connorp

I'm online so any questions shoot them below. Pete

Hey,

We looked at some other products around sharing but it was working out at a cost of nearly a euro a share. Seemed crazy, but your right it's not idea. We'll make it better over time. We had a bit of a push to get the new marketing site up etc.

Glad you find it useful, took a while to put it together in a useful way.

Pete

Hey HN,

We created this guide after running through the process ourselves and thought we'd put something together to help the community. It's about 136k in total you can get. We got some tips from other startups guys and popped it all together into a pdf with infographic.

Hope you find it helpful. Let me know your feedback @bullethq

Well John my co-founder is the engineer and he came up with the new copy. We got rid of the 'No Signup', the no credit card is a strong message, once your onto the next step you'll see we don't ask for a signup. Thanks for pointing it out.

Hi, idea of 'Who paid you', is for people that do work then invoice later, say you have a regular client. I've just tried to replicate that error and can't - can you drop me a mail on peter at bullethq.com.

Yep we're 100% with you but it's tricky to build but on our list. What you see now it the MVP for saying good bye to your accountant.

We have GetItKeep it on our list but I think they're changed direction and are working in the US.

Pete

Hay man, No need. They've built a great product. Thanks.

Yep - our product is gear for companies up to about 10 users. In Ireland about 80% of the market is SME and that's under 5. Great thing with cloud is you can reach these people, but still deliver a cost effective solution and reduce stress.

Thanks Man. My co-founder will be pumped the demo took a long time to build.

fiskah just said the same about the copy - I think we'll change it. It's mean to be the opp, I hate having to sign up to try stuff out. Doh!

Thanks - We we're wondering about that. You know what it took us a month to build the demo tech - so you could save it as a live session. Any suggestions???

Thanks man. I spent 10 years working for Rabobank... Well I thought myself UI design. John who does the dev would say the same things as you. But I really think UI starts from the Dev. Example he was the one who met with the A/cant but still fought the simplicity. Then he'd say to me design a process for paying someone and you have to include xyz. I'd design it and send the screen back (not explaining them) if he didn't get a step we'd a prob and so on. If you look at the design I use it's just boxes. I'm not a graphic designer we just didn't have the money to hire one. But here is an interesting thing. If you look at dribbble it's full of beautiful design but when you then check out the sites they were designing for all their design is removed or broken (not all the time) so what that really says is keep it simple. As a point I use fireworks 8 - it's great at boxes and that all I can use. Means the site's super fast too. If you need any advice on it let me know follow me on twitter and we can share emails @peterconnor

Thanks. The fee is taken for limited companies. What our thinking is. Don't spend 2k or 1,500 on an accountant to do your book keeping and fill out forms for you. If you're going to spend that kind of money spend it on a tax advisor etc. But there are a lot of business out there that spend 2k on their accountant and see them once a year, and 2k could help a lot of comps at the moment. Thanks again for checking us out.

Hey yep we know FreeAgent they're doing a great job and it's great to see they've got funding. They've been around a good number of years now.

Just to point out though - we fully automate all your tax return and provide payroll. With Bullet you don't need an accountant, with FreeAgent you do (unless of course you're comfortable doing your own returns). But the more Bullets and FreeAgents in the world the better. Accounting products are crap at the moment and provide guys like you with an endless pain in the ass.

I suppose time we'll tell. We know some of our competitors have started lifting our copy so we're annoying someone.

Thanks we're self thought UI guys, it's our first product. Cause we do all tax returns, the product needs to be migrated to other tax rules. So our next step, which we're working on is the UK. Where you based.

Well Gareth, we didn't have any money to spend on marketing, and we're just learning to do it ourselves. Not to mention we're in a saturated market full of big guns. The biggest thing to learn about marketing your products I think is nobody really cares about the product they care about what it does for them or how it helps them. When you build something you're in love with it, but sadly you're the only one to think so. So we try and find out what people hate and twist it. From having people come to our current site we know the tag 'Automated Accounts', line doesn't mean anything to them. So we're changing it to Hello Bullet, Goodbye Accountant. If you need an hand with your app's I'm happy to help out a fellow startup. Follow me on @peterconnor and we can DM emails if that helps.

That's a shame, we didn't want to hire any PR company. We just want to be ourselves. So sorry if it p*ssed you off. We're just learning as we go, again we thought it was an interesting story to share with people who love making ideas real but don't have the cash.

I hear what you're saying. I use to call TechCrunch, TesticulCrunch. When I was working other startups years ago, you'd read these stories '12year old invents 'A Button', and raises 12Million', then you find out it was a pile of shit. I suppose we set out to really try and create someone unique. Which is probably a better word, but people might understand 'disrupt', better.

Well we've been building for about a year. Although the front-end is pretty simple it's quite complex in the back-end. We were the customers, myself and John both ran consulting web/dev companies. A lot of the user testing we did was on my mother 78, and Johns dad. We wanted to build a prod that didn't require any training. So if 'Mum', and 'Dad', could use it we knew everyone else could. In the last month we've been tweaking based on user feedback though, but not a lot. We'll be bloging about what we did.

Hey, the way Revenue work is your tax liability lies with the individual. So we've actually no way of underwriting that that goes for an Accountant to product. But like all good open companies we know if that was to happen our business would be dead. So ultimately that's the best way to underwrite your product we feel.

Bullet got built in the first place cause my co-founder John was paying an Accountant quite a bit of money and he failed to file his returns, resulting in an audit. Bullet Automates all the tax returns so to miss it you'd need to actively ignore it. Hope that answers your question.

Hey, your right 250 users isn't going to knock the ball out of the ball park. But remember what the product is, it's an accounting product and that puts people into a coma with bodrum. So getting 250 on to the application with no marketing in less then a month I think sends a message that we've built something that people want, it's disruptive cause the 3000 other accounting products have all just copied Sage. When I was designing the UI - I hadn't looked at one competitor.

Hey, the €1,400 amount is made up of every out going we had in the company. That included the logo design, to company formation which is about 300 euro in Ireland. I'm not a designer but I learned how to design so we could build it, we worked hard in the evenings and weekends to get the product built. So what we're really trying to say to people is you can do it. Sure it doesn't include our time, but running it so tight is a reflection of how significant we value our time. Everything we did, piece of copy we wrote had a time cost, that made us focus on what people wanted. So to me the €1,400 means everything. Hope that makes sense :)

Thanks for the heads up - working now :)

https://www.bullethq.com/