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Re:Launch HN: Swipe (YC S21) – Simple Billing and Accounting... by ignoramous on Wednesday July 28, 2021 @06:33AM (#27982244)
Congratuations on the launch, Sri Teja.

A couple questions:

How is Swipe different from Bikayi.com (coincidentally by IIIT-H and YCombinator alumnus, just like yourself)?

And how different is Swipe to Khatabook, OKCredit and other such similar solutions? Do they not focus as much on IT (gst/tax) compliance? Where is the catch?

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The landing page has more contact us CTAs than get started, you may want to flip the ratio around?

Also, I believe embedding YouTube video on the homepage might help given trying the product requires sign-up (in addition to linking users to to your YouTube channel for tutorials).

Per my reading, WhatsApp integration is one of the differentiators, but the service lacks a mobile app? That is a strange disconnect. What isn't the landing page telling me about the integrations?

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As someone who knows many small, often home-run businesses, Swipe is definitely onto something, filling a niche that other services won't / don't. It would be interesting to watch Swipe's progress, especially since copycats are on-the-rise given never-seen-before fund raises by Indian VCs. All the best.

Re:Launch HN: Swipe (YC S21) – Simple Billing and Accounting... by sri-teja on Wednesday July 28, 2021 @07:04AM (#27982430)
We are solving the billing and compliance for businesses, while Bikayi and other online store solutions make it easy to share product catalogue online to the customers. For the businesses having offline/store-front sales and online sales in different apps, it is becoming more complex to consolidate the sales from these different channels.

With the aggressive implementation of GST(Goods and Services Tax, a monthly sales compliance) in India, business owners are spending between 2-7 days per month to organize these sales for tax filings. And even managing the payments is also becoming complex for the businesses as they need to manually check who paid for what transaction.

Apps like Khatabook and OKCredit and not towards the invoicing and GST compliance, but are more used for recording the credit/debit. For micro businesses it might work as most of them don't worry about inventory and tax stuff. We are targeting the small and medium segment and making it easy for them to manage inventory, bills, customers, vendors and taxes at a single place.

We started with Desktop version as most of our initial customers use desktop for billing, and we are comfortable developing web apps. Now, mobile app is in private beta and some of our customers are already testing it. Soon in a week or so we are about to launch the native mobile app on playstore.

Thank you for the suggestions on the landing page, we will be working on them.

Re:Launch HN: Swipe (YC S21) – Simple Billing and Accounting... by ignoramous on Wednesday July 28, 2021 @07:32AM (#27982604)
Thanks for your reply. Swipe is then an alternative to Tally, Freshbooks, Zohobooks, ClearTax, Vyapar, Gimbooks et al?

My comparision with Bikyai was prompted by Swipe's support for setting up an online store. And with the well-funded Khatabook (and OKCredit), because they are bound to enter invoicing and tax-compliance market eventually (if they haven't already: https://wap.business-standard.com/article/companies/fintech-...)

Re:Launch HN: Swipe (YC S21) – Simple Billing and Accounting... by sri-teja on Wednesday July 28, 2021 @08:40AM (#27983034)
We are building this product from the business owner/founder's perspective to make it easy to improve business using technology rather than just for accounting purpose. The motivation to just record the transaction is lesser, but to collect payments easily from the customers, at the same time updating the accounts automatically is valuable. We are focussed on that which the other softwares in the industry are missing.

Also at this stage, we are not too much worried about the competition as this is a big market opportunity and we believe it is going to be much more bigger market than today in the coming couple of years. So sooner or later competition exists.

Re:Launch HN: Swipe (YC S21) – Simple Billing and Accounting... by vira28 on Wednesday July 28, 2021 @09:15PM (#27991703)
@ignoramous, How do you keep yourself so up to date on everything
Re:Launch HN: Swipe (YC S21) – Simple Billing and Accounting... by ignoramous on Thursday July 29, 2021 @10:36AM (#27997058)
Hi, thanks? This is off-topic, but I don't think I am as up-to-date as it might come off. In fact, news.yc remains the only source of content I consume, which also defines my limit. I guess it isn't really a good thing to be spending as much time as I do on news.yc, anyway.