How Sablora Addresses European E-Invoicing Mandates for Small Businesses

I have a family friend who runs a cleaning business, where she cleans 4-5 office spaces that she manages by herself. For the longest time, she had her daughter help out by sending invoices to her customers at the end of the month. As this is no longer possible, she asked me to help teach her how to do it herself. The only issue is that, as she is a bit older, she struggles with using a computer. So, teaching her how to use Microsoft Word to edit a template, manage the files inside the computer, and then send it to her clients was not an easy task as I hoped. Therefore, I created Sablora with the hopes of simplifying invoicing for small businesses and freelancers, especially some older folks who don't know their way around a computer. My final goal for the product is to be simple to use so that a non-tech-savvy business owner and a seasoned accountant can both use it. It should be easy to use but feature-rich enough that everyone benefits.

Worked, I think the best approach that genuinely brought my first users, as ancient as this is, was word-to-word marketing. I initially pitched my product to the family friend that had the issue. Since then, I've had another four of her friends also give the product a try. From this, I was able to gather so much valuable feedback that I can use to improve the product further. Although this doesn't bring a lot of traffic, it brings a customer base that I know is eager to use the product and willing to give feedback. Flopped, Initially, my marketing approach was to put a high budget on Google Ads and hope that I would increase traffic that way. The only issue with this is that it brought traffic to the website but had almost zero conversion to my product. It resulted in a high bill and no real profit. I think this was an approach not very suited for the target audience that my product is built for.

As my starting target European audience is mainly in the Benelux, France, and Germany regions, which have all recently introduced e-invoicing mandates requiring invoices to follow a strict format schema. I had customers complaining that my product wasn't valid for their use case. So I took it upon myself to research the regulations of each country and implement them; Sablora now issues EN 16931-compliant invoices as Factur-X, with country-driven VAT rates and the cross-border treatments each jurisdiction requires. I've gone as far ahead as building for France, where businesses have to be able to receive e-invoices from September 2026 and small businesses won't have to issue them until September 2027. This has also shifted my attention when building this product to keeping up with regulations as a forefront for new features that I develop, as well as future updates to the existing features to keep them up to the standard imposed.

A big oversight from a lot of competitors is that they assume the e-invoicing mandates are a big-company problem. They build for the deadlines hitting first, which are the ones aimed at large and mid-sized enterprises, so that's the market their products target. But the obligation that actually lands first is the obligation to receive, and it applies to everyone regardless of size. In France, every VAT-registered business has to be able to receive structured e-invoices from September 2026, while small businesses aren't required to issue until a year later. So a one-person studio that thinks it has until 2027 is already in scope, just for the half of the problem nobody is talking about. The long tail of freelancers and micro-businesses is the larger group by count and the least served, and they're being forced off emailed PDFs whether they want to or not. That's the window I'm building into.

My main goal is closing all remaining compliance gaps in my product and making my product usable in a larger selection of European countries. As each country requires a different set of strict guidelines, it's critical that I stay on top of that list and ensure that my product matches it. Of course, a long-running task is to improve the UX of the product. My main goal is to make a simple-to-use product, and I will continue to iterate on this goal.

The product recently launched, and most of my current users came from my own network - people who switched to Sablora from whatever they were using before. I've given them free licenses deliberately, they're early supporters helping me find the gaps and rough edges, and their feedback is worth more to me right now than their subscription would be. As the product matures, the goal is converting to paying customers and acquiring them outside my own network.

Over the past 3 years, I worked as a software engineer at an email security company where data security was the primary goal. I built Sablora with that in mind. Data is private and belongs to the customers, and that's a serious risk for any SaaS, and one I don't think most founders take as seriously as they should. In regard to the invoicing or accounting domain, I didn't have any previous experience with it, so it was a lot of learning from scratch. I had to get familiar with compliance regulations, specifics from industry professionals, and get a better grasp on what exists and what is missing from the market.

Building the product before I understood the constraints of the market I was building for. I designed Sablora around a well-crafted PDF invoice because that's what invoicing had looked like for the last twenty years, and I only learned about the structured e-invoicing mandates when customers told me my product wouldn't work for them. That's the wrong order. In a regulated market, the regulation is part of the spec; it isn't a feature you add later, and I ended up rebuilding parts of the invoice engine that I would have designed differently from day one if I'd done proper market research.