Built for owners who make the big calls without a big team behind them.
I've spent years alongside small business owners — coffee shops, contractors, retailers, professional services firms, and family-run operations. They all share the same pain: they're making decisions that span sales, operations, finance, and people, but the evidence is scattered across a dozen places and the clock never stops. DecisionGraph is the decision layer I wish every one of them had.
Why I'm building this.
I've worked across strategy, operations, and analytics for the better part of a decade — inside startups, growth-stage companies, and alongside dozens of small business owners. Different industries, different sizes, wildly different day-to-day pressures. But one pattern showed up everywhere.
Every small business I got close to was drowning in information and starving for a clear decision.
The bank account showed cash flow. The inbox held customer conversations. The CRM had the pipeline. The accounting software had the books. The project management tool had the work. Each system did its own job well. None of them could answer the questions the owner actually needed answered — Can we afford to hire right now? Should we buy this equipment? Which customer should we prioritize? Should we raise prices? Is this marketing spend actually working?
Those answers lived in the gap between the tools. And filling that gap was the owner's second job. Usually at midnight. Usually on a phone screen in the car between jobs. Usually with a spouse or a partner asking, "Are you sure?"
The most capable owners I met weren't stuck because they lacked judgment. They were stuck because the evidence they needed was scattered across a dozen places, and the reasoning behind the last similar decision walked out the door with the last employee or got lost in a thread.
"The owner knew the answer in his gut. But he couldn't get the numbers, the customer context, and the team input in one place fast enough — so the decision kept getting pushed to 'next week' until the opportunity passed."
That conversation was the tipping point for me. It wasn't that the owner lacked skill. He was sharp, experienced, and deeply committed. It was that the whole process of making decisions inside a small business was broken — and no one was building a tool that treated the owner's decision as the product.
Dashboards told him what already happened. AI chatbots gave him a one-shot answer with no sources. Spreadsheets held the numbers but not the context. None of them answered the actual question: what should I do, why, and how confident should I be?
So I started building DecisionGraph in the evenings. Then in the mornings. Then on weekends. Then full time.
Six patterns that show up in almost every small business.
The evidence lives in too many places
The bank, the inbox, the CRM, the accounting software, the project tool — each holds a piece of the answer. A simple question means opening five apps before you can even think clearly.
Every decision starts from zero
Owners reopen a blank spreadsheet, dig through old threads, and try to remember what happened last time. The first half of every decision is just reconstructing what the business already knew.
Speed beats quality — until it doesn't
When the evidence takes too long to assemble, calls get made on instinct or the loudest voice wins. Good thinking arrives after the moment has already passed.
The audit trail walks out the door
Ask 'why did we decide that?' and watch someone scroll through texts, emails, and notes. Real accountability requires a record — and most small businesses simply don't have one.
The business never gets smarter
Each decision is a one-off. Reasoning isn't captured, outcomes aren't tracked, and the same analysis gets re-done next quarter by someone new. Learning doesn't compound.
The owner becomes the bottleneck
The best operators pull miracles out of their heads. Their judgment is celebrated, the underlying system never gets fixed, and every big call still has to go through them.
The last piece finally arrived.
For years the missing ingredient was reasoning. Small businesses could connect a bank account, run accounting software, and track customers in a CRM. But the last mile — reading across all of that context, weighing trade-offs, and producing a clear recommendation — still required the owner sitting alone at a laptop at midnight.
Modern LLMs changed that. Not because they're perfect. Because they're finally good enough to act as a real reasoning layer when you give them the right context and hold them to a real audit trail.
That's the bet behind DecisionGraph: connect the systems a small business already uses, structure the evidence into a business graph, run the reasoning transparently, and capture every decision so the next one starts smarter than the last.
Four principles I'm building around.
Start with the decision, not the dashboard.
A dashboard tells you what happened. A decision requires a recommendation, trade-offs, and a clear next step. The experience should be built around the owner's question, not the data source.
Evidence should be connected, not collected.
The job is not to dump every report into one place. It's to connect the facts that matter to the decision at hand — customers, cash flow, contracts, capacity, and past reasoning.
Reasoning must be visible and traceable.
Every recommendation should show the chain of evidence behind it. Owners need to see what was considered, why it matters, and where confidence comes from — without a data science degree.
Outcomes should teach the next decision.
When a decision is executed and measured, the result becomes context for the next one. The business should get smarter as it learns, not just as data accumulates.
How I work and what I optimize for.
Decisions are the product
Success is measured by the quality of decisions owners make, not the number of charts they generate.
Trust is engineered
Recommendations must be explainable, evidence must be traceable, and access must be permissioned by default.
Context compounds
The platform gets more valuable with every decision made, because it learns what matters to your business — not just your industry.
Amplify the owner
Software should sharpen the owner's judgment, not replace it. Build for the person who signs the checks and sleeps with the consequences.
Want to help shape it?
DecisionGraph is early, opinionated, and evolving fast. If any of this resonates — try it, break it, tell me what's missing. I read every note.