Our Competitors Raised $100m

um so please welcome to the stage Ari salafia [Applause] so much um it's a pleasure to be with you all today what a great event so far um It's My Hope for you today that you're gonna hear my story I'm Gonna Keep it really real with you and I hope that you find me afterwards we talk about what's working in your business what's not maybe and we all just make

some really great connections here going forward so thanks for your time we're gonna Jump Right In I'm gonna share with you uh the story of tax taker how we have been competing with one million dollars in funding versus my competitors 100 million in funding and how I know it's kind of wild right um and how that hasn't scared us away and we're still doing tons of business we're collecting amazing client logos our clients love us we love our clients

and we're excited about the opportunity that's um in our market and I think there's probably a lot of shared overlap with some of the things that you all are working on being at the founder 500 so with that let's Jump Right In so over the next 20 minutes I'm going to be talking about our customer machine how we've identified our customers how we've acquired customers cheaply and how we've

nurtured our Network because with a million dollars we don't have we don't have that that big ad spend uh right like like the other guys our product machine how we've invested in process how white glove customer service has been Key to Our Success and really having to be disciplined and kind of doing one thing first we'll dive into what that means and then we'll end with our company machine how we're competing

being extremely intentional both with our culture not having any big Egos and how authentic authenticity uh we think wins so um tax taker Revenue growth this is not going to be a presentation on how I said oh my gosh I got like two partners and I hockey stick to a billion dollar unicorn status my numbers are probably one of the least impressive numbers you're going to see at the conference but to us there's a big story that happens here and we're super proud of it and super

excited about it and I'm going to share with you how our company kind of changed and iterated and now has uh three million dollars about in bookings and renewals for this next coming year so real excited um so let's with uh just knowing your customer tax taker started as a white label solution for accounting firms we do government tax credits uh for growing companies Nationwide we started this

company because um a few years ago legislation improved for startup companies and small businesses to better benefit from government tax credits namely the research and development tax credit so you might have been getting spammed or maybe have used some of my competitors um if you're on Twitter you know who I'm talking about um and uh basically companies can get a ton of money back for every dollar they spend on development uh accountants

found this to be really attractive for their clients and I was working with accountants across the country and a bunch of them were coming to me saying Hey how do we come Downstream to help these startup companies that can better qualify from these programs so we went to Market with and piloted out a white label kind of offering and what we found was was it was so painful so that's why you'll see that first number it was so painful working with accountants and now they're some of our best Champions

um but we had to get really drill down into how could we create the most value amount of people and we realized that we had to go direct to the businesses themselves because they were at the end of the day so excited about the money that they could get back um so um we're going to talk about acquiring customers cheaply when you don't have a ton of AD budget when you have straight development costs and human capital costs you've got to be able to be really Scrappy and build referral programs and

partnership programs to to get larger and then nurturing engagement is everything and I think that's a huge winning differentiator that a lot of companies miss out on that there are many free ways to engage and nurture your network that will pause extremely uh or will yield positive returns um so the early days getting Buzz for a tax taker I started selling to CPA firms across the country with our product

without having a product um they saw some wireframes and they're like this is amazing this technology is so cool so um yeah this was uh like a top 50 firm in the country and I was like hey we have got this thing do you want to be part of it and they're like yes um so just kind of building the buzz and knowing that we were going to need others to kind of build the machine from a partner standpoint was was really key for us although uh actually ended up

having to completely scrap our first go to market strategy um acquiring custom or I should go back to this though um so uh one of the reasons why we had to shift our go to market strategy was uh basically uh you think of your account and think about all the things that they have to do for you every single year in your tax return are government tax credits while extremely lucrative that's just one line item so our our business model was

pretty challenging at the onset because um they were excited about what we had to offer and that they could offer now offer their clients so it wasn't so much the technology wasn't working because we got there pretty quickly with the technology uh but it was more so they had so many other priorities that would take precedent or take urgency with our clients so we couldn't get fast option and bootstrapping the business originally I was like if I'm gonna wait

around to sell our product for us we're just not going to make it so that's why we had to make make that shift just going to the companies directly um so one way to acquire customers on the Fly and cheaply is through affiliate agreements and revenue share Partnerships this has been key to tax takers growth overall growth plan and by Design we've built out Channel

distribution programs and actually have not ever really done any paid programming so we don't do PPC any paid SEO sem these will agreements have done wonders and have yield hundreds of thousands and now over a million dollars which we're really excited about so this is something that will live on I think after the presentation and I can also

send to you afterwards but one thing that we were pretty steadfast on is you know if we're going to have folks that help us get to that next customer we're going to pay them handsomely we're not going to be cheap so we might why are the customer a little bit cheaply but we're not going to be stingy on what we pay that affiliate so typical SAS Revenue shares around five percent we're we're paying our Affiliates 10 15 even 20 percent

um on a first year deal and sometimes on multi-year so we want to incentivize them to continue to be thinking about us to be spreading the word because if we can influence the influencers that can have a huge huge effect so our competitors you know they raised a ton more money than us they're also compelled to spend a lot more than us right so where they might think of they need to get to a thousand customers or

10 000 customers like Blitz scale we think about how can we get to 100 influence a thousand or ten thousand so just kind of a little bit of a different different approach um so this is an agreement that we send like a binded kind of practitioners or channels so I think this one is forecaster so

financial planning software and we like to go in and create pretty steady Partnerships with folks that are already selling to our ICP so ricp is a lot of the folks in this room precede through kind of series a venture backed or bootstrapped startup technology companies so why not hang around folks that also sell into those companies they're looking for value-add services

or looking for value-add services we don't always want to just be talking about to our clients they don't want to just be talking about what they're selling to their clients let's team up we're chasing the same clients and and share share resources um so this is just one example our core Channel Partners at tax taker being a tax credit space naturally accountants fractional CFOs accelerators and and VCS folks that have a stake and a vested

interest either because they're already working with these companies or they want to see these companies be Capital efficient so I would really encourage you to kind of think about as you're growing up your referral partnership agreements or your partner or just kind of your growth plan from an acquisition standpoint there's going to be a lot of folks out there that are like this is the winning recipe through this one marketing lead funnel and this like sometimes going just Back to Basics and just thinking

who else is selling to these folks like who do I need to be talking to who can help me build the megaphone um it can do wonders and it can it's kind of uh it's kind of a have to have when you're being really Scrappy so nurturing your network this is something that our competitors drop the ball on and one of the biggest things of feedback that we get from clients that move over to us that have worked with a

competitor or have uh evaluated one of our competitors they are like wow it was so awesome that I talked to someone or like you were a real human and we're like what um so when we think about building a referral engine we like to use this uh tree analogy um so um it's basically you want to plant the seeds right like a lot of the things we're going to say here are super obvious but like we forget that simple

things in execution can like phenomenal so uh we'll send this out afterwards to anyone that wants to email me but you want to plant the seeds right so you want to identify the buyers the advisors the channels that you're going to need so for us again accountant firms VCS accelerators then you want to build an engagement relationship and these are things that don't always actually take a

lot of time but it's really important that you're consistent with these activities right so just like you would with a sales cycle like building a Cadence with partners and influencers is extremely important so the element so you want to if you want to build an engaging relationship you're going to have to identify what are the things that I can do on a consistent basis that are going to remind my influencers that were around we're here to add value

Etc so for us we authentically engage with their brand we'll come up with co-marking marketing strategies that could include a shared blog post that could include a joint hosted webinar a lot of folks are looking for Content so we try to pinpoint kind of easy ways that we can consistently show up with each one of our partners and I mean it's kind of funny sometimes even it's like just going on LinkedIn and liking some of the things they're doing or promoting

some of the things they're doing like those things pay off over time um and that's been a huge kind of a huge thing for us um shine educating the referrer it's a lot easier for someone to talk about what you do if you remind them what you think you do right so consistently providing a blurb making it stupid simple for them to refer you to their client base is everything like you

don't want to just have a conversation with someone and be like I hope they remember that I sell tax credits and they're going to remember that one they should give it that business to me like you know it just it's it can become just a mess you're talking with so many quality people why not have that little extra follow-up or a little extra blurb that you send to them so that they can send it to the person that you want to talk to um also like creating measurable goals

with your partners not every partner is the same we look at Partners like a sliding scale so sometimes a partner might just be kind of a partner perk right listing a quick discount in in their perks page others are going gonna be that more robust relationship maybe there's going to be kind of a joint venture of campaigns for a series of months maybe it's going to make or maybe it's just going to be shared blog posts on a quarterly basis so when you're

talking with Partners it's really it can be a really slippery slope to also overcome it so it's really important that you also want to make sure that you know the goals are aligned with yours and that also you're not doing you know just all the work and you never get any referrals back so but educating the referral pays off and then incentivizing them so we do rev share agreements at tax taker we pay you know

a bit more than others might in traditional kind of SAS businesses but sometimes our our Affiliates and partners they don't want any money back end so that's also awesome because then we get more margin for that they just want to see a great provider you know know give value to their customer so this is kind of a a loop you know continuing to say okay am I have I identified the right Partners the right seeds am I building an engaging relationship am I educating them am I

giving them the resources that they actually need to help you know build my message and what I'm trying to get across and then rewarding them along the way it's fun when people get paid like our Affiliates are stoked when all of a sudden they get two thousand dollars that just hits their account or five thousand dollars depending on the size of the client it's it's it's really awesome so next we're gonna go into investing in process overall customer experience and

doing one thing that I think a lot of Founders it's really for us to do right we want to say yes to everything um so this is our customer Journey map we start with awareness of tax credits that's been actually the best thing about our competition when you have 100 million dollars out there in competitor funding by the way when I went on my uh investment tour everyone said this was not a big enough market and now we have

100 million dollars in competitor funding so that's that's always kind of funny so we this is really is kind of the David and and Goliath story but use that as just validation that you're doing something right and there's the market like there are many horses that are winning in our space and your competitors might actually be paying for the education and buyers to come your way so we look at this as an amazing thing so building awareness educating

customers is super expensive like when people find out what we do they're like oh tax taker you help startups get money that's a no-brainer right like everyone must sign up and like you think but it's not always it's like people hear the word tax and they're like not my thing like I'm not I'm probably not responsible for that free money okay I have an accountant they're probably on it right there's a lot of there's a lot of things where we can kind of just kind

of slip to the Wayside because of that well now because we have competitors that are super active on Google ads they're active on campaigns and Linkedin and Twitter like by the time we show up they've seen The Impressions 5 10 15 times and they're like cool yeah I know I need to do this and like how do I get started so like that's been awesome but our customer Journey map has is really this this one Loop of you know we're

we make them aware then we go through a discovery and qualification process this is one of the biggest differentiators between us and our competitors and where we win all the time is this discovery and qualification our competitors they go off and say we're going to qualify you and get your money in 20 minutes it's not true and most of them under qualify or overqualify clients they make big claims and they lack the follow

through we get a lot of a lot of leads that come over from our competitors that after speaking with our team for five minutes 10 minutes they'll go wow I actually know what this is and how it works and what I'm going to get back like I was working with them for six months and I never really knew so we invest human capital up front to get better results for the long term and that's been really key for our business

so where we've pulled back tech uh has actually made our uh retention a lot stronger with our clients and where we've seen a lot less drop off because we're doing a little bit of the heavy lifting up front by just having a phone call with our clients to make sure that they are eligible for the service that we're actually offering so they don't spend any more amount of time and then not get money at the end of the the day

so that's been huge for us and then just the way our business model runs we have to collect data financial data and project data about the team and what the company does annually and build out calculations and a report for their annual tax filing again I over engineered the hack out of this at first especially working with accountants because they're so detail-oriented and we started talking to our customers and

they're like hey you know you actually have a really pretty product for tax and uh but like we don't care we just want the money just tell me what I have to do to give you the money and like I'll do it right so we pulled back in certain areas with our engineering um so we have Integrations that pull into payroll HR data ways for clients to quickly upload things but we scrapped our survey and process completely and

that actually sped up our our project turnaround times um by weeks months um because again they could just talk to a human quickly that we could get more robust information on a 20 to 40 minute project interview call then we could having them go through surveys inside of the product um so that was a that was a big wake-up call for us um and then they go through tax filing and report and then we ask them if they're happy about the money they got

back and most times everyone is happy about money that comes back to them and then the the customer Journey just continues year after year um so again um Revenue growth This Is Us pilot testing this is us shifting to very early stage startups This Is Us peeling back our product and then all of a sudden our Compound Effect with our Partnerships our referrals our Advocates

us actually leaning into humans can be part of a scalable process is allowing us to finally start to get that little hockey stick so super excited um this is an example of us being just really really intentional about um our product roadmap what's important from a business case standpoint and most importantly what's important to our

customers so we take a really high level approach to start what are the things we're hearing from our customers what are the things that our internal team wants to see you know what are efficiencies that can be made uh in the brain date that we had just before this I was talking about how we had a a two-month hundred thousand dollar inner integration project and now I pay 500 a month to get to 80 times the amount of payroll companies

huge right so like had I known that that was something that would existed you know hundred thousand dollars like you have to go through some pain sometimes but with everything that we do we always are bringing it back to Willis get us to you know more customers will actually make our customers go through the process faster um and you know will it create more revenue for the business and it will

make our employees happy um it's really easy to to want to over engineer things all the time get into kind of feature fatigue uh but for us we've just been really really disciplined from an engineering standpoint having to couple of iterations so now we we just instill a lot more um automation uh through processes rather than like deep Tech inside of our product um so these are just kind of some

screenshots of kind of our quick sprints um so staying disciplined yep easy to slip into next feature that's been something that I think also right more money more opportunities to spend money so when you don't have a lot of money to work off of uh you're going to be a bit more disciplined on where the next dollar goes so that's that's a big one for us we've also really looked inwardly

like what can you even buy a little bit it doesn't even have to be 2x 5x or 10x but just buy a little bit that's going to move continue to move the needle and uh what can you afford to say yes to I think as Founders and especially folks that um kind of have say like our non-technical Founders it's really easy to get excited about ongoing opportunity and say yes to everything but not every deal is is a good deal and especially

being kind of the the David in in the David Goliath story you know you always want to look bigger than you are and say yes to so many things because you think they're going to get the next customer but you really have to just be kind of self-aware of of what's actually achievable and attainable and again I know I'm saying really obvious things but sometimes we have to say these things over and over again for them to like get through our heads

um so we got asked what else all the time in our journey uh we were focused on our r d tax credit we knew it was a big Market about 18 billion dollars are claimed every year in the U.S annually and without fail like during our fundraise and after what else what else what else and we knew we wanted to continue to help clients do more but we knew that we needed to get this right

and we needed to get a really good process around this offering right first before we extended ourselves too much but as a Founder it's super painful when you have all these people saying hey what else do you do like I want to give you more money and you don't have anything to give to them so over the last uh year we've been building out a couple of different offerings one has been an additional tax credit that came out of the the cares act kind of PPP so

it's my cell if you have any if you have employees and you experienced either a revenue reduction in the last couple of years or if you're a brand new startup you started in 2020 you could get up to seven thousand dollars per employee per quarter it's pretty huge it's a big refund check from the IRS so we launched ERC in a r d and we're really excited actually this week we just made the announcement that we are offering tax

credit financing so typically you have to wait for your tax credit until you file it every year and we now can actually front a majority of that so that you can get here sooner and use that to grow your business but we want we wanted to do this for the last two years but we just weren't ready we needed to get the credit process down we needed to get customers that were wildly

happy with what we were providing and being advocates until we were able to open up business lines two and three so I know it's really exciting when you want to open up a whole lot of service offerings but again when you're competing you know anyone so much bandwidth it's just really important that you do that one thing first and that's been extremely successful for or kind of a successful strategy for us we had to slow down to now go kind of faster

um so last talking really kind of quickly about building your company machine this is really about organizational Health culture and how your internal culture really can can really affect you positively with your external customer base so you really always want to be intentional for us remembering the vision and what what our why is and where we started where we are where we're headed and getting that

continual buy-in from the team that's really important to us as an organization um you know everyone has egos but we like to say that we have kind of a no policy we are not I I was in a sorority I loved frat parties we are not a frat party that's just not the way we do business it's not like just do it at any cost any ethic whatever our competition is is a lot like that like and that's the feedback we get

um it's grow at all costs hustle just sign anyone up even if they don't qualify whatever we'll get to it later we are not like that we know that we have something valuable to offer we're just helping a customer get what they deserve and we're going to do right by them and we are just just super authentic and we know that that wins because ultimately people remember

people not logos unless you're Nike um so our team today we're small and and Scrappy uh there's six of us um and at seven with an intern and then we have a small contract Network so we have determined that because of the technology that we've built with our delivery team we can five times the amount of work than a traditional

practitioner can do in this space you've leaned into going more top of the funnel heavy on Partnerships and sales folks to build the engine for to keep kind of top of the funnel going and then we're able to deliver a robust credits year after year with with a lean technical team because our product helps a lot so six ways to

compete in any industry so we talked about being strategically cheap but sharing in the wealth right so be cheap in the way that you identify how to get to that next customer but reward those that helped you along the way it pays off so much in the long run nurture your network don't forget who is helping you how can you be engaging with them even your customers for us we know

exactly what our customers do we know who makes up their teams so we can be thoughtful of oh baby are you raising let's go introduce you to this VC that also referred these other portfolio companies to us like just keep it real and it will pay off um staying laser focused you know doing the one thing first it's so hard because I know a lot of you want to probably do like a billion things and have even more

ideas every every single day but um you know doing just one thing really well and getting that right to propel you on to that two three four thing it's it's it can do wonders um when you can't build what can you automate or make efficient we just didn't have that bandwidth or that budget to spend in Ai and machine

learning and all the crazy things that I wanted to think about and disrupting this whole space but guess what my competitors that are raised 25 50 100 million that have ai at the end of their names they're asking us what are they doing differently right so kind of goes to show you you know you can build processes that have technology people but might not be the most expensive be intentional and be deliberate about

the customers you want we've had to face ourselves many times you know we're accountants the right way to go we're direct customers the right way to go now we're swinging back over to accountants we've kind of nailed some of the the direct companies and now accountants are coming back like oh okay I think we might be ready for you so that's kind of an interesting um and then lastly be authentic you know people remember people not logos they're going to remember how they made you you

made them feel so I hope that after this session uh I get to learn about a bunch of your Journeys and really really appreciate the time here today so thank you [Applause] [Music]