Before Tax

After playing with referrals, ads, and affiliates (of all conceivable kinds) with very limited success, it's starting to paint a less lucrative picture than I expected. Truth be told, while visitors on my site seem to genuinely enjoy the content - they simply don't seem to want to buy anything. 🤷‍♂️

While part of me is a little salty about that, another part is very grateful for all the doors this project has opened up. Thanks to Before Tax I've been connected with tons of successful entrepreneurs in the financial planning and tax space. They've given me ideas and insights I never would have gotten otherwise.

One big reason to be grateful for this project is how it's culminated into Excelkits.com. I'll be telling that story on the Excelkits product page: https://www.indiehackers.com/product/excelkits.

While I'm marking Before Tax as closed on Indie Hackers, I plan to keep working on it by keeping it up to date and adding features that make sense for other users of Excelkits. I still have fun working on Before Tax and it feels good knowing there's lots of people out there finding value in it. Besides it sends a nice stream of traffic to Excelkits 😜

The first serious monetization attempt was a CPA referral service. Before Tax is about saving taxes and CPA's can help you do just that... made sense to play matchmaker.

Added a referral form connected to HubSpot's CRM I started to get sign ups. Next I conducted brief interviews over email about accounting services the prospect might be interested in. Finally I'd look up reputable CPA's in their geographic area and started connecting them via email. Heyyy this might just work! 😬

Thankfully I wasn't charging anything to anyone, because as it turns out that would have been pretty illegal. After lengthy discussions with a contract attorney, turns out there's strict rules that govern how you can refer professionals, such as CPA's, in the United States. Some networks like Dave Ramsey's have managed to find loopholes to stay compliant, but it still seemed kind of sketchy to me.

Shut it down.

After months of learning about SEO, writing articles, and tweaking the site structure I started to see more than a trickle of traffic. Success here was probably a combination of the domain beforetax.co getting more than 9 months old and moving all the content into silos.

Time to start figuring out how to monetize this thing.

After months of research, designing, and hacking it's ready.

It's so basic it pains me to think about it, but I published a free self employment tax calculator. I wrote a massive blog post to accompany it as well. Not nearly as cool as I was hoping it would be, but I learned a lot about taxes & SEO.

Home page was ugly and most of my traffic bounced quickly... but a least now I could see if other entrepreneurs were feeling the same pain and were eager to solve it.

Realizing understanding taxes are a real pain once you step outside of the W2 world into the realm of entrepreneurship. There's more tax savings, but also more headaches... all I know is there's an opportunity here and want to solve it.

So I started learning the inner-workings of the U.S. tax system 😳