€1,400 b-strapped prod that’s disrupting the market, 250 customers before launch | Hacker News Reader

€1,400 b-strapped prod that’s disrupting the market, 250 customers before launch

blog.bullethq.com

13 pointsconnorp38 comments

How did you get 250 users interested and pre-subscribed without spending a ton on marketing? (Really interested as I've built a few small apps that never go anywhere as I'm not much of a marketing guy).

Bootstrapping a product for such a low cost and having a high* number of users interested before launch is inspiring - good luck with the launch!

* - I know someone will come and say 250 isn't "high" compared to Facebook or something, but 250 paying customers is a nice income stream and quite impressive for a low-cost, bootstrapped product built as a side project from your consulting gigs.

Well Gareth, we didn't have any money to spend on marketing, and we're just learning to do it ourselves. Not to mention we're in a saturated market full of big guns. The biggest thing to learn about marketing your products I think is nobody really cares about the product they care about what it does for them or how it helps them. When you build something you're in love with it, but sadly you're the only one to think so. So we try and find out what people hate and twist it. From having people come to our current site we know the tag 'Automated Accounts', line doesn't mean anything to them. So we're changing it to Hello Bullet, Goodbye Accountant. If you need an hand with your app's I'm happy to help out a fellow startup. Follow me on @peterconnor and we can DM emails if that helps.

Hard to imagine how they arrived at the total cost of €1,400 - what about the hours of work that went into the web app and iPhone app, and all the visual design? Are they calculating their hourly rate as insignificant?

Product looks good, but this €1,400 figure is meaningless.

Hey, the €1,400 amount is made up of every out going we had in the company. That included the logo design, to company formation which is about 300 euro in Ireland. I'm not a designer but I learned how to design so we could build it, we worked hard in the evenings and weekends to get the product built. So what we're really trying to say to people is you can do it. Sure it doesn't include our time, but running it so tight is a reflection of how significant we value our time. Everything we did, piece of copy we wrote had a time cost, that made us focus on what people wanted. So to me the €1,400 means everything. Hope that makes sense :)

What's the position on liability if the program generates erroneous taxation information and a (user) company gets hit with tax penalties?

Hey, the way Revenue work is your tax liability lies with the individual. So we've actually no way of underwriting that that goes for an Accountant to product. But like all good open companies we know if that was to happen our business would be dead. So ultimately that's the best way to underwrite your product we feel.

Bullet got built in the first place cause my co-founder John was paying an Accountant quite a bit of money and he failed to file his returns, resulting in an audit. Bullet Automates all the tax returns so to miss it you'd need to actively ignore it. Hope that answers your question.

In most places you are responsible for the accuracy of any returns sent to the tax authorities, not your accountant or creator of a software package.

disrupt: verb

* drastically alter or destroy the structure of (something)

I think this word is being overused. 250 customers for a new accounting product is not disrupting.

Hey, your right 250 users isn't going to knock the ball out of the ball park. But remember what the product is, it's an accounting product and that puts people into a coma with bodrum. So getting 250 on to the application with no marketing in less then a month I think sends a message that we've built something that people want, it's disruptive cause the 3000 other accounting products have all just copied Sage. When I was designing the UI - I hadn't looked at one competitor.

Interesting. How long did it take you to develop your MVP? Did you build the system together with many customers?

Well we've been building for about a year. Although the front-end is pretty simple it's quite complex in the back-end. We were the customers, myself and John both ran consulting web/dev companies. A lot of the user testing we did was on my mother 78, and Johns dad. We wanted to build a prod that didn't require any training. So if 'Mum', and 'Dad', could use it we knew everyone else could. In the last month we've been tweaking based on user feedback though, but not a lot. We'll be bloging about what we did.

It'll be interesting to see your experiences. As a backend developer (who, unfortunately, sucks at visual design - damn colourblindness) I find these kind of posts inspiring: it's something I'd really love to do, I just haven't met the right partner yet (hard when you're a Brit living in The Netherlands).

The complexity of a user interface is inversely proportional to the time (and talent) needed to create it.

I wish you guys the best of luck :)

Thanks man. I spent 10 years working for Rabobank... Well I thought myself UI design. John who does the dev would say the same things as you. But I really think UI starts from the Dev. Example he was the one who met with the A/cant but still fought the simplicity. Then he'd say to me design a process for paying someone and you have to include xyz. I'd design it and send the screen back (not explaining them) if he didn't get a step we'd a prob and so on. If you look at the design I use it's just boxes. I'm not a graphic designer we just didn't have the money to hire one. But here is an interesting thing. If you look at dribbble it's full of beautiful design but when you then check out the sites they were designing for all their design is removed or broken (not all the time) so what that really says is keep it simple. As a point I use fireworks 8 - it's great at boxes and that all I can use. Means the site's super fast too. If you need any advice on it let me know follow me on twitter and we can share emails @peterconnor

Design or number of users regardless, people really need to stop using the word 'disrupt'. It's one of the top reasons I steer clear of TechCrunch.

I hear what you're saying. I use to call TechCrunch, TesticulCrunch. When I was working other startups years ago, you'd read these stories '12year old invents 'A Button', and raises 12Million', then you find out it was a pile of shit. I suppose we set out to really try and create someone unique. Which is probably a better word, but people might understand 'disrupt', better.

There are already people doing this In Edinburgh where I'm based, with far more impressive numbers than 250 users pre-launch, FreeAgent (http://www.freeagent.com) If you think these guys are going well you should check them out. They actually DO have the figures to back up being called "disruptive". I don't mean to be negative with regards Bullet, just that when I read the post I thought wow only 250 and they're "disruptive". The guys at FreeAgent are doing a spectacular job and the funding they received and users they're pulling only serve to confirm it.

Hey yep we know FreeAgent they're doing a great job and it's great to see they've got funding. They've been around a good number of years now.

Just to point out though - we fully automate all your tax return and provide payroll. With Bullet you don't need an accountant, with FreeAgent you do (unless of course you're comfortable doing your own returns). But the more Bullets and FreeAgents in the world the better. Accounting products are crap at the moment and provide guys like you with an endless pain in the ass.

In that case I apologise, I didn't realise that Bullet's offering had something over FreeAgent. My understanding was that they were achieving the same end. Good luck all the same.

Hay man, No need. They've built a great product. Thanks.

That's different, not disruptive.

It's a nice looking product, great price and not being Sage is (in my limited experience) a good thing, but you're a long way off of disruptive.

Out of interest it's applicable for just Ireland at the moment? Any plans to expand out?

I suppose time we'll tell. We know some of our competitors have started lifting our copy so we're annoying someone.

Thanks we're self thought UI guys, it's our first product. Cause we do all tax returns, the product needs to be migrated to other tax rules. So our next step, which we're working on is the UK. Where you based.

Yep UK, which is kind of why I asked. If I ever went freelance this is EXACTLY what I'd want. No idea how it scales to a bigger business but that's a massive market right there of people who will pay fair money for a straight forward product.

Yep - our product is gear for companies up to about 10 users. In Ireland about 80% of the market is SME and that's under 5. Great thing with cloud is you can reach these people, but still deliver a cost effective solution and reduce stress.

Fair play to ye, I look forward to trying it out.

> This allows its customers to remove their accountants and reduce their accounting fees, saving them €1,500.

My accounting fees are more around €300, so it depends on context how much you save.

€12/month is around €150/year, which also needs to be taken into account.

One might also want an accountant to check your return and tax credits and that type of stuff, even if using your app. I would be surprised if it removes accounting fees in many cases.

Great work, though, keep it up.

Thanks. The fee is taken for limited companies. What our thinking is. Don't spend 2k or 1,500 on an accountant to do your book keeping and fill out forms for you. If you're going to spend that kind of money spend it on a tax advisor etc. But there are a lot of business out there that spend 2k on their accountant and see them once a year, and 2k could help a lot of comps at the moment. Thanks again for checking us out.

Bug: site allows me to add a 'Who paid you?' before any invoices are created. Then when I create an invoice, it loses the 'Who paid you' info I entered.

What I'd really like is to have all my expense invoices set up to be sent to myaccount123@bullethq.com, and have your software parse out the details (VAT etc.) and arrange it nicely by date and company. It's currently easier for me to log into, e.g. my web hosting provider, pull up a list of invoices for the last year and copy/paste them into a spreadsheet. Your approach would have me manually enter info from dozens upon dozens of invoices one at a time into your webapp (using the 'Incoming Bill' form).

https://getitkeepit.com/ are an Irish company that parse incoming bills from an (admittedly small) number of utility companies, maybe you could look at something similar?

Hi, idea of 'Who paid you', is for people that do work then invoice later, say you have a regular client. I've just tried to replicate that error and can't - can you drop me a mail on peter at bullethq.com.

Yep we're 100% with you but it's tricky to build but on our list. What you see now it the MVP for saying good bye to your accountant.

We have GetItKeep it on our list but I think they're changed direction and are working in the US.

Pete

Hi muxxa,

The site will let you get to the "Who paid you" money in page, but it won't record any of the details unless you select which invoices the payment is for - that's why the details appear to be missing when you go back to that screen after having created the invoices.

Stay tuned for our iPhone app (and email service) which will be able to suck in your invoices and they are entered automatically for you, so you won't have to do any of the tedious typing.

Writing a headline such as "Irish business builds a product for €1,400 that’s disrupting the market, with 250 customers signed up before launch." about yourself just makes me leave the site immediately.

That's a shame, we didn't want to hire any PR company. We just want to be ourselves. So sorry if it p*ssed you off. We're just learning as we go, again we thought it was an interesting story to share with people who love making ideas real but don't have the cash.

Link from your blog post goes to https://www.bullethhq.com (extra h)!

Thanks for the heads up - working now :)

https://www.bullethq.com/

Awesome, great problem to tackle.

Nice demo process!

You might want to test different copy for "Get started in 5 seconds, no credit card, no signup" and the button at top of page, when I read it had to do a double take if your telling me I need a CC to signup or if it's not required.

Just saw on pricing page it says "No credit card or signup required." but didn't read that first time around. Or maybe it was a split tested page!

Thanks Man. My co-founder will be pumped the demo took a long time to build.

fiskah just said the same about the copy - I think we'll change it. It's mean to be the opp, I hate having to sign up to try stuff out. Doh!

a little feedback in case the founders are reading this:

when I saw the "Try now" button with the line "no credit card - no signup" I first understood it to mean exactly the opposite than they intend it to :)

Thanks - We we're wondering about that. You know what it took us a month to build the demo tech - so you could save it as a live session. Any suggestions???

As an engineer, I'm probably not the best person to ask about product copy ! But maybe even changing to a comma like further down the site? When I see - it makes me think there is a correlation between what is being said :)

Still, it might just be my nitpicking; the product looks great, I have "suffered" Sage myself and this looks like a simpler option for small businesses

Well John my co-founder is the engineer and he came up with the new copy. We got rid of the 'No Signup', the no credit card is a strong message, once your onto the next step you'll see we don't ask for a signup. Thanks for pointing it out.

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