Invoy

What Inspired Me: The \$4,000 Problem

The idea clicked during dinner with a friend---a senior consultant. He was complaining, becuase he'd just spent four solid hours on a Saturday manually piecing together three client invoices. He broke it down: at his hourly rate, that was \$4,000 of lost, non-billable time just on admin.

That felt wrong. It's a huge structural waste. He's one of the smartest people I know, working at a huge firm like McKinsey, and their internal process was still failing him.

I realised the issue wasn't just Alex. It was everyone in the service-based economy that bills by time. I talked to a freelance dev ("Sarah"), who admitted she was underselling her time by 20\% just becuase she didn't want to log the small jobs. Another guy who ran a small agency ("David") was getting constant client pushback becuase his hour breakdowns were too vague.

The core realization: The system for turning time into money is broken. People need a transparent bridge between the actual work done and the final bill, without manual entry.

Defining the System and Getting to PMF

Once I saw the scale of the waste, it became a problem about system building. How do you efficiently connect a person's real-world actions to a financial document?

Our first move was defining the beachhead market: high-value independent consultants and small firms who use G-Suite. For them, the \$4,000 pain point is real, acute, and immediate. They had the highest need for administrative efficiency.

The next step was hitting product-market fit (PMF) fast. We figured we needed to solve two things:

1. Logged Time: Automatically generate invoices by reading the calendar. This is the obvious part.
2. Unlogged Time (The Hard Part): Use AI to turn messy human thoughts---like a voice note---into a perfect, justifiable, itemized invoice.

Built With

• anthropic
• api
• calendar
• claude
• fastapi
• google
• jinja
• python
• react
• resend
• sqlalchemy
• sqlite
• tailwindcss
• typescript
• vite
• vosk
• weasyprint