Using data to empower Small Business.
Post-pandemic small business was hurting. Hurting from opaque loans, hurting from forced closure and riddled with debt. While the government and financial institutions had their hand forced to provide support, the biggest reoccurring issue for Small Business was transparency. How can you get help when no-one can see your data. How can you help yourself if you can’t understand your own data?
Quota started in this environment, and found itself, two years later, in a whirlwind of MCP and AI solutions. What Quota got right was the concept of finding the ‘Single Point of Truth’ in a small business, a franchise or a multi-layered corporation - and exposing it in a way that was easy to understand, easy to action and easy to share.
Know your problem.
Small business has a big problem. They’re high risk. They’re so high risk that the majority fail within five years of incorporation. The reason that the majority of small businesses fail is complex. Some simply fail because their owner isn’t good at business. Some fail because the market rejects their offering. But if you have a business that is viable - and you have some business acumen then your biggest risks are - making bad decisions and a lack of access to capital.
Most business owners make bad decisions, not because they don’t seek out good advice - but because they don’t have the right numbers in front of them to make a good decision.
Most business owners lack access to capital because, as a whole, small business is high risk. For a bank or lender, the general risk is often not worth engaging with. For a viable business, they lack the ability to de-risk themselves from their contemporaries. Risk is a numbers game, and the house always wins.
Quota was founded to resolve that weighted bet, and it resolves it through providing small business owners with SPOT - a single point of truth in their business data, that can be verified by banks and lenders and underwritten by accountancy professionals.
Accountancy professionals are uniquely placed to validate small business data. They’re also uniquely trusted by banks and lenders. Accountancy professionals are also in a race to the bottom - stagnant pricing and the threat of AI is undermining their business models, and their only respite is to move up the value chain towards offering services that mom and pop bookkeepers cannot offer.
So the problem space Quota found itself in is rather unique and multi-sided. It served the small business owner, it served the lender. But it also served the accountancy professional. And it is the accountancy professional who ultimately drove Quota - in both its legitimacy and reach - to the small business owner and the lender.
Quota is a heavy data product. It’s also a finance product. It’s a product where precision wins and errors can cause real life pain. It relies on complex data connectivity with dynamic ledgers and bank APIs, and it requires incredibly deep categorization models to provide the insights required by those making large capital decisions.
In short, Quota is Bloomberg Terminal for SMB. But it’s a Bloomberg terminal simultaneously used by a highly qualified accountancy professional and a business owner with a financial knowledge largely limited to ‘number go up’.
Build simple even when it’s complex.
Quota allows Accountancy professionals to quickly onboard businesses through automatic connections to QBO and Xero. From there, Quota automatically maps the history of the company using a proprietary codec called QCS. QCS is a complex beast of a codec that required very stringent information architecture. That architecture then is able to generate a parser logic, which can be leveraged by AI query engines.
This complexity is hidden in Quota - the categorization, the logic paths - to generate a smooth onboarding experience where the Accountancy professional is able to input, connect, sync and categorize any small business in under four minutes. Quota is also able to handle interdependency between types of businesses, industries and connected businesses, such as franchises and groups of companies.
This means for the Accountancy professional, businesses can be compared, reports generated and up-market advice created at-a-glance. However the big win for most Accountancy types is the way which, thanks to the QCS codec, any business on the platform is instantly compiled. A compilation in most industries is the financial standard for investment of any type, and for most Accountants, a compilation is (a) time consuming to produce (b) has very slim margins and (c) is immediately out of date at the point on compilation. Quota provides real time compilations for every connected business.
The driver UX is also critical in terms of usability and trust. Can they operate this bus safely? Is the screen a distraction? How do they reboot a Smartbus? How do they answer passenger questions? What does their uniform look like? How do they deal with platform bugs? What happens if the payment system fails? How do they communicate a problem? How do they change shift? Where do they pee?
The bus controller ‘Boss View’ UX isn’t critical, but at scale it’s hugely important. Where are my buses? Are all my drivers on the road working? How can I contact my drivers? Are my buses bunching up? How bad is the traffic? Should I reroute a bus to avoid traffic queues? Who needs to go on a break? Has a driver exceeded their legal driving time? Is this route profitable today? How much am I burning in costs?
All of these questions are moot unless someone actually gets on a Smartbus of course. No passengers, no action. This meant using the bus to tell the story externally to potential passengers, making it look accessible, but also making it look trustworthy.
Scale the architecture.
Smaller buses are agile, but they also hold less people. Less people means lower demand routes, and lower profits. We spun up a fleet of six large buses with the goal of making the Smartbus scale.
Higher frequency routes and more passengers means communications and payment UX becomes a critical part of the user onboarding flow. If the bus stops to onboard 10 passengers, to maintain the frequency of the service, the payment transaction process and boarding needs to be completed as quickly as possible. If it takes 10 seconds per passenger, each asking questions about how to pay and what to pay - that’s 100 seconds per bus stop, which totally derails the other buses frequency and schedules. It also annoys passengers being onboarded - and also annoys existing passengers with places to be.
Much like the smaller bus we needed the UX and storytelling to extend to the exterior of the bus - making it look accessible, but also making it look trustworthy. The bigger format of the larger bus allowed us to use large 40” OLED screens to expedite that communication and storytelling. However the time a user has to see these screens is limited - at the bus stop as they board, as it travels by at 50MPH, or if it’s stuck in traffic from the sidewalk. We chose four in-flux screen states that allowed for a consistent narrative - location, payment, user benefits and at-a-glance plain language destination. The left side of the screen remained static, containing the crucial information relating to cost, route and route number.
Our internal UX also got an upgrade. We were able to improve on our Bus to User feedback loops and allow users to interact with the bus platform. With Busmoji we were able to give users a personalised experience - using the Citymapper App, the user chooses their route as they would normally. On boarding the Smartbus, the app signs them a Busmoji. When it’s their stop, the bus reminds them by showing their emoji on the bus screens. Great for drunk passengers - even better if you’re not sure of when to get off or have forgotten the name of your stop.
