Francisco Oliden, the Founder and Director of Agencia Eremo- a communications agency in Argentina, works majorly with non-profit agencies and churches. They offer many services like email marketing, social media marketing, picture and video making, branding, and web designing.
In this interview, we talk about:
How was their work process before Ruttl?
How did they come across Ruttl?
Which feature became their favorite?
What impact did Ruttl have on their business
Creative use cases of Ruttl
A glance into Ruttl’s roadmap
How was their work process before Ruttl?
As Francisco’s company usually works with non-profit institutions and churches, they work on very small budgets. What this means is low margins and to back it up, they need to have higher efficiencies.
Before Ruttl, they used to have their entire feedback process on Google Drive. They used to upload files over there and the team used to comment their feedback. This process got very clunky. Why?
In Francisco’s words:
“The old process was messy. I would leave the feedback and the team would answer on top of that and then I would answer afterwards… A long thread of conversation would result inside Google Doc just for one tiny piece of the website. We had that multiplied a thousand times because there are many things in the website that need feedback.”
All of this resulted in misunderstood feedback and longer project turnarounds.
“It stretched the project from 1 month to 3 months and we used to lose out on a lot of money as the inflation rate is 50-60% yearly and three to four months delay would cut back our margin by 20%”
How did they come across Ruttl?
Francisco found us during our AppSumo launch when members of the AppSumo community were talking about Ruttl in their Facebook group.
That’s when Francesco thought to himself, “It could solve a lot of my problems.” That’s how the team’s journey with Ruttl started.
Which feature became their favorite?
The team loves the commenting feature that allows them to have a small conversation in one single place or pixel on the website.
On top of that, Francesco absolutely likes that he can easily share a picture or attachment in the comment and even have a video recording where he can explain the feedback in depth.
“It’s like having a natural conversation with someone which you couldn’t have on Google docs.”
What impact did Ruttl have on their business?
“It gave me a lot of clarity over what to do next and what is missing and what needs to be done.”
Overall, Ruttl helped save Francesco not only valuable time but money as well. Here’s how:
Earlier they had one Google folder with all the different pages and docs. This used to get multiplied by 5 or more when they were working on a lot of different projects. With Ruttl, they could have everything organized and on one single platform.
Contextual feedback in Ruttl helped reduce errors and confusion. For instance, when the team was making use of Google Drive, sometimes a client would give feedback about the “Contact us” page whereas this feedback was interpreted by the team as the feedback on contact details in the “About us” page.
As there was more visual clarity and less confusion, the entire team could curtail a lot of inefficiencies.
“According to Clockify, without using Ruttl, I was spending two times more, in hours, giving feedback and having meetings. Now I am spending less than half of that time. It’s been a game-changer. I can now spend more time developing new clients, trying to add more services to my business, and looking for more projects.”
Creative ways to make use of Ruttl
Our founder shares some of his creative ideas with Francesco on how to make use of Ruttl. Here are some your design agency can incorporate as well.
For hiring purposes: If you want to hire a UI/UX designer, give an assignment to him using Ruttl. Here’s one example - give access of the landing page to him in Ruttl and ask him to make some changes to it and make it more aesthetically pleasing and interactive.
For sales purposes: As an agency, you can take a potential client’s existing website and make some edits to it in Ruttl and show it to the client with a friendly caption, “This is how your site can look like.” This can become a part of your sales pitch where the client can easily see what you bring to the table.
For team bonding exercises: At Ruttl, people come up with various games that they can play on the platform and bond with each other even when they are miles apart due to the pandemic.
Francisco adds to this list one more creative way agencies like him can make use of Ruttl:
They have a lot of anniversaries with the non-profits they partner with. So, they can create a page inside Ruttl where people can leave comments and wish “Happy Anniversary”. They can even have recordings of those wishes on the platform itself instead of having to use various other mediums for that.
A glance into Ruttl’s roadmap
Some soon-to-come features that users would absolutely love are a part of Ruttl’s roadmap:
Make edits: Without using any CMS, make edits and it would be live on the website.
Edit PDFs: Not just the commenting feature, but you will also be able to edit PDFs.
Video review: You will be able to comment on a video second by second and these comments will come in the form of a timeline.
Francisco's team found Ruttl to be a game-changer for them when it came to reducing inefficiencies and saving valuable money by closing projects faster.
