It’s funny — I never thought I’d be in the “AI” field. My journey didn’t start with code; it started with coffee. And guilt.
A few years ago, my best friend Sarah finally did it. She quit her corporate job to open the bakery she had been dreaming of since childhood. I was her biggest supporter, cheering her on as she poured her life savings and passion into creating this beautiful space. Her croissants were art, and her joy was contagious.
But about a year in, I saw the light in her start to fade. Every time I texted her to grab a coffee, she would reply hours later, exhausted, buried under scheduling or staring at broken booking links. Instead of flour on her apron, she had spreadsheets on her desk.
Baking, the thing she loved most, had become maybe 10% of her job. The other 90% was this invisible “second job” she never signed up for: being her own receptionist, scheduler, and IT support.
That was my entry point. I didn’t see a market opportunity; I saw a friend losing her spark. And I got angry. Angry at the myth we sell entrepreneurs — that if they just “hustle harder” and buy one more “simple” tool, everything will work out. It doesn’t. It just adds another password and another dashboard.
So, I set out to kill that second job. Handle is the weapon I’m building to do it.
The problem we’re solving is simple: we want to give founders their spark back.
Small business owners are crushed by admin tasks. Scheduling, invoicing, rescheduling, customer management — all of it takes over their lives. The chaos monster follows them home at night, steals their weekends, and chips away at the passion that made them start in the first place.
Handle is their AI partner. When the chaos shows up at 10 PM in their inbox, they don’t have to deal with it. They just forward it to us, and we handle it.
It’s about eliminating the second job so they can go back to doing what they love.
Most of the business software industry is built on the same broken promise: “Here’s a powerful tool. Now it’s your job to learn it, manage it, and become an expert at using it.” That’s insulting.
It’s like giving someone who’s drowning a heavier life jacket and telling them to swim better. Competitors sell dashboards and features. They automate one small step but add more buttons, more settings, more work.
We do the opposite. We tell the founder: “Give us the work. All of it.” Handle is not another tool; it’s a partner. Not another dashboard; just a simple conversation.
That’s what makes us different. We’re building a “headless” software experience. No dashboards, no clutter. Just outcomes.
Because I believe the most passionate people in our communities — the bakers, the trainers, the consultants — deserve to win. They are the real heroes. They make our neighborhoods vibrant. But right now, they’re losing a war of attrition against busywork.
My personal mission is to arm them. To give them back their time, their spark, their lives.
I want to build a world where the success of a small business is determined by the quality of their craft, not by their tolerance for administrative pain. I want Sarah to be able to just bake again. I want her to say “yes” when I text her for coffee. That’s what drives me.
The hardest challenge has been conquering the “loneliness of the idea.” Early on, Handle felt like a secret only I saw — this massive problem of business owners drowning in busywork while the world accepted it as normal. It was tempting to build in a vacuum.
The weight of that isolation was real. The turning point came when I stopped pitching and started listening. I went where my future customers were — places like Reddit — and asked about their pain. The flood of “me too” responses was the antidote.
That moment shifted everything. My job wasn’t to build my secret idea, but the solution the community was begging for. Moving from “my vision” to “our shared problem” changed the trajectory of Handle.
Yes, fundamentally. The industry standard is to give the owner more tools and more dashboards. We think that’s broken.
Our standard is: tell us the outcome, and we’ll handle the process. Our entire product is built around a conversational interface — literally just text us what you need, and we’ll do it. That’s a radical departure from the feature-heavy, graphical approach of everyone else.
Absolutely. I fundamentally disagree with how the industry defines “simplicity.”
Competitors release new features and call it “making the product simpler.” But really, they’re just adding complexity. Another button, another setting, another thing to manage.
I believe real value is created when you remove the user from the work entirely. My competitors think the goal is to build a better cockpit. I believe the goal is to build autopilot. That’s a deep, philosophical difference.
The biggest trend is the consumerization of AI. Giants like Meta and Google are training millions of people to interact with AI conversationally. That’s a huge tailwind for us — they’re educating the market for free.
But the second trend is also a challenge: these giants will inevitably release generic AI agents for businesses. And people will get disappointed when they realize how shallow those agents are.
That’s why I believe the real future lies in vertical, specialized AI partners. Not one AI that does everything poorly, but a collection of expert AIs that each do one thing perfectly. Handle is positioning itself to be the expert AI partner for service businesses — a niche the giants will overlook.
Our five-year vision is to become the conversational operating system for the service economy.
For the first 18–24 months, we’ll focus obsessively on boutique fitness, wellness, and coaching — becoming the best in the world at solving their administrative chaos. That deep, vertical expertise is our moat.
Once we dominate those beachheads, we’ll expand methodically. The playbook for a yoga studio is 80% the same as for a law firm or home repair service, and our engine is built for that expansion.
By years three to five, Handle will evolve into a platform. We’ll offer the Handle Engine as an API so other SaaS companies can embed our conversational automation. Our focus will remain service businesses, but our reach will scale exponentially.
Now, we are preparing for a $100,000 pre-seed. This isn’t about growth, it’s about proof — building our MVP, onboarding the first 10–20 paying customers, and demonstrating the “magic moment” where our AI saves measurable time on admin tasks.
We’ll also validate our go-to-market playbook and guerilla marketing approach. The goal is a 12–15 month runway to de-risk the business and create undeniable traction for a larger seed round.
If I started over, I would spend zero time building anything in the first three months. I’d only talk to customers and build an audience.
With my last idea, I rushed into building. I had a cool solution, but I hadn’t yet deeply understood the crushing pain of my customer. I was selling a feature, not a feeling.
The lesson I learned is this: your first product is not your code. It’s your point of view. Success comes from articulating the customer’s problem better than they can themselves. If you can do that, they’ll assume you have the solution.
Stop building. Start listening.
Don’t ask customers what features they want. Ask them what they’re complaining about at dinner with their spouse. Ask them what task they dread every Sunday night. Find the pain that’s so deep and so real they’ve just accepted it as part of life.
Fall in love with that problem. Talk about it, write about it, build a community around it. If you can articulate someone’s pain better than they can, you already have their trust. The product is just the proof.
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