After speaking with hundreds & hundreds of interior design business owners over the years, I have identified two main pain points to running a residential interior design business:

Clients (just kidding…all of our clients are awesome)
Running the business part of their business

Almost universally, designers love the design side of their businesses. A smaller number of designers thrive with the designer-client relationship. However, very few interior designers love the business side of their business...project management, accounting, HR, marketing, etc

This is where SaaS companies like indema can help interior designers looking to grow & enjoy their business.

For this article, we interviewed indema founder Timothy Murenzi.

Douglas Robb - Interior Designher: Why did you create indema? What did you hope to achieve?

Timothy Murenzi - indema founder: indema was built from my failures as a designer. I was never efficient in my business process’ and as a result of that, I lost a lot of money, time and clients from it. I was using binders, and at one point I was signed up to 5 different platforms (Asana, Quickbooks, a separate invoicing platform called Square and even Excel to manage products) out there to manage multiple parts of my business that I truly never had my finger on the pulse of.

When I look back, I realized that there was never that ONE solution for me to see my whole business and project at the same time. I feel as though if there was something like that, I think I would have been able to grow the firm in the way it needed to grow. I also had a lot of challenges with the construction side of things - not truly knowing what was happening and when, and there was a serious disconnect from myself to the GC to the architect and beyond. This almost always resulted in more questions from the client than answers we can give as a design firm.

I have been a designer for 12 years (first 8 as strict furnishings, last 4 as kitchen and bath specialty) and it was really at a breaking point that indema started to come to life. I looked at every part of what I failed at throughout the years and wrote it down. But I also wrote down what the solution (for me) would have been. When I had a true idea of what it was that I needed to grow, become more organized and have my finger more on the pulse of every moving part of my firm, indema was born. At the time, I really wanted something that can just get me organized with not only the project management side of things, but also the business side of things and be able to get a bigger picture of all of that.

Douglas Robb - Interior Designher: How has indema evolved?

Timothy Murenzi - indema: indema 1.0 was before we even shared it with anyone else. I remember I had a very small 5-page platform that I used on projects that included simple task management and being able to invoice my clients and send estimates (which at the time did help me a lot!). I was becoming more organized, my profits increased, and I was much happier and finished projects a bit faster. A few design friends wanted access to it, so I gave them all a copy of it. They all (with the exception of one who wound up changing careers) were just as (if not more) successful with the 1.0 version.

So, considering my friends had success with it, I knew I was onto something and felt obligated to share it with the world. I then went back to the drawing board with the feedback I had received from my friends, and created a Beta version. At the time, I was running a podcast and I had about 1300 monthly listeners when I did an episode about this. That single episode resulted in 135 designers wanting to use indema on the beta version.

All of this happened quite fast as well, but when I started to see that indema could REALLY help people, it became a passion of mine, even more so than designing. We spent 3 months with the beta testers asking feedback, getting ideas, and developing the platform even more each day. Every single day, we made adjustments and pushed updates. It was kind of insane how frequently things were improving and new things were being added.

From there, we come to today! We have so many more features than our first version and even now it’s extending so much into other sectors that I can barely keep up sometimes. We improve and implement features based on designer feedback specifically - we rarely develop something because we just “want” to. We truly feel we are the designers’ platform in that we do things for them before anything else.

Recently, we released a calendar booking system (similar to Calendly), we are now developing a social media management add-on where designers can add their social media managers and be able to see and approve all posts, etc.. and even schedule all their social media within indema. We are planning a home staging add-on, showroom management add-on, and the list goes on. Indema is TRULY an all-in-one platform for our industry.

Douglas Robb - Interior Designher: Why do interior designers need indema?

Timothy Murenzi - indema: When you think about what we do as designers, 80% of that is running a business. We no longer can JUST focus on designing. As much as we would love to. Our strength is helping new(er) and even micro-sized design firms to grow using indema. We have an equal balance of project management, business management, and even designing with our recent release of vision boards, as well as upcoming client engagement side where clients can visually see products in a different way than a traditional mood/visionboard. While I can’t get into that second part now because it’s not yet released, its absolutely going to help clients and designers be more on the same page when it comes to sourcing materials!

Now, we realize too, that designers have to do all of the above. So, we make it easy for them by implementing automations to save the designer time - so they can focus more on designing. An example of this: When a client approves an estimate, our system automatically then creates an invoice and a purchase order at the same time for only the approved items. The designer saves at least 20 minutes alone not having to create that invoice from scratch and PO from scratch.

Work smarter, not harder I was always told! And I'm sure you’ve heard that phrase too! It’s important for us to make things easier for the design firm, and implementing these automations that will eventually scale into other sectors of the platform, will allow designers to truly focus on other things without having to worry.

Indema is the most affordable platform on the market. This low price model allows designers to to spend less money versus paying for a more expensive platform that doesnt do everything we do, or pay for multiple platforms to accomplish the same thing indema helps them overcome.

Douglas Robb - Interior Designher: How does indema help interior designers manage their clients?

Timothy Murenzi - indema: Within indema, designers not only can manage leads in their sales pipeline, they can also manage the client communications within the platform as well. We have traditional messaging, as well as project forums, contract agreement discussions, and clients can even comment on tasks if the designer wants. We are really helping the designer create more organizational structure on the client communication so that the designer doesnt have to give out their cell number and receive a text about cabinet colors at 3am. :-)

To take this a step further, we will soon have inbound and outbound email capability where designers can even automate their own communication with their clients. We do have a strong focus on client experience and are implementing features to improve this between the designers and their clients.

Douglas Robb - Interior Designher: How does indema help interior designers manage their vendors?

Timothy Murenzi - indema: We are excited to say that we not only allow designers in indema to send PO’s directly to their vendors within the system, we will soon be able to use the inbound and outbound email capability to automate communication with vendors, as well as import information that a vendor sends a designer into the system. At it’s core, keeping track of your vendors and who your reps are as well as contact information is definitely covered.

Douglas Robb - Interior Designher: How does indema help interior designers manage their employees?

Timothy Murenzi - indema: indema is working its way to being a fully functional Human Resources system as well. Right now, employees can clock in and out, manage their projects, designers can gage performance of employees by their task completion, managing attendance, leaves of absence, and even generating a payroll statements.

Douglas Robb - Interior Designher: How does indema help interior designers with project management?

Timothy Murenzi - indema: indema has various ways to manage a project. Designers can add tasks and milestones (AKA Phases) which also automatically convert into the Gantt chart for each project, designers can even add their general contractors to the platform as users, set specific roles and permissions for those contractors who can also enter information about the construction side of the project to keep track of what’s happening and when, we also have Burndown charts, and even Kanban task management. Collectively allowing the designer to see and manage many parts of their projects even with other trades.

Douglas Robb - Interior Designher: How does indema help interior designers manage the business side of their business?

Timothy Murenzi - indema: indema is a self-sufficient finance platform too in the sense that designers can send estimates (clients can even approve or decline items and physically sign the estimates to approve them), invoices, get paid for those invoices (with our integration with Stripe, PayPal, Razorpay, and Paystack), send out purchase orders to vendors to begin the fulfillment process (even done automatically for you when an invoice is generated), and even down to credit notes, expenses, and reporting for those finance key points. We also integrate with Quickbooks and soon XERO to help those designers who already use those financial platforms continue to use them without issues.

Douglas Robb - Interior Designher: How does indema help interior designers manage their communications?

Timothy Murenzi - indema: We have various aspects of indema that help designers communicate with their clients and employees and keep those conversations organized. We have an internal messenger, project forum where you can create public or private discussion topics where clients can comment on specific topics relating to the project, clients can also start conversations about the agreement if they have questions about that process, and even employees can converse with clients as well. You can even set tasks to public where your clients can comment on tasks if they have any questions. Later, we will be releasing inbound and outbound email capabilities where you can have all communication through indema.

Douglas Robb - Interior Designher: For design companies that sell products as well as services, how does indema help them manage their inventory?

Timothy Murenzi - indema: We have had such a huge response in regards to features, and are happy to say that we will soon have a specific inventory management system for designers who do sell products and keep inventory. Our ETA for this release is Q2 2022 and are currently looking for beta testers to help with creating this add-on for indema.

Douglas Robb - Interior Designher: How does indema help interior designers plan for the future of their business?

Timothy Murenzi - indema: indema’s reporting system allows designers to pull specific reports relating to various parts of the business. Task reports, income vs. expense, etc.. being able to see this information can help you accurately plan changes that need to happen - whether that be you realize that you aren’t making enough profit on products you are selling on projects, or you aren’t billing enough time. All of those factors go into making changes for improvement or growth.

Douglas Robb - Interior Designher: How does indema compare to other interior design management platforms?

Timothy Murenzi - indema: I would love to premise this by saying that our philosophy is that we dont see our competitors as such. We would love nothing more than to partner with other platforms as we believe that a designer should choose a platform that best fits their business model and what they need to grow as a design firm. This philosophy allows us to not be “sales” driven, and be more driven about helping designers grow. Period. Community over competition.

That being said: what indema is, is an all-in-one platform for designers to be able to help designers have their finger more on the pulse of everything thats happening with their design firm.

Douglas Robb - Interior Designher: What are your plans for the future of indema?

Timothy Murenzi - indema: indema’s future lies with the designers who use indema. As they evolve, indema will evolve! Indema has about 13 different add-ons to the platform that we are currently developing, which is intended for designers to be able to extend the functionality of their account while keeping our plans the lowest in the industry.

We also have a strong focus right now on creating another indema for general contractors, and architects - this would allow all three (Designer, architect and general contractor) to be able to connect their accounts if they all have the same project. From there, communication and project management between designer, GC and architect would all be connected for the projects they work on together!

But again - the future of indema, is the future of designers.

Douglas Robb - Interior Designher: What kind of support and/or training does indema offer to it’s users?

Timothy Murenzi - indema: indema will support and train any user on any plan. We offer full support for chat, and email. Training: users get a free onboarding session (1 - 2 hours depending on how long they need) and we also provide training for the whole team. Training for the whole team is additional cost at $50/hr and as needed.