Why we made Rainfall

When you ask small business owners about AI, most of the time the response is the same, they’ve tried ChatGPT a few times and got some useful answers but quite quickly it shows its limitations and it is constrained to writing the odd email, if used at all. It’s hard for them to align that with the headlines around AI that say everything is changing and to see how it could fit into their actual day. Those same headlines that talk about image generators making art or whole industries being replaced have nothing to do with them wrestling for five hours a week with a spreadsheet that doesn’t quite work or a confusing process they can’t resolve.

Big businesses have teams of engineers, huge budgets and an abundance of time to figure out which AI tools could actually save them money and time. There are roughly 5.5 million small businesses in the UK, around 60% of private sector jobs, and most of them have none of those things. It’s becoming harder every day to run a small business and almost nobody is making small, useful, affordable tools that would help close this gap.

That gap is why Rainfall was created but not as another corporate consultancy selling strategy, we make small custom things, Chrome plugins, spreadsheet automations, little boutique portals that do the one specific thing that the big SaaS platform won’t. Sometimes all that’s needed is a written guide helping business owners to pick which modern tools would actually be worth their time. This is small scale, craft software like a local jeweller or baker, custom commissions done by one person at a time.

This kind of bespoke software was always possible, it just used to cost £20,000 and take a small dev team three months. Modern tooling has changed the rate at which software can be made and the cost along with it, so that most of what we make takes a few days and costs far less than tens of thousands of pounds. AI didn’t replace the work of building it, it made the work cheap enough that small businesses can afford it for the first time.

This journal will be where we write about the things we make, what we’re learning, and what we think AI is genuinely good and bad at. Straightforward notes from a small workshop in Manchester.