Death & Taxes

First algorithmic, completely free tax app

1 follower

First algorithmic, completely free tax app

1 follower

Launch tags:iOS•Fintech•Tech

Launch Team

Swarm.trade

Can you expand on how you are using algorithms to help file taxes? I wasn't able to gain much information from your landing page. Maybe i'm just being skeptical, but i'm having a hard time believing that you built a product that can do "everything" better for just $32K.

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10yr ago

Michael Zweig

Maker

@plingampally Hello Pari, excellent question. A few answers, not in any particular order: Doing taxes for 80%+ of American tax fliers is fairly simple. It is not an archaic art but rather a fairly straightforward process of asking the correct questions (algorithm to determine your questions based on profile etc). We make the process simpler and in our opinion, far superior to the other offerings out there. How we did it for so cheap- my team put a lot of entrepreneurial GRIT, long hours, and scrappiness into building this. We had a retired senior accountant help us with IRS compliance for free (and the satisfaction of 'sticking it to the man'). Finally, we have a full year until next tax season when we launch this bad boy. This year we will be testing, deconstructing, and just generally poking at it to make it better and better.

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10yr ago

Swarm.trade

@yozapli "Doing taxes for 80%+ of American tax fliers is fairly simple" I've seen similar statistics before, and it usually refers to the percent of Americans that take the standardized deduction vs the itemized deduction. What you will find out eventually is that creating an effective tax product for the remaining 20% is extremely hard. Not only is that subset of users' taxes more complicated, they are more vested in the accuracy of the return. An error for that group can result in fluctuations in the order of thousands of dollars.

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10yr ago

Michael Zweig

Maker

@plingampally 100% on. That is why we are taking this very, very seriously and are working on making sure our product is delivering optimal results (think Pepsi Challenge but for tax apps)

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10yr ago

According to the gif on your site I am assuming this is only for individual tax filing? No joint/married option?

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10yr ago

Michael Zweig

Maker

@unseenvision This is 100% for joint/married as well as single. Thank you for the question and keen eye. We will update the GIF next time to have that example as well.

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10yr ago

This looks like a great product, and I certainly applaud your efforts, but honestly the "completely free" part is off-putting to me. I am not sure about other people, but to me, tax information is some of the most private and sensitive information that exists. I already have a hard time handing all this over to and trusting a CPA as it is due to all my security paranoia. Now you want me to trust a brand new startup with all my most sensitive data that is unsustainable from the outset? That's a really hard ask.

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10yr ago

Michael Zweig

Maker

@vlucas Thanks for the comment. 100%, it is a big ask to give your most sensitive financial data to a startup. That is why we are taking another whole year to rock this out and make sure we are able to live up to our ideals of being the best tax filing mechanism there is. On your CPA security paranoia- we are toying with the idea of making it completely blind to ourselves and only allow the user and the IRS the ability to ever go within the individual data. Any thoughts on how to monetize though?

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10yr ago

I'm also curious that the site doesn't have an SSL certificate, is the info that people are uploading secure on the app?

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10yr ago

Michael Zweig

Maker

@geekgirlweb Very good point. That landing page was just for sign ups- not the actual app- that was just for the ProductHunt launch.

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10yr ago

Michael Zweig

Maker

Yes, this is real. I founded Death & Taxes for one simple reason: I HATED filing my taxes and I am a tax nerd. There is such a better way. My team built Death & Taxes to be controversial- we are the anti-current tax filing model of other apps (that will remain nameless due to the fact that they sue everyone and lobby the government every year for millions of dollars to make taxes MORE COMPLICATED) that claim “We are free- wink, wink unless you have a pulse” model. Our modus operandi is simple- build something amazing. State of the art algorithms and smart questions that are vastly superior to everything else out on the market. We are more accurate for optimizing your financial decisions and getting you an accurate IRS compliant filings. Our team consists of tax experts, developers, designers and millennials who wanted a better way of handling the most important and largest financial event that any American will have to deal with: taxes. The IRS is scary, the forms are confusing and the other companies out there make billions of dollars every year for something that shouldn’t be so hard or expensive. First question- how will we make money? I spent a grand total of $32,781.63 building our app, completely self funded and with no outsiders. My ROI has quite a low bar. I built D&T to scratch my own itch. Everything will always be free. All features (which we will have pretty much everything HR Block, TurboTax, TaxAct, etc offer- just way better, in our and our users humble opinions) will be open to everyone. We might monetize in the future by having offerings at the end of the process, kind of like CreditKarma or offer enterprise solutions for companies that issue a lot of W9s or 1099s. I am from Youngstown, Ohio and grew up in a 100 year old scrap recycling family business- I live for finding ways to turn other people’s trash into gold. When can I actually use this? Next tax season. We are showing this off exclusively to the PH community. We love ProductHunt- I am on it almost every day. We hope to get 100,000 early signups before Tax Season 2017. Until then, we will grant alpha access to people who share the early signups with their networks (great for quarterly filings for freelancers). Please sign up and have your friends signup- the early adopters are what will make this great. What about my security and privacy? Until February 17th of this year, I was still using a ‘dumb’ phone in principle due to privacy and security concerns. I got an iPhone to test D&T, but only use it for iOS development. We are deeply, truly committed to your privacy and security- additionally there are federal regulations and IRS rules against us misusing your private information ie we can go to jail for messing this up. I have no interest in spending time in a Federal Prison selling who knows what for selling your email or Social Security Number to a spammer and miss my children’s life. Not a fair trade or ever on my radar. This is not like most FinTechs or social networks, this is mega regulated US Federal Law. Which Uber of X industry are you? Or in non tech journalist parlance: which startup do you look up the most to? D&T wants to crush, disrupt, and/or shake up the tax industry in the same manner Robinhood disrupting the stock trading world. You mentioned the other app- that shall remain nameless- spent millions to make taxes more complicated. Where is your proof? http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/27... http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/1... http://www.slate.com/blogs/money... We are really excited to see what you think about our product, to hear what you would like to see in an ideal Tax Filing app, and hear any horror stories that you had using another app in the tax space. Any other questions- please comment here or tweet me @yozapli We are a very serious startup but I could not resist writing the following: If you are a VC or angel and have interest speaking about the space: GiveMeABillionDollarsSoICanBecom... Journalists: DisruptAncientIndustry@deathandt... HR Block for an acquisition: YesPleasebutNeedaCheckbookwithlo... Intuit/TurboTax for acquisition: 404Error@deathandtax.com Thank yous: The Team- you are AWESOME, our mentors and advisors, and our families for being there for all our adventures.

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10yr ago

@deathandtax Thanks for taking the time to explain a lot of the hesitations I'd have with letting another company loose on my taxes. This is an insane industry, so big props for attempting to tackle it. You've got my email address - let's see what happens next year! My taxes this year were hell because of the ultimate of first world problems, selling restricted stock. If you can make that any easier you've got me.

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10yr ago

Michael Zweig

Maker

@300mhz @deathandtax Thank you Justin for the love. We look forward to really helping rock this industry.

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10yr ago

Luck here is too far but have to ask... any chance you would cover Australian Taxation System in the distant future

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10yr ago

Michael Zweig

Maker

@hiten_kumar Would love to, thank you for the vote of confidence. Once we launch our American system- we are already building a foundation for a Digital Nomad American Expat Tax App called CoconutFile. We are really excited about the space and how much can be done to make it better.

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10yr ago

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