As a freelance web dev who also has an Airbnb side hustle, I got tired of expensive bookkeeping for a few transactions per month. I tried DIY, but my time is worth more than that.
Most importantly, both pros and DIY got subtle things wrong and caused me to miss out on thousands of dollars in deductions and credits.
So I’m making an AI bookkeeping chatbot that will handle all that for me. The aim is full automation while surfacing tax deduction and credit opportunities throughout the year. Like wouldn’t it be awesome to just have the research and tax credit or do home office deductions with zero effort?
At the end of the year, Kumbara puts together a series of financial reports that you plug into your tax software or hand to your CPA.
Working hand-in-hand with CPAs and some platform partners on this. Would love to hear from other solopreneurs or engineers who want to help build the future of financial freedom.
I procrastinate on taxes for the silliest of reasons: I don't want to spend the time to create a P&L for my side gig to give to my accountant. Takes less than an hour but it is just annoyingly tedious.
All my income and the majority of my expenses are done through PayPal because I want to minimize the bookkeeping effort. For some unknown reason, they don't have an annual P&L statement as a standard report. This year I tried a bunch of things with Copilot using PayPal reports. The most eye-opening result was that I could give it a .csv file with all my transactions for the year and tell it to generate a P&L statement with expense categories. It managed the task almost flawlessly. The only cleanup I had to do was to recategorize a couple of items. To say that I was blown away is an understatement.
> After seven years in San Diego, my wife and I have decided to uproot our family and move to the Bay Area. While there were many factors (a new job opportunity, family), a significant reason was finding a community of truth-seeking people.
Funny. The lack of truth-seeking and truth-telling is one of the chief reasons I moved away from the Bay Area.
You'll find unquestioning dogmatism everywhere you go unfortunately.
For what it's worth, the odds for rationally evaluating political ideas tend to go up around folks that have gone to universities that are known for some decent level of intellectual rigor.
Still not great though, some of the most dogmatic people I've met in my life were professors and undergrads. But those that were the opposite more than made up for that.
Have you tried renting a truck from Home Depot before? There's no way to reserve one in advance. Most Home Depots have one or maybe two trucks, you just have to show up and hope that it's available.
Uhaul is much more reliable, but in my experience renting from them is expensive and very time consuming. Each checkout usually takes me 20-30 minutes, even when I use the app ahead of time (their app is horrible).
Where I live, I'd say trucks make up 30% of the vehicles on the road. It's a big part of the culture here and extremely practical. There are no practical rental options. Lots of places in the US are like that. That's what led me to eventually buy a pickup for myself.
Someone needs to create Zipcar for trucks for those of us not living in dense urban cores.
If you order from a slightly more upscale hardware place they'll do delivery for a reasonable price usually next day. Seattle has a place called Dunn's. Their lumber is somewhat more expensive but it's all premium grade or better and you don't have to sort through 50 2x4s to find 5 good ones. In fact everything I've had delivered was high quality except one piece. I called them back and they swapped it out at no charge to me. Better if you're ordering with a truck you can fit much larger pieces like beams or 20' trex pieces that you can't get in a pickup. Delivery is $75-150 depending on how much of the truck you use last I checked. I stopped getting anything but instant fixed from Lowes or home Depot. For any big project thses places also discount in bulk better. We put in a 1k sqft paver patio. Was half as much buying from a local supplier who delivered for $50 on 5 pallets. No way I could have gotten that in a pickup with or without a forklift. Had a dingo delivered. Sure I could have trailered that but I'd have to rent and return a trailer. It was dropped off by a rental place and picked up a month later included in the rental. 8 minutes of my time. 15 total if you include the phone call to rent. I've spent an hour renting a chipper from home Depot.
Same for metal working. Moving sheet steel by yourself is stupid unless you want to slice up yourself and your vehicle. Deliver trucks have cranes. Even better you can get 24' lengths of tube steel which really cuts down on price. They put the pavers 30 feet from the street sneaking under power line easily.
If your doing a house how many trips are you making with a pickup full of drywall. How much are you racking up in gas in that sucker going to hd?
He does some processing on the area of the footage with the crt's to make them look nicer on video. You can't actually see the screen, it's just a square the same size as the monitor that seems to be making that region darker.
If you could pick any language to migrate these programs to, which one would you pick and why?
I've never used Java professionally, but that's probably what I'd pick. Seems to hit the sweet spot between time-tested, widely-used, enterprise-proven, performant, future-proof/portable, and well-understood. Seems from another comment that's what US DOD is betting on, as well.
I had one for the first time from our local co-op. It was definitely firmer than any other apple I’ve had but I wouldn’t call it “teeth-shattering” by any means.
Oh, but the flavor. Exquisite. Floral, fragrant. Tasted half like a really good apple, half like a perfectly ripe Bosc pear.
Do yourself a favor and find a ripe Arkansas Black apple. Best apple I ever had.
You wrote elsewhere that you validate within the first four weeks. How exactly do you do that? What if you have no Twitter following or very little social media presence? How can you get people to listen to you and say yes/no?
I’ve tried micro startups in the past. I build a landing page, get Google AdWords, maybe put out a post on Reddit or HN, and then…nothing. No signups, no comments. Maybe I’ve just picked the wrong ideas, but I can’t even get people to say “this is bad.” Just silence.
Seems easier when you’ve already built some clout and have a following. But also seems like I’m doing something wrong.
Do you have a specific example of how you did it? A link that you can share?
Not OP, but validating ideas is (relatively) easy. First, you figure out who will use your product. Then, you get a few of those people to use or discuss your product. You only need a few people, and they can be close acquaintances. After showing the product to a few people you imagine to use your product, you come to a determination of whether or not they liked your product. This part is a little subtle. You don't ask them "did you like my product?" Instead, you try to figure out if your product seems like something they were excited about, would continue to use, and, most importantly, tell others about.
Think about it like this. If you show the product to a handful of people that you imagine to be ideal users, and NONE of those people are excited enough about your business to share it with others, then what chance of success do you really have?
To give you a concrete example. I made an app that was a pretty revolutionary take on reading short stories. I had a few friends try it out, all of whom were passionate readers. They said they liked it, but I could see that none of them opened it again after their initial test. To me, that was all the signal I needed to pivot to something else.
We found people to be biased toward being polite. So we found "being excited" was a bad signal for what to build.
The best signals were when people offerred things that actually cost something e.g. reputation (by putting us in touch with important people), money or time (if they're people who valued their time highly).
We still haven't found any crazy level of growth though so maybe it is easy and we're just doing it wrong. Who knows.
The book "The Mom Test" written by Rob Fitzpatrick may help you with that. It presents ways to ask non-leading questions and understand the flow of discussion such that even your mom wouldn't be able to lie to you.
You have to decode what they say. Which is really hard because obviously working on the product yourself, you want to believe they care about your product.
For example:
- "This is awesome! I would absolutely use this if it would just have this one extra feature it does not have now." --> I absolutely don't care about this product. Please leave me alone. I have better things to do.
> but I could see that none of them opened it again after their initial test.
I think OP agrees w/ you and this is their key point -- you can ignore everything they say and just look at how, or whether, they use it. More generally, I think it helps to try very hard to get at the underlying problems people have, and try to make those problems go away. People will use very terrible software (interfaces) if it solves a real problem for them. I think your signals are good generalizations to be clear, I just think we (all of us) regularly gloss over problems by focusing on tech, design, or otherwise "cool" things. It can be really hard to figure out what problems people actually have, and also whether they are significant enough to change their behavior to solve them better.
If it would have been easy, we would probably have millions of micro-startup founders out there.
I have been doing customer discovery professionally for over 10 years as a sales person and PM and there is no 1 method or silver bullet to predict whether the product will be successful.
Talking to acquaintances is terrible, because they are biased (see MOM test). They will tell you all kind of stories, but ultimately what matters is:
Are they going to pay?
Excitement has nothing to do with revenue which in the end is the blood of a business.
To extend this - there is a patter now on Twitter where indie devs are selling to their twitter friends, but is it a viable business beyond that? I don't know.
What I do know is that the only way to validate a product is to get paid and the market will tell you the truth.
When I see a potential problem, see if I can solve it. See if it's already being solved, if not I pitch the idea to few people. If at least 50% got excited. I pick this idea to build.
You can find problems in your day to day life. Travelling is another way of discovering new problems. Every problem is not worth building a solution for. Only the burning ones with business potential.
> See if it's already being solved, if not I pitch the idea to few people.
And how do you find these 'few people' to pitch to? You would have to find the right people with skin in the game, who are actually impacted by this right? How do you do that? For me, this has always been the part I could never crack.
If you don't have first-hand contact with your potential users, and you don't know where they are, then you likely lack the empathy to build a great product for them.
For anyone scrolling by and getting sucker punched by halpert here, I'd like you to know that not being surrounded by people whose problems can be solved with software startups doesn't mean you 'lack empathy'.
I think boffinism's comment below hits it, but to also add -- its important to try and find a charitable interpretation of comments when possible. Here I think empathy was meant literally as understanding other people's needs and points of view. If you don't know people with some problem directly, and also don't know how to find them -- how sure are you that the problem you are solving is real and in need of a practical solution? You have to understand user needs very well to build a novel product that people want to use. Its not about software startups solving the worlds problems -- I think its just a very general point about solving problems you understand and not ones you don't have any experience with.
To give a more concrete example, I know of a successul life insurance company. It was started because the founders had a bad experience with purchasing life insurance. They then worked with (and as) life insurance agents to better understand the customer (and insurer's) needs. THEN they built a company, one solution at a time.
Q: I am having trouble understanding why people think / do X
A: You should talk to people who think / do X and ask them why they think / do X. Until you do so, you lack sufficient empathy to address their issues / change their behavior.
Its good feedback that it is worded in a way that has ambiguous meanings, one of which (you are a sociopath) is an unwelcome character judgement. But IMHO the charitable interpretation is perfectly practical and important feedback: Don't build products for users you can't talk to and learn from.
I feel like 'and you don't know where they are' is maybe the redeeming phrase in halpert's post. If you have an idea that you think would help some people, and you have no idea where such people are concentrated... maybe it's a sign you don't know enough about said people to really be able to help them?
He did not say „lack empathy, making you a bad person“.
He said „lack empathy for building this particular type of software“, meaning you would not be getting enough emotional feedback (due to lack of connections).
Posting on Reddit or HN is fine, but unlikely to be successful if that is all you do. Cold calling/emailing/linkedin and posting on forums like HN continuously can both help. The latter only works if your solution genuinely solves someone's problem otherwise it will come off spammy. If your solution has obvious keywords and those keywords aren't too expensive, then Google ads can be relatively cheap method to get started too.
I’m not OP, but a strategy I’ve seen on Hacker News in the past might be called ‘clout hijacking’, wherein you get a momentary boost from someone who has an established audience already. A popular Twitter user, a YouTuber, a newsletter author, etc.
The frugal way is to make something they genuinely want to share to their audience, but, for some, you can also just pay them.
> His most famous, and most controversial, work was “Iron John,” which made the case that American men had grown soft and feminized.
What a bizarre take on Iron John.
First of all, Iron John is a work of amateur folklorology written in a poetic style. It's an extended meditation on a particular folk tale. As any student of folklore knows, the same folk narratives reappear across many time periods and cultures in different guises. That's part of what makes the field so fascinating. There's no direct reference in Iron John to "American men" or anything like that, although there are mentions of America in the same way that he also refers to medieval Norse culture, Polynesians, etc.
Second, if anything, Iron John is about recovering the divine masculine from the toxic wasteland of caricatured and commercialized masculinity. Bly's work is a complement, not a riposte, to the important work feminist writers have done in recovering the divine feminine. To reduce his work to making a case that men have "grown soft and feminized" is to fall into the same farce that Bly was fighting against.
Bly advocated for men to explore their psyches and deep feelings. Iron John connects men to eternal themes of masculinity through the lens of folk tales. Yes, some of those themes have to do with "traditional masculinity," e.g., being a warrior. But he does so with nuance and care, never by denigrating or attempting to confine women, and always while recognizing men's vulnerability.
If I were to summarize Iron John's main theme, it's that the inner child in men must eventually escape the metaphorical mother to discover the "inner hairy wild man" or "Iron John," which Bly describes as the masculine analogue to the feminine "inner hairy wild woman." It's a story about adolescence at its core. It's not even necessarily about biological sex or cisgendered identity, although Bly doesn't go out of his way to accommodate trans people or other gender expressions. (It's not exactly a work that's aged perfectly well.)
There are valid reasons why one could critique Bly's work. Some polemical claim about American men growing "soft" isn't one of them.
>Bly therefore saw today's men as half-adults, trapped between boyhood and maturity, in a state where they find it hard to become responsible in their work as well as leaders in their communities. Eventually they might become weak or absent fathers themselves which will cause this behaviour to be passed down to their children. In his book The Sibling Society (1997), Bly argues that a society formed of such men is inherently problematic as it lacks creativity and a deep sense of empathy. The image of half-adults is further reinforced by popular culture which often portrays fathers as naive, overweight and almost always emotionally co-dependent.
>Historically this represents a recent shift from a traditional patriarchal model and Bly believes that women rushed to fill the gap that was formed through the various youth movements during the 1960s,[21] enhancing men's emotional capacities and helping them to connect with women's age-old pain of repression. It has however also led to the creation of "soft males" who lacked the outwardly directed strength to revitalize the community with assertiveness and a certain warrior strength.
I’ll admit, not being familiar with Bly, your comment makes me want to become more familiar if only to see how such contrasting interpretations could exist. I certainly find your take more appealing by far. But I’m also curious whether I’ll find myself with yet another take.
As a freelance web dev who also has an Airbnb side hustle, I got tired of expensive bookkeeping for a few transactions per month. I tried DIY, but my time is worth more than that.
Most importantly, both pros and DIY got subtle things wrong and caused me to miss out on thousands of dollars in deductions and credits.
So I’m making an AI bookkeeping chatbot that will handle all that for me. The aim is full automation while surfacing tax deduction and credit opportunities throughout the year. Like wouldn’t it be awesome to just have the research and tax credit or do home office deductions with zero effort?
At the end of the year, Kumbara puts together a series of financial reports that you plug into your tax software or hand to your CPA.
Working hand-in-hand with CPAs and some platform partners on this. Would love to hear from other solopreneurs or engineers who want to help build the future of financial freedom.
https://www.kumbara.money
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