Jonathan Suter launched SimpleTax three years ago with his wife Allison and friend Justin Reynen after seeing a need for innovation in a space that had been stagnant since the dawn of online tax filing. In this short as-told-to article with Canadian Business‘ Max Fawcett, Suter outlines how they got started and explains why his service remains ad free despite an uncertain revenue stream.
“It was tax season at the time, and I was working on my taxes with a product that no longer exists. I asked Allison, my wife, ‘Why isn’t this getting better?’ For something that needs to get done every year by tens of millions of Canadians, why are we not seeing more innovation in this industry? Surely there must be a better way of doing your taxes than software that was designed 10 or 15 years ago.
Design is very important for us, and I think there’s been a renewed focus on well-designed products over the past few years. It’s very easy for entrepreneurs to continuously add features and new things to their product. But I think it’s important to think about what your product is not going to do. What is it not going to have? So, in our case, we don’t have ads. We don’t have upsells. We got rid of a bunch of unnecessary cruft on the outside of the screen. And we don’t have a price.
Are we going to maximize our profit with the ‘pay-what-you-want’ model? Probably not. But if we get lots and lots of people using our product, a certain percentage will support us. That just has to be larger than our costs, and our costs are very low. The cost for us to process a return for somebody is fractions of a fraction of a penny. We have people who e-mail us begging us to charge money, because they’re petrified we’re going to disappear. But the fact that we’re still here means the model is working.”
This story originally appeared in Canadian Business
