I spent the first decade of my career inside organizations that took project management seriously. Visa. Multi-million-dollar implementations. Clients with their own PMOs on the other side of the table. The work had real rigor — and real overhead. Dedicated PMs, dedicated tools, dedicated meetings about meetings.
That rigor is why those projects landed.
When I started working with small businesses — boutique consultancies, five-person agencies, founders running services on the side — I expected to find a stripped-down version of the same playbook. Instead I found something stranger: most of them had nothing. Not "less." Nothing. A shared spreadsheet, a Slack channel, and a series of late-night anxieties about which client was about to slip.
The tools they could afford weren't built for them. The tools built for them weren't honest about what running a project actually requires. So they stitched together five SaaS products that each did one piece poorly, paid $200/month for the privilege, and still didn't know whether their biggest project was going to finish on time.
Mainspring is the bet that this gap is closeable. One product, opinionated about how the work fits together: projects connect to time, time connects to invoices, invoices connect to AP, and an AI advisor sits across all of it answering the questions a CFO would, if you had one.
We're not trying to be NetSuite. We're trying to be the operating system that a four-person services business can actually run on — without giving up the rigor that makes the difference between a project that ships and one that quietly drifts.
That's the whole pitch. The rest is execution.
— Dwain