HN, would love your feedback on my idea | Hacker News Reader

HN, would love your feedback on my idea

domainvitals.com

21 pointsphankinson20 comments

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What friends and random people on the web (even on HN) think about your idea is irrelevant.

You need to speak to prospective customers and get reliable answers to these questions:

1. Are you solving a problem they have?

2. What substitutes do they resort to right now?

3. How much are they willing to pay for this service?

Thanks for the feedback. I agree with you, and we thought HN might be one of the best places to get some feedback, since this is where a lot of tech entrepreneurs hang out. I'm hoping the audience here can spread it to anyone they feel the idea may be relevant to.

Small business owners are your most likely customers. I'd suggest also asking for feedback on small business forums like:

http://www.smallbusinessforums.org/

Wow - 28,000 registered users!!! Definitely going to ask around in these forums.

most of them are likely spam bots. last activity on those forums was like 3 months ago.... it's dead

august 2006 was 3 months ago?

the part where you categorize income & expenses automatically is pretty hard. so there will be a lot of manual labor involved and lot of clarifying with clients if you want to do it properly.

you said it yourself on your website, bookkeeping is expensive and time-consuming... your idea is like waterbed. you off-load your clients only to have this problem on your own plate now. it just won't become magically cheap and fast just because you do it.

and if you execute this idea, it will be nothing more than an outsourced bookkeeping service. there are thousands of bookkeeping firms already doing this.

Disagree. It'll be an outsourced bookkeeping service on the web.

That fact alone lets you offer heaps of goodies and efficiencies that your bookkeeper around the corner can't.

Your idea is great. So great even, that there is already a precedence for this sort of thing.

Mint.com, indinero, less accounting, all of them use backend bank services like Yodlee to sync with bank accounts and statements, auto-categorize expenses, and generate visual reports and integrated tracking tools to make accounting and bookkeeping simple.

The question isn't "is my idea good?" it really is "do I have enough of a unique angle to compete with others in that space?"

Absolutely - I'm familiar with the companies out there. However, those companies typically only focus on a few banks to do an automated reports. Also, from bank statements and credit card statements you can't get granular information like amount paid for multiple items from one store or even the tax you paid.

Our solution would take your receipts and invoice, extract that granular data and feed it back into a system for the business owners.

I would pay $1000/yr for this service if you could do one key thing: figure out, based on the receipts, which ones are tax deductible (e.g. food) and which could be tax deductible if I did something extra (e.g. NY ST 121.3, sales tax exemption for computer hardware). None of the existing solutions take the tax issue to the next step.

Exactly.... This is the key pain point we are trying to solve! Glad to see you think it would be useful :)

Not to rain on your parade. Shoeboxed* does this type of thing already. I am currently using their limited trial. http://www.shoeboxed.com/receipts-for-taxes/ I'm not sure how you would differentiate yourself. You might have in mind other ways to tackle this problem.

You have an excellent idea and the space ripe for disruption because I for one dislike receipt management for expenditures. It is a necessary evil.

*I'm in no associated with any of the above.

The key thing which all of the existing solutions miss is proactive recommendations based on your company.

I mentioned ST 121.3 as an awesome example because most NYC startup founders aren't aware of the rule.

You are looking for http://Shoeboxed.com plus any of its various integrations.

The Shoeboxed part is hard. The reporting is less hard insomuch as it is a UX challenge, not an operational challenge.

You mean like this: http://www.invoice2go.com/? Yeah, go for it.

Cool, thanks for the link.

Isn't it slightly concerning that you are finding out about your competitors through this feedback thread.

I recommend you find out about all your competitors, try their services and see what they are doing "wrong". If you can improve on these or come up with innovative features that make live easier for small business than its a good idea. Otherwise your just another book keeping firm.

I think a "What do you think of my idea" site generator would cover a real need

Google Moderator can be used for getting idea feedback, though it won't generate good looking pages.

http://www.google.com/moderator/

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