Ep. 173 - AI, RFPs, and the Real Path to Sustainable SaaS Growth

Guest: Ray Meiring, Co-Founder & CEO at QorusDocs

Scaling a SaaS business from consultancy roots to enterprise success requires more than just great tech—it takes ruthless focus, smart go-to-market choices, and a deep understanding of your buyer.

In this episode, Ray Meiring, co-founder and CEO of QorusDocs, joins host Ken Lempit to share the lessons learned on his journey from South Africa to the U.S. market and how QorusDocs carved out a winning niche in AI-powered proposal automation.

We unpack:
 ✅ Why founder-led sales can’t scale—and how to move beyond it
 ✅ The trap of chasing SMBs after funding (and what to do instead)
 ✅ How QorusDocs found product-market fit through one anchor customer
 ✅ What every SaaS CRO and CMO should know about RFP response teams
 ✅ The critical role of marketing in driving pipeline (not just sales)

Ray also shares the moment venture funding pushed them off course—and how doubling down on their ideal customer profile helped them reset, rebuild, and grow more efficiently.

If you're a SaaS CMO or CRO scaling into enterprise, navigating founder-to-function transitions, or wondering where AI really moves the needle, this episode is packed with firsthand insight.

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Transcript

Ken Lempit: Welcome to SaaS backwards, a podcast that helps SaaS CEOs and go-to-market teams, accelerate growth and enhance profitability. Our guest today is second time founder, Ray Meiring, co-founder of QorusDocs, an AI powered proposal management software that automates the creation of personalized pitches, presentations, proposals, and RFP responses.

Ray, welcome to the podcast.

Ray Meiring: Thank you, Ken. I really appreciate being on here today. Great to talk to you.

Ken Lempit: Yeah, I'm excited to run this episode. I think there's gonna be a lot in it for our listeners. But before we get started, could you please tell us a little bit about yourself and your company, QorusDocs.

Ray Meiring: Absolutely. So as you mentioned, my name's Ray Meiring. I'm the CEO and one of three co-founders of, of QorusDocs. Originally from Cape Town South Africa. That's why, you know, kind of a different accents coming through here. moved here to the US in 2015. And QorusDocs is about pitchers proposals and RFPs.

If you've ever had the joy of. You know, responding to an RFP document, you'll know just how time consuming and painful those kinds of documents can be. So we apply AI into that process to help you to produce those documents more efficiently and ultimately to increase your win rate.

Ken Lempit: That's, that's a great proposition and I think use case for AI. I really like the things that get into workflow and labor intensive processes, and we get both of those in RFP response, right?

Ray Meiring: Absolutely.

Ken Lempit: Why, why don't we get right into like the, where this company came from, the founding story. You guys, I guess we're operating as a consultancy and I guess was it like consultant with kit kind of situation?

Ray Meiring: I mean, that's where we started. Yeah. We, we started, we came outta that dotcom era in the early two thousands through some acquisitions that had happened. And at one point, myself and. Two other founders. We were like, we, we decided we can do a lot of this stuff ourselves. And so that's where we started.

We started with consultancy and we were working with a number of the very large companies in South Africa. Right in the beginning it was the birth of dot net. And we had those skill sets and we would go into these big companies and we would, just build what they asked us to, to build through that, through that process.

But we were able to get a pretty decent consultancy business off the ground. It was a great lifestyle business as well. But as we were thinking about scale, we realized, well, consultancy business, if we really wanna scale this thing, that's gonna be very challenging with growing headcount. And how do we get global?

And of course, we were in South Africa at that time, so that's when we had this crazy idea. Hey, let's build a product. This is really gonna scale things for us. And of course we, we made the typical naive mistake of thinking, Hey, we'll build this thing and everyone, we'll put a website up and everyone's just gonna buy it 'cause it's just such cool tech, right?

But we had, we had a lot of lessons to learn as we started moving from consultancy into, into product world.

Ken Lempit: Yeah. So it was sort of a field of dreams approach initially, huh? If you build it, they'll show up, right?

Ray Meiring: If you build it, and you know, to some extent that did actually happen to us in a, in a very serendipitous way. But I mean, that's, that's not how to build a scalable business. We, we certainly know that today,

Ken Lempit: and how did you sort of land on document generation as the, the thing you were gonna build? Because I imagine you had some, some other experience as well in the consulting business.

Ray Meiring: So we looked across this consulting business and we said, you know, maybe amongst 10 customers that we had, where was this, where was there a consistent pain point? We probably narrowed it down to three. We tried one or two, didn't work out, but the document generation piece. It seemed to really be a, a very challenging piece.

I mean, at the time if you wanted to generate a document, you had to do something like run Microsoft Word on a server and automate this process. And it was an absolute nightmare to do that. So we had come up with a pretty novel way of being able to generate documents. And so we said, you know, let's build that thing.

Let's just generate documents for customers. And in the early phases of what we were doing. We were generating any document from contracts to proposals, to reports. We, I think we did an electricity trade example. In one case it was so broad and so wide. But that's where the original idea kind of came from,

Ken Lempit: So definitely understanding your customer, which were professional services firms, right?

Ray Meiring: right.

Ken Lempit: So understanding their needs, their pain points, things that they would quickly recognize as a problem in their business.

Ray Meiring: Yeah, I don't think we had our ICP fully dialed in at that point yet. 'cause we were just trying to build, you know, this very broad thing. But that was definitely part of the journey is figuring out where, where this was best used.

Ken Lempit: So there, there's a kind of a moment in time here when you had some work you were doing with Vodafone, which if, people don't know them, global, global phone company heavily tilted toward mobile like our, like our AT&T uh, probably is a good, or, or Verizon, you know, two good examples of, of who Vodafone might be like.

But, so you had, you had some sales activity with, with Vodafone, and how did that change your product strategy? What, what was the influence there?

Ray Meiring: So what happened there is that we had this generic document generation tool. As I said, it covered a very broad set of use cases and Vodafone were looking for a proposal solution. We were a South African company, they're one of the biggest European telcos. They contacted us through our website. We went across and pitched them and showed them this document generation tool that we had.

You know, they said, well, this is awesome. But we need a couple of things different in this. We want to use it for proposals. We want to use it for RFPs. So we need this to be in the Microsoft Office application. We need this to work with our SharePoint environment. We need three or four special features in this thing. Now we were kind of hungry and, you know, ready to, to do whatever it took. So we worked all the way through kind of the, the Christmas time that year and we built these features into the product. And we won that business with Vodafone and they became like our anchor tenant as we did that.

They, they taught us so much about this, this use case. And that really was a pivotal moment because it changed a few things for us. Firstly, it kind of changed the product and made it very unique and very different to a lot of the other competitors in the market. But the second thing it did is. It helped us to understand where our best use of this very broad document generation tool was because we'd been struggling to sell, you know, this very generic product.

And when we took it into that unique avenue and positioned it for proposals, pitches, and RFPs at Vodafone, and learned from them as an anchor customer, it helped us understand that ICP and it really gave us a target market to now focus on. As we planned on taking this to market more broadly.

Ken Lempit: How did you cement that, that ICP? Because you have one customer, and I'm sure you know, you were thinking, well, is this a thing? Is it a one-off or is it a thing? So how, how did you dig in and verify or validate your ICP.

Ray Meiring: Well, we, we kind of anonymized what we were doing with Vodafone to start, and we started to tell that story to other prospective customers in South Africa that started to resonate. Then we were introduced to this group called the APMP Association for Proposal Management Professionals. It's quite a mouthful.

And you know, I never before thought that there would be an association just for people that write proposals. But this is one of the most amazing associations people go there to learn and get certified on how to write the best RFPs. How to write the best proposals. And the minute we were introduced into that forum, we suddenly realized that there's this whole audience out there

that need software to do this. Exactly the problem we were solving at Vodafone. And that this was a global audience that needed these problems solved, and there were very few competitors in the, that specific market at that time, maybe a handful of them, and we had a differentiated product. it was the conversations with customers and then kind of the introduction into this association that helped us to see, wait, there's a market here, there's a, there's a global market for this.

It's growing. And if we continue to build great products and software and we can market into this audience, we can really grow something. And that's, that's how we validated that ICP.

Ken Lempit: I mean, I think that's really kind of fascinating and I think perhaps a takeaway for listeners to the podcast. I guess maybe there's two sides to this. One is, if your business depends on RFP response, not only might there be technology that could help you, but the person or people driving it could actually be accredited.

Have some skills that are unique to that business problem, right?

Ray Meiring: Absolutely. I think the first time we went to that APMP event, it was in the small kind of hotel lobby in Chicago. And there were maybe a couple hundred people in the room there, maybe you know, three or four vendors presenting. The one we went to in 2025, they took over The Gaylord Opry Hotel in Nashville.

It was just mass of thousands of people through there, hundreds of vendors in the space. So RFP responses are a huge pain companies of specialized teams handling those critical documents and they can get accredited and they can use software to to solve that problem

Ken Lempit: But I bet a lot of scale up guys doing enterprise solutions might not have encountered this yet.

Ray Meiring: Probably.

Ken Lempit: Just to be honest, the first time I've heard of it, I've been around a while. But it's really exciting. I think that's a great, a great kind of takeaway. If you're selling to an enterprise and you're a, a scale up and you haven't done it before, this might be a, a way to better engage these very sophisticated buyers.

Ray Meiring: Definitely. Definitely.

Ken Lempit: So we're still in South Africa at this point.

Ray Meiring: Right, right.

Ken Lempit: We have, we have a desire to sell more globally and into the US. How, how did you recognize that you needed to move from South Africa? What were the, you know, what were the challenges that made it clear that something had to change?

Ray Meiring: Well, we had developed a pretty decent track record in South Africa and then into the UK. The UK was a natural market for us 'cause it was the same time zone. Lot of similarities and crossovers for us. But the Internet's global, right? I mean, you can't stop people contacting you from, from the US, and that's what was happening.

This was a unique product offering, and we were getting a lot of inbound interest coming in from the US and to address that, I mean, this was like in the early 2010s, we were using things like Skype and those kind of things to try and sell. But you know, you, you couldn't, and you still can't beat an in-person presentation.

So we were on airplanes backwards and forwards from South Africa to various parts of the US every six weeks. Myself and one of the other co-founders, we were just basically crossing over, flying across here. We'd also developed a very strong relationship with Microsoft because of the integration that we had into their product, and so we were backwards and forwards on the Microsoft front as well.

So we knew that there was strong demand, particularly in the North American market. We had some customers in the US. But it's incredibly expensive for a South African company to be able to kind of crack into that market. Well, you know, get in here in the US where I'm based now. So the first thing we did is we tried to raise some funding in South Africa, and that was really challenging.

You know, South Africa does not have a VC market like the US does at all. So we were talking to, you know, kind of seed funders, private equity funders, lenders, just trying to raise some, some capital. It took us a long time to actually become successful to do that. But eventually we cracked it. We, we landed a, a what would be a seed funder by US standards, but was actually private equity by South African standards.

They invested in us, gave us our first check, and we could start to hire people in the US to, to address some of the demand that we were seeing there. Overall, though, the demand just got so great that we had to come across here. We just couldn't spend time on airplanes and we needed to fund further.

So myself, I came across in 2015, chose Seattle 'cause of its proximity to Microsoft. Brought our CTO over nine months later. She could develop the relationships with the, the tech community. I could start looking at the sales and the, the funding community.

Ken Lempit: is that an unusual path then? Is it hard for firms from South Africa or other, you know, non-obvious markets to raise the money to get out of their own geography.

Ray Meiring: Very, very challenging. Very, very challenging to, to be able to, to do that. Firstly, it's incredibly difficult to raise a US investor invest in, let's say a South African company. I mean, there's so many options that US investors have to invest locally. Added complexity of coming into a country like South Africa, you know, that, that kind of a, a deal breaker for, for many of them.

And then the investment community in South Africa is just minuscule. It's really, really small. Even in the UK it's much, much smaller and they don't want to invest in South Africa. And, you know, tech startups, they'd invest in, European tech startups or US tech startups. So yeah, it's, it's a challenge raising and, and we bootstrapped most of the time through that period just to try and get there and, you know, keep this thing moving.

Until we could raise some funds.

Ken Lempit: Yeah, because we've had clients who were South African who went to London, you know, it seemed like maybe the same time zone and not quite as far from home, you know.

Ray Meiring: It's true, Ken. I mean, we thought about that. We were like, okay, maybe we build this business in London, but ultimately the US market's the one we want. So why would we take a two step process? It's very disruptive. Let's just try and go straight to where we wanna be and, and land there, which we, which we were successful in doing.

Ken Lempit: Yeah, that's, that's awesome. And later on I wanna talk a little bit about how that's transformed the business, 

Let's talk a little bit about your sales process. So, bootstrapping means you guys were leading. Founders were leading the sales process. How did you move off of founder dependency for sales?

What did that look like and what are the lessons there? That's a real important time, you know, in a SaaS company development, moving off, dependence of the founder for all the revenue generation.

Ray Meiring: I mean, I, I think when I look back on it now, I can see all the mistakes that we made through that process, but it was a, it was an incredibly challenging time to move from the one to the other, as everyone knows when you're founder led. You can kind of lead the product team to match the demand in the market, the specific requirements.

You know, you've got that authority to do that. And while we were still trying to understand ourselves and where we really were gonna be successful, we made a lot of starts and stops in saying, let's hire a sales leader. Let's hire a sales team, and then ask them to sell a largely undefined product into a difficult market. At the time, you know, we thought that was wisdom in, in scaling the business, but for those sales folks, they had to be pioneers. They had to be groundbreakers to actually get that right. They had to form our messaging for us, inform our product strategy. So we had some hit and misses through that, through that process.

And I think what happened, to be quite transparent is that we started founder led, hired up a sales team, moved back to founder led, hired up a sales team, kind of eventually like morphed in and out of this founder led sales kind of approach until we really got confident in our product market fit, everything became clearer and then we could start to scale an actual sales team at that point in time.

But it was a lot of like backwards and forwards there as we try to just figure that difficult piece out.

Ken Lempit: Yeah, you know. 

When the product isn't really right,

Ray Meiring: Yeah,

Ken Lempit: you need a special sales executive to be able to straddle that requirements gathering and selling at the same.

Ray Meiring: Absolutely, yeah. I couldn't agree more with that. And I, I think for us, what was challenging as well was it was the product and then we're, we're South African selling into a US market. There's a cultural difference as well. In the sales approach that we were completely unfamiliar to. When we were doing it ourselves

we had this novelty aspect attached to us where we were kind of different and novel, but the minute you try and scale that through a sales team, it's very difficult to scale and, and we're pushing on levers that are maybe not, you know, as, as common here. And just trying to collaborate that and, and get that right was, was difficult.

Ken Lempit: I mean, it's the key thing though. So, if you look back now, what, what are like the two or three mistakes you wish you didn't make? So maybe somebody could benefit from your experience?

Ray Meiring: Well, I think the first thing we did was we, we hired sales and we said to sales, go build demand. Right? Go build demand, and then close that demand. What we should have done is really taken those funds and invested that more aggressively into the marketing elements of what we did, to have marketing build that demand for us, and then scale sales off the back

of the marketing demand as opposed to the reverse of that. We did do that. We learned that lesson kind of midway through and changed things up around that. But that was definitely the, the number one kind of perspective that we changed. The other hit and miss that we had was trying to work with a channel, right?

Like independent or resellers of the product. And what was challenging with that, was that we didn't know our product well enough, so how could we expect a channel? To really know our product and sell that. And that lesson is until you've really got your own direct sales motion going really, really well.

Don't try and bring a channel into the picture yet. Get that own direct piece working exceptionally well. Then think about scale through channel, but don't reverse that. It's tempting though, right? Because channels can be perceived as a slightly cheaper than a direct model.

Ken Lempit: There is leverage in the channel, but I totally agree. You You have to make it as easy as possible for the channel to, to succeed. And if they have to think too hard, they're gonna sell something else.

Ray Meiring: Exactly right. They're gonna go where the easy money is.

Ken Lempit: Other thing I just wanna point out is I didn't pay you to say you need marketing to build demand for your sales team. This guy, this guy said it here for the first time, but I, but I think it's a really important point that, salespeople can't be expected to carry the whole burden, right? You need to give them leadership across the board.

So it's product training resources for like systems engineering in the complex sale. I mean, there's a lot that goes on in a complex selling situation and in a very large country like the US it's real hard for salespeople to get traction without the help of a marketing leader who helps define the ICP really well and starts prosecuting that definition for the benefit of the salespeople.

Ray Meiring: And I, I couldn't agree more with that, Ken. 'cause it, I think one of the pivotal moments for us was hiring a great marketing leader. Great marketing leader, introduced marketing tech into the company, like tools like HubSpot and semrush and those kind of tools, but then really helped us shape like who's the persona we're going after, where do they hang out?

Like what is important to them? All right, let's start putting materials to them. All right. Now we've got something for the sales team to come in off the back of versus the sales team just trying to basically shoot out into those areas there with absolutely no air coverage to support them.

Ken Lempit: Yeah, that's, that's a great point. So, and thank you. I will send you, I will send you some kind of coupon for that. Let, let's turn our attention to the impact of getting venture money.

I really wanna understand how that influenced and impacted go to market for the company. You mentioned when we did prep that it also affected pricing and targeting and which is an unusual kind of outcome.

Let's talk about that. What, what was the big impact of the funding right around COVID.

Ray Meiring: We had been looking for US VC investment probably from like 2017 'cause we'd kind of burned through the original South African private equity money. We were back to bootstrapped at that point, and we knew we needed more capital funding to scale into the US. We had some good traction, good, good momentum behind us, but we were still a South African company by all intents and purposes.

Although our head office was in the US our company was still in South Africa. So we searched far and wide to find a partner. Lots of pitches. We found an amazing partner in West River Group who invested in us in 2019. Took a real, you know, bet on the South African company and, and helped us to transform as well, to move our kind of primary company to the US.

But then we. It kind of landed on Series A funding, $5 million sitting in the bank. What do we do with this now. At the same time COVID happened, right? 2019 the first tranche came in 2020 April, I think the second tranche of that money came in, and that's right when COVID hit. And it was a confusing time 'cause we had this cash, now we've gotta scale, but everybody's kind of moving out of the office back to home.

Is the world about to implode? We didn't know. So what we, we, we kind of sat around trying to figure things out for a while and then we started to see SaaS just take off, right? Like really in a big way. And we started to hear about peers and competitors who were just like absolutely exploding. And the expectation for us was like, we need. Triple, triple, double, double, whatever it was at the time there, like we need this explosive growth out of you guys. So in thinking through that, we were very much in this enterprise, Vodafone, like companies in the world, and we were thinking, well, how do we, how do we scale this? It's really hard to scale this in the enterprise.

Let's go down market. Right? Let's hire up an army of BDRs and SDRs and pump more money into Google and LinkedIn and Capterra and G2 and those areas there. Hire this BDR SDR team and start just blasting out into the market. Come up with pricing strategies that fit the SMB change, change the actual product to support that market there.

That's, that's our path to scale and growth. Well, that was wrong. That's not the way to do it. That's not the way to do it. And we had, you know, we had some growth, there was some good growth in the early stages as we did that, which was almost like a false positive to us. It gave us false confidence in this process. But it just wasn't the right strategy for us to really grow the company in a meaningful way.

It was growth and then churn because it wasn't the right customer fit for us. We were just trying to go after that, you know, triple, triple, double, double. And we weren't getting to that, to that point in the right way. So it was a challenging time for us to kind of burn through a lot of cash and get good growth, but not quite the growth that everybody wanted around us.

Ken Lempit: So what did you do next?

Ray Meiring: So what we did next is go back to first principles, right? We went back to that persona, we went back to that ICP. We basically pulled all of our pipeline data, all of our customer and churn data, and we said, who sticks with us? Where do we have win rates higher than 50%? Which ICPs and markets really work for us.

As we analyzed all of that data, we had a lot of data at that point. We saw a very clear picture. We win when we are in enterprise professional services companies. That is absolutely the best space for us. Law firms, engineering firms, consulting firms, tech firms. Anyone that puts a bio or a resume or a CV into their pitching proposal, that's where we stick.

That's where we win. That's our space. And so we completely reinvented our messaging to direct at that space. Reinvented our sales team to direct at that space, disqualified small leads and changed the way that we approach the market.

Ken Lempit: So in this situation, the venture investment and the expectations kinda led you off the path, right?

Ray Meiring: Yeah, 

I would say that expectation for high growth, which was. Yes, it was the VC community at that time. It was the investment community. It was ourselves as well. Like we wanted that growth. We wanted to see that, that success. And we would, we had money and we'd throw our money at anything to try and get the growth out of it.

Ken Lempit: You know, it's really interesting. We, we look at recently funded companies for us as you know, good prospects or an advertising agency. 

Ray Meiring: Right.

Ken Lempit: But the um, the temptation to move away from what worked like, from what got you to this point is very high. And it may not be that you need to do that at all, but just keep doing what worked

right, just do more of that.

Ray Meiring: Exactly, Ken. I think discipline and focus is the lesson that I took away from that. Just focus on what works and be disciplined and not chasing the shiny things if you're consistent in the marketing space. It might take some time, but that consistency is gonna get results if you're in a good market with a good product.

Ken Lempit: So, I wanna focus you forward now if I can for kind of end, you know, land the episode on what's next. So, looking ahead, you know, what are the strategies that you are putting out, you know, that you're laying out to continue growing core stocks in the enterprise space,

Ray Meiring: AI is definitely, you know, part of that story. I mean, I, we, we couldn't have a podcast and not talk about AI and how that's changing

Ken Lempit: And we almost did it.

Ray Meiring: We almost got there. Yes. But it, it's changing the parameters in our opinion. Firstly, you know, we need a, we need a big moat. Because AI is there to disrupt a lot of those kind of like point areas that we may have operated in. And then adoption of AI internally is gonna change the economics of our business as well. As we adopt more AI ourselves will be able to do things faster. So our strategy from a go to market perspective. It's again, focus and discipline. Do the things that work well and look for peripheral expansion opportunities to expand the market. Back to the good old you know, Geoffrey Moore, kind of bowling pin perspective there.

You know, go to the peripheral markets, but pretty much staying in our lane. Do what we do, well do it better. Really dominate those markets. Internally, though, we're building AI into everything. We're finding more specific use cases in those markets where our technology is valuable. So, you know, pictures and proposals.

Today we're adding business cases, is another document type that our customers are asking us to please produce those documents. How might we go after those documents? And then looking really intently and inside the operational elements of our business. Where are there opportunities for us to use AI ourselves so that we're not growing expense at the same speed as we're growing revenue and we have an opportunity to actually, to get back to good old accounting profits and, and build it from that, you know, kind of operational efficiency perspective with good revenue growth.

Ken Lempit: It seems also like, integration with other things would really help here. So, just like you looked at where you won and where you didn't have churn, you know, if we have three or four or five hundred RFPs we've responded to, we could then go back if we connect that to our outcomes and really understand what are the elements of the RFPs that were most successful, right?

So there's definitely an opportunity to take the data you're generating and, and apply some AI to that.

Ray Meiring: Absolutely, and, and many of our customers actually get feedback directly when they win or lose an RFP down to the actual question level. AI can just mine that information and come back with a perspective for that customer on where they're strong, where they weak, where they need to improve. It's phenomenal the things that we're able to do now with this technology.

Ken Lempit: Well, that's a great place to land. Ray, thanks so much. If people wanna reach out to you or learn more about your company, how can they do that?

Ray Meiring: Yeah, www.qorusdocs.com. That's a great way. Otherwise, reach out to us on LinkedIn. We're easily discoverable there. And just remember there's no you after the Q in QorusDocs. It's just Q-O-R-U-S docs dot.com.

Ken Lempit: No, you after the queue. I like it. If people wanna reach me, I'm on Linkedin/in/kenlempit. My advertising and demand generation agency for SaaS companies is Austin Lawrence Group. And if you haven't subscribed to the SaaS backwards podcast yet, please do so wherever podcasts are distributed, you can also subscribe on YouTube.

Ray Meiring, thanks so much for telling the qorusdocs story here on SaaS backwards.

Ray Meiring: Thank you, Ken. Thoroughly enjoyed the conversation. Really appreciate you having me on here.