Vertical ERPs for Independent Workers
Matt Brown, Co-Founder of Bonsai, on the rise of vertical ERPs
This reveals why Bonsai is built more like small business software than a labor marketplace. The useful common ground across independent workers is not identity, it is a narrow set of messy jobs like sending proposals, signing contracts, invoicing clients, getting paid, and handling taxes. Once a company starts from those repeated workflows, it can serve designers, planners, and other solo operators without forcing them into one broad freelance bucket.
-
Bonsai chose to stay on one side of the transaction, the worker side, because marketplaces have to balance buyers and sellers at the same time. A SaaS tool can go deeper on one persona, while a marketplace like Upwork earns a higher take rate by solving lead generation for both sides.
-
The category gets blurry fast. People doing similar work may call themselves entrepreneurs, small business owners, designers, sole proprietors, or LLCs. The same ambiguity shows up in contractor payroll, where tax status, legal structure, and day to day workflow often describe different slices of the same worker.
-
That is why the winners increasingly organize around workflow and money movement, not labels. HoneyBook has grown by packaging leads, proposals, contracts, payments, and now banking for service pros, while contractor payroll platforms win by turning scattered contractor payments into one repeatable operating system.
The market is heading toward products that act like operating systems for very small businesses, not generic freelancer apps. The companies that win will capture both workflow and cash flow for specific use cases, then layer on banking, credit, insurance, and tax products once they already sit in the middle of how independent workers run their business.