Over the last 25 years, I’ve started, grown and run a number of businesses — from early-stage ideas through to a business with revenues into the £30m range.
In that time, I’ve used a lot of business software. I’ve always liked tools that genuinely add value: software that helps you think clearly, make better decisions and scale without creating more work than it saves. But I kept coming back to the same frustration. The things every business needs — a financial model you can trust, a simple way to keep projects on track, and one place that knows every customer — were either too rigid, too complicated, or far too expensive.
So, like many founders, I built what I needed in Excel. That worked for a while. But the model always grew, the formulas became fragile, and once a second person got involved, something usually broke.
Smart Budget was created to solve that: model your assumptions and get a proper P&L, balance sheet and cash flow — set your opening position, add actuals as the year unfolds, and watch the forecast move with the business.
Smart Project came from the same place: proper Gantt planning, dependencies, milestones and critical path, without the bloat.
Smart CRM completes the picture. Leads used to live in my inbox and a spreadsheet, and good ones slipped through. Now every contact, quote and follow-up is in one place — and enquiries from your website land there automatically.
These tools earned their keep in my own businesses; that’s why I’ve made them available to others. The pricing is deliberately simple: £20 a month per app, up to 25 users included. Take whichever you need, or all three.
And if there’s something you’d like Chilli Pepper to do, tell me — you can suggest features directly from your account, and I prioritise what users ask for most. It was built from real business experience, and it will keep getting better through real user feedback.
Jim Driver
Founder, Chilli Pepper
