Day 2: Found a $1.5M funded "competitor" this morning. By lunch I realized they don't even play in my space.
Hey everyone, Posted here for the first time yesterday. Today was a lot.
I found CentSight and spent an hour convinced I was dead. While doing my usual research this morning I came across a company called CentSight. "AI CFO for SMBs." My twin pitch. I went cold.
I went deep on them immediately. CentSight launched two weeks ago on June 24th. They raised a $1.5M pre-seed from Mudita Venture Partners, a venture studio, meaning they co-built the product alongside the founder. The founder is a serious operator who previously built and sold a recruiting software company. Not a first-time founder. Not a side project. Real company, real money, real experience. I genuinely thought I was finished before I had started. Then I actually read what they built.
CentSight connects to QuickBooks and Plaid. Their entire product lives on the ledger. Settled transactions. Historical data. They explicitly market "read-only" access as a security feature, which means they are architecturally locked out of doing anything upstream, no time tracker integration, no scope creep detection, no change order drafting, no invoice follow-ups. They analyze money that has already leaked. They are a rear-view mirror dressed up as an AI. That is not what Aerca is.
Aerca lives before the invoice. It catches the leaks while the work is still happening. It drafts the uncomfortable email to the client before the month ends and the margin is already gone. CentSight cannot do any of that without dismantling their entire product identity.
I went from panicking to being genuinely energized within an hour. A team with a veteran founder and $1.5M in funding just proved that agency owners will pay for financial AI. And they left the entire pre-invoice space completely untouched. Then I got my first real inbound.
Somewhere in the middle of all this, I noticed an email sitting in my inbox from the Aerca contact form. A user who found the site through IndieHackers, wrote in to say the messaging resonated, and then asked a specific, detailed question about the product.
Not "what does this do?" A specific, product-level question. From a stranger. From the post I wrote yesterday. That told me the pain is real. I replied the same day. The part I keep thinking about.
The biggest thing I realized today is not about CentSight. It is about distribution.
Right now Aerca exists in a vacuum. The site is live. The messaging is sharp. The landing page looks serious. But I am a 16-year-old developer in India with no audience, no network in this space, and no budget for ads. If I just keep building and don't actively fight for discoverability, nobody will ever find it. CentSight has a venture studio's design team, a founder with an existing network from his last exit, and $1.5M to make noise. I have IndieHackers, a GitHub account, and whatever time I have between school.
So the next two weeks are not about building more features. They are about making Aerca a product people can actually stumble across, not something that sits perfectly designed in a dark room.
The plan: build a BYOK (Bring Your Own Key) open-source MVP and publish it on GitHub. No cloud, no database, no data stored anywhere. You clone it, plug in your own OpenAI or Claude API key, upload your timesheet and contract data, and within minutes it shows you exactly where your margin is bleeding and drafts the emails to recover it. Open source means discoverable.
Developers find GitHub. Agency owners trust code they can read. CentSight spent $1.5M to prove the market is real. I am going to spend 48 hours proving the gap they left behind with a GitHub repo and a README.
Two things.
If you run an agency or know someone who does, forward this post or introduce me. I don't have a network in this space yet and I am genuinely trying to find the people who feel this problem every single month. One warm intro is worth more than a thousand impressions right now.
And if you are an agency owner yourself, follow the build. I will keep posting updates here as I go. I need brutal, honest feedback from people who actually run service businesses. Not encouragement. Tell me where I am wrong.
One question before I go:
A 16-year-old developer with no funding, no network, and no team is building against a veteran founder with a prior exit and $1.5M in institutional backing.
Do you think that is a problem? Or do you think the person closest to the code and furthest from the corporate playbook actually has an advantage here?
Genuinely asking. Drop it in the comments.
