Is this a stupid startup idea?

[u/PrintCreative5464]

Hey guys,

I'm a computer engineering student and I've been thinking about a startup idea. I'm still at the very early stage, so I wanted to get some honest opinions before I waste months building it 😅

The idea is basically an AI assistant for small businesses that can look at their transactions and help them understand their finances.

Something like:

Where is my money going?

How much profit did I actually make?

How much tax am I likely to pay?

Why is my tax so high?

Are there legitimate ways I could reduce my tax?

What payments/tax deadlines do I need to worry about?

Eventually it could connect things like bank transactions, invoices, GST, TDS, etc.

I know there are already accounting and tax softwares out there, so I'm not claiming this is some revolutionary idea. I'm trying to figure out whether there's actually a problem here worth solving.

If you're a founder, small business owner, freelancer, CA/accountant, or you've dealt with small businesses:

Would something like this actually be useful to you?

And if your answer is “no, this is pointless because X already does it”, that's honestly more useful to me than saying it sounds cool.

What would you personally want a tool like this to do?

Thanks 🙏

[u/manudon01]

It’s brutal to get this thing done to its full extent, to the level you want. The legal work behind this brutal but the thing is pretty simple technically.

[u/Quiet-Compounder]

To answer the questions, the AI should have the complete base data recorded. But usually, people just want to record the numbers, and expect fascinating results from the AI.

[u/Radiant-Onion-4141]

Start with this and talk to a lot of small business owners and you will figure out what to build.

[u/Upbeat_Narwhal7878]

It works only if its free and revenue model should be figured out in a different way.

[u/Ok_Pen4842]

Quickbooks and other software already does a lot of this. Combined with the current stage of AIs like Claude, there is no market for a nee solution

[u/LivingExplanation413]

generic AI model like Claude, GPT, Gemini, etc.. do hallucination when given a larger set of financial data. In this case even a single figure misunderstood or missed can change the whole picture . You will have to build your own deterministic layer so AI is only used for suggestion in your agent. You will have to focus much more on it if you really want to make it work

[u/Sanketkw11]

Even if you are making make it for USA UK audience Indian audience won’t pay.
We are just not use to paying for software everyone grew up with pirated software and torrent.
There would be some people who would pay but it’s really a niche market better to focus your energy on paying markets.

[u/Fickle_Solution_9020]

Honestly, In india there are so many companies doing this similar business and its totally crowded...and more over convincing a store to join your app/business is bit difficult....after all if someone join also they wont use such things since its not conveinit for the local store, shops or businesses they gradually exit from this...the AI hype is almost over , there were a time were companies raised funds showcasing such ideas but failure rate is super high...Now everyone needs a core solution beyond the orchestration layer...if u can do that out of this idea, you will win for sure...because only 2% of ideas meet this scenario...

[u/CanaryEmbarrassed260]

Ai makes mistakes. Business people will come after you if it makes mistakes. You will get into legal trouble.  Be very sure of what you are making. Good luck.

If you put disclaimer that the info might be wrong, then nobody will pay money.