Start-Ups, Networks, and Mindful Spending

AN INTERVIEW WITH THE FOUNDERS OF PROCURIFY

Ali Pitargue

One of the biggest challenges for any entrepreneur concerns the management of costs and funds. You may rely on revenue and investments to build your company, but a huge part of handling income is keeping track of how your company spends.

In response to this, three BCIT graduates—Aman Mann, Eugene Dong, and Kenneth Loi—developed a platform that makes company spending more transparent, efficient, and convenient. They founded Procurify, user-friendly spending management software. It is an online and mobile platform that allows organizations to set budgets, approve spending requests, track shipping of purchases, file invoices, and more.

Can you tell us about the process of founding Procurify?

Eugene Dong It started as a BCIT school project that was assessing an IT consulting company. We saw how they manage their internal spending, and it’s done through paper forms, emails, and phone calls. They were implementing ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems, but they still weren’t able to fully see how they spend their money. After the project, we just started talking to other companies and we realized this was a more universal problem. All these new systems were coming out, but it wasn’t enough. So, we got the idea to start our own platform and went from there.

Kenneth Loi We did something that was very rebellious of us. Normally, after you finish the project, you just write a report. But the three of us decided to actually build something that’s meaningful for the client. So, we put our brains together and just hacked away a very basic version of what’s Procurify today.

What were each of your roles in establishing Procurify?

KL Eugene, Aman [Mann, CEO of Procurify] and I come from different backgrounds. We got grouped randomly by our instructor at that time, and it just so happened that each of us had different strengths that complement each other. Aman has a business background, Eugene comes from a computer science background, and I come from a design and customer experience background. In the beginning, my role dealt with the layout and design of the user interface, as well as testing how the customer tackles the workflow.

ED My role was focused on building the infrastructure and back-end servers. I was translating what Kenneth’s doing into actual layouts that people can use. I make sure that everything talks internally.

KL I haven’t been designing anything since I got out of school. I had to re-learn it. I’m glad that now, we have the proper team of designers and the proper team of engineers who can actually take Procurify from where we left off to where it is today.

ED Aman met with different potential investors.

KL He was the hustler. [laughs]

ED Aman did a lot of talking to customers and market research. He showed what we have developed and designed, and actually tried to get users for it. He reached out to investors to see who is interested in funding this company.

KL He was also a man with no shame. We attended a lot of networking events where we got to pitch in front of small angel investors. One time, Aman did the “Gangnam Style” dance in front of an audience. It was quite frightening, for me anyways [laughs]. But that got the attention of one of our incubators.

What was your strategy to acquire investors to get Procurify off the ground?

ED All three of us were relatively new to startups. So, our strategy was to meet as many people as possible. We met with people who have done this in the past. We even took a flight to San Francisco, where we didn’t know many people. We just started networking to see what it takes to start a successful start-up. From there, we got introduced to an angel investor who wrote us one of the first cheques to fund the company.

KL We were just three kids trying to hack their way in to see if there is a market. We made a lot of calls. Once, we called a tofu company and said, ‘Hey, do you want to try and use this software for free? We’re BCIT students.’ We weren’t students anymore, but we pretended we were just to get different companies to take meetings with us. They gave us feedback on what works and doesn’t work for that product.

Your mission statement says you want to help organizations align their organizational spending with their values and objectives. Can you elaborate on that?

KL At the end of the day, what we want to do is5

help make work life a lot easier for organizations. A lot of hidden pains comes around spending and we realized that gap. We noticed there was a lot of hidden dollars that are just flowing through the company without them realizing it. That affects a business’ core values and objectives because we believe that you don’t necessarily have to add more revenue or do layoffs in order to save money. There are ways to improve your bottom line by managing your spending.

What makes Procurify different from other spending management systems?

ED When we were building it, we wanted to take inspiration from a lot of the consumer applications that we’re using day-to-day. We noticed a lot of the business systems were quite hard to use. It required extra steps that weren’t necessary to accomplish a task. With Procurify, a user can understand pretty easily without much training. And we make it a pretty enjoyable experience,

I think. That kind of sets us apart from other competitors.

KL A lot of corporations still use very old systems. Even when I went to school at BCIT for Operations Management, they taught us how to use the ERP systems, which required a whole 4-month course. Workers in a company shouldn’t have to go through that horrific training process if they need to spend for work. It should be as simple as buying from Amazon or Google. That’s what differentiates us from our competitors. We’re not trying to overblow the system, we want to make something very simple and easy-to-use.

How did your clients respond to you propositioning this feature?

KL Most companies buy us because of UXI (User Experience Interface). The first thing they see with our software is how easy it is. [The software] is something that you can pick up in a couple of minutes, versus a lot of traditional software where you actually have to go through

training. That shouldn’t be the case for today’s technology.

ED Companies should focus on what the company is good at, not the admin work.

How is Procurify an ideal software to use for entrepreneurs?

ED For any entrepreneur that’s growing their company, they have to manage their spending. We facilitate that quite well, so you can proactively know what your team members want to spend their money on, and approve or deny as needed, as well as make comments on requests.

KL As an entrepreneur, [it’s beneficial for] getting funding from your investors. You’ll have an investment board, and they’d want to know how you’re performing in terms of your spend and cash flow. They want to know if you’ll be running out of money any time soon. With Procurify, you are able to track all that, and it provides confidence to investors.

How important is it for companies to identify their spending culture?

KL It’s very important for any company to identify their spend culture because companies shouldn’t just be relying on cutbacks, layoffs, or revenue. They can also achieve positive savings by actually understanding how they spend. Everyone in the company needs to have that mindset of making the best use of the dollar. Spending culture facilitates not only the ability to buy, but it instills trust. You can trust team members to be able to go buy stuff that’s beneficial for the team. It gives confidence to the executive and it gives the autonomy to the team members.

One of the company’s core commitments pertains to sustainability—where you say you constantly challenge destructive and unsustainable business practices. How does Procurify promote sustainability?

ED With most companies we’ve talked to, the still make purchases using paper. They’d send couriers to deliver paper requests across multiple

offices. And that is unsustainable because you’re taking up extra time and money even if it’s a 20-dollar purchase. They probably spent more on the courier service than the actual cost of the product. So, what Procurify does really well is making that all electronic. You can submit a request within seconds and have an approver look at it, which can be done in 90% less time.

KL We once had a client who had a studio stationed in Vancouver, as well as headquarters in the US. The Vancouver office got their purchases approved by having to physically sign a piece of paper and send it through FedEx to the States. Then the request has to make its way back to Canada before they can make that purchase. If you imagine the amount of gas that’s wasted, that’s a big carbon footprint. So, it’s not just reducing less paper and cutting less trees, but actually lessening pollution.

ED At the same time, there’s the added value of a better business process.

KL And less angry employees!

What advice do you have for upcoming entrepreneurs who want to venture into a software start-up?

ED Just talk to people. When we were starting out, most people were pretty receptive to new entrepreneurs wanting to do something different. If you ask someone for a coffee, most likely, they could have some time and say yes. Also, people at speaking events tend to stick around after the conference to talk. Go to as many as you can and get to know the community and learn from them. Be prepared to be rejected a lot. If you’re asking someone for funding, you’re probably going to get rejected quite a few times, but eventually you’ll find someone who’s a good match.

KL Be prepared to fail. Things will screw up, and in the end, it’s about how you’re able to learn, move on and get back up. As an entrepreneur, you’re always going to have ideas, but [be resilient] in how you execute them. Don’t be afraid to try different stuff. That’s how you move forward and grow up. There’s going to be investors that shut you down, but don’t be discouraged.

Procurify announced in June 2019 that they have raised an additional 20 million USD in funding, which includes investor contributions from Runa Capital, HarbourVest Partners, Manulife, and Kensington Capital’s BC Tech Fund. They remain committed to educating businesses about how to manage their spending culture.