Spotlight: Ray Meiring – Co-Founder & CEO of QorusDocs

Tell us about your personal journey - what brought you to Seattle?

Lee Child, Stephanie Laurent, and I founded QorusDocs in Cape Town South Africa in 2013. Cape Town offers a great lifestyle and access to amazing developers, but we knew we needed to relocate to be closer to our customers who were predominantly in the USA.

In 2014, the founding team toured the US to explore potential locations that met these criteria. After extensive city visits, and tasting craft beer in at least 5 states, Seattle Washington emerged as the best choice. The area offered access to a pool of talented professionals, enabling QorusDocs to build a skilled team to support the company's growth. And as mentioned, Seattle's proximity to our customers was a significant advantage, as it allowed us to better understand and cater to the needs of our target market.

Another crucial factor in selecting Seattle was its proximity to Microsoft Corp. Being located near Microsoft gave us the opportunity to establish relationships with product and engineering teams, fostering collaboration, and ensuring the incorporation of the latest innovations into our software solutions.

And let’s face it, Washington’s natural beauty and vibrant atmosphere added to the appeal of the area for me and the QorusDocs team. The combination of a thriving tech industry, access to talent, customer proximity, and the breathtaking surroundings made Bellevue, just outside Seattle, an ideal choice for QorusDocs to re-establish its headquarters in 2015.

What was the original goal or real-world problem that QorusDocs looked to solve?

Prior to founding QorusDocs, we had established a software consulting business. As we worked closely with our customers, we noticed a consistent challenge in generating repeatable documents like contracts, proposals, and fact sheets.

Also, around that time, Microsoft moved to OpenXML as the format for all MS Office documents. This meant that our users could work directly in MS Office to design their templates and have them generated on a server with high-performance. We saw an exciting opportunity when we addressed our customer’s document generation challenges with the advantages of this modern technology. The founders invested all our savings into building a product that would revolutionize the way documents were generated from templates.

Our initial product offering was overly broad, covering a range of document automation scenarios. Over time we narrowed our focus to documents that have a material impact on the revenue process, particularly proposals, pitches, and RFP (Request for Proposal) responses. These documents are painful to produce, time consuming and error prone. Further, the process around the production of proposals and pitches is often poorly managed.  By 2015 we had evolved our offer from broad document generation to a very focused Proposal Management solution.

We experienced some early success in selling the product to the South African market. Within a year, we began receiving inbound demand from the UK and USA. It was at that point that we realized the potential of our product and made the exciting decision to spin off from our first startup and establish QorusDocs as an independent SaaS (Software as a Service) startup.

How have you found the startup journey?

The startup journey has been an incredible experience for the founding team. I often reflect on the words of Marc Andreesen, quoted by Ben Horowitz in his book "The Hard Thing About Hard Things": The only two emotions in a start-up are euphoria and terror.

I can confidently say that the euphoric moments have far outweighed the challenges. One of the most remarkable aspects of founding and running a startup is the privilege of working with exceptional individuals. We have been fortunate to collaborate with amazing customers who believe in our vision and are willing to take a chance on us in the early days.

The team members who have joined us on this rocket ship journey are another highlight. We have worked tirelessly to deliver on our mission for our customers. The team has ridden waves of both euphoria and terror through these times.  Ultimately the dedication, passion, and resilience of our colleagues have been instrumental in shaping the success of QorusDocs.

What keeps you up at night?

The 2020's have been a crazy time. From COVID, to economic tailwinds to the current economic head winds and a possible near-term recession.

The macro environment places pressure on a growing start-up like QorusDocs. But with the help of WRG we are well funded with a strong strategy that will allow us to continue our inevitable forward motion.

The current economic headwinds are also impacting our customers. They've proverbially "tightened their belts" in recent months. They are under pressure to reduce costs, which often translates to the possibility of downsizing their workforce.

To address these concerns, we have intensified our efforts to support our customers. We have doubled down on our customer success effort to help customers meet their goals and objectives. Our focus has become laser-sharp, and we are concentrating on areas where we know we can excel and achieve success.

What has it been like working with WestRiver Group?

WestRiver Group (WRG) have been incredible partners to QorusDocs. Not only have they provided us with the necessary capital to fuel our business growth, but they have added strategic value to our business.

The support and guidance we have received from WRG on our board has been valuable. Their network, relationships, best practices, and insights have helped us shape our overall strategy, allowing us to navigate challenges and seize exciting growth opportunities. Their contributions have accelerated our success.

What does the future hold for Ray and the QorusDocs team?

We are incredibly excited about the future and the opportunities that technology innovation presents to our customers. Generative AI (Artificial Intelligence) is a revolutionary technology that will completely transform the way we interact, particularly in how it empowers sales and business development teams to create exceptional proposals, pitches, and RFP responses.

With the inclusion of Generative AI, we envision a future where the document creation process becomes significantly streamlined, efficient, and impactful. This technology will allow us to automate and enhance the generation of compelling sales pitches. But we are only just scratching the surface, as over the next few years, we will see new, creative applications of this technology emerge.

QorusDocs is committed to staying at the forefront of innovation that leverages innovative technologies and will play a leading role in shaping the future of AI powered proposal management.