From The Founder: July Update

The Honest Bit First

We've always been self-funded, and July was the month that runway ran out. We're still actively finding investors, but I'd rather just say it plainly than dress it up: money is tight, and it's going to stay tight for a bit. Visibility on where BudgetBro actually stands has been harder to get a handle on than I expected too, not the numbers themselves, more just knowing which numbers actually matter week to week when you're this early. But underneath all that there's a set of signals that keep telling me the same thing: this is a long-term game, and the pieces are starting to move in the right direction. More on that below.

Life Outside The App

The renovation on my grandad's place is nearly done. Genuinely can't believe I'm typing that sentence. Me and Samar have been putting the hours in and it's looking properly good now, the kind of good where you forget what the place used to look like. Bit emotional if I think about it too long, so I won't.

Here's a clip of us mid-tile so you can see what "putting the hours in" actually looked like:

Here's me and Samar tiling

Bigger news: we're leaving the UK in two weeks. New chapter, new country, and I'll be honest, I'm ready for it. If you want to follow that side of things, I'm @joshstartsup on YouTube and @joshstartsup on TikTok.

What's happened with BudgetBro this past month?

Two bits of good news on the business side before anything else. We've applied for our trademark, and our pitch deck is done and already going out in small chunks. Neither of those things gets celebrated with fireworks, but they're both huge for securing our future, one locks down what we've built, the other starts the conversations that get us adequately funded.

App store discoverability has been a grind. Getting found organically is much harder than people make it sound, but we're not starting from nothing, we're ranking #2 for "travel budgeting" right now, which for a bootstrapped app with zero ad spend is a signal I'm genuinely proud of (thank you Nathan). Alongside that we've been watching our GEO and SEO numbers closely: AI impressions, website visits, and keyword rankings climbing across a few different countries. None of that pays the bills directly, but it's the kind of early, unglamorous traction that tends to compound.

On the product side, the web app is really taking shape now. It's built to fully integrate with your phone, so your data and progress move with you rather than living in one place. We've also added MCP abilities for anyone technical enough to care what that means (you know who you are).

Explore Map is coming along too, and we're building it so non-members can use it, not just people who've signed up. Getting value in front of people before we ask anything of them.

And Day Trips is live. It needs more refinement, I won't pretend otherwise, but it's out there as one of a handful of funnels we're using to get people into the app. "Day trips" as a search term is genuinely huge. We're doing something more intricate than that, day trips that fit around a budget and an actual pace of life rather than cramming in as much as physically possible and as cheap as possible. Different approach, and I think it's the right one for us.

What's the plan for the coming weeks?

Once we land in two weeks, I'm going back to putting 150% into the company. Looking forward to it, if I'm honest. I think my absence while we finished the renovation has played a real part in why things have slowed down these past months, and I'm not going to pretend that's not true. But I also think it was needed. We needed that reset, all of us, and I'd rather take it now on our own terms than get forced into one later.

One shoutout before I go

Nathan. That's it, that's the shoutout, but I mean it. He's reactive, he's creative, he's loyal, and he's kept things moving when I couldn't be as present as I wanted to be. If this whole thing somehow falls apart one day, I already know I've come out the other side with a friend for life. Whatever happens next with BudgetBro, whatever direction it takes, me and him are the core of it.