Why we built BrassWell

Nobody sets out to build accounting software. I ended up here the long way around: I tried four or five different systems for handling my own money, each one worked for a while, and each one had a problem I could not get past. Eventually it seemed more sensible to fix the thing properly than to keep switching.

The push to actually do it came from an unlikely place — I had been watching Starter Story on YouTube, which is hours of people explaining how their business began, and the pattern in almost every one of them is the same: they had a problem, the problem was boring and specific, and they were not the only person who had it. That last part is the whole bet. I was fairly sure my money setup was not a personal failing but a shape that a few million self-employed people are in.

In my case what I went looking for first was a book. I read a lot of personal finance — it is a genre with maybe six real ideas in it and several hundred books, but the six ideas are good ones. When I started working for myself the one I reached for was Ramit Sethi’s I Will Teach You to Be Rich, and specifically the part where he stops talking about budgets and starts talking about buckets.

A jack of all trades

I have been starting things for as long as I have been working. A media and marketing agency was the one that stuck longest, and most of the last few years I have run it from Latin America — new countries, new languages, new ways of doing ordinary business, and the particular education that comes from being the outsider in the room until you are not.

What that life makes you is a generalist. You do the sales and the invoicing and the editing and the tax and the awkward conversation about the unpaid balance, because there is nobody else to hand any of it to. Jack of all trades, in other words — and doing every job, badly enough to understand it, is why I knew what the money problem felt like from the inside long before I thought about building software for it.

The problem was never the math

Working out what you owe is not hard. A percentage of what came in, set aside, every time. Any self-employed person can describe the correct behavior in one sentence, and almost none of us do it — because the money lands in one account, undivided, and looks like yours.

That is the actual failure. Not ignorance, not laziness: a number in a bank account that is partly the government’s, partly rent and partly yours, with nothing anywhere on the screen saying which is which. You spend against the whole balance because the whole balance is what you can see.

The idea I borrowed

Sethi’s Conscious Spending Plan does not ask you to track anything. It asks you to decide, once, what share of your money goes where — roughly 50 to 60 percent to fixed costs, 5 to 10 to investing, 5 to 10 to savings goals, and whatever is left, 20 to 35 percent, to spend on whatever you like with no guilt attached. That last bucket is the part that makes it survivable. Every budget built on discipline eventually loses to a Friday night; a plan that has already approved the Friday night does not have to win that fight.

I called my version the freedom buckets, because that is what the last one actually buys, and I ran it by hand for as long as I could.

Where the book stops and self-employment starts

Every percentage in that plan is a percentage of take-home pay. That phrase is doing enormous quiet work. It assumes a number that arrives on a schedule, the same size each time, with tax already removed by somebody else before you ever see it.

Take that away and the system needs two changes. Tax has to become a bucket of its own, and it has to be the first one, filled before anything else is even considered — because nobody is withholding it for you and the bill arrives four times a year regardless. And the percentages cannot be applied monthly, because there is no reliable month. They have to be applied to each payment as it lands, so that a $9,000 January and a $900 March are handled by the same rule without either one requiring a decision.

That is the entire mechanic BrassWell is built on. It is not a new idea. It is a very good old one with the paycheck assumption taken out of it, which turns out to be most of the work.

What we tried first

For the monthly budget it was an Excel document first, then a Google spreadsheet, then Numbers on our iPhones. Each one worked for a while, in the way spreadsheets do: perfectly as long as you keep feeding it, and then not at all. Two separate bank accounts worked better and lasted longer, and it is still advice worth giving — a separate business account is the highest-leverage habit available to a self-employed person and it costs nothing.

The consumer budgeting apps ran into the same wall, and it is not that they are bad — several are very good. It is that they open by asking for your monthly income, and if you are self-employed that question has no honest answer. You enter a number you made up, and then spend the year watching the app compare reality to your invention.

The small-business accounting tools have the opposite problem. They are built to produce statements for someone who will read them — a bookkeeper, a lender, a board — and they are excellent at it. When it is only you, that machinery is overhead you maintain for an audience that does not exist.

None of these are broken products. They are products built for someone slightly to the left or right of where I was standing, which is a much more common situation than software being bad.

The gap in the middle

Between a budgeting app that assumes a salary and an accounting suite that assumes a bookkeeper sits a very large number of people: sole proprietors, freelancers, one-truck contractors, single-chair salons — earning irregularly, filing quarterly, and sitting between two categories of software that were each designed with somebody else in mind.

What that group needs is narrow and specific. Money arrives; it should divide itself before you can spend it. Tax should leave the spendable balance the moment it lands. An invoice should take a minute, and a paid one should land in your income on its own. And the question can I afford this should have an answer on screen that is already net of everything owed.

That is a smaller product than accounting software and a more opinionated one than a budgeting app. It is the whole of what BrassWell does.

The conversation in the car

The other thing that changed since 2025 is that I went a long way down the AI rabbit hole. Not as a novelty — as a working tool. The distance between “I have an idea” and “there is a thing running on a screen in front of me” collapsed to something I would not have believed two years ago. For a one-person shop that is the whole difference between a notion and a product.

So I played with a few. Most went nowhere, which is the correct outcome for most ideas. The one that did not came out of a brainstorming session I had out loud, talking to ChatGPT while driving — a stupid-sounding origin for a company, and the true one.

What turned it from a nice idea into a plan was the strategy underneath it, and that came from the Starter Story pattern above. Do not invent a category and hope. Find something people are already paying for, so the demand question is settled before you start. Then go and read how the existing options are failing the people using them — the reviews, the forums, the support threads, the one-star complaints nobody inside the company wants to read. Build the version that fixes the complaints.

That is what this is. Self-employed finance is not an unproven market; people pay for it every month. The gap is not that the category is missing. It is that most of it was designed around a salary, and the self-employed were handed the same tool with the edges filed off.

What we decided not to build

The shape of a product is mostly the list of things it refuses. BrassWell does not do payroll, inventory, multi-entity consolidation or double-entry ledgers, and it will not file your return for you. Each of those is a real need, and each one would pull the product toward the customer who has a bookkeeper — who is already well served, and is not who this is for.

It also does not give advice. The tax figure is an estimate against your own numbers, labeled as one. For your actual situation you want an accountant, and the app says so rather than implying otherwise.

Why it is called BrassWell

The name is an old English surname, and it means what it looks like: brass, and a well — the spring in the village you keep coming back to.

Brass carries its own freight. “The brass” is what people call the ones in charge — weight, seniority, the person who has done this before and is not rattled by it. Brass tacks. A brass band. It is not a delicate material and it does not pretend to be.

Put the two together and you have the thing I wanted to build for a group that usually gets handed something flimsy: a tool with some weight to it, that you come back to because it is useful, for people running their own small and self-employed businesses.

We will not be the biggest company in this market and we are not trying to be the most expensive one. What a small operation can genuinely be best at is the part the large ones have quietly stopped doing — a real answer from a real person when something has gone wrong with your money. That is the standard I would rather be judged on.

Where it is now

Live on the web, and on the iPhone App Store since October 16, 2026. The tax buckets and the invoicing were built first because those were the parts needed first. The iOS app is the same account and the same data — you do not start again.

What gets built next is being decided by the people using it — a claim that is easy to make and easy to check: write to hello@brasswell.app and a person replies, and the company is small enough that the person is often the one who wrote the code.

Whether the guess holds is the open question. It is possible I have built a very good tool for one person. The way to find out is to put it in front of people and listen.

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