Uncommon Frank

The Agency

Uncommon Frank is an independent software agency founded on a simple belief: small, focused teams can outperform larger shops when they have the right tools. Operating as a lean outfit, they specialise in building custom mobile and web applications for local businesses — anything from booking systems and loyalty apps to full client-facing portals.

For the first two years, the team ran like most agencies do: CRM in one tool, scoping in another, proposals in a separate PDF template, deployments handled manually. It worked — but just barely. Every new project meant re-assembling the same fragmented process from scratch.

The Challenge

The real problem wasn't any single tool — it was the friction between them. A potential client would come in, the team would spend two or three days drafting a scoping document in Notion, assemble a PDF proposal by hand, fire it off via DocuSign, and then manually set up Stripe for payment. By the time a signed contract arrived, a week had elapsed and the initial energy from the lead had often cooled.

Smaller projects — the kind that could genuinely be profitable with an efficient process — weren't worth touching. The overhead was too high relative to the margin. Uncommon Frank was effectively pricing themselves out of a large slice of the market just by having a slow process.

The Solution

Uncommon Frank adopted Platfio as their end-to-end agency platform. The first change was the Plan Builder — scoping that used to take three days now takes a focused morning. The team works through discovery, personas, user stories, and flows inside one guided tool, then exports a shareable PRD the client can review directly.

That output flows directly into the Proposal Builder. Estimates are tied to the plan. Packages and milestones are structured. The client receives a professional, client-ready proposal — not a PDF stitched together from three different documents. Sign-off and payment collection happen in the same flow.

The App Builder and Deployments feature handle the build and store submission side. Projects that used to require manual handoffs between separate tools now move from signed proposal to deployed app without leaving the platform.

The Results

The clearest change was speed. The lead-to-signed-proposal time dropped by roughly 40%. Clients who previously went cold waiting for a proposal are now signing within 24–48 hours of their first conversation.

The more important change was which clients Uncommon Frank can now take on. Projects that were previously uneconomical — smaller-scope apps, startups on tighter budgets, businesses wanting phase-one MVPs — are now profitable because the overhead per project is so much lower. The minimum viable project size shrank significantly, opening up a whole category of work the team had been turning away.