An Open Letter to Founding Agencies
From the founder of Easy RFP, to the first hundred agencies who will help us build it properly.
Dear founding agency,
If you are reading this, you are either considering applying to Founding 100, or you have already been approved and want to know what you are signing up to. Either way, you deserve a clear picture of who is on the other side of the screen. So this letter is mine, in plain language, and it tells you exactly what I am building, why, and what I expect from us both.
Why I am building Easy RFP
I spent ten years in MICE — running corporate events, sourcing hotels across thirty European cities, sitting through BAFO rounds where the same negotiation script played out the same way every time. The pattern I kept seeing was not a lack of inventory or a lack of demand. It was a lack of data symmetry. Hotels know what they have signed with everyone else in the city. Planners go in blind. The gap quietly funds three to eight per cent of the typical corporate travel budget every year.
Easy RFP exists to close that gap. The product sends RFPs to the right hotels in parallel, normalises responses across rate types and currencies, and surfaces the negotiation language that actually moves rates in EU markets. It is not magic — it is the boring, useful operational work that a senior procurement person would do if they had time. Most planners do not.
Why this is in beta
Because I refuse to charge for a product that is not ready. The bones are there: hotels, briefs, RFP responses, comparisons, contract drafts. But the edge cases — the ones that come up in week six, not week one — are still being filled in. Features that work for ten cities need to work for two hundred. Workflows that are intuitive in English need to be intuitive in Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese. Compliance documents that are correct under GDPR need to also be correct for procurement teams that have never heard of an Estonian OÜ.
None of that is solved by writing more code in isolation. It is solved by sitting next to real European MICE agencies while they use it, asking what hurt, fixing it, and shipping again next week. That is what Founding 100 is for.
Why I am giving it free for now
Three reasons, in order of honesty.
First, because the alternative is dishonest. Charging before the product is ready sets a contract you cannot keep. I would rather lose the revenue and earn the right to charge later than take the money now and disappoint.
Second, because I want the right kind of feedback. When something is free, people use it differently. They try the workflows they would skip. They tell you what is annoying, not what is broken. They stay long enough to find the second-order problems, the ones you only see after a month. That is the feedback that turns a working prototype into a tool that an industry adopts.
Third, because I am paying for it out of my own savings. Easy RFP is not venture-funded. The financial pressure to charge fast is the founder's, not an investor's. That changes what I am willing to compromise on.
What I promise
- I will reply to every email you send me, personally, inside two working days.
- I will not sell your data. Not to advertisers. Not "anonymised". Not under any framing.
- I will not identify your agency in any public benchmark or write-up without your written consent.
- I will tell you in writing, at least sixty days ahead, what paid pricing will be when the promotional period ends.
- If I have to end your free access early, you will get thirty days' notice and a clean data export.
- If something I built is making your work worse, I will treat that as a P0 problem until it is fixed.
What I expect from you
In return, I am asking for three things, none of them onerous.
The first is three short feedback sessions during the promotional period. Thirty minutes each. Format your choice — video call, voice memo, written response. The goal is for me to hear, in your own words, what is working and what is not. The thirty-per-cent lifetime loyalty discount is the lever for this, because asking for someone's time without compensation is the wrong way to start a relationship.
The second is honest use of the tool. Use Easy RFP for the RFPs you would have run anyway. Do not invent test cases that do not match your real workflow — they teach me the wrong lessons. The agencies that helped most in the first weeks were the ones who used the product to run their actual quarter, not the ones who tried to stress-test it.
The third is the right to use your company as an early reference, on terms you control. Specifically: I would like to list your logo on a future "trusted by" section once you have used the product for at least one full quarter, with a one-click way to remove it. If you would rather not be named, that is fine — your free access does not depend on the reference.
What this is, and what it is not
Founding 100 is not a free trial that converts to a sales call. It is not an early-access list to give the appearance of demand. It is a small, deliberate, paid-in-feedback partnership during the year that decides whether Easy RFP becomes the European hotel-sourcing standard or just another tool that almost worked.
I am one person with two contractors, building from Madrid, with the legal entity in Estonia for tax and operational sanity. We are not a hundred-person startup pretending to be ten people. We are exactly what we look like, and the tool we ship reflects that — careful, narrow in scope, and built to be useful before it is built to be impressive.
Thank you for considering this. If you want to apply, the form is at /pricing/founding-100/. If you have already been approved, welcome — and please write to me directly when something is broken or could be better. I read every line.