The story behind BearTax

Cryptocurrency, a new wave of technology, economics and monetary exchange has brought a huge shift in way we think, trade and strategize our moves. Never thought trading such digital assets will pave our path to a new SaaS startup BearTax. Here’s a small story of how we started with the most user friendly crypto tax assistant BearTax.

Every time you read a story behind a startup, David Fincher’s “The Social Network” has a huge influence on you. It shows Mark as a jerk, and if you expect the same here, I’m sorry we don’t have any such founders here. Keeping this aside I will make sure the narration shall be interesting with all your favorite tech words.

Concept behind the crypto taxation is still uncertain and fairly new. Given the nascence, issues faced by our co-founders with available tax tools out there made it evident that there is a need for better tax tools and accounting suites for accounting professionals and casual as well as professional traders.

The philanthropic approach to the solution is the very reason BearTax pushes its amazing customer service, exciting pricing plans and splendid user experience to everyone.

BearTax appears quieter in its growth compared to others in the space. It is true and there is no exaggeration behind the $0 marketing strategy. BearTax didn’t spend a penny on marketing and we believe in giving undivided attention to the people we know first before going in the path of mass marketing. We improve the user experience almost daily and solved most problems we come across on the way.

Word of mouth publicity is a huge win and we love the way users love our customer service.

Problem[s] Statement

After the initial views on the existing apps, our team has reviewed them and came up with a primary problem set. Some of them worth solving are listed below.

1. Failing on high volume trades
2. Inability to handle transactions made by a bot
3. Extremely high pricing plans and
4. Mismatch of withdrawals/deposits

After trying everything out there on the market, we’ve decided to build our own solution around the end of January 2018 and launched BearTax.

Solution

BearTax provides seamless integration with various exchanges, intelligent matching of trades across exchanges, curated historical data for every coin, ability to review transactions while avoiding force sells/negative balances and gives you required tax documents.

“Make what people want” — Paul Graham

This is what we believed and worked for us. We’ve rolled it out to individuals with modest pricing starting $0.99 and live chat available for everyone without discrimination on pricing. Our major intention was to educate users on cryptocurrency taxes, usage of exchange integrations, making them feel safe connecting their exchanges using API keys with read access only.

Meanwhile, our business development team focused on building partnerships with CPAs to reach out to a wider audience and building BearTax as a crypto tax suite.

All about Customers

At the time of writing this article, we have more than 800 happy customers on our platform and growing exponentially. There are some unique cases that we would have never faced unless these special ones came forward to try our application. These special cases revealed issues on the Exchanges API responses, empty cases and some even helped with solving a bug on our side.

BIG THANKS TO ALL

Whats next for BearTax?

As a team we always thought solving tax filing issue is the primary problem to be solved. As we have done that, we are looking at more

• Exchange integrations, POS support for merchants
• Rolling out to next 20 countries
• Helping high volume traders to keep a tab on their taxes

Exchange integrations seems to the logical step towards expanding BearTax for a huge community.

That’s our story and we are more than happy to serve all the customers who have come up with problems we’ve never thought of. And without them we would not have been in the shape we are now. We are a bootstrapped startup having revenues enough to cover operations this year. Thanks for reading and trying out the platform

BearTax - Your Crypto Tax Assistant

Follow the BearTax publication to know more information about taxation of cryptocurrency in various countries, updates about our platform, interesting engineering titbits and more.,

Website: www.bear.tax | Twitter: @bear_tax | Facebook: @beartaxapp

The story behind BearTax was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.