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It's a fairly capital-intensive business.

Here's my best articulation of specifically what makes it hard: https://waseem.substack.com/p/tech-enabled-services




The disconnect you have with me (your customer) is that I don’t want or need a “tech enabled service”.

I just want the service.

Sometimes being a Pilot customer feels like I’m being experimented on. Instead of humans reliably doing our books, now I need to hire a fractional CFO (which you conveniently also provide) to double check your work.

We find errors in our Pilot books at a staggering rate. Things that would never be missed if we just had a human bookkeeper.

The value prop for a “tech enabled service” from a customers perspective is non-existent. It’s not cheaper for the customer (I pay you over $25k/yr for doing very little), the quality isn’t any better, and as we see with Bench (who also raised $100 million) there’s incredible risk in relying on it as a business critical service.

Anyone reading this, just please go hire a human bookkeeper. Don’t believe the marketing spin pitched by these tech enabled services companies.


Hey cj, just created an account here to reply to your thoughts, as they strike home. I own Merrittbookkeeping.com. It's a bookkeeping service run by humans, offering very affordable monthly rates. I'm surprised how many new companies are launching "AI powered bookkeeping", but for more money than we are! Why would the end user care if it's AI, unless it's way cheaper? Same thing you are expressing here. Not sure why companies promote fancy tech unless it is a benefit to the end user, not the company themselves.




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