B2B CPQ Sales SaaS

Industrial distributors quote on spreadsheets — quotes ship slowly, pricing errors are common, and there's no pipeline visibility for sales leadership or approval-status visibility for the customer. The existing CPQ market splits into two ends: enterprise-priced platforms (Salesforce CPQ, DealHub) that take months to implement, and templated quote tools that don't support multi-level approvals or shared-login customer environments. The first prospect needed something that landed in the middle — full quote lifecycle, supports their concurrent-user reality, sized for their planned 100-reseller rollout.

Interviewed distributors and resellers about their quoting pain points. Analyzed the existing CPQ market across price tier, time-to-deploy, and feature depth. Validated that the core needs were pricing accuracy, approval-cycle speed, and pipeline visibility — and that the prospect's shared-login customer reality (multiple reseller employees working from one credential at the same time) was a hard requirement that off-the-shelf tools didn't handle.

Built a multi-tenant SaaS with Next.js 14 App Router and Firebase. Quote builder with configurable pricing rules engine, multi-level approval workflows, e-signature integration, and a customer portal where the prospect's resellers see their quotes, approvals, and order status. Concurrent session management with device fingerprinting solves the shared-login problem without forcing the customer to roll out individual credentials. Full REST API with webhooks for integration into the customer's existing systems. Demo environment seeded with realistic sample data for prospect walkthroughs.

• Next.js App Router over Pages Router — needed server components for multi-tenant data isolation and server-rendered customer portals
• Firebase over Postgres — faster iteration for a solo builder; Firestore's real-time listeners enabled live quote collaboration without rolling my own websocket layer
• Device fingerprinting for session management over forced individual credentials — solved the shared-login problem on the customer's terms instead of forcing a credential rollout they'd never approve
• Configurable pricing rules engine over hardcoded markup logic — the prospect's pricing rules vary by reseller tier; a config-driven engine handles that without per-customer code changes
• 100-reseller rollout architecture from day one — sized the multi-tenancy model and Firestore data shape to the prospect's planned scale, not the MVP — avoids the rewrite that kills early SaaS deals when the customer expands

• Multi-tenant SaaS with full quote lifecycle: quote builder, configurable pricing rules, multi-level approval workflows, e-signatures, customer portal
• Sub-100ms session validation with device fingerprinting solving the shared-login customer reality
• Customer portal with e-signatures, approval tracking, and order-status visibility for the prospect's resellers
• Full REST API with webhook integrations for downstream systems
• Demo environment seeded with realistic sample data; prospect onboarded with their catalog and completed the demo cycle; commercial follow-up active
• Sized for the prospect's planned 100-reseller rollout — multi-tenancy and data shape designed for that scale on day one