How MV Design turned proposal acceptance into instant payment

MV Design is a one-person interior rendering studio run by Michael Venditto. Since April 2024, Michael has built the business around creating 3D and photo-realistic visualizations for residential clients, helping homeowners and contractors see finished spaces before a single wall goes up. He operates as a sole founder: no employees, no sales team, just proposals going out and clients deciding whether to book.

When Michael started the business, he had a simple goal: charge what his work was worth. What he quickly found was that his payment process was making that harder.

The challenges

Michael’s early process was straightforward in theory: finish a discovery call, agree on a scope, send a Stripe invoice. In practice, something broke down between the verbal yes and the payment. Clients who had seemed enthusiastic on the call would go quiet. Without a formal proposal to refer back to, they had questions. Those questions required follow-up calls, more time, more energy spent re-closing deals that should already have been closed.

The problem were friction and pricing power. A plain Stripe invoice, arriving cold after a call, didn’t reflect the quality of work Michael was selling. He found himself unable to charge what he felt the work warranted. He briefly considered building a checkout flow on his Squarespace website, but ruled it out. He wanted to vet clients before committing to a project, which meant proposals were the right vehicle. He just needed proposals that could close the deal end-to-end.

The solution

Michael connected his Stripe account to Qwilr in June 2025, initially drawn in by the quality of the proposal design. But it was the integrated payment that changed how his business ran. Now, when a client accepts a proposal, the payment happens at the same moment. There is no invoice to send, no separate step for the client to complete, no gap where deals can die.

Today, 90% of his revenue flows through QwilrPay.

The results

Payment on acceptance

Before Qwilr, every deal required a client to take an active second step after saying yes. That step - opening a Stripe invoice, clicking through, entering payment details - was where drop-off happened. Since switching, Michael collects full payment at the point of acceptance. He has had one refund in his first year of using QwilrPay.

A real-world test of removing the integration

Michael works with another Qwilr customer who briefly built their own proposal tool, similar in design to Qwilr but without payment integration. After clients accepted a proposal, they received a separate invoice. Within three weeks, they returned to Qwilr. The reason was unambiguous.

Near-zero payment follow-up

Because Michael collects in full at acceptance, he never chases payments. In a year of operation, he has issued one refund. He does his own bookkeeping with monthly exports from QwilrPay and describes the financial side of his business as straightforward, a marked contrast to the manual follow-up cycles his earlier invoicing workflow required.

Pricing confidence

The switch to Qwilr didn’t just change when Michael got paid - it changed what he could charge. The combination of a professional proposal and an integrated checkout gave him the credibility to command prices his earlier invoicing workflow had undermined. After switching, his revenue, in his words, “really started to explode.”

The impact

For Michael, QwilrPay isn’t just a feature he uses, it’s the infrastructure his entire business runs on. Every proposal, every client, every payment flows through the same integrated experience that he built his pricing confidence and his client relationships around.