Nathan did a fine job of summing up why we built Stride in this post -- http://blog.strideapp.com/post/18976926872/origin-story

It's clear that the problem extends to small businesses and the like, we just want to make it clear that we didn't build Stride for salespeople. The app is too simple for their use, and that's what we wanted.

The idea is to tie in Freshbooks, Mailchimp, Rapportive and other integrations as we move forward, to help round out what small business and freelancers need.