Over the years, I've been building businesses in my spare time with varying degrees of success, but I always really had one problem - I selfishly never really created something people want (I'm sure this may resonate with some of you…)
For some reason, I thought that making something that was new or pushed the boundaries of technology, wouldn’t make me any wealth (dumb me, eh?), so in the past I pursued things like e-commerce and an email newsletter.
Well I've now kind of realized that making something of real value actually goes hand in hand with wealth. I quite like this, it's fun building stuff that no one has built yet.
Anyway, it started with a chat with my dad. For a bit of context I'm a chartered accountant, working full time as a partner, and my Dad is also. He works at his own practice though, not the one I’m at (thank God, I'd kill him!).
He was badgering me for an hour while we were on a car journey back from my brother's, to build stuff for accountants instead of making memes on the internet (a pretty fair suggestion tbh…)
I've been building a bunch of the internal systems at the accountancy practice, so it kind of made sense. So I thought, what the hell? I'll give it a go.
So at Christmas, I sat down and started playing around. After having spent ages building with AI on the other startups, I was very pleasantly surprised at what I was actually able to automate. Okay, if I'm honest, that is a real understatement. I was extraordinarily surprised just how much I could automate from my Job.
After a bit of messing around, I set out with one intention to build something that is an order of magnitude better than what is available on the market. I thought, "If I can automate stuff I do at work, then maybe I'd have a bit more spare time to build the startup”. Hopefully therefor a continuous acceleration loop.
It looks like that might have worked to be honest. I haven't shared it with loads of people yet, only a few partners at the firm, but it seems to be spreading like wildfire internally.
One of the tools automates reviewing the notes, policies & disclosures in a set of statutory accounts, exactly the same way as I'd review them myself. We're now using this as a preliminary review on all my teams clients.
Probably the other one which is finding the most use is the "Ask Tax Questions" one. Very simply, it's just a more accurate assistant chatbot than ChatGPT.
There's a bunch more that are in there, and also a bunch that we're using internally that aren't released yet (like something which automates our clients post/letters we receive), but I won't drown you with all that detail.
Anyway, without further ado, I'm very pleased to introduce, Accounts Draft.
Thanks for reading! - If any of you try it out, hope you find it useful. Any feedback would be more than appreciated.
Kind Regards, Rob
Robert Benson-May, ACA