Receipt AI

We Built A $1.5K/Mo AI App For Receipts

December 24th, 2024

Who are you and what business did you start?

My name is Queenie Peng, and along with my co-founder Ian Heraty, we run Receipt-AI.com. We help busy, traveling teams manage their receipts effortlessly using AI and SMS.

What sets Receipt-AI apart is its SMS-based receipt upload feature and the ability to reconcile expenses in Xero and QuickBooks online with one-click.

Users simply send a picture of their receipt using SMS, and Receipt-AI takes care of the rest: extracting data, renaming files, categorizing expenses with AI, ensuring secure storage, and uploading them to Xero or QuickBooks online for reconciliation. This SMS functionality allows receipt management to happen anytime, anywhere, without the need to download additional apps, making it exceptionally accessible and convenient.

Adding a memo like 'Lunch with Jason about the Q3 project' in your text message can help you remember the receipt later.

Our office - coffee shops :)

How do you come up with the idea for Receipt AI?

We keep an idea book where we write down every idea we come up with and rate it based on three metrics (on a scale of 1-5):

How big is the idea?
Founder-market fit.
How painful is the problem?

The key is not to judge an idea before putting it in the basket. This process helps us stay objective and organized when evaluating potential opportunities.

Before Receipt-AI, we ran a food truck booking website called Popping.live. At its peak, we helped over 100 organizations in Chicago book food trucks. Despite our best efforts and passion, we realized that no matter how high our IQs were, we couldn’t make the business profitable. It was a tough lesson, but it taught us something valuable: Ideas matter. Execution is critical, but choosing the right problem to solve can make all the difference.

Receipt-AI stood out because it’s something we truly enjoy working on, and we love serving our customers. Before launching, we built a simple landing page with an annual payment option only and announced on LinkedIn that we were launching in a month. To our surprise, a customer signed up immediately—Igor, you da man! That was our “aha” moment: clear validation that the problem was real, the solution resonated, and we were onto something meaningful.