With roughly $50,000 in personal financing and an idea to solve a technical problem, two Greenville men launched ScopeStack, a company that in three years has grown from one user to nearly 1,000.
ScopeStack fast-facts:
- Founded in January 2018 to streamline scoping services for IT companies
- Launched by founders Jon Scott and Andy Vanasse
- Started with $50,000 personal investment from founders
- Employs seven people with plans to add two additional employees this summer
With roughly $50,000 in personal financing and an idea to solve a technical problem, two Greenville men launched ScopeStack, a company that in three years has grown from one user to nearly 1,000.
The problem
Finding a way to streamline the process IT professionals use to define the scope of work needed to come up with a sales proposal, a historically tedious and time-consuming process.
The solution
Using their backgrounds in technology service, ScopeStack co-founders Jon Scott and Andy Vanasse found a way.
Scott says manually pulling information from a variety of platforms once involved cutting and pasting into Word and Excel documents, a cumbersome process that was inefficient.
“That was just driving me crazy,” Scott says. “It was driving me crazy that my team was spending so much time on documentation rather than spending time with the customers.”
Vanasse explains the platform uses innovative technology to allow users like IT engineers to accurately price and scope a project in a fraction of the time the old process required. He adds that users of the platform can now scope a project during their first client meeting, a prospect that was almost impossible to conceive under the previous process. ScopeStack employs an intuitive, user-friendly interface to organize disparate components into a coherent whole. Customers can select from a database of services they offer and easily plug them in based on the needs of the project.
Help from SC Launch Inc.
After the initial, $50,000 investment from Scott and Vanasse, ScopeStack attracted $75,000 in grants from the South Carolina Research Authority (SCRA), for further product development and expansion. The company also received a $250,000 investment from SC Launch Inc., SCRA’s investment affiliate, earlier this year, to expand its operations and workforce..
Both men say SCRA has been an invaluable partner in the company’s success and that the investments have helped them grow to employ seven people with plans to add two more later this summer. Scott adds that they also expect to reach 1,000 users soon.
Vanasse says the company has had strong support from the Greenville community and he looks forward to strong growth in the area’s tech sector.
“I really want to be a part of encouraging the tech community here to grow,” Vanasse says.
