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Why it’s the right time to roll out the new Tropic

...and what our new capabilities mean for your business.

David Campbell
May 3, 2023
6 min read

In the current economy, every dollar counts. 

That wasn’t the case back in 2019 when we had just founded Tropic and companies were still growing at all costs. It was common to see $100M ARR companies that still weren’t profitable, and the most valuable companies were built on software. 

Flush with easy VC money, fast-growing businesses spent a decade buying more and more software in a scramble to find anything that could potentially unlock growth.

But that cycle of reckless spending on software (and everything else) has met its day of reckoning. Private and public markets demand efficiency and discipline. The pitchforks are out. Savings has replaced sales as the CFO’s top priority. 

In board meetings, bottom-line efficiency now beats top-line growth. 

In a top line-focused economy, you could build a massive sales stack that optimized your ability to close deals at the highest price. On the flip side, I’ve seen procurement teams who were enabled with little more than a notebook and a spreadsheet. My cofounder Justin Etkin was tasked with designing procurement at Wunderkind when we both worked there. He went to the market to get a platform, but—as he put it then—“Is there seriously no Salesforce for buying?”

Today, there is. I’m thrilled to introduce you to the new Tropic.

Our new capabilities help companies run lean

Tropic has expanded dramatically from our procurement-as-a-service roots into a wide suite of software, data, and service packages that help businesses cut costs and boost their bottom line, across every stage in the process.

Today we’re rolling out a unified spend management platform that brings many point solutions under one roof to help CFOs consolidate their stack:

  • Automated intake forms: These intelligent forms help everyone in your company streamline purchasing requests with one URL.
  • Dynamic approval workflows: Tropic’s new rules-based workflow logic will route requests to the right person at the right time, every time.
  • Supplier onboarding: Our portal alleviates the manual burden of chasing suppliers for infosec and bank details by looping them into our workflows and letting the platform drive.
  • Supplier and contract management: The new Tropic combines SaaS management, contract management, and spend management in one platform, giving you insights to control every dollar. 
  • SaaS management: A slew of new integrations help you connect your SaaS stack and monitor SaaS licenses and usage trends.
  • Shadow spend detection: Identify every tool and transaction that hasn’t passed through your approval process using deep integrations with accounting and ERP systems, as well as every major SSO solution.
  • Open-source marketplace: Featuring Tropic-validated price points, our Discover platform lets you point and click to buy SaaS tools at the lowest price possible. Tropic is the only company that refuses to collect commissions from suppliers, maximizing savings for you.
  • Purchase orders: Generate purchase orders right in Tropic and push them seamlessly into your ERP, eliminating manual overhead and system-hopping.
  • Purchasing portal: Think Amazon for B2B SaaS spend. Our Purchasing Portal is a streamlined supplier catalog where your stakeholders can easily buy against your approved providers, while researching and requesting new suppliers with the power of data.
  • Collaboration: Integrate your favorite workflow tools into Tropic, and consolidate direct messages and email communication on our platform for streamlined purchasing.
  • Budgeting: Set and enforce budgets across teams to prevent overspending.
  • Spend Analytics: Track actual and expected spend at the team and individual level. Forecast more efficiently by understanding SaaS cost/FTE across each team and level.

Powered by the Supplier Graph

It’s all powered by a unique data layer and ingestion engine, the Supplier Graph, which is the holy grail for supplier data. The Supplier Graph pulls in contract, usage, utilization, and transactional data from across Tropic’s network—tens of thousands of supplier contracts totalling billions in managed spend. Enrich your own data set with Graph data to uncover better purchasing decisions for your company. 

Tropic’s platform, with assistance from the Supplier Graph, provides a 360-degree view into suppliers. No matter how well-run, all companies need help answering mission-critical questions like:

→ Are we getting good pricing and terms on our contracts?

→ Are we buying the best tools for our team's needs?

→ Do any of our suppliers or purchases come with security and compliance risks?

→ Are we using all the licenses we pay for?

→ What are other companies using and paying?

An expanded menu of service options

We’re also announcing an expanded lineup of packages that open Tropic up to more companies based on their specific needs and stage in the purchasing journey. No procurement team, small procurement team, large procurement team? No problem, we’ve got companies of all shapes and sizes covered. 

Add-on services range from on-demand expert advisory to fully-assisted negotiation-as-a-service, plus hybrid solutions that allow businesses to throttle help if and where needed. 

The new Tropic provides features and functionality for every stage in the procure-to-pay lifecycle, alongside integrations with all your favorite 3rd-party point solutions, making Tropic the one-stop orchestration layer for every dollar of spend. 

A new website to celebrate the new Tropic

To capture the value generated on our new platform, we launched a new website and refreshed branding. As the lines between B2B and consumer products blur, we want to continue sharing our vision for ease and consumer-grade purchasing experiences with Tropic. B2B brands can and should be fun.

We’ve chosen a new color palette and gradient set that we hope evokes sand dunes on a beach at night—right where we want to be, and where we want to take you. This is our vision of procurement paradise.

Finally, in keeping with our vision for an efficiency-focused market, I’m proud to say we overhauled this entire website ourselves. 

After meeting with all the best B2B SaaS agencies, we determined that no one was ready to get as weird as we wanted to get. Their timelines had us doing mood boards three weeks into the engagement (coupled with exorbitant agency fees). We think the new economy requires companies to think creatively. The new economy favors companies that get their hands dirty. 

Our Head of Marketing, Adam Feber, ran everything. It was a truly monumental feat, beyond the armchair quarterbacking most marketing leaders have to offer. The two of us wrote the bulk of the content, and our design team built pages and illustrations from start to finish in a matter of weeks. Oh, and we then rebuilt the site from the ground up with a new CMS. Pretty cool, if you ask me. 

Cheers to the new Tropic. 🌴

Book a demo to see how we can help your business boost their bottom line by capturing every drop of savings.

Share this post
David Campbell
David Campbell is the CEO and Co-Founder of Tropic.

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In the current economy, every dollar counts. 

That wasn’t the case back in 2019 when we had just founded Tropic and companies were still growing at all costs. It was common to see $100M ARR companies that still weren’t profitable, and the most valuable companies were built on software. 

Flush with easy VC money, fast-growing businesses spent a decade buying more and more software in a scramble to find anything that could potentially unlock growth.

But that cycle of reckless spending on software (and everything else) has met its day of reckoning. Private and public markets demand efficiency and discipline. The pitchforks are out. Savings has replaced sales as the CFO’s top priority. 

In board meetings, bottom-line efficiency now beats top-line growth. 

In a top line-focused economy, you could build a massive sales stack that optimized your ability to close deals at the highest price. On the flip side, I’ve seen procurement teams who were enabled with little more than a notebook and a spreadsheet. My cofounder Justin Etkin was tasked with designing procurement at Wunderkind when we both worked there. He went to the market to get a platform, but—as he put it then—“Is there seriously no Salesforce for buying?”

Today, there is. I’m thrilled to introduce you to the new Tropic.

Our new capabilities help companies run lean

Tropic has expanded dramatically from our procurement-as-a-service roots into a wide suite of software, data, and service packages that help businesses cut costs and boost their bottom line, across every stage in the process.

Today we’re rolling out a unified spend management platform that brings many point solutions under one roof to help CFOs consolidate their stack:

  • Automated intake forms: These intelligent forms help everyone in your company streamline purchasing requests with one URL.
  • Dynamic approval workflows: Tropic’s new rules-based workflow logic will route requests to the right person at the right time, every time.
  • Supplier onboarding: Our portal alleviates the manual burden of chasing suppliers for infosec and bank details by looping them into our workflows and letting the platform drive.
  • Supplier and contract management: The new Tropic combines SaaS management, contract management, and spend management in one platform, giving you insights to control every dollar. 
  • SaaS management: A slew of new integrations help you connect your SaaS stack and monitor SaaS licenses and usage trends.
  • Shadow spend detection: Identify every tool and transaction that hasn’t passed through your approval process using deep integrations with accounting and ERP systems, as well as every major SSO solution.
  • Open-source marketplace: Featuring Tropic-validated price points, our Discover platform lets you point and click to buy SaaS tools at the lowest price possible. Tropic is the only company that refuses to collect commissions from suppliers, maximizing savings for you.
  • Purchase orders: Generate purchase orders right in Tropic and push them seamlessly into your ERP, eliminating manual overhead and system-hopping.
  • Purchasing portal: Think Amazon for B2B SaaS spend. Our Purchasing Portal is a streamlined supplier catalog where your stakeholders can easily buy against your approved providers, while researching and requesting new suppliers with the power of data.
  • Collaboration: Integrate your favorite workflow tools into Tropic, and consolidate direct messages and email communication on our platform for streamlined purchasing.
  • Budgeting: Set and enforce budgets across teams to prevent overspending.
  • Spend Analytics: Track actual and expected spend at the team and individual level. Forecast more efficiently by understanding SaaS cost/FTE across each team and level.

Powered by the Supplier Graph

It’s all powered by a unique data layer and ingestion engine, the Supplier Graph, which is the holy grail for supplier data. The Supplier Graph pulls in contract, usage, utilization, and transactional data from across Tropic’s network—tens of thousands of supplier contracts totalling billions in managed spend. Enrich your own data set with Graph data to uncover better purchasing decisions for your company. 

Tropic’s platform, with assistance from the Supplier Graph, provides a 360-degree view into suppliers. No matter how well-run, all companies need help answering mission-critical questions like:

→ Are we getting good pricing and terms on our contracts?

→ Are we buying the best tools for our team's needs?

→ Do any of our suppliers or purchases come with security and compliance risks?

→ Are we using all the licenses we pay for?

→ What are other companies using and paying?

An expanded menu of service options

We’re also announcing an expanded lineup of packages that open Tropic up to more companies based on their specific needs and stage in the purchasing journey. No procurement team, small procurement team, large procurement team? No problem, we’ve got companies of all shapes and sizes covered. 

Add-on services range from on-demand expert advisory to fully-assisted negotiation-as-a-service, plus hybrid solutions that allow businesses to throttle help if and where needed. 

The new Tropic provides features and functionality for every stage in the procure-to-pay lifecycle, alongside integrations with all your favorite 3rd-party point solutions, making Tropic the one-stop orchestration layer for every dollar of spend. 

A new website to celebrate the new Tropic

To capture the value generated on our new platform, we launched a new website and refreshed branding. As the lines between B2B and consumer products blur, we want to continue sharing our vision for ease and consumer-grade purchasing experiences with Tropic. B2B brands can and should be fun.

We’ve chosen a new color palette and gradient set that we hope evokes sand dunes on a beach at night—right where we want to be, and where we want to take you. This is our vision of procurement paradise.

Finally, in keeping with our vision for an efficiency-focused market, I’m proud to say we overhauled this entire website ourselves. 

After meeting with all the best B2B SaaS agencies, we determined that no one was ready to get as weird as we wanted to get. Their timelines had us doing mood boards three weeks into the engagement (coupled with exorbitant agency fees). We think the new economy requires companies to think creatively. The new economy favors companies that get their hands dirty. 

Our Head of Marketing, Adam Feber, ran everything. It was a truly monumental feat, beyond the armchair quarterbacking most marketing leaders have to offer. The two of us wrote the bulk of the content, and our design team built pages and illustrations from start to finish in a matter of weeks. Oh, and we then rebuilt the site from the ground up with a new CMS. Pretty cool, if you ask me. 

Cheers to the new Tropic. 🌴

Book a demo to see how we can help your business boost their bottom line by capturing every drop of savings.

Share this post
David Campbell
David Campbell is the CEO and Co-Founder of Tropic.
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