Creating Better Proposals

How Specifi IO’s New Proposal Tool was Built for the CI Channel

- Jeremy Glowacki

 

Specifi IO, a proposal tool with project and business management features, made its U.S. market debut at CEDIA Expo 2023 and won the TechStarter Competition’s Best Startup award. Based in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and released in the UK and Ireland in 2021, Specifi is designed to help AV integrators produce professional proposals and win more business with unique and time-saving features.

Specifi was originally developed in 2017 by Founder and Managing Director Matthew Booth for his AV distribution company’s eCommerce website (Indigo Distribution). The platform allowed Indigo customers to produce professional quotes and installation documents using Indigo’s products. Now, the company is looking to make in-roads into a U.S. custom integration channel with several established proposal software brands. Wanting to learn more about what makes Specifi special, RTT reached out to Booth and Joe Lautner, executive vice president of strategy, formerly of Nortek Security & Control, who is leading Specifi’s U.S. market expansion.

In an hour-long Zoom call triangulating Booth in Ireland, Lautner in the San Francisco Bay Area, and myself in Indiana, we learned a lot about the evolution of the proposal tool — much more than we’ll cover here. To start things off, Booth noted that the product that became Specifi was grounded in his background as an electrician who entered the CI business as an installer and then a distribution company owner with limited brand partnerships in place.