Tracks is “a lightweight sales pipeline tool for very small businesses – and nothing else. It is designed to be simple to pick up.” Its customer service is focused on helping you as much as it can when you get stuck. Tracks was founded by Gregor McKelvie and Lewis Spearman, who have been joined by Ruth, who manages the website, social media and accounts. Gregor is a developer and takes care of customer support too. Lewis handles design. “We also work with a number of freelancers and people to lend a hand who we are incredibly grateful for.” says Gregor. Gregor, Lewis and Ruth love outdoors, hate commuting and are fond of animals, especially dogs.
“If you think about a company like Salesforce you think large, complicated software, with an ecosystem of developers and partners. You might think world domination.” Gregor says, adding “We are the opposite. I’ve worked with lots of CRMs in the past. As a customer said to me the other day, they all feel so “heavy”. As part of some small business consultancy I was doing 5 years ago, I was using a range of tools to manage a sales pipeline for a client. It wasn’t working so well, so I built a prototype of what a simple sales pipeline tool might be. I showed it to the client and they agreed to start using it. So we grew it from there.”
The first challenge for Tracks is to strike a balance between building a product and marketing a product. The second is knowing what to spend money on. “Ultimately you have a finite resource when bootstrapped and not knowing what to invest in can cripple you.” Gregor tells us. He adds, ‘We believe the CRM adoption and sales pipeline management for very small companies is a good thing. It gives them structure and focus.However, most CRM and sales pipeline software goes unused. We are trying to change that by creating a very simple, elegant and useful sales pipeline tool. It is beautiful because we put much of our effort into design, user experience and customer support. In fact, we put these three things before profits, growth and new features.”
The Excel spreadsheet is the biggest competitor for Tracks. Excel being easy to use, is widely popular. A lot of people also use email for sales pipeline management – again because it’s easy and familiar. On future plans, Gregor tells us that they have a second version of Tracks in beta stage at the moment. He says, “Once this is launched we will be rolling out Google Apps integration, mobile apps, an API and a list of other UX improvements.”
Tracks’s target customers are small agencies, consultants and service based companies. It also has a few architects and IT service providers as customers. The customers are spread across the world.
Please visit http://buildtracks.com/ for more information.