Competition & Differentiation

Question 1

Who are your competitors?

Answer 1

• On Client satisfaction: Platforms like Zendesk or Freshdesk
• On Client workload & profitability: KarbonHQ and similar software track billable hours

Question 1

What do you understand better than your competitors?

Answer 1

• On Client satisfaction: Platforms like Zendesk or Freshdesk, built for high-volume, short-term interactions. Accountants need tools that analyse long-term relationships, conversations that span across time, and don’t want to lose email workflow. For this, Combinely works on top of emails, requiring no change in platform or how they interact with clients to provide useful insights tailored for accountants.
• On Client workload & profitability: KarbonHQ and similar software track billable hours, but miss out on the valuable insights within client interactions. Their output is only as good as the input, which is often manual and incomplete, impacting accuracy. Combinely uses client interactions volume and nature to fill in the gaps, helping accountants make better decisions.

Question 2

How did they segment their products? Where does Combinely fit inside this spectrum?

Answer 2

Competitors in the accounting software industry segment their products as:

- Task management / Practice management software
- Data storage software
- CRM / insights software

Combinely focus on CRM / insights software for now

Question 3

Karbon

Answer 3

• 23K daily users / $40 per month per user start
• 80-100M revenue - 5x / 6x valuation
• 2014 founded, US based
• 100M raised (last 2023 10M)

Question 4

Zendesk

Answer 4

• 100,000+ users / $20 per user per month start
• $1.34B 2021 Revenue
• 2017 founded, US based
• > $90M raised
• Acquired private 10.2B 2022

Question 5

freshwork / freshdesk

Answer 5

• $20 per user per month start
• 60,000+ customers for freshdesk
• > $500M raised
• 600M revenue
• IPO 2021 $12B

Question 6

Saleforce

Answer 6

• $31.352B 2023 revenue
• IPO 2004

Question 7

How do you differentiate versus KarbonHQ

Answer 7

• Front streamlines emails workflows for accounting firms, while we are extracting key insights from client interactions to help accounting firms leaders maintain high client satisfaction and work efficiency as they grow.
  
  • We have a different focus and that’s why half of our customers are using Combinely alongside Front.
  • Front is manual and needs full team adoption, whereas Combinely is fully automated and works without complete team buy-in. Front’s setup and training take months; ours takes five minutes.

Question 8

Who do you fear the most?

Answer 8

We are aware of the competition but from our research, none of them delivers a product that customers are enthusiastic about

Question 9

What is a key aspect of your field that most people don’t know about?

Answer 9

Most accountants want to move from standard compliance tasks to advisory roles

Question 10

How do you build a moat?

Answer 10

• Existing competitors: they’d need to discard a lot of their functionality to compete
• New entrants: as we collect more data, the performance of our system will improve

Question 11

How do you differentiate versus Front

Answer 11

• Front streamlines emails workflows for accounting firms, while we are extracting key insights from client interactions to help accounting firms leaders maintain high client satisfaction and work efficiency as they grow.
• We have a different focus and that’s why half of our customers are using Combinely alongside Front.
• Front is manual, and needs full team adoption, whereas Combinely is fully automated and works without complete team buy-in. Front’s setup and training take months; ours takes five minutes.