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The Insight

Freelancers don't hate bookkeeping.
They hate deciding.

Every expense is a micro-choice: is this meals? Supplies? Office? That friction, compounded weekly, is what breaks them.

Conventional wisdom is wrong

WHAT TOOLS ASSUME
  • ✕ Freelancers want powerful features
  • ✕ They'll learn accounting categories
  • ✕ They enjoy financial control
  • ✕ More dashboards = better tool
WHAT FREELANCERS ACTUALLY DO
  • → They want zero decisions
  • → They Google "is coffee deductible" every year
  • → They want to never think about it
  • → They pay for invisibility, not insight
Dao Tran
FOUNDER–MARKET FIT
"I ran a 9-person design studio and did its books at midnight for four years."

Every Friday I'd promise myself I'd categorize receipts. Every month I'd panic-sort 200 transactions the night before taxes were due. I built Freeledger because I lived this problem.

THE WEDGE

Auto-categorize.
Auto-set-aside taxes.
Zero decisions.

Connect your bank. Every transaction gets categorized instantly. Tax liability calculated and set aside automatically. You never choose a dropdown again.

Today's transactions Adobe Creative Cloud Software & subscriptions • Auto-categorized $54.99 Blue Bottle Coffee Meals & entertainment • Auto-categorized $6.75 Staples Office Supplies Office supplies • Auto-categorized $42.18 $23.41 set aside for taxes
SMALLEST SIGNAL
210

waitlist signups from one Reddit post

40 said "take my money now"

Posted in r/freelance: "What if your bookkeeping did itself?" 210 emails in 48 hours. 40 replied asking for beta access and offering to prepay. We haven't built it yet.

What we'll learn with this money

01

Which categories matter

Do freelancers need 47 expense types or just 8? We'll ship simple and learn what's missing.

02

How much tax automation they trust

Will they let software set aside tax money automatically, or do they need a confirm button?

03

What price makes them say yes immediately

Is it $12/mo? $29? $49? We'll test with real cards, not surveys.

MARKET (LOOSELY)
76M

US freelancers, growing every year

A few dollars a month from each is enough. We're not building enterprise software. We're building the thing freelancers wish existed when they're staring at a spreadsheet at 11 PM.

Use of funds: every dollar mapped to a milestone

WHAT WE'LL BUILD
  • $160K Core product: auto-categorization engine + tax calculator
  • $80K Bank integrations (Plaid) + compliance groundwork
  • $100K First 1,000 customers: support + onboarding flows
  • $60K Runway buffer: 9 months, two technical founders
WHAT WE'LL PROVE
  • → Freelancers will pay $20–30/mo for invisible bookkeeping
  • → Our categorization AI beats manual entry 95%+ of the time
  • → Tax auto-set-aside doesn't cause support panic
  • → 1,000 paying users gives us the dataset to build what's next
WHY NOW
"The tools freelancers tolerate were built for accountants, not for them."

QuickBooks launched in 1983. Xero in 2006. FreshBooks in 2003. Every incumbent optimizes for feature-count and accountant-friendly reports. Nobody asks: what if the freelancer never had to think about it? The wedge is open because the old guard can't un-complicate their products. We can start simple and stay that way.

THE ASK

$400K pre-seed SAFE

Ship the wedge + reach 1,000 paying freelancers in 9 months

Let's talk:

Dao Tran & Pia Romano
dao@freeledger.co • pia@freeledger.co