Direction C · Investor narrative
The 33 million
small businesses
that hate accounting.
QuickBooks was built for bookkeepers. We're building for the owner who never wanted to learn what a debit is.
01
The problem
Every small-business tool assumes an accountant in the loop.
82% of U.S. small businesses have no in-house finance person. They use QuickBooks anyway — and 60% pay an outside bookkeeper $200–$800/month to interpret what QuickBooks tells them.
The category is 30 years old and still requires a translator. That's the opening.
02
The insight
Owners don't want reports. They want one number.
Ask any owner what they actually want to know: "how much can I safely spend?" That's it. Not P&L. Not balance sheet. Not aged receivables.
Nobody answers that question in one sentence — because doing so requires the software to make a call, not just render the data. That's a product decision most incumbents are structurally afraid to make.
03
The product
Zero-knowledge bookkeeping + a Human Capital ROI engine.
Layer 1: invisible double-entry driven by bank feeds. Owners never see a ledger.
Layer 2: The Morning Number — spendable cash, computed daily, after taxes and payroll are reserved automatically.
Layer 3: Human Capital ROI — the differentiator. We attribute revenue to employees and rank them by return on fully-loaded cost. HR stops being a cost center.
04
Why now
Bank APIs, tax APIs, and cheap inference collapsed the moat.
Plaid + modern payroll APIs + LLMs mean a 6-person team can now do what QuickBooks needed 500 engineers and a decade to do. The category is finally rebuildable from scratch.
05
Wedge & expansion
Land on trades. Expand horizontally.
V1: Home services (electricians, plumbers, HVAC) — 4M businesses, high pain, low incumbent NPS, clear chart of accounts.
V2: Clinics, salons, agencies. Same core, vertical-specific tax quirks and staffing models.
V3: Full platform — HR, insurance, investments, banking sub-accounts.
06
The moat
Not features. Not AI. Judgment.
Anyone can add an AI chatbot. Very few will ship software that makes financial calls on your behalf — reserve this, don't spend that, hire her not him. That requires taste, liability appetite, and a data model built for decisions, not reports.
Once an owner trusts our number, switching cost is behavioral, not technical.
07
Business model
$49–$149/mo SaaS. Payments take-rate on top.
- Solo: $49/mo · bank sync, morning number, tax reserve
- Team: $99/mo · adds payroll integration & HCR engine
- Scale: $149/mo · adds decision engine, insurance, benefits
- Payments & payouts: 0.5% take-rate, opt-in
LTV target: $4,200 at 42 months. CAC target: <$400 through vertical content + accountant partner channel.
08
The ask
$3M seed. 18 months. 10K paying customers in one vertical.
Team of 8 (4 eng, 1 design, 1 tax/accounting lead, 2 GTM). Milestone: prove that owners will pay $99/mo for a product that shows them one number instead of 40 reports.
After that: raise Series A on the wedge, expand verticals.
The bet
Accounting software has never been designed for the people who own the business.
We are.