I started building BillWatch because of a conversation I had with a restaurant owner in Ohio.
She had just gotten hit with a surprise compliance issue. The federal tipping credit rules had changed, and she found out three weeks after the change took effect -- from a comment in her POS vendor's Facebook group.
She wasn't negligent. She had a system: Google Alerts for "restaurant labor law", a legal newsletter she skimmed when she had time, and a general sense that her accountant would tell her if something major happened.
The system just didn't work.
The pattern
I started asking around. Same story, different industries.
A healthcare billing manager who found out about a CMS reimbursement rule change from a Reddit thread. A fintech compliance lead who caught a relevant SEC guidance document three days before a submission deadline, by accident, while looking for something else. A food manufacturer who missed an FDA labeling update because it was buried in a Federal Register entry that Google never surfaced.
None of these people were bad at their jobs. They were all doing the same thing: waiting for someone else to catch it first.
Why existing solutions fail
The Federal Register is technically public. Congress.gov has every bill. The problem is signal-to-noise.
Congress introduces roughly 10,000 to 15,000 bills per session. The Federal Register publishes thousands of notices per year. If you are running a restaurant or a small healthcare practice, you don't have time to read any of this. You have time to run your business.
The tools that exist are built for lawyers and lobbyists. They are expensive ($500+/month), require legal training to use, and output raw documents instead of plain-English summaries.
The workaround most SMBs use: subscribe to a trade association newsletter and hope they catch the relevant stuff. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don't.
What we built
BillWatch monitors the full federal bill database and matches every new bill to your industry or your chosen topics. When something moves -- introduced, advanced through committee, headed to a floor vote -- you get a plain-English summary: what changed, what it means, what (if anything) you need to do.
The goal is early warning, not after-the-fact news. A bill takes months to become law. If you know it's moving, you have weeks to adjust.
We're in early access at billwatch-landing.vercel.app if you want to follow along.
The question I'm still working on
The hard part isn't building the monitoring system. That part works.
The hard part is figuring out which industries feel this pain acutely enough to pay $9/month to fix it.
Healthcare and restaurants are the obvious ones. But I suspect compliance-heavy SMBs in pharma, agriculture, and financial services have the same problem and even less visibility.
If you run a business in a regulated industry and you've ever been caught off guard by a regulatory change -- I'd genuinely like to hear how it happened. What was your system? What failed?
Drop a comment or reach out directly. Still doing customer discovery and every story helps.
