Sqrl (pronounced squirrel) has raised $550,000 in seed funding from investors such as
CincyTech,
Hyde Park Ventures and
Vine Street Ventures. Sqrl addresses the issue of lost time, efficiency and profitability for businesses due to manual information gathering and processing with a request engine that automates and manages routine communication and requests.
The genesis of Sqrl came not from a desire to create the next massive company, but from a pair of accountants who wanted to improve their business. Ryan Watson, Ryan Baker and Craig Baldwin had started their own online accounting firm,
Upsourced Accounting, and were experiencing a problem.
“About a year into the business (late 2012), we finally caught our stride with client acquisition and revenue,” says Watson, CEO of Sqrl. “What we hadn’t nailed, however, was any kind of efficiency and, thus, profitability. We realized the primary culprit was the hours of back and forth e-mails we’d send between our clients requesting, following up on and gathering the documents we needed to perform their accounting work.”
So the team decided to build a solution, initially as an internal tool. After checking in with other accounting firms to see if they had a similar issue and to ask if they had a solution for it, gears started to turn.
“The feedback was overwhelmingly that yes, our fellow accountants did have the same problem, and what’s more, they were all asking to use our solution when we were finished,” Watson says. “At that moment, Sqrl stopped being just an internal tool for our accounting firm and became a broadly applicable product we would ultimately market to the industry.”
From that point, the founders took their idea through the
Over-the-Rhine-based accelerator the
Brandery and continued to refine the solution they created.
“Initially, we’ve been tailoring our message towards small to medium accounting firms and their accounts,” Watson says. “However, among the users that implemented our platform in its first week, more of them were from outside industries (mortgage, legal, digital advertising, insurance) than not. This problem clearly spans the entire professional services segment, and we believe our product is well positioned to those industries.”
Sqrl is now publicly available and free to use, so visit
www.getsqrl.com to give it a try.
By Mike Sarason
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