I built OrangeTill because the answer didn’t exist yet

I have a degree in music education. I’ve run a Boston-style roast beef restaurant in New Hampshire for 13 years. I had never written a line of code in my life.

I built OrangeTill anyway.

I want to be clear about something: I am not a tech person who built an app. I am a merchant who solved her own problem. OrangeTill lives at our restaurant counter first. Every feature exists because someone standing behind a register needed it — and that someone was me.

I want to tell you how that happened, because I think it matters — not just for OrangeTill, but for every merchant who has ever felt like the future was arriving whether they were ready or not.

It goes back in our blockchain

My desire to build things didn’t come from nowhere, and my cousins have the same vision. It goes back in our blockchain.

Engineering runs deep on this side of the family — further back than most. We have railroad engineers and steam engineers in our history, people who looked at the infrastructure of their era and figured out how to move it forward. My grandfather carried that forward in his own way: a Stevens Institute-educated engineer who also studied law, he started a company in the basement of his home just outside New York City. A precise solution to a narrow industrial problem that turned out to be needed everywhere once someone built it right. That company grew into a worldwide operation. Three of his children worked in it over the years in different roles. My father, now retired, was an engineer there. My uncle still leads it today. My aunt remains involved.

My father and I always found solutions when they didn’t exist — whether around the house or for school projects. I grew up with a Barbie doll in one hand and a wrench in the other, working on old cars with my dad or in his wood shop. I was good at math. I excelled at science. I went into music instead, and that’s a longer story. But the instinct to figure things out, to make the thing that wasn’t there — that never left.

OrangeTill is that instinct, pointed at a problem I couldn’t stop thinking about.

But that’s only half of where I come from.

My mother grew up in a small fishing village in Nova Scotia. She left school in the 8th grade to go to work and help support her many siblings. Her father was a cook on a fishing boat. By any measure, they had little — but she knew how to make do with what was there, and she made it look like enough. There was no basement workshop, no engineering degree, no corporate trajectory. There was family, and necessity, and the kind of resourcefulness that doesn’t come from a classroom.

My mother was one of the brightest people I have ever known. She was an avid reader her whole life. She loved to cook and to serve others with her talents — not because she had to, but because that was how she showed love. She kept going through things that would have stopped most people. She always encouraged me to do the same.

Building OrangeTill is a tribute to both of those very disparate heritages: the engineer who started a company in a basement, and the fisherman’s daughter who left school at thirteen and never stopped learning. One side gave me the instinct to build. The other gave me the reason to.

The afternoon everything shifted

I got into ₿itcoin in 2024. I bought some sats, got nervous when the price moved, and sold. I think a lot of people have that story. Fear is a reasonable first reaction when you’re new to something that doesn’t behave like anything you’ve known before.

But I kept reading. Saifedean Ammous. Lawrence Lepard. Natalie Brunell. The more I read, the less afraid I became — and the more I understood that what was happening wasn’t a trend. It was a shift. The kind that doesn’t ask for your opinion.

So I started stacking again. And I started thinking about my restaurant.

I reached out to our POS company to ask about Bitcoin payments. And I waited. And waited. Months of silence. No roadmap. No timeline. No acknowledgment that this was even on their list.

I’ll also say this plainly: I built OrangeTill using AI tools throughout the process — for research, for writing, for code. The same forward-thinking that led me to ₿itcoin led me to embrace those tools without apology. The future doesn’t wait for you to feel ready. You either pick up the tools that exist right now and get to work, or you don’t. I chose to get to work.

I sat with that feeling for a while. Despondent is the right word. I valued ₿itcoin. I believed in where this was heading. But the tools just weren’t there for someone like me — a small business owner, not a developer, not a fintech company, just a person running a restaurant who wanted to be ready.

I didn’t have a background in software. I went to a religious school where computer class conflicted with music and the other classes I was taking — something had to give, and at the time it was tech. I was good at math. I excelled at science. But I followed a different path, and for a long time I didn’t circle back. That’s one of my quiet regrets. But here’s what I’ve learned: it’s never actually too late to start.

Building the thing that didn’t exist

What surprised me most about building OrangeTill wasn’t how hard it was. It was how much I loved it. Every single day I wanted to get back to it. That feeling — that pull toward a problem you’re genuinely trying to solve — told me I was building the right thing.

I was so absorbed, so glued to my computer in a way I had never been before, that my husband actually pulled me aside and asked if I was okay. I hadn’t told him about it yet — I wanted a partially working product and a website I could actually show him before I said a word. He had only ever known the musical side of me. He didn’t know I liked building things this much. Honestly, I don’t think I knew either.

I learned how the internet works. How APIs connect. How a payment flows from a customer’s wallet to a merchant’s screen. I learned by doing, which is honestly the only way I know how to learn anything that matters.

The core idea was simple: use what merchants already have. A phone. A tablet. A Clover or Square terminal with a browser. No new hardware. No percentage fees. No complexity. Just a clean, fast way to show a price in dollars and receive the crypto equivalent — on any device, anywhere you sell.

About the name. And the cat.

“Orange” for ₿itcoin. “Till” for the register. That’s the whole name.

Hodl — our mascot, the orange Ghibli-inspired cat with a ₿ collar tag — came from an old X account I ran where I was teaching ₿itcoin through an orange cat character. I was taught in college that if you want to truly learn something, teach it. So I did.

Hodl is also a small tribute to my mother. She loved Maine Coon cats. She passed away from cancer in 2013, and she was the kind of person who kept pushing you forward even when everything felt like too much. A year before she passed, I gave her an orange polydactyl Maine Coon kitten. She named her Thumbalina Mudgett. Thumbalina is still alive and well today, living with my father and his wife — an extra-toed, very opinionated reminder that some gifts outlast the people you give them to. His wife is a nurse who works with veterans, from a military family whose roots stretch from the Korean War to Korea itself. Our family is a lot of things from a lot of places. I think that shows up in what we build. I think about her a lot when this gets hard.

She would have found the whole thing hilarious. And then she would have told me to keep going.

About Peter

My husband Peter is a drummer and a founder in his own right — he holds a degree in Business from Suffolk University and founded the restaurant that OrangeTill will call its first home. This year, that restaurant turns 50.

Peter is a first-generation immigrant from Messini, Greece. His family emigrated to the United States when he was ten years old. He was the first person in his family to earn a college degree. The restaurant he built from that foundation has fed this community for half a century.

When I finally showed him what I had been building — the app, the website, the whole thing — he understood immediately. He had only known the musical side of me. But he’s a builder too. He got it.

Why I think this matters

I had a moment years ago that stuck with me. We weren’t updated on our POS and suddenly couldn’t accept Apple Pay. Customers were confused. It was awkward. We scrambled to catch up.

Crypto adoption is going to hit the same way — except faster, and with higher stakes. Institutions are already holding ₿itcoin on their balance sheets. Payments infrastructure is changing. The tokenization of assets is approaching faster than most people outside the space realize.

Small businesses will not get a warning. There won’t be a memo. One day a customer will want to pay in Bitcoin, and either you’ll be ready or you won’t.

I want merchants to be ready. Not because it’s a business opportunity — though it is — but because I genuinely believe that accepting ₿itcoin gives a small business something rare: the chance to build an appreciating balance sheet. To keep what you earn in an asset that isn’t being diluted by the day.

That’s not financial advice. That’s just what I believe, for what it’s worth, from a restaurant owner in New Hampshire who read some books and decided to do something about it.

New Hampshire’s motto is Live Free or Die. It turns out that’s not a bad description of what ₿itcoin is trying to do either. I don’t think that’s a coincidence — I think it’s just who we are up here.

₿itcoin is for everyone is what Natalie Brunell believes — and we believe that OrangeTill is, too.

What success looks like to me

This is the iPhone moment for small business.

I want to walk into a business in New Hampshire — a roast beef place, a barbershop, a flower shop, a church, a food pantry — and see OrangeTill on the counter. I want a plumber to accept ₿itcoin for a job and hold it. I want a music teacher to get paid in Bitcoin and not have to convert it immediately because they understand what they’re holding. I want the carpenter, the freelancer, the coffee shop, the food truck, the nonprofit, the house of worship — all of them — to have a tool that was built with them in mind.

OrangeTill is discounted for nonprofits. That’s not a footnote — it’s a commitment. Mission-driven organizations deserve access to the same tools merchants use, at a price that respects where their money goes. The same simplicity, no percentage taken from a donation that was meant to go entirely to a cause.

That’s the whole thing. It’s not complicated. It’s just what I set out to build that afternoon when the search came back empty.

— Sarah, Founder of OrangeTill · New Hampshire · March 2026