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jlm382's comments

jlm382 | 13 years ago | on: What's up with inDinero?

Hey Kenneth, Jessica from inDinero here.

I appreciate you expressing your thoughts. Let me try to address them for you.

inDinero shook up our whole business model at the beginning of 2012, pivoting from a self-service model to a full-service model. As a result, we’ve been dedicating the vast majority of our resources to our full-service clients.

This has impacted response times for our self-service clients, but we see that as a necessary compromise in the growth of our company. I’m glad you decided to upgrade to our full-service package!

It looks like we could have done a better job on our calls with you today in describing our payroll offerings. Yes, it’s absolutely true that we use Intuit as the backbone of our payroll service. We think at this stage of inDinero’s growth that we need to invest our resources in developing our web-based dashboard and providing the suite of bookkeeping and tax services that our clients require. Using Intuit as a payroll backbone allows us to keep our focus where it needs to be.

While many of our payroll clients have their pay days on the 1st and 16th of the month, we can support any pay dates and periods you would like to use. I’m sorry if this was not made clear.

We do use Google Docs with some clients to share information because many of our clients find that a convenient medium, but we do not use it for sensitive information exchange. Generally we use it only for the reporting of hours for hourly employees and reimbursement amounts.

I hope I’ve addressed your concerns, and your Finance Team at inDinero is still very eager to work with you and show you how we can make your life easier. We look forward to proving that to you.

jlm382 | 13 years ago | on: Lightspeed Summer Fellowship

This is a pretty good program. I went through this back in the summer of 2009 and there were no strings attached. The Lightspeed partners were fun to work with, and we got to meet a lot of other super smart founders.

jlm382 | 13 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2012)

San Francisco, CA | inDinero (S10) seeks Lead Developer (indinero.com)

inDinero has been hauling for about two years now, growing to over a thousand paying business customers, and we're looking for a lead developer! Both founders (Andy and Jessica) studied computer science before starting the company, and they wrote most of the initial code until product launch. Today, the company has five full-time developers scattered across the globe, and we're looking for a tech lead who can oversee our team and it's growth as we go from five to thirty.

What will happen day-to-day?

Spec out new product features with our design team /// Improve our engineering workflow /// Get feedback from team on how we can speed up their work /// Make sure the test suite runs faster and is continuously running /// See that all devs get their technical questions answered promptly /// Update the dummy databases that our developers test code on.

Prioritize long-term structural improvements to make to our infrastructure /// Upgrading Rails /// Using something like mongo to track events /// Make sure the servers will scale /// Ensure high security /// Audit code base every quarter /// Refactor and modularize key parts of our code base.

Skills we're looking for: Ruby on Rails, 1+ years Java, 2+ years HTML/CSS/Javascript Sysadmin experience (Debian)

Interested? Shoot a note over to [email protected] with why you'd be perfect for the role!

jlm382 | 14 years ago | on: Shouldn't Robots Be Doing My Taxes By Now?

Auto-generating a tax return is one thing. Taking advantage of all your potential tax benefits and considering your edge cases is another thing. I've seen tax returns for many of inDinero's customers, and it's clear to me that their previous accountants took shortcuts in compiling the return.

Yes, it'll get filed. But there were probably more tax advantageous things they could have / should have done. Consider these examples:

1 - tax credits. How is the government supposed to automatically know that you're paying for child care? How are they to know that you just installed solar panels on your roof or that you just purchased an electric vehicle? Sure, they can make this "automatic" -- but then you'd still be going out of your way to report your purchase, and this is in no way simpler than the current solution today.

2 - does it make sense to be taxed as a partnership or sole-proprietor? For a lot of our customers, they're basically flushing $20k down the toilet because they didn't want to go through the tiny nuisance of filing as an S-Corporation. Pretty sure you don't want the IRS to dictate your tax treatment.

3 - should you depreciate your Aeron chairs over multiple years, or do accelerated depreciation which will allow you to deduct the entire amount in a single year? The IRS gives us the flexibility to choose, and it's questions like these that may require the help of a tax professional.

4 - deducting vehicle expenses. How is the IRS supposed to figure out how many miles on your car were used for business VS personal purposes?

5 - what part of your apartment was used exclusively for hacking? No way for the IRS to know that the number is 250/1500 square feet.

In short, putting together a tax return isn't that hard. The difficult part is hunting down all of this other information that we have no way of just knowing.

Instead of asking why robots couldn't be doing our taxes by now, we might rephrase the question to read "how can we do year-round accounting in such a way that taxes are 10X easier to take care of?"

jlm382 | 14 years ago | on: Start-ups hit Cash Crunch in Silicon Valley

Based on my chats with other founders, I think the seed financing market is still pretty strong. Companies that should get funded are still getting funded, and I don't see that changing anytime soon. I wouldn't get too worked up on the scary headline...

In reply to another comment I saw, this applies even to non-YC companies.

jlm382 | 14 years ago | on: InDinero Now Lets Small Businesses Track Receipts

It's difficult to build a useful service where people have to manually enter their data. We used to make it easier for people to enter in details without having to add their bank account, but we found that they were far less likely to come back after 30 days. I'll definitely sharpen this sign up flow and try to make it more compelling to add data without knowing much more about the service.

jlm382 | 14 years ago | on: InDinero Now Lets Small Businesses Track Receipts

happy to offer my 2 cents, but inDinero hasn't been PR crazy for almost a year. My email address is in my HN profile.

We've been keeping quiet, trying to get more of our core basics right. Among all the mistakes I made, I'd say getting PR too early was one of them. And not having a plan to stay relevant after an initial PR blast was my next mistake.

jlm382 | 14 years ago | on: InDinero Now Lets Small Businesses Track Receipts

We had pricing information show before the signup page, but we saw a 30-40% drop in our funnel. We'll probably add back the pricing page, but have it tucked away in case someone wants to find out without signing up.

jlm382 | 15 years ago | on: Spend the Summer at Lightspeed

inDinero got $35k from them, and it was everything they advertised: free office space, no equity, no strings attached.

With that said, I'm very happy to have taken the dilution hit from going through Y Combinator the summer after :)

jlm382 | 15 years ago | on: Y Combinator W2011 application (my rejection email)

we learned nothing from our rejections (other than the willpower to withstand rejection), and continued building our product.

I think we didn't get into TechStars because we were still wrapping up school. YC probably would have rejected us too.

jlm382 | 15 years ago | on: Y Combinator W2011 application (my rejection email)

inDinero saw rejection many times before getting into Y Combinator...

We applied (and got rejected in the first round) from the U.C. Berkeley Business Plan competition first in spring of 2009, then again in the spring of 2010. We also got turned away from TechStars during Spring 2009. We also tried raising angel money in the summer of 2009 and couldn't get a single commitment.

It's not all fun and roses.

This kept us going for a while: http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html

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