

Show HN: We want to become India's TurboTax. Feedback? - architgupta
http://cleartax.in

======
gary4gar
Hello Archit, Fellow Indian Geek here. I must say good job on the site, you
have managed to make something that is usable. Here is some of my suggestions:

1) I think you need to get a fancy logo. current one is too plain according to
me.

2) You are asking customers some sensitive & yet I do not see "Privacy Policy"
which is what stopped me from entering PAN No right at first step1. If its
already there, highlight it

3) A Strong TOS would indemnify from liability. so, You should add a TOS &
make customers agree to it.

4) Any Particular reason Pricing is hidden from Homepage?

5) In welcome email that you send. add few details like name, userid etc. It
makes it more original & less fake.

6) I understand you want a "Lean UI" but I think more naked than Lean. so
spice it up a bit - add some fancy transitions, better typography(Try
webfonts) etc.

7) For entering Date,javascript validation message says: "Please enter date of
birth in format: 25/10/1984". isn't giving specific format DD/MM/YYY more
accurate. Further, Any reason you are not using Date Picker?

8) Make Login Button more prominent. so user won't try to register again. Your
current homepage encourages to everybody to click on that big orange button
which is not something you want your existing users should be doing.

9) Taxes aren't something that most people understand. so even after such
Intutive UI, people will have questions. so highlight your support methods
available(Phone, email etc).

10) Last & most important: Don't just be a pretty interface to official
Website. You never know when incometaxindiaefiling.gov.in becomes irctc.co.in.
That's too risky business model. Try to add more value to service.

Hope it helps

~~~
architgupta
Thanks for the detailed feedback.

Actually we have a pretty strong privacy policy. I should put it on the front
page: <http://cleartax.in/meta/privacy>

When you sign up, you agree to the terms and conditions. Maybe I should
emphasize that a bit more on the signup page: <http://cleartax.in/meta/terms>

~~~
gary4gar
You're welcome!

About TOS & Privacy policy. I couldn't find these after searching. Maybe place
it in Footer, FAQ.

------
mikaelgramont
While it is good that you kept the UI very lean, you would probably benefit
from having a UI/UX guy help you with making the app feel a bit more 'dressed
up'. Currently this looks like a developer designed it (I should know, I
suffer from the same problem).

Also, having worked on pretty much the exact same product for the French
market, one thing I remember people liked was help sections. By that, I mean
big long blobs of text that explain the law in detail. On each form page you
could display the relevant explainations, and then compile that into a
searchable index, and even use that on dedicated pages for SEO purposes.

Oh and maybe you wanna say 'the easy way [to do your taxes]', rather than 'an
easy way'.

~~~
architgupta
Mikael,

Can you elaborate a little bit on what you mean by "dressed up". I am looking
for feedback here :-)

Yes its mostly a developer driven UI.

About Help Section: I am continuously building out the help section from what
people ask on our support aliases.

About SEO: Excellent tip. We have seen traffic come to our few blog entries on
certain long tail google queries. So we will be working on this next.

I don't see your email on your profile. Maybe I can pick your brains about
what you did for the French Market.

~~~
mikaelgramont
By 'dressed up', I mean choose a set of colors (say 3) and use them for
recurring elements in your pages (titles, questions, etc). Try to use colors
and white space to visually separate questions, rather than borders (ex: the
legend tag uses borders). Use colored backgrounds to give a sense of vertical
space. Also, most sites have a footer, that helps give a sense of space too.

I personnaly would stay away from using yellow/blue/pink/green on the same
page (at 1:00 in the video).

I can send you my email, but I don't see yours in your profile either :p

~~~
architgupta
Feedback noted.

I just added my email id to the profile. Thanks.

------
masnick
Check out this demo video: <http://cleartax.in/meta/demo>

I wish taxes in the US were this simple. I've been thinking for a long time
that some good UI/UX designers should be in charge of redoing the US tax code
and forms. If it's too complicated to be usable/understandable by a person
without special training, then it shouldn't go in the tax code.

~~~
architgupta
Actually I lived in the US for 5 years. My tax return was fairly simple - but
TurboTax asked a lot more questions to maximize deductions and tax credits
(which were not applicable to me)

We have made an "opinionated" UI where we show only the common deductions. If
you want a not-so-common deduction, you can claim it, but its not part of the
regular workflow.

------
braindead_in
I used this to file my wife's tax return the other day. The experience was
quite good (going by Indian standards). Few things based on my experience.

1) There should be a flowchart explaining the steps. Something like Enter
information -> Generate ITR V -> Send it to CPC. I was lost when I was asked
to post something somewhere and had to look up the process of e-filing on the
net.

2) While entering information each text box/textarea has a information on the
relevant field of Form 16. That should link to a pic to sample Form 16
highlighting the field. Somethings were ambiguous.

3) More information on what types of Tax Filings are covered. I had to ask you
guys to ask about self employed tax filing (and you guys responded very fast,
which was great) because I didn't find a FAQ.

4) Information on when do you have to pay and how much. I was never asked for
any payment. Which is good, but I'm still kinda confused how that happened. :)

5) The step where it was submitting the information to the income tax website
kept timing out. I guess it was maybe because the endpoint was not responding.
I tried it the next day during working hours and it went through. You can
maybe automate this by giving users an option to automatically retry.

Few questions I had after using it was.

1) Will you guys add support for digital signatures? 2) Will you also allow
someone to apply for a digital signature and get it? 3) What is your business
model? Do you charge a fee for each filing?

Overall I'd give you a rating of 4 (on a scale of 5). I wish there were more
such utility services in India.

~~~
architgupta
Thank you for the detailed feedback! Very actionable.

1\. We'll add the flowchart. This is a very good idea :-)

2\. I'll do a sample picture example for form-16

3\. Its constantly evolving - but that's no excuse. We'll put up a clear page.

5\. Good idea. Feedback noted.

On Questions

1\. Digital signatures are coming very soon.

2\. We are also going to support buying digital signatures via the website. I
still need to figure out how to do it in the least confusing manner :)

3\. We plan to sell CA review services of your tax return. Still figuring out
whether to charge for each filing.

We'll work hard to get to that 5 out of 5 rating :-)

------
copper
Just curious: how much would I have to pay to get cleartax pro?

Also, you might want to fix the Mr Bose example: "ClearTax (an Income Tax
website) rode to his resuce". I'm not entirely sure that I consider the story
to be a positive endorsement, by the way :) It seems too contrived to be true.

Edit: I found out there's a demo video from HN. You might want to make that
link a tiny bit more prominent. I love the video, by the way.

~~~
architgupta
We are still arriving at a good pricing model.

Right now we charge from $5.5 to $30 for professional CA support. (CA in India
is similar to a CPA in the US)

~~~
copper
I /hope/ Ayush's PAN info in the video is fake :)

In my opinion, your prices are too low on the higher end. A normal tax return
preparer charges something like Rs 250 (negotiable, particularly on bulk
deals) to around Rs 500 for a simple ITR-1/ITR-2 return. For people who
require audited returns, It would be an order of magnitude more. I take it you
don't do those :)

Either way, best of luck!

~~~
architgupta
Actually we are starting to get requests for higher-end cases.

Lot of people who earn income from business and profession would like a quick,
friendly UI to get their taxes done. Its hard to design though :)

We aren't supporting auditing yet. We have to figure that out.

------
apinkelefant
I will give you 3 quick points : 1) target NRIs and their tax questions. You
will not find any more eager paying customers than NRIs who can get help with
their taxes and also help in filing . Search the forums and you will will
hundreds of queries and questions . Leverage those to come with a custom
product offering for them 2) Get some Branding : you will need some solid
reputation or word of mouth for people to come to you. Explore tie ups. 3) Get
some white hackers to test your site. There is nothing more important than
convincing people that they can trust you with important financial data. Have
your sites "worked on" thoroughly. :-)

I can give more but not for free ;-)

Pat apinkelefant@gmail.com

------
known
Many software professionals in India use this brilliant
<http://www.ynithya.com/taxcalc/>

~~~
sagarun
The above said spreadsheets does not work with open/libre office. If you are
looking for openoffice version you can use <http://freedom-matters.in/>

------
mikerg87
Two technical things if you are really serious. Localization. Make sure you
can support the 22 official languages. And you need a mobile strategy. Mos of
your potential users are going to come from. When you consider that brazil had
more notebook shipments than India though the population is 1/5th. By my
estimation, in India the mobile phone us the Internet.

~~~
w1ntermute
I don't know what the rules are like in India, but in America you don't have
to pay taxes if your income is below a certain amount. I'm guessing that most
of the people who don't know English are going to be in that lowest tax
bracket.

~~~
copper
The rules are similar, and a bit more generous if you're female, or above a
certain age. As for the other part of that statement, you'd be surprised at
how many people in that bracket can speak English - at least well enough to
use a cell phone :)

~~~
w1ntermute
> you'd be surprised at how many people in that bracket can speak English - at
> least well enough to use a cell phone :)

I think you missed the point - it's not about whether people in that bracket
can speak English, it's that there aren't any people in the tax-paying bracket
that can't.

~~~
copper
Indeed. In my defense, anecdotal evidence: quite a few people in what we call
the super-senior citizen bracket (yes, really) do pay taxes, and more than a
few of them don't speak English.

------
meow
Wish I have seen this last week :). Had to pay 250 bucks to a CA. I tried
filing through the income tax website before that.. it looked okay, but you
have to jump through a lot of hoops before getting it right. Also, it looked
too flaky so didn't dare to go with e-filing..

------
amaranand
Honestly, no one pays taxes in India. Your product has no market. I can speak
at length about this, but it's part of the reason real estate values in India
increase by 30% year over year. Everyone hides their black money in real
estate investments.

~~~
crazydiamond
>"no one pays taxes in India"

I and millions more pay taxes. True about black money, though, but those are
business people. Salaried people pay taxes at source, we do not get cash at
all.

~~~
amaranand
And the people who are employed by tiny companies get paid in only cash, and
also do not pay their taxes.

I will admit that "no one" is an exaggeration, but India is one of the worst
countries I could think of to try and start a product that helps people figure
out their taxes.

~~~
sankara
Exaggeration and over generalization. You should check with a decent CA on the
number of people availing their services to file tax. And just so you know
there are 30 million people filing tax returns every year. Quite a low number
(in comparison to the population) but definitely not a small market.

------
alphakappa
I like what you are doing here, but you need to be upfront with the pricing
before making a user sign up. Having to give up some personal information
before even knowing what the product will cost me gives me a negative feeling.

~~~
architgupta
I'll put a pricing page up. I can see how its confusing.

------
endian
Some splash page design thoughts:
[https://img.skitch.com/20110724-qejdafa6fjpwg3gx86q1xmxdgh.p...](https://img.skitch.com/20110724-qejdafa6fjpwg3gx86q1xmxdgh.png)

~~~
architgupta
Wow, thanks for taking the time out!

Couple of Questions: \- Why do you suggest taking the copyright out?

\- I thought hyperlinks should follow typical convention, people are used to
clicking them.

~~~
architgupta
I understand now about the hyperlinks. Just checked google.com and it has the
same behavior. Blue links and underline on hover. :-)

Feedback noted.

------
wyclif
Just a minor note on English: in "Keep a safe electronic copy of your
taxrecords with us" _tax_ and _records_ should be two separate words, not one.

~~~
architgupta
Thanks. I'll fix that!

------
bretthopper
While it's great that you're using HTML5 Boilerplate, you should probably
change the default favicon and the pink selection highlight colour :)

~~~
architgupta
Thank you. Feedback noted.

I kinda like the pink :-)

------
talbroda
Make sure you load test! www.soasta.com

------
Herwig
Add some color to the logo

------
DrJokepu
Don't try to become the "Something of Something" or "Something meets
Something". Instead, try to become simply Something. That is all.

~~~
kirubakaran
"X of Y" is a great pitch starter for a startup. You give the audience
something to peg their thoughts on and go from there. Otherwise, potential for
confusion before the "aha!" moment is too large.

AirBnB was "We are the eBay of spaces" for a long time. Now that everyone
knows AirBnb, everything else is "We are the AirBnB of %s"%('tutoring', 'car
rental', 'casual sex', ...).

Do you have a better sentence to get the listener to say "oh I see!" and have
their eyes dart all over the place as they think of all the potential uses?

~~~
clobber
I don't know, this might be good way to explain your idea to a non-investor
but for VC's I've read the opposite:
[http://www.businessinsider.com/entrepreneurs-dont-tell-an-
in...](http://www.businessinsider.com/entrepreneurs-dont-tell-an-investor-
your-startup-is-like-company-x-for-y-2010-7)

I think instead you can better form your pitch like this:
[http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/03/madlibs-pitch-adeo-ressi-
fo...](http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/03/madlibs-pitch-adeo-ressi-founder-
institute/)

