FBARs.app

I did't talk to enough people and was too interested in the opportunity rather than who I was serving. I decided to refocus my efforts on an audience I care more about and connecting with them over their problems.

No regrets really, I learned a ton and it didn't really cost me any money or time. I'm glad I did this project, even if it didn't net me any money.

Onwards!

These past few weeks have been a bunch of chopping wood.

I needed to pass risk screening to get access to Plaid production (the financial provider I'm using to calculate the entries needed for FBAR). Because it's financial data, they try to be rigorous about the people they give access to their platform. The "Best Practises" document they sent me was intimidating for an indie developer, but despite not having a super mature change management process of a security governance strategy, I was accepted. I can finally migrate to prod and get everything ready for the 2011 year.

I went to Fiverr and got a logo made so I could start sharing links to my landing page with a little bit of branding. That was a fun process and I really like the results.

I finally pulled the trigger and send a message to the ex-pat facebook group looking for beta testers. I've been dragging my feet HARD since this is the first time I really send a message to a group of people to solicit feedback.

I've been fearing judgement of the mob, so it's been hard for me to hit submit, but it's done and now all I can hope for is interest from the general public.

The MVP is still definitely an MVP and is lacking a lot of features and support, but I'm really hoping theres a few early adopters who will give me the time of day and help me work the kinks out of the process.

I had an interview with an accountant who has built a following around doing USA ex-pat taxes. I interviewed him about being a user of my product and he was very excited about the product since it's a real pain point for his business. The FBAR is the one part of the process that he can't facilitate for his clients- they have to do this part themselves.

He was very excited about having an offering that he could give to his clients. I have dreams of whitelabeling this product for accountants, but at least to start- he was happy that he could just have a place to send his clients.

Best of all, he runs a facebook group with 5000+ american ex-pats that he was the moderator of. He invited and approved me to the group and asked me to solicit feedback from the groups members to gauge interest.

Really productive call- I've got another professional in my corner!

While I finish the last pesky tasks to secure prod and flip everything over to using production credentials, I'm doing as many customer calls as possible. I've done a number B2C interviews with my American friends, but I'm hitting the ground running with accounting firms now.

I have some leads on accounting firms that do US taxes, so I'm trying to figure out how to best approach them. The problem I have currently is that the accountants don't feel the pain when it comes to FBARs- getting FBAR entries is a problem their clients have, not the account themselves. I'm sure there'll be some kind of referral fee for accountants down the road, but to get accountants to talk to me at all, I need to appeal to the their interests of making their customers lives easier. As a pitch, that doesn't feel very strong, but maybe that's just me. I need to find a way to appeal to a feeling or emotion that the accounts have, but the only way to know if it's a good pitch is to try.

I was waiting for contracts to come back to me for my consulting business, so I had more free time than usual, so I put on the gas and finished the MVP.

It took me a little bit to figure out how to deal with TLS certificates between AWS and the hosting provider I'm using for the marketing site, but HTTPS was the last part preventing me going to production!

Now that it's all set, I just need to flip Plaid and Stripe to production and we're live. All the ex-pats I know are very keen to use the app to do their FBARs for the 2020 tax year, so I'll do beta testing with them in January when the 2020 year has completed, and get prepared for the big tax rush of Feb/Mar/Apr 2021.

Who is my customer? Is it USA ex-pats or is it accountants helping ex-pats to file their taxes?

At least initially I thought it was the ex-pats themselves, but I've realized that accountants could be a useful channel for marketing this too. If I can find a way to approach accountants and get them to sell FBARs.app for me, that would be a great way to find new customers.

I reached out to an accountant I know that does USA tax prep and she mentioned that FBARs are an annoying part of her business. She charges her clients to input the FBAR values into the disclosure website, but it isn't a "value add" service. She doesn't have a strong idea of the amount of pain that goes into creating FBAR entries, but she knows it isn't trivial for her clients to do.

At the end of the call, I mentioned that I built an app to do this and demoed it to her. She agreed to refer me her clients come US tax time, but after the call I had a think- I've read The Mom Test, so she may have just been nice to say that, but I need to figure out a hook of some kind to get her interested in getting her clients to use my application. Understanding that will help my sales process in the future.

I've been a backend developer my whole career, so creating a "beautiful" app isn't something that's in my wheelhouse.

I'm a member of "Founders Club" from @AntCas, and in my first matching, I got matched with @jimzarkadas who is a designer and developer looking to teach developers how to create great UX. We hit it off and have been meeting every week to discuss design and he critiques my designs and we work through design questions and problems together.

We've had a bunch of sessions together and we've come up with a UX that is MILES ahead of my v1 prototype design. For launch, I don't want to put in any extra effort into the UI since the flow is enough to get the job done, but I'm really looking forward to overhauling the UI with a better and clearer design.

Foundersclub is awesome and you should join it if you're interested in connecting with other founders and meeting great people!

Thanks @jimzarkadas and @AntCas <3

I'd been part time at my job for about a year, working on various other projects in my own time. I quit because I had a year of runway saved and was starting to consult around the Canadian R&D tax credit called SR&ED (sredability.com). I have opportunities to get started and spend more time consulting and doing product development, so I figured now was as good a time as any to get the ball rolling,

My wife and I are Canadians and we were on vacation talking about taxes (as one does). My wife has American citizenship by birth, and the USA charges tax based on citizenship, not residency- so despite never living in the USA she has to filed USA taxes every year.

One disclosure that's required as part of an American living abroad is a Foreign Bank Report (FBAR). On every cash or investment account outside of the USA that you are titled on, you have to submit the accounts highest balance through the fiscal year. This is a pain to calculate because you have to download PDFs of your statements to calculate this, for every account you're on. My wife spent an entire day last year to figure this out for her accounts, and annoyingly, her accountant couldn't help her make the process easier.

I had heard about Plaid in a podcast, so I decided to see if I could do these balance calculations for her, and I hacked together a small, proof of concept.

I know a few other American ex-pats that also complained about their FBARs, so I decided to productize the service into a Micro-SaaS and see if I can take it anywhere.