Thank you article, it is quite enlightening how dangerous it is to build on a developer hostile platform. Congrats, that you still pulled it off! One discrepancy I have noticed: is it 16k per month or 1.8k?
Good luck!
1
Same question, that's a big difference lol. Admirable business nonetheless!
2
Definitely more like $1.8k to $1.9k! maybe one day it will be $16k!
1
This comment was deleted 4 months ago.
2
Great article, thanks for recounting your experiences with such intimacy. Many of your challenges along the way resonated with me. "If someone emails into support, it means we have failed to communicate something, or are lacking an important feature." Really, useful anchoring principal .
1
Thanks for the feedback Ciaran. This stuff should be easy, but it's the balance of sell before you build and then sprint to build once you have sold!
2
Nice article Michael, easy to digest. Do you think that Xero->Stripe reporting market is big enough to make this a viable business?
On a gut feel, Yes - our total addressable market (TAM) is users of Stripe and Xero less the Xero users who send and want invoices paid through Xero. Not reporting, but jsut simple accounting.
But I guess a question is what is a viable business? We bring in more than we spend at the moment, but don't pay ourselves. We'd need to probably quadruple in size to start being a viable business, if viable means paying ourselves the average wage here in Australia for time spent.
1
Finding part of a good system that is broken, and fixing it, is exactly how building a usefull buisness works.
1
Thanks!
1
I believe I used you guys with Chocolab before I made the move to QuickBooks Online. You could probably make 100 more businesses out of improving the stuff Xero does poorly (by the time you would be done you may as well just build a new Xero). I’ll never understand why Xero is so big here and raved about for such poor, unfriendly and unautomated software.
1
I actually love Xero! In a past life (& business) we used another non-cloud package and I literally did not understand the numbers or accounts. When I moved into Xero, I had a handle on it all, on a day-to-day basis.
I think it's because they made bookkeeping accessible to non-accountants or bookkeepers.
I found quite the opposite, the ability to connect and automate things was outstanding.
Now, in saying all this, I have not even explored any of the others like QuickBooks or even Zoho books - I just assumed the automation like there are in Xero do not exist.
I actually just presume that most startups and indie hackers use Xero too.
1
I think one of the issues I have is I first started bookkeeping in Xero, where a lot of people came from doing things completely manually so it was a huge improvement for them. Xero really struggled in a few areas for me:
1 - Reconciling thousands of transactions quickly - There was no real way to do this easily, I ended up using the Cash coding view (when I finally discovered it by making myself an 'accountant') however I still had to manually click through each page to confirm the transactions there that I set up rules for, I ended up writing a quick javascript web plugin to do this for me. I then eventually exported to a csv did my work there and then reimported. (Quickbooks is far better here)
2 - I never understood why so much manual work was required for me to do what is very simple book keeping.
3 - It is extremely difficult to handle Paypal payments, even without making payments from your own account.
4 - Why it doesn't have better integration with Paypal, Stripe etc I really don't understand. I mean the fact you had to build Bankfeeds.io I find odd, given Stripe is one of the biggest payment platforms in the world, yet Xero has no easy way of dealing with it's fees?
5 - My use case isn't really that complicated, I'm an ecommerce business where every single transaction is digital. It really would not be a very complex task to have bookkeeping almost 100% automated, at least for customer payments (and there fees) and recurring expenses.
Quickbooks Online doesn't really do all that much better to be honest, except it is cheaper and has far better integration with payment platforms. Xero left me with the feeling that, given a few weeks, I could very easily automate my bookkeeping myself with google docs, a few apis and some Javascript.
Xero gives me the feeling it is 5 years behind the rest of the tech world.
I really do feel like I am missing something here.
1
Cash coding was also a wonder when I found it too! we had this eCommerce business and hired a bookeeper that spent hours everyday pressing OK! to match transactions. Then I stumbled on cash coding!
Re integrations, Stripe, in strict technical/accounting terms, is not a bank account and should not be a bank account. It would be like saying your eftpos terminal in a cafe is a bank account.
But we all want to use it inside xero as if it was. So that is why we built bankfeeds.io
I think you are right though, Xero took accounting packages into this century and it took a while and some large piles of cash, but the others are gaining.
1
Nice! Just had a look at LeadChat and I'm curious to know if you actually provide a virtual agent as a service along with the live chat widget?
1
Yeah! but by virtual agent, they are real people :) that business model is a blend of technology and humans. The technology is delivering smart insights and potential answers to human agents in real-time. The human part is a centre of chat agents to achieve 24/7 coverage with near instant customer onboarding. Reach out to me at michael at leadchat dot com if you want me to intro you to one of the guys that can demo it for you.
1
Yup that's what I thought. That's a pretty good way of diversifying the revenue stream while providing added value in a highly crowded space! Cheers!
1
Cool business! Certainly would help me if I used Stripe+Xero. We use Recurly+Stripe and need a DATEV (german tax format) export and built our own solution for this right now.
9$ seems like a no-brainer for me, no wonder customers are buying immediately after testing it. If you save a few hours every month on a task that most people would consider extremely annoying (bookkeeping) then they would certainly pay more for this. Have you experimented with higher prices?
ProfitWell has a product doing "Complete end-of-month books in 1-click." generating GAAP metrics and charge 1000$ / month.
1
Do you use Xero for accounting? Recurly+Stripe, Zoho+Stripe, Magento+Stripe, etc is all fine - as long as it's also Xero :)
1
No, we use DATEV UnternehmenOnline for accounting. Its a german company that most tax consultants here use.
Thank you article, it is quite enlightening how dangerous it is to build on a developer hostile platform. Congrats, that you still pulled it off! One discrepancy I have noticed: is it 16k per month or 1.8k?
Good luck!
Same question, that's a big difference lol. Admirable business nonetheless!
Definitely more like $1.8k to $1.9k! maybe one day it will be $16k!
This comment was deleted 4 months ago.
Great article, thanks for recounting your experiences with such intimacy. Many of your challenges along the way resonated with me. "If someone emails into support, it means we have failed to communicate something, or are lacking an important feature." Really, useful anchoring principal .
Thanks for the feedback Ciaran. This stuff should be easy, but it's the balance of sell before you build and then sprint to build once you have sold!
Nice article Michael, easy to digest. Do you think that Xero->Stripe reporting market is big enough to make this a viable business?
Hey @BartBoch, thanks for your kind words.
On a gut feel, Yes - our total addressable market (TAM) is users of Stripe and Xero less the Xero users who send and want invoices paid through Xero. Not reporting, but jsut simple accounting.
But I guess a question is what is a viable business? We bring in more than we spend at the moment, but don't pay ourselves. We'd need to probably quadruple in size to start being a viable business, if viable means paying ourselves the average wage here in Australia for time spent.
Finding part of a good system that is broken, and fixing it, is exactly how building a usefull buisness works.
Thanks!
I believe I used you guys with Chocolab before I made the move to QuickBooks Online. You could probably make 100 more businesses out of improving the stuff Xero does poorly (by the time you would be done you may as well just build a new Xero). I’ll never understand why Xero is so big here and raved about for such poor, unfriendly and unautomated software.
I actually love Xero! In a past life (& business) we used another non-cloud package and I literally did not understand the numbers or accounts. When I moved into Xero, I had a handle on it all, on a day-to-day basis.
I think it's because they made bookkeeping accessible to non-accountants or bookkeepers.
I found quite the opposite, the ability to connect and automate things was outstanding.
Now, in saying all this, I have not even explored any of the others like QuickBooks or even Zoho books - I just assumed the automation like there are in Xero do not exist.
I actually just presume that most startups and indie hackers use Xero too.
I think one of the issues I have is I first started bookkeeping in Xero, where a lot of people came from doing things completely manually so it was a huge improvement for them. Xero really struggled in a few areas for me:
1 - Reconciling thousands of transactions quickly - There was no real way to do this easily, I ended up using the Cash coding view (when I finally discovered it by making myself an 'accountant') however I still had to manually click through each page to confirm the transactions there that I set up rules for, I ended up writing a quick javascript web plugin to do this for me. I then eventually exported to a csv did my work there and then reimported. (Quickbooks is far better here)
2 - I never understood why so much manual work was required for me to do what is very simple book keeping.
3 - It is extremely difficult to handle Paypal payments, even without making payments from your own account.
4 - Why it doesn't have better integration with Paypal, Stripe etc I really don't understand. I mean the fact you had to build Bankfeeds.io I find odd, given Stripe is one of the biggest payment platforms in the world, yet Xero has no easy way of dealing with it's fees?
5 - My use case isn't really that complicated, I'm an ecommerce business where every single transaction is digital. It really would not be a very complex task to have bookkeeping almost 100% automated, at least for customer payments (and there fees) and recurring expenses.
Quickbooks Online doesn't really do all that much better to be honest, except it is cheaper and has far better integration with payment platforms. Xero left me with the feeling that, given a few weeks, I could very easily automate my bookkeeping myself with google docs, a few apis and some Javascript.
Xero gives me the feeling it is 5 years behind the rest of the tech world.
I really do feel like I am missing something here.
Cash coding was also a wonder when I found it too! we had this eCommerce business and hired a bookeeper that spent hours everyday pressing OK! to match transactions. Then I stumbled on cash coding!
Re integrations, Stripe, in strict technical/accounting terms, is not a bank account and should not be a bank account. It would be like saying your eftpos terminal in a cafe is a bank account.
But we all want to use it inside xero as if it was. So that is why we built bankfeeds.io
I think you are right though, Xero took accounting packages into this century and it took a while and some large piles of cash, but the others are gaining.
Nice! Just had a look at LeadChat and I'm curious to know if you actually provide a virtual agent as a service along with the live chat widget?
Yeah! but by virtual agent, they are real people :) that business model is a blend of technology and humans. The technology is delivering smart insights and potential answers to human agents in real-time. The human part is a centre of chat agents to achieve 24/7 coverage with near instant customer onboarding. Reach out to me at michael at leadchat dot com if you want me to intro you to one of the guys that can demo it for you.
Yup that's what I thought. That's a pretty good way of diversifying the revenue stream while providing added value in a highly crowded space! Cheers!
Cool business! Certainly would help me if I used Stripe+Xero. We use Recurly+Stripe and need a DATEV (german tax format) export and built our own solution for this right now.
9$ seems like a no-brainer for me, no wonder customers are buying immediately after testing it. If you save a few hours every month on a task that most people would consider extremely annoying (bookkeeping) then they would certainly pay more for this. Have you experimented with higher prices?
ProfitWell has a product doing "Complete end-of-month books in 1-click." generating GAAP metrics and charge 1000$ / month.
Do you use Xero for accounting? Recurly+Stripe, Zoho+Stripe, Magento+Stripe, etc is all fine - as long as it's also Xero :)
No, we use DATEV UnternehmenOnline for accounting. Its a german company that most tax consultants here use.