Guest post by Andrew Quan, soon to become our ambassador in Australia. I recently got married, and for those who have done so before, you know very well the process required to go through various suppliers to get the ‘best quote’. Everything from florists, hairdressers, suits / dresses / attire, catering, music / DJ services… you name it. With so many quotes flying around, we used a large ‘master’ spread sheet to manage contacts and inclusions across each vendor quote… needless to say this was a very manual task.
Imagine a way to centrally manage the way you get and accept quotes from suppliers. Imagine a way for businesses to come to you, rather than you going out individually to each of them. That’s what PickAQuote.com.au tries to address with its online service offering.
I’ve sat down with Marcus Lim, the co-founder of PickAQuote.com.au, based in Sydney Australia. The guys at PickAQuote are building a central on-line marketplace to streamline the supplier quotation process. Their business model is relatively simple:
- Consumers post their requests on-line for free
- Competitive quotes come in
- The consumer picks the best quote available
Revenues come from quotation fees (when a business responds to a job with a formal quote) as well as success fees (when the business is accepted for a job). Customers may also receive some ‘kick-back’ revenue ($10) for each successful referral made, as well as $5 for every job completed.

There is certainly great potential for this organisation to be a successful – the real questions to address are how to achieve critical mass (for both supply and demand), how to leverage economies of scale, as well as how to market an on-line product to a typically off-line activity.
PickAQuote has been actively marketing on national radio channels, and have been mentioned on prominent newspapers in Australia. Given such media coverage, the direction this business is heading is one of many examples of an innovative Aussie start-up aiming to disrupt the status quo. Expect to see more innovative Asia Pacific start-up / business model examples on this blog in the future.




