When Growth Becomes a Time Problem

Recently, I met a new friend through Xiaohongshu (RED) — Ms. R.

A little over three years ago, she left China for Dubai and founded a CSP (corporate services provider) firm that provides accounting, tax and corporate services mainly for Chinese entrepreneurs and businesses in the UAE. Beyond accounting, tax and company formation, they also have fairly complete local capabilities, including some licenses and resources with high application barriers, such as financial and Web3-related ones.

Her business has been doing well.

When she first started, most of her customers came from Xiaohongshu. Today, as word of mouth has accumulated, referrals from existing customers have become an increasingly important source of new business.

Interestingly, that's also how we met.

She later told me that she had only read a few of my posts before having a very direct reaction:

"Isn't this exactly what I need?"

She quickly found the SnapLedger website, and from there discovered my Founder Diary.

What surprised her even more was that the Founder Diary actually has a Chinese version.

She even asked her colleagues back in China to test whether the website could be accessed without a VPN — not only did it open directly, it loaded fast.

For me, that was a nice little surprise too.

When we build a product, we spend a lot of time thinking about marketing, channels, SEO and content distribution. But sometimes the most effective connection is simply one person stumbling across a few posts and realizing:

This product happens to solve the problem that is giving me the biggest headache right now.

And Ms. R's biggest headache today is not a lack of customers. It is not having enough time.

She has dozens of client cases moving forward at the same time. Each project can involve different government departments, in-person errands, document preparation, payments, client communication and follow-ups.

A lot of the key information is scattered across WeChat chat history.

So every day she has to keep confirming:

• Which step is this client at right now?
• Who is responsible for the next step?
• What documents are still missing?
• Have government fees changed?
• Did we overcharge or undercharge this client?

None of these things are complicated on their own. But when dozens of projects run in parallel, the management cost multiplies quickly.

She also tried using Feishu (Lark) to manage the team.

The problem wasn't that Feishu lacked features — it was quite the opposite: too powerful, and too expensive to learn.

In particular, many of the team members who run government errands in person turn over fairly often. You can't retrain everyone every few weeks on how to use multidimensional spreadsheets, kanban boards, databases and various workflows.

After exploring it for a while, she eventually gave up.

Another problem I found very interesting is that her project management and financial management are naturally tangled together.

Her own service fees are usually fixed, but the government fees on service projects change frequently, so almost every month there are refunds or top-ups to settle with clients.

And as an agent service provider, those collections need to be further separated in the accounting:

Which part is truly the firm's revenue, and which part is just collected on behalf of clients and then paid to the government.

If project information, payment information and government fee changes are all scattered across different chat histories, the month-end reconciliation naturally becomes very tedious.

That is how we ended up talking about Snappy PM.

What I have in mind is not asking her team to learn yet another project management system, but making Snappy an AI Project Manager.

Everyone can keep communicating in the way that feels most natural to them, while Snappy organizes the fragmented information in the background into client projects, tasks, timelines, to-dos and project boards.

At the same time, SnapLedger can keep the project's collections, government pass-through payments and true service revenue clearly sorted in sync.

In other words, project management in front, financial management behind — but underneath, it's the same business process.

If AI can truly connect this process end to end, then the value of software is no longer just "improving efficiency a little" — it can genuinely reduce the number of things a founder has to personally watch every single day.

At the end of our conversation, Ms. R said one sentence:

"This way I can free up my hands to expand into more markets!"

I think that sentence nicely summarizes why we are building Snappy.

Good software shouldn't give an entrepreneur a new system to manage.

It should give them their time back.