We completed six months of our start-up TaxReco’s journey last month. This article is a reflection of how far we have come in the previous six months.
Ideation and Conceptualisation
The idea of TaxReco originated from our co-founders Avdhesh Sharma and Vijender Singh Bachal, who are highly experienced in solving tax-related matters for various organisations. Through their experience, they realised that organisations in India often struggle to reconcile their tax data (B2B) with their vendor or customers. Often tax departments within those organisations either have lots of people periodically (monthly or quarterly) reconciling their tax records manually (which is highly slow and error-prone) or outsource it to consulting organisations. Through their experience (and lots of enquiries from organisations), they built a hypothesis that this was a good problem to solve by building a product that organisations can use confidently to reconcile their tax with the click of a button. Initial research also suggested that there isn’t any credible product available to solve this problem.
Committing & Validating
Once they convinced themselves about the idea, they reached out to the people who can join this journey and start building the product and Sai Krishnamurthy, and I joined the team. We created a solid cross-functional team as Vijender is our functional expert. Avdhesh comes from Sales & Marketing experience, and Sai and I have been building products using lean and agile principles and practices for the past 20+ years. Sai has documented the technical journey here in another blog.
We launched our first MVP around Mar-21 and since has been evolving based on our beta customers. We have been getting lots of positive feedback from our beta customers that how this product has massively simplified their tax reconciliation and removed most of their manual activities. They can now spend the same time doing more value-adding work. We have also learned a lot by working directly with our beta customers to evolve this product further.
We are continuously gathering feedback and acting accordingly. We have already changed our strategy to focus on specific organisations who suffer massively from this issue due to the large volume of transactions and have responded positively to our product’s idea. We have enough data (through customer feedback) that our product helps organisations simplifying their tax-reconciliation process to learn that our hypothesis has been validated. We are very close to getting our first few paid customers now.
Next Steps
We are now moving towards a typical Market/Product fit stage of a startup and are very excited (and nervous) for the next challenge.
Although we started our journey by focussing on solving the Tax Reconciliation problem, we want to shake up the entire corporate tax space to allow organisations to be independent of outsourcing organisations. They can have a clear view of their absolute tax positioning at the click of a button. If you are related to a tax matter, please watch this space for more regular updates.