CRM solution for agencies and freelancers
About Clientjoy
Yash: With Clientjoy, we are trying to help agencies and freelancers manage their clients and grow their businesses. We used to be an IT and tech agency where we built SaaS products, FinTech products, and eCommerce platforms for our clients. And we scaled that from a two-person team to a 55 people team.
We started facing some challenges in terms of scaling, and so we reached out to our agency friends and figured out that there is an inherent problem in terms of the way that agencies and clients work together. And to solve that problem, we said we’ll stop our agency operations and start building our own SaaS product.
Clientjoy use cases
Yash: Basically, if an agency or a freelancer currently is working on any project, the way that their journey works primarily starts from, you know, using some sales CRM, like Pipedrive or HubSpot or something like that, to manage the leads that they acquire.
And then that kind of s followed by using, you know, Google Docs or PandaDoc for sending across their quotes or proposals, or estimates or contracts, which is then followed by using some project management system like Asana or Trello, along with their communication systems like Slack, or something like that.
And then, once the project is over, they have to use some ticketing system. Then an invoicing system like QuickBooks. So they have to get all the payments that they receive manually. This journey, from start to finish, like from the time they have a lead to the time they’re able to receive their first payment, they’re using five or six different software.
So they don’t have any visibility on which projects are profitable and which clients are working out well for them. They don’t know what their bottlenecks are or what their growth enablers are. Even smaller agencies, like two or three people, have to do manual reconciliation of whether work was paid for or not and whether these reimbursements were cleared or not.
We want all of those things to happen in one single place. So that’s primarily what Clientjoy offers.
Different types of software
Yash: A horizontal software is basically software that serves a particular department across different industries. A general-purpose CRM is horizontal software. If you look at something like Pipedrive, it can be used by sales teams across different industries, they could be used by companies in healthcare, universities, agencies, and construction companies.
They are basically solving a problem for a particular department across the industries. We firmly believe that horizontal software will not be good enough, and what companies need is vertical software – software that solves multiple departments in one particular industry. That’s what Clientjoy does. We are building software that all departments in one industry can use.
If you’re doing your sales, invoicing, accounting, proposals, and payments, all of those things, for freelancers and agencies as an industry, happen on Clientjoy.”
Yash: This does not say that our CRM is better than Pipedrive, our proposal engine is better than PandaDoc, or our invoicing is better than Quickbooks. What it goes on to say is that for the freelancer and the agency use case, what Clientjoy offers, is much more specific to what those requirements are.
So instead of offering 150 things as a sales CRM, we only offer 50, those 50 are specific for agencies and freelancers. So it’s easier for them to sign up and to start understanding the software, and at the same time, it’s more cost-effective for them.”
What is the price for Clientjoy?
Yash: What we want to do is, is we realize how difficult it is for agencies and freelancers to start their businesses, right? So you typically start as one person trying to acquire clients and trying to build your ideal client persona. Then, figure out your sales, what your pricing will be, what offers you make, and so on.
And so, in the early stage, you don’t want to burden yourself when you are a freelancer and a single person. And so what we are saying is, up until the point of time where you have three clients, client drive is completely free, right? So, you can use Clientjoy for free for as long as you want.
Um, up until the time you have three clients. And so once you have achieved that milestone of having three concurrent clients, um, then, um, it’s, it’s assumed by us that, that you have some hold on, on what your pricing is, what you’re offering is, what your sales pipeline looks like, what are the kind of clients that you’re targeting, and so on and so forth. And then you could start charging.
So it’s free forever for one person & up to three clients.
Clientjoy cost
Starts at $39 for three users per month, which is basically like an hourly rate of a good photographer or a good Android engineer, right? So if one person’s one hour is equal to Clientjoy for a month for three people across sales proposals, all of those things put together, and managing your clients, having a custom domain, custom branding. If you go annually, however, then we offer you two months off, and then on top of it, we also offer you a dedicated account manager.
So if you go annual, whatever system you’ve been using, whether it is spreadsheets or two or three different software, we will migrate all of your data from whatever it was that you were using to Clientjoy. So you have access to all your data, everything set up, your templates are created, your currencies are added, your tax rates are added, your clients are added, leaves are added, and then you can start from the day.
Right. And so, that’s primarily the pricing we have free forever for up to three clients. After three clients, you pay $39 for three users, and everything is unlimited. And if you go annually, we’ll also have a dedicated account manager with free migration.
How big is your team?
Yash: We are about 24 people now. About seven of them are in the growth team, so those are the people who help us build and manage our website, our content across social media, blogs, our resources, and so on. Then about ten people are in engineering, they work on the product. And then a couple of people in UI/UX and product management, and one person to help us make sure that we are legal and compliant.
Have you raised any funds?
Yash: We’ve raised capital, but it’s a very small ground. We raised about $800,000 in equity financing from a small VC in India. We will be raising more rounds of equity financing. I have a co-founder who is also my wife. We are both partners in the firm as well as life partners. And so she actually looks after our product and, and tech.
She’s a computer science education major. She used to lead our take aspect for the agency and now looks after the product for Clientjoy. I look after everything else that is not the product, you know, strategy, marketing team, or all of that. S it’s just the both of us trying to grow this company.
Advice for people that want to start a business with their partner
Yash: The number one is to make sure that if you’re starting a business with your life partner, it is that have very, very clear. A distinction of your job rules, so what are the things you are supposed to work on, and what are they supposed to work on? And feel free to advise each other on the job and how that could have been done better.
But ultimately, respect the other person’s call. So if they’ve made a decision, even if that goes against what you would have done, you’ve got to respect it because that’s their job role. And expect the same for your job role as well, okay? So that’s number one.
Number two is, you know, I think that starting a business with your life partner is a great thing. Because, you know, when I’m down or when she’s, and we are not feeling okay, we are a little demotivated, or something bad has happened, and it will eventually happen, we are always there to support each other. And when we support each other, we know that the other person is not just saying.
Not just saying it for the sake of saying it, we know that they realize the challenges that we face and the uphill climb that we have in, in front of us and that they will be there to help us solve and fix those challenges. Right. And so, that’s the great thing about starting a business with your partner. You have to learn to let go and set up some rules, it’s a discipline. It’s easier to go to the other one and say – oh no, you got this wrong, I could have done it better, and things like that.
Resources that may help you
We see ourselves as a group of people who are trying to help agencies and freelancers grow their businesses and manage their clients. So I just wanted to share with you that we run this Universe campaign, and if people are reading this, go to Clientjoy slash Universe. We’ve published more than 15 resources to help agencies and freelancers grow businesses and manage clients.
Also, we’ve published resources like 150 plus co-templates, 300 plus Excel sheet templates, and 700 plus presentation templates. We’ve got 1500 plus social media influencers for 20 plus social media templates and ideas and stuff like that. And all of it’s completely free. So everyone can grab, use, copy, distribute, whatever. So that’s, that’s one of the ways we try to help.
Connect with Yash:
Clientjoy: clientjoy.io
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/yashparallel
