I'm Graham — here's why I built BuildRound

BuildRound is a tiny, profitable software company that I run. Not a startup chasing a billion-pound valuation. Not a marketplace. Not a venture-backed grow-or-die. The whole point is to stay small enough that the people using it actually shape it.

Here's the conversation that started it. A friend of a friend was thinking about leaving his job and starting a gardening round. He'd been quoted £27,000 by one of the franchise networks — the system, the playbook, the kit discounts, the brand on the van. £27,000 he didn't have, plus a 6% royalty on every customer he'd ever sign up.

We sat at a kitchen table and worked out what he actually needed: a list of his customers, a way to schedule them, an invoice that didn't look like it had been built in Word in 1997, somewhere to log the cash payments, and a number for how much tax he should set aside. That's it. The bit the franchise was selling wasn't a system — it was permission. Permission to start, scaffolded by the feeling that someone else had figured this out before him.

BuildRound is that scaffold, for £15 a month. The same setup a £27,000 franchise gives you — the system, the playbook, the tools — without the franchise fee, without the royalty, and with your own name on the van.

What I'll never do

A few commitments, written down so I can be held to them:

• I will not sell BuildRound to a US private-equity firm. That's where good UK SaaS goes to die. The price doubles, the support gets outsourced, and the tool stops being yours. If I ever step away, I'll find a buyer who runs it the same way — or hand it to the people using it.
• I will not put up the price on existing operators. New tier, new price — fine. But the £15 you signed up at is the £15 you'll keep paying. (The only exception, written into the terms: if HMRC changes VAT or another statutory tax, that gets passed through — your subscription doesn't subsidise a government rate change.) The day BuildRound starts growing by squeezing existing customers is the day it stops being interesting to me.
• I will not become a marketplace. BuildRound doesn't connect homeowners to operators and it never will. Your customers are your customers. We don't rate you, we don't mediate disputes, we don't take a cut of the work.
• I will not chase the multi-crew enterprise market. Jobber and ServiceTitan can have it. BuildRound is for solo operators and very small teams. We'll get really good at that one job rather than half-good at five.

A bit about me

I'm based in the UK. I've spent a long career building software, mostly in places where the products got steadily worse as the companies got bigger. BuildRound is the opposite experiment: stay small, stay cheap, stay focused on a specific kind of person — someone with low-cost equipment, some hustle, and the willingness to learn the trade. Get really good at helping that person, and stop there.

If you've got something to say about it — a feature you'd want, a screen that confused you, or a question I haven't answered on the site yet — I read every email personally.

For non-founder things — billing, account help, switching from another tool — see the contact page.