Your next SaaS: EIN / Tax ID lookup & verification

The latest edition of Unvalidated Ideas is out! Here's one of the ideas in there:

VerifiedTINs - TIN / EIN / Tax ID lookup and verification

Most countries have some form of Tax Identification Number ("TIN") -- a number or combination of letters and numbers that represents a person or a company that can pay taxes.

Companies in the United States have an EIN, some countries in the EU have TINs and they're crucial for knowing that you're sending money to the right person/corporation and doing the reporting afterwards. Having a company's EIN/TIN means that you can often look up details on the company, and refer to them in more formal contexts accurately.

I'll cut to the chase -- someone needs to build and centralize a database of the trusted EINs, TINs and other identifiers for international companies. Companies can have many identifiers, identifiers for subdivisions, etc so things can get complicated quickly.

Being international will set you apart and be a great way to avoid phishing, mistaken invoices, and save time during the part of the year everyone is doing their taxes.

There are a lot of ways to make this idea even better -- selling TIN verification and persistent payment details to payments providers is another great angle to take. Think of this like the blue verification check for Twitter that everyone lusts over. Except this time it's not just internet clout that's at risk.

Starting to sell this service to large financial services means you've won -- go all in on the idea and you'll sell in a couple years for more money than seems reasonable.

As you might expect, you've got competitors -- companies like track1099.com who primarily deal in generating 1099s for contractors. No one said it would be easy!

About to try and sell this idea (before you build, of course)?

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