BEFORE THEY HAD GLOBAL REACH, QWILR’S FOUNDERS HAD TO ‘MURDER’ THEIR ONLINE DOCUMENT STARTUP

Since Qwilr launched in June 2014, co-founders Mark Tanner and Dylan Baskind have raised $2 million in funding for their SaaS web-document builder, which has been used by more than 40,000 businesses, world-wide, to create 200,000 webpages.

The business partners spoke to Dynamic Business about having to ‘change gears’ and ‘murder darlings’ to get to where they are, the value their Sydney-based startup is generating for customers, and why creating art is indistinguishable from building a company.

DB: Can you give an elevator pitch for your startup?

Tanner: File-based documents, such as Word, PowerPoint or PDFs, tend to be pretty ugly and they don’t capture much data, nor do they connect with other software like accountancy, analytics or CRM systems. Qwilr makes it easy to build beautiful webpages that are responsive across devices, have high-calibre security, capture analytics data and connect with the software that powers a business. These webpages, known as Qwilrs, also interact with tools like self-service quoting, forms and data visualisation. It’s the functionality and aesthetic prowess of the web, but for document use-cases like proposals, pitches, brochures and reports. It looks great, but it is also deeply functional. It is easy to use, but it is powerful.

DB: Mark – how did you come to partner with Dylan?

Tanner: Dylan and I have been friends since we were teenagers. I used to go and watch his band, The Winter People, play at gigs across Sydney but when I moved to NYC to work with Google, we lost touch. We reconnected at a mutual friend’s wedding, where Dylan told me about a tool he’d developed to assist him in his career as a freelance developer/designer. Read more

James Harkness - Dynamic Business - 28 July 2017