Heytax

Why did you found your start-up, what problem are you addressing and how do you solve it?

Heytax is a tool that helps crypto traders and investors to create tax reports. For example, if a trader buys Bitcoin and sells it a few months later for a profit, they have to pay tax on the income they have generated; this is the simplest example.

It gets really complicated when someone exchanges crypto for other crypto or receives airdrops or coins from hard forks. If someone has made a lot of exchanges, they face the challenge of creating a report for the tax office with all this data.

We founded Heytax because we (the founders) need the service that Heytax offers. We acted and looked for a solution that would help us monitor our business, get an overview of our tax liabilities and optimize our trading behavior for tax purposes. There was and is simply nothing on the market that does this for us. That's how the idea for our tool came about.

What has been your biggest success so far?

We organized a meeting where we did a pre-sale (or Initial Access Offering, as we called it) for the product and the feedback was great. People were very eager to buy (even before the end of the event) and almost every attendee wanted to secure early access for themselves. This gave us the great insight that people are interested in this service and this topic. It was rewarding to see how many people showed up at our meetup and were willing to pay cash upfront for a product that is still in development.

Why are you on Startbase?

We are currently preparing for our seed round. We hope to get contacts with investors from the fintech space who have experience either with tax products or in the crypto space.

What would you recommend to other founders?

Just go for it. It's always worth it. The risk you take is not as crazy as many think, but the lessons and contacts you get are amazing. Talk to as many people as possible about your idea. Everyone will have something to add to what you already have and some may even give you new perspectives.

Where did you meet each other?

Vladislav and I were employees at Taxfix and at the time we came up with the idea, we also met Constantin at a blockchain meeting. We are all crypto traders and with our different backgrounds we realized that we are the perfect founding team for this problem.

What was the hardest rejection you have ever received in a pitch?

We haven't had that experience yet (fingers crossed). Everyone was really nice to us. But we have had the experience of turning down an incubator and a funding offer.

Do you have an office cat/dog/turtle...?

Not yet. But we're all very pet friendly, so I imagine that will happen at some point.

Do you still have a real social life since the company was founded?

For us, work-life balance is super important. We think people are more productive when they have a good balance. We have a no-work policy for the weekends. I sometimes get too excited and then often do small things at the weekend too. But yes, we all work hard to maintain our social life.

If an investor gave you €500,000, what would you do with the money?

We're in the fundraising process right now, so we have a very detailed spreadsheet of how much money we need and what we're going to do with it. But to summarize the next big step: getting the prototype to product maturity so we can launch.

Let's say you are the governing mayor of Berlin for a day, what would you change?

I would change the currency to Bitcoin for a day so that everyone can experience how easy and quick it is to use a cryptocurrency.