We talked to food brand founders about their numbers. None of them wanted to look.
In January 2024, we sat down with four food brand founders. Combined revenue over $1.3 million. Not one of them knew their profit for the prior year. They weren't being careless. They just didn't want to see a number that might hurt. Prophitable exists to make looking easier than... not looking.
We asked a question before we built anything.
In early 2024, before writing a line of code, we talked to food brand founders. A pickle company, a cookie brand, a packaged meals operation, a beverage brand. We asked them all the same thing: how do you track costs?
The answers were remarkably similar. Spreadsheets that hadn't been updated in months. Labor hours that were "estimated." Formulas still referencing last quarter's ingredient prices. One founder didn't include the cost of paying herself to produce. Another was delivering to 120 retail locations and had never once tracked fuel costs.
None of them knew their actual profit for the prior year. Not even a rough number.
They weren't bad at math. They were afraid of the answer.
What if the best-selling product is actually losing money? What if that "great deal" from the co-packer is eating the margin? These are uncomfortable questions, and every founder we talked to was doing the same thing: staying busy producing and fulfilling orders so they wouldn't have to sit down and check.
That became the design constraint for everything we built. Prophitable couldn't be a reporting tool you open once a month when you finally have time. Cost data had to flow through automatically, so the numbers are just there, updated, whether you're ready to look or not.
Every feature came from a conversation.
Real-time cost cascading? That came from founders whose spreadsheet formulas were three months stale. Frozen batch costs? From a founder who looked back at old production runs and realized the numbers had silently changed on her. Co-packer support? From brands selling products they didn't manufacture, who still needed to know if they were actually making money.
By February 2026 the product was live. 20 features, four founding pilots running their actual businesses on it, Stripe billing active. No venture capital.
Who's behind this
Prophitable started as a spreadsheet in 2017. Percy and his wife, Maile, were running their own food business and couldn't figure out what it actually cost to make their products. So Percy built a spreadsheet to track it. It worked for a while. Then the formulas got messy, the data went stale, and maintaining the thing became its own part-time job.
Turns out every food founder they talked to had the same spreadsheet. And the same problem: it was collecting dust.
In January 2024, Percy sat down with four food brand founders to understand the problem more deeply. What he kept hearing wasn't "I don't know how to do this." It was closer to " I don't have the time" and "I don't want to find out." Founders were avoiding a number that might hurt, so they stayed busy producing and never checked.
That insight changed the direction. The spreadsheet became a product. Prophitable was born — a platform designed to make it easier to see the truth than to keep avoiding it. Every feature traces back to something a real food brand founder said they needed. Prophitable is built by food founders, for food founders.
Percy's wife, Maile, and son, Lane
One person. Full context. Feedback driven.
Currently, Prophitable is bootstrapped and operated by a sole founder. There is no venture capital funding, no board, and no roadmap built by committee.
That's intentional. One person with full context across product, engineering, and strategy moves faster than a team with handoff overhead. Every feature was designed by someone who talked to the users, wrote the spec, and verified the result. When a user says "this flow (or feature) doesn't make sense," the fix ships in 24 hours, if not the same day.
20
features
Built
on research
Don't just break even, break bread.
At Prophitable, our mission is simple – to simplify your operations so you can focus on creating world-class customer experiences. You can no longer afford to be in the dark when it comes to understanding your numbers.
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