I was recently introduced to Revv, a new no-code document-centric platform designed for entrepreneurs and business owners, by my friend and Freshworks’ Director of Analyst Relations, Alan Berkson. Revv’s all-in-one platform provides vetted document templates, workflow, recipient activity tracker, and bank-grade eSignature to help its users manage their businesses more easily.
In my call with Co-Founders Rishi Kulkarni and Sameer Goel, we discussed the genesis of the company and the services that Revv offers.
Laurie: Before we get into more detail about what Revv does, can you give us a little background on yourselves, and why you started the company?
Rishi: I started my first company 10 years ago when I founded 1Click, which was acquired by Freshworks, and then spent the next few years building and selling products at Freshworks. That’s where I met Sameer and we started thinking about venturing into this new product.
Sameer: I worked at a semiconductor startup in the US some 20 years back, and that’s where I first got the bug to start my own business. I’m an engineer by trade, but also have an MBA, and have worked in product and product marketing roles throughout my career with Yahoo, Nokia, and Freshworks.
Laurie: Let’s dig a little deeper on what Revv does, and who you’ve designed it for, and why.
Rishi: Revv is an all-in-one, document-centric platform that provides vetted document templates, workflow, recipient activity tracker, and bank-grade eSignature services. Revv is for both established business owners of professional services, solopreneurs, small businesses, agencies, consultants, freelancers, family businesses across different industries. Our ideal customer uses Microsoft docs or Google Docs for authoring, Gdrive, Box, Dropbox for document storage, and Docusign/digital signatures for closing. Our primary market is the US. But our bottom-up product-led sales attracts users from all over the world.
Revv’s machine intelligence engine underlies this platform, which works similarly to Grammarly. Revv’s machine learning engine provides full visibility into the complexities of a document, pinpoints clauses that deviate from the standard, and extracts data from the document into a standard data format (JSON). This data format combined with our integration with Zapier lets users easily interface with any business application such as Zoho, Salesforce, Slack, and many more.
The result is that users’ documents are organized, shared, and electronically signed in one centralized place.
Sameer: Documents are the heart of any business. Any dollar in or out of the business usually depends on a document. With the pandemic and the digitalization, we wanted to help small businesses replace manual processes and point solutions with a single app.
Revv’s underlying API based integration solves for authoring, storage, integration all in one platform. Every document is human readable and shareable anytime on any device. Thanks to machine learning-driven document extraction, every document is simply a one-click integration into different business apps like CRMs.
Laurie: And how does it work from a user perspective?
Rishi: Our typical user is searching for a document template for a proposal or business plan on Google. They find us on Google, as we have tons of ready to use templates. The first wow moment happens for our users when they find our templates are editable and customizable right in their browsers.
This is a Google search-driven experience. We are also used for shopping for everyday things, but now it’s extended to everyday business documents. Our users can customize one of the hundreds of free templates in the browser through our app.
The second wow moment hits them when they discover the download option has alternatives like free bank-grade eSignature. When the document is finally sealed, it’s automatically transferred to a business app of their preference, e.g. Google Drive, Zoho CRM, Slack messaging. Our users can always use our unlimited storage of the documents as those documents can now be permission-based tagged by our machine learning engine to extract critical information like payment terms, renewal dates. It’s an Apple iPhone moment for our users when it comes to everyday documents.
Laurie: Are there similar solutions in the market, and if so, what differentiates Revv?
Sameer: There are really great solutions for document authoring, document storage, document integration, and document eSignature. Our differentiation is to put them all together in one platform, with one support team to contact with one simple pricing plan. Machine learning tools are not within reach of most businesses, even large companies. Our all-in-one platform is powered by Revv’s machine learning engine which comes included in the platform in the simple pricing plan.
Laurie: I noticed there are two editions, one free and one that people need to buy. Can you explain how these differ?
Rishi: The free plan is for occasional users who create documents on an as-needed basis. They get access to all the power of our platform. But the paid plans also get access to a large quota of digital signatures and workflow management to manage documents with a team. Our paid plan offers a native API for integrations, which allows our users to design custom document-centric processes.
Laurie: You launched Revv just a few months ago, in the midst of COVID-19. What was that experience like? What kinds of challenges–and/or opportunities–has that presented?
Sameer: Businesses are rapidly seizing opportunities created by this weird coronavirus world, a world that is going digital and paperless, a world that doesn’t really want to do anything face-to-face. This is propelling small businesses to digitize more of their interactions around easy to use apps.
Laurie: What’s the learning curve like to use Revv? And how many people are using it now?
Rishi: We have 3000+ active companies using Revv. These users can access and evaluate some of the product features, and upgrade and access restricted features if they need them. Our plan is to create an easy to use platform that helps run business for over 1 million users. We take a bottoms-up product approach to engage owner-operators across industries and focus on increasing adoption by the ease of use of the product. Business document templates are a way to nudge that adoption. We continue to invest in templates aiming to be the largest repository of business templates on the internet.
Laurie: I know it’s only been in the market a few months, but what are you hearing from customers? What do they like? And what are they asking you to do next?
Sameer: We get lots of positive feedback for our all-in-one offering. We get requests for templates for different kinds of documents. We need to offer better pricing for consultants who want to onboard clients on our platform. We don’t support any affiliate programs yet, but that’s another request we get from many. Better integration with their price books and product catalogs is a big focus in our roadmap.
Laurie: Looking ahead, what do you see as the biggest market opportunities and challenges for Revv?
Rishi: Running a business is hard! Entrepreneurs start a business to address a pain point, something that they’ve either seen at close quarters or experienced themselves. Most entrepreneurs are experts in their domain, not necessarily in running business operations, and that’s where Revv can help.
It’s no secret that distributed teams and the gig economy are gaining steam. Many companies have been considering these models for a while now. The coronavirus pandemic just accelerated this for a large portion of them, and made others realize that this distributed workforce model can actually work. With the right communication and collaboration framework in place, businesses can run at the same efficiency as before.
Revv enables this–it supports remote work, enables collaboration, and facilitates compliance. It makes individuals and distributed teams work together and work better, without breaking the bank.
Laurie: How can people learn more and try out the solution?
Sameer: They can visit our website at https://www.revv.so/templates to get an overview. For a more hands-on experience, they can sign up for our completely free version there as well.
© SMB Group, 2020
Source: Laurie McCabe’s Blog