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Ask HN: Review our startup (esp. if you file 1099-MISC)

8 points by midnightmonster ↗ HN
Might be truer to say, review our startup's 3rd attempt at making something people want enough that we can make money on it. If you need to file 1099-MISC this year or you have in the past, we'd love to know if this is appealing to you, and if everything you have occasion to try works well for you. (You pay nothing until you actually schedule for e-filing.)

Track1099.com e-files your 1099-MISC forms with the IRS and e-delivers them to your recipients. We import from Bill.com, Intacct, RealPage (for property managers), Quick Books Online, and anything that you can get a spreadsheet out of.

http://track1099.com/?ref=hn

Note the various obvious referral tag! Our 'business person' believes that posting about this here is a waste of time (I had to explain that I wasn't signing us up to be 'hacked'), but as the putative UX guy on the team, I'd really appreciate your feedback, and if it turns out to be useful to anyone I'd like to be able to show the business person that we generated some revenue out of it, too.

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More details for the interested....

This is the work of a 4-person distributed team composed of 3 contractors and a founder (there's an uninvolved co-founder, too). I'm one of the contractors, but we contractors have a material stake in the success of this product as well.

If you do front-end work, view source on any page with a form (inc. the sign-up) for what is AFAIK a pretty novel take on building web forms.

3 comments

[ 6.5 ms ] story [ 19.9 ms ] thread
cd34
My first question is, why am I using you rather than my accountant? My second question is, why aren't you contacting my accountant? :)

I like the design, I don't like some of the conversational tone.

--- You are super important to us. We answer emails at all hours of the day and night. Really. We'll get you up and running in no time

or

Think about it – 88 cents in stamps, about a buck in envelopes, paper and toner cartridge. Not to mention having to resend the 1099s to those who keep losing them. That’s $2 in materials alone, plus another $2 in time and effort. At least. Call it $4 total for one 1099-MISC.

A/B test this:

Save Money

No more stamps, no envelopes, no expensive toner cartridges. No more snail-mailing of 1099s that someone lost.

I've always been told (and experience tells me) that using No on the page reduces conversions. Additionally, the people you are trying to attract, may not understand 'snail-mail'.

Fix this: Refunds are not given if recipient refuses e-delivery.

Even if I had to pay more to get it delivered, you now have me going in to the system to figure out who didn't accept, then exporting that data and printing it myself. Notify me a few days in advance rather than the day before.

Other than that, looks like a pretty solid service. What are some of the tech details? I noticed Amazon ECS - what is the backend running?

codejoust
It looks great, but as stated earlier, the about pages would do well with a signup button/link at the bottom. Another random thing: the logo for the homepage seems to be wider than the rest of the pages - I'm guessing there's some CSS stretching going on.