Competing against a paper notebook
How do you compete against something that’s cheaper, more flexible, and has zero learning curve?
One of the things that is important when building a product is knowing your competition. In 2025, it is highly unlikely that any idea with legs has zero competition, even if indirectly.
When thinking about Cari, my WhatsApp-based expense management tool for micro-businesses, the most notable tools in the space are products like Quickbooks. People know of Quickbooks even if they’ve never used it, but that actually isn’t actually my competition in this segment.
My competition costs less than $5, has no subscription, can be used in infinite ways without a learning curve, and a single one lasts months if not years. It’s a humble notebook.
It’s a surprisingly durable tool, pages can get dirty or tear, but it’s easy to simply throw into a bag and safer to leave out in the open by your side as you interact with customers all day, every day.
It is astounding to see the various “systems” folks have conceived to track their sales, appointments, inventory and expenses on the blank slate that is a paper notebook. It is truly the original Microsoft Excel.
Speaking of Excel, in some of my early experiments I explored converting some of these paper workflows to Excel (or Google Sheets, which is free), but the harsh truth was that many of these folks never used spreadsheets or quite simply didn’t want to. Some would keep using their paper notebook and then wait until I called to check-in to have me update the sheet for them.
With that in mind, Cari has always been about simplicity over glamourous features. I want users to get in, get out, and go about their day like normal. Logging an expense is as simple as dictating a voice note or a text.
In a perfect world, it’d be like electricity and the other utilities that we access multiple times every day without actively thinking about it. That utility today for many micro-businesses is a paper notebook.
Rather than directly competing with it, my focus is on chipping away at it and even working alongside it to deliver new benefits not possible with only paper.
Computer vision and AI can do a lot to build a bridge between existing paper based systems and software such that folks can finally gain automated insights and visibility into their business, even if they keep their paper notebook around.
Cari is a gambit on being there when the notebook falls short. I’m excited to explore more of that.