely a market. But I think you should ask prospects how they do their invoices and anticipate their objections.
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Hi th3marine thanks for the feedback! I agree that my product targets a specific user. A freelancer that only creates 1 invoice a month (and only needs invoicing) won't really benefit from this product unless you really want to track your business from A to Z.
Besides invoicing it does way more than that:
- Forecasts revenue
- Forecasts expenses
- Time tracking with automatic invoicing
- Automatically calculate your transportation costs and bill them
- Online payments (Stripe, Mollie, Paypal)
- Build contracts
- ...
Cheers!
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After a lot of processing of user feedback and improving the product to handle different workflows for different kind of businesses, Bizzey finally reached the 100 active users mark.
I'm blown away by the positive feedback from the users which energizes me more to keep this thing running.
After working through a number of beta tests and iterations specifically with freelancers, I've finally launched Bizzey to a broader audience.
People are signing up without me needing to advertise it besides word of mouth of my beta users.
As for development I'm running everything on heroku so I can focus mainly on development of Bizzey.
2 Comments
Am wondering how it compares to MYOBcapture ? Does it do anything additional?
https://www.myob.com/nz/myob-apps/myob-capture
MYOBcapture is widely used and been around for while now.
There are others but MYOBcapture has one of the better AI (before the AI hype) so handled faded receipts /crumbled + flatten receipts well. (common scenarios for tradies)
I haven't heard of myob.com, but it looks like its a similar solution to what I'm building with the focus specifically on invoicing.
I keep extending the features of Bizzey with additional stuff you would need in your business but wouldn't necessarily go for a completely different subscription.
Bizzey is now able to create invoices, manage expenses, keep your documents organised, digitally sign your documents, manage your calendar events from outside of your favorite calendar.
Upcoming features are:
Social Media management, Helpdesk, ...
I want Bizzey to become a one stop shop for all your business needs in a single subscription.