Joiin, we’re delighted that our growth as a company was recently rewarded with two awards at the FinTech Awards South West for Best Growth Story of the Year (sponsored by Deloitte) and Fintech Exporter of the Year (sponsored by W Legal).

The awards recognise the achievements of the thriving FinTech sector across the UK’s South West, celebrating the fantastic companies making a difference and bringing innovators and digital experts together for an exciting awards evening.

As a fast-growing software-as-a-service company, we pride ourselves on delivering a globally available cloud-based consolidated financial reporting platform. In particular, the Best Growth Story of the Year award – sponsored and presented by industry-giant Deloitte – feels like a prestigious chapter in the unfolding narrative of our success. A recognition of and a testament to how far we’ve come in such a short time with a product-led growth approach at our company’s strategic core.

The Joiin story

We launched our first minimum viable product in 2019 and achieved our first revenue in Q1 2020. Since then, our company has snowballed, with recurring subscription payments increasing dramatically due to the rapid scaling of our business and expansion into crucial new markets.

Along the way, we’ve firmly established our platform in the finance and accounting space as a trusted brand, now boasting over 30,000 plugged-in companies across 103 countries globally. Just 31% of our customers are in the UK, with exports accounting for 69%, including 24% in Australia, 20% US and 4% each in Canada, Singapore and New Zealand.

Our growth strategy is driven by a product-led approach – meaning our entire company comes together to create a product that people want to buy in the first place and then stick with. Our recent awards back up our faith in that approach, which runs through everything we do – from our free trial and focus on continuous customer feedback to how we let our product do the talking. Being product led is our ethos.

What does ‘product-led’ mean for customers?

Firstly, high satisfaction yet lower pricing.

Central to our ethos is delivering a simplified and intuitive platform that removes the need for a costly sales function in our business, enabling us to scale quickly, with minimal sales-related contact, yet maintaining high customer retention and satisfaction rates.

Our current Net Promoter Score (NPS) – a metric to gauge customer loyalty, satisfaction, and enthusiasm with a company – is +56 (the SaaS industry average is +32). Much of this satisfaction comes from our platform being a powerful consolidation tool, first and foremost. However, custom reporting, brandable report packs and real-time dashboard insights provide tremendous added value to our customers at no extra cost.

And because our product essentially sells itself, we’ve realised that we can strip away traditionally accepted and complex pre-sales, sales, and onboarding layers. In a more traditional sales-led business, these multiple layers must be paid for, which would be covered by a higher product price.

Thinking more innovatively, we can operate without these complex layers and therefore offer much lower pricing, making a purchasing decision far more accessible (with fewer overheads to cover in the price).

Secondly, greater involvement in the product.

Our product – the consolidated financial reporting platform we deliver – focuses on making the complex task of consolidated reporting much easier for accountancy advisors and business finance teams. They get a better real-time understanding of group finances, meaning that with our automated platform, they can spend less time on manual consolidations and get more time back to add value to their businesses.

Yet, as an innovative software vendor, we understand that you can never stand still. Our customers’ expectations are constantly changing. It’s no longer about simply providing technology and delivering set benefits but looking constructively at how we can disrupt the market and continuously innovate, all with our customers in mind.

So, last year, we bucked the trend and moved into an office to bring our product team together more effectively in one place, tripling the size of that team and enabling greater collaboration with our loyal customers. The office and subsequent product development roadmap, developed with customer input, have been significant steps in our product-led growth approach.

We can now collaborate better with our customers and implement their product requests more effectively, meaning our platform has only grown in popularity.

Ultimately, if you decide to utilise our Joiin platform, you can expect to play your part in its development by suggesting improvements and enhancements.

And we listen. In total, we have implemented 350+ platform updates based on customer suggestions, appreciating that this collaborative relationship with customers benefits our customers, us and our product. Our mutual gain is a better product, inevitably leading to an improved user experience overall.

And it’s working. The continuous improvements to our platform deliver a 96% subscription renewal rate amongst our existing customers, according to our 2022 customer survey, which points to happy customers and means sustainable growth for us as a business.

Who oversees product updates at Joiin?

Across Joiin, we all work in the firm belief that we’ve created a highly effective solution to multi-entity and multi-currency financial consolidations – a complex challenge faced by accountants and in-house finance teams across the globe who have been yearning for a solution for some time.

Historically, the approach to the complex challenge presented by consolidated reporting has been to create an almost equally complex solution.

However, our product team – led by Joiin directors and co-founders Rob Lucas and Tomek Szpinda (pictured) – has simplified the process to the point where customer onboarding is almost entirely self-service, meaning users can be up and running and creating reports on our platform within minutes.

In our survey, our customers told us they get immediate value from our platform within an average of 7 minutes when onboarding, in the form of running a first off-the-shelf report from within Joiin. While globally, the universal demand for such ease of use means our platform appeals to people everywhere. Only recently, we surpassed the two millionth report run on our platform, demonstrating the value our worldwide customers place on the reporting we provide.

Rob, Tomek, and their team drive the product updates and improvements we make in collaboration with our customers.

One example is enhancements to AP/AR reporting. The improvements we implemented mean our customers can see all outstanding invoices in one view with the ability to drill down in detail, saving accounts receivable teams hours of debt collection work by streamlining the process.

We have a multi-client feature for accountants and advisors so they can easily automate and share reports with clients, including functionality that had been regularly requested by customers and now means their reports are automatically emailed to trusted contacts once created, saving considerable time and hassle with a much-simplified process.

We also launched a dashboard that provides a highly visual one-page financial overview, meaning users can easily stay updated with the metrics that matter most to them.

Customer feedback specifically asked for a dashboard view, and we acted. It was the first result of our outstanding product team coming together in our new office environment to build something exceptional.

That’s a neat summary of ‘the Joiin way’ of doing things.

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