Victor case study
2015
Viewrail makes custom floating stairs and railing and sells them entirely online. There is no showroom. The quote is the store.
When I joined, the company did about $2M a year with five people selling. A quote was a pencil sketch on graph paper, faxed or emailed, redrawn from scratch for every change, then re-keyed by hand into order entry.
The founders wanted software instead of paper. They found me on Elance.
What I built
A quoting engine that let a customer, or a rep on the phone with one, design a railing or stair in the browser and watch the price and parts list follow the drawing.
- Live pricing and parts lists
- Generated blueprints and installation directions
- Real-time 3D of the design as it takes shape
- Customer sign-off straight into payment and order management — no re-keying
- From 2017: structural-steel costing for the FLIGHT floating-stair line, straight from the drawing
Eight and a half years. 100+ shipped versions.
What kept it stable
A stair is a construction purchase. Customers save a quote and come back to it months later, and by then the product rules, the prices and the data model have all moved.
A migration chain of paired upgraders and downgraders, eventually 100+ deep, walked any hibernating estimate forward the moment it was opened.
Zero stranded estimates in eight and a half years.
2023
By the time I left, Viewrail was past $100M a year with more than 100 reps, and every one of them sold through this system.
The growth is theirs. The quoting engine was mine to build and run, and it was the only way anything got sold.