A new journey — building Keeper Tax

👋 Hi friends, we’re starting a new business. Wish us luck!

Today is officially the first day of the rest of our lives! Just kidding. We’ve been at it for a few months now, I just hadn’t gotten around to posting about it.

What’s Keeper Tax

Keeper is a service that automatically finds tax write offs for self employed people. We do this by monitoring your bank statements with computer algorithms. Check us out >

Why taxes‍? Sounds boring.

Nope, taxes are awesome. Taxes are like someone offering you $1,000 per year in exchange for doing some research and writing stuff down every week. If that’s boring then please write me a check.

Also, this isn’t my first tax rodeo. Previously, I worked on Stride Tax — an app that’s helped 200k+ gig workers track their mileage and expenses write offs The experience of growing that app (and seeing so many people churn) made me realize something super upsetting: there are millions of 1099 contractors out there who are leaving huge amounts of money on the table (we estimate $1,320 per year, on average) because taxes sounded boring.

With Keeper, we’ve set out to build a solution for those people leaving money on the table. That solution needs to be far earlier than expense tracking apps today, and it need to be fun. Easy, right?

Why now‍

Self employment is becoming mainstream. Back in the day, self employed people were savvy small business owners. They bravely chose to forgo the traditional W2 route, knowing full well what it involved.

Today, platforms like Uber and Airbnb and are making self employment / 1099 contracting work much more ordinary, and much less intentional.

This new wave of gig workers don’t think of themselves as business owners. They don’t have “business expenses”, and they don’t think about what’s a tax deduction and what isn’t. Why would they?

For these folks, accountants are too expensive, and tax software is too much work. There has to be a better way.

What’s next

Not much — we’re almost done here (just kidding).

We have a lot ahead of us. The space is hyper competitive and, there’s a certain company (rhymes with “grintuit”) leading the pack. But whatever we build, we want to make sure it adds value to what already exists. Ahoy!

[this post originally appeared on the Keeper Tax blog]