I was introduced to the world of income tax filing when I joined a CA firm as an intern. Most of the salaried individuals are clueless about tax filings, and hunt around on the internet or for CA firms to aid them. There were quite a few self-help sites in India. In US, this was a huge market, and the Indian was was growling very strongly.
However, I wasn’t satisfied with most of the Indian sites. They were complicated, ugly and not very user friendly. I used the existing software provided by the Income Tax Deparement (Excel spreadsheet) and modified it to make it more efficient and simple. At our CA firm, we were able to save over 50% of our time by using these forms.
It was good idea, I thought. I needed to scale it. But the problem was that I knew nothing about software development, and I couldn’t afford to hire a developer. I went the hard way. I started learning web development off the net: forums, tutorials, SO, php manuals, etc …
It took 4 months, and I was ready with my site – taxfile [dot] in. I took special care to make the site user friendly, smooth and accessible. The one thing I had in mind through the development was to cut down as many seconds as possible in the return filing process. Also, I kept it free.
Next: how to get users? Um … Google. How? SEO. I learnt SEO, and one month later, I started to get decent traffic.
Some 5,000 users signed up, and the site generated 2,200+ returns during the tax season – in 4 months. Judging by the support requests, quite a few advocates and tax professionals used the site. User feedback was pretty good.
Now, I feel stranded. I realized that ‘making’ wasn’t enough. I have to ‘sell’ it. I am a student with no experience in marketing, entrepreneurship, e-com or even web development. I don’t even know anyone with whom I can discuss this project. I am clueless about the next step. I have a hell lot of ideas that I wish to implement on taxfile.in, but I’ve put them on the back burner. I have come to a stage where abandoning the project seems like the most reasonable idea.
Or maybe I could keep it dormant and return to it after a few years when I have the experience and resources to execute the plan.
I still believe in myself, and in the idea. But is that enough?
Perhaps the best people to ask advice from are The Rodinhooders. So here I am.