I started https://usebx.com/app just under a year ago. We now do a few hundred thousand GBP per month in revenue. Nothing fancy, just a solid accounting and project management app, solid service, and good sales to corporate customers (we look after the smaller customers too, but only actively market to larger corporate clients, where the returns are significantly better).
We've just invested more in the code base to offer more features within our app, but kept things pretty simple at the start. Releasing in a couple of weeks!
Looks amazing and fast, congratulations. If you don't mind sharing, What is your tech stack ? How many developer hour were consumed developing it and how many to maintain it ?
We wrote our own JavaScript framework called alive.js. We're going to open source it once we've got it documented properly. It's similar to Vue, but without the virtual DOM. Instead we keep track of "update" functions. It also has some nice async lazy loading capabilities which helps keep the experience fast.
Development time was about 4 months to an MVP. 2 developers, but one was an absolute rockstar. Maintained by 2 guys now (1 of whom is an original developer). Also have a small sales team, composed of 5 contractors.
We do in-house deployments for corporate clients, which many other providers do not offer.
Our app is loved by our customers, and especially so because it's a light PWA that feels native.
We also offer a free forever tier and are also integrated with UK tax authorities to submit company taxes online (this will be mandatory from 2019 onwards).
Our support is considered to be really good, because we bend over backwards for our clients. We listen to them and add features they ask for as quickly as we can.
We have in built project management and time tracking, and we're making this functionality better in our upcoming release.
Our quality of service and the easiness of our app seems to win us clients from the likes of Sage, QuickBooks and Xero. Try them all, and then try Bx - I hope the difference is obvious!
Very impressive! I must say, writing an entire accounting/bookkeeping package seems like a lot of work, especially as a side project. Can I ask what domain-specific knowledge you had before you decided to embark on it? For example, did you already have experience in small business financials to guide you? Did you have someone like a Chartered Accountant or Tax Lawyer advise you?
Also, just FYI -- your FAQ contains an outdated reference:
API currently in beta, but will be available by mid November 2017
Thank you! I'm an ex investment banker, so understand financials pretty well. I've also grown up helping with family businesses, doing the taxes from age 13 onwards, so it's sort of in my blood. I also wrote a little PHP toolkit so my parents could track inventories based on their invoices (that was 16 years ago!). That was probably the first version of Bx right there!
Despite everything I thought I knew, the project was significantly more challenging than I expected. Writing accounting software itself is conceptually not that hard, BUT, putting a scalable analytics framework around it is hard. Optimising queries to get the most of your metal is hard. Writing a PWA and making it feel native is hard. These are not obvious considerations when you think about writing accounting software, but take up a lot of time when you're faced with them during the development process.
Almost all the things I thought were minor considerations were actually very challenging projects in their own right. They were also excellent learning experiences.
And yes, the API is in fact now live, but only for corporate clients. We found most small businesses don't really need it, and some people even tried to game our rate limits, so we disabled it. We're releasing a new, more robust API very soon.
Also, now that we have some cash, we're also going to improve the landing page, add some tutorials, maybe even start a blog and do some marketing.
P.S. I never really involved an accountant for advice because I wanted to stay away from accounting jargon in the app. No journals or ledgers etc. Just simple terminology anyone can understand. I showed it to my accountant a couple of months ago, and he was actually very impressed. In fact, he's started using it with his clients to record their sales and purchase more efficiently. I can't really ask for a better seal of approval :)
We've just invested more in the code base to offer more features within our app, but kept things pretty simple at the start. Releasing in a couple of weeks!