Eriko

How it started

So we were looking at these freelancer job boards and it hit us that most people hiring bookkeepers weren't looking for some accounting genius. They just wanted someone who would REMEMBER their weird preferences without constant reminders.

We saw this pattern over and over:

Business owners kept getting screwed by 3 things:

1. They'd train a bookkeeper on all their weird expense categorizations (like calling bar tabs "networking") and then 6 months later that person would quit and they'd start over. Such a waste of time.

2. QuickBooks is a nightmare and most people hate using it. They weren't hiring bookkeepers for knowledge but just to deal with the horrible interface.

3. Good freelance bookkeepers are either way too expensive or super unreliable. The cheap ones make tons of mistakes. And tax time? Forget it. They all vanish.

I totally got it watching my friend Mia sitting in a coffee shop manually sorting hundreds of transactions because her bookkeeper ghosted her right before tax deadlines. She runs a legit company worth millions and there she was doing grunt work because humans are flaky.

Our janky solution

So we cobbled together Eriko - basically trying to make an AI that could actually get hired as a bookkeeper:

1. We built this memory system so she'd remember everything about each client. Tell her once your coffee is a business expense and she just knows forever. No more repeating yourself.

2. Made it text-based so no one has to learn QuickBooks. Just text her like "hey that Amazon charge was office stuff" and she handles all the backend junk.

3. Our sneaky trick: when she gets confused, she quietly pings one of our CPA friends who fixes just that specific thing while she keeps working on everything else. Clients never even know.

4. The real test was putting her on Upwork and Fiverr (clearly saying she's AI) to see if she could get actual jobs. And she did! Started getting reviews and everything.

Why it's different

Most AI accounting tools are just boring software with AI slapped on. You're still buying a product you have to manage.

Eriko is different because you're actually hiring help, not buying software. She builds a reputation through reviews and gets better with each client. It's like hiring a service instead of buying a tool.

The coolest part is she learns differently. Those other AI things train on general data then stop. Eriko keeps learning from each specific client, building a unique memory for every business.

The results

People who've hired Eriko save like 15-20 hours a month on financial crap they hate doing. It costs way less than hiring even a mediocre human bookkeeper. And no more tax season panic.But the best feedback was from this startup founder who texted me: "first time in 3 years I didn't have nightmares about my books before tax day." That was pretty cool.What started as a dumb side project turned into something people actually find helpful. We didn't plan to pioneer some new model of AI labor, but seems like that's what's happening.We're not VC-backed and don't have some masterplan to disrupt accounting. Just some nerds who thought it'd be fun to see if we could make a semi-independent digital worker that could survive in the wild. Turns out she can, which opens up weird possibilities we're still figuring out.