Introducing Quoter
We’ve changed our name – Socket is now Quoter.
A little background
While Socket was originally created about 7 years ago, it took a backseat in our former software development company while we focused on client work in order to pay the bills. As the story usually goes for service-provider-turned-product-companies, we had always planned to taper down our client work and focus solely on Socket; it just took us a few more years than we anticipated.
One such client project involved the development of IT Glue, which led our team on a five year detour in the journey to becoming a product company. We developed the IT Glue software from the ground up and helped scale up an internal engineering team to eventually take over what we had built. IT Glue saw incredibly rapid growth, going from an initial concept to over 5000 partners and 100 employees in just five years.
It was through our adventure with IT Glue that we learned more about the Managed Service Provider (MSP) industry and the lack of innovation in the sales quoting space. The only MSP-focused quoting tools are overly complicated, archaic, and expensive, making for a great opportunity to reposition Socket as a modern, cloud-based alternative that is faster, simpler, and significantly less expensive.
About two years ago, we started tapering down our client work and began pivoting Socket toward the MSP market, building the features and integrations necessary to make our quoting software a viable option. Fast forward to 2018, IT Glue was sold to Kaseya and we wrapped up our work with the engineering team so we could go all-in on Socket.
Working with IT Glue founder Chris Day for a number of years and witnessing his visionary leadership and reputation in the MSP industry, it was an obvious decision to partner with his next venture, Top Down Ventures, when given the opportunity.
As such, we’re thrilled to officially announce a partnership and investment from Top Down. We’re confident their team-based investment approach and collaborative strategy will help us propel our product and company to the next level.
Why Quoter?
We realized that we needed a new identity that better reflected our vision and the problem we’re solving:
In talking to thousands of MSPs, we’ve learned that most companies have a single employee within the organization who owns the quoting process – the designated “quoter”.
The reason is typically twofold:
- Software complexity – the incumbent solutions are clunky and difficult to use. Training multiple team members on how to use the software without creating more problems than it’s worth is simply not feasible.
- Outrageous per-user pricing heavily discourages full adoption of the software across the company.
We decided to solve this problem once and for all by taking a different approach with Quoter.
- We believe that quoting should be painless.
- We believe that everyone in your company should be capable of creating quotes, so you can turn every customer touchpoint into an opportunity to sell more.
- We believe that integration should be seamless and just work.
- We believe that expensive, per-user pricing should go the way of the dinosaur.
Everything about Quoter is geared toward this vision. For example, one of the first things you’ll notice is that all of our standard pricing plans include unlimited users. This is just the beginning of our commitment to helping MSPs supercharge their revenues.
Finally, we wanted a name that was simple, memorable, and gave instant recognition of the service we provide.
The name change is the first of many exciting changes we have in store. Our product will continue to evolve at a rapid pace with innovative new features geared toward empowering MSPs to generate more revenue.
Thank you to all of our partners for your support. We have lots of work to do, but we couldn’t be more excited for the journey ahead.