Heytax

Why did you start your start-up, which problem do you address and how do you solve it?

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

Things get really complicated when someone trades crypto for other crypto, or gets Airdrops or coins from hard forks. If someone has made many trades, they face the challenge of producing a report for the IRS with all this data.

We founded Heytax because we (the founders) need the service that Heytax offers. We took action and looked for a solution that would help us monitor our transactions, give us an overview of our tax liabilities and optimise our trading behaviour from a tax perspective. There simply was and is nothing on the market that does this for us. This is how the idea for our tool came about.

What has been your greatest 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 keen to buy (even before the event ended) and almost every participant wanted to secure early access for themselves. This gave us a great insight that people are interested in this service and this topic. It was worthwhile to see how many people showed up at our meeting and were willing to pay cash up front for a product that is still in development.

Why are you on Startbase?

We are just getting ready for our seed round. We hope to get contacts with investors from the Fintech room who have experience either with tax products or in the crypto room.

What would you recommend to other founders?

Just do it. It's always worth it. The risk you take is not as crazy as many people 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?

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 dealers and with our different backgrounds we realized that we are the perfect founding team for this problem.

What was the hardest rejection you ever got in a pitch?

We have not had this experience yet (fingers crossed). Everyone was really nice to us. But we have had the experience of turning down an incubator and a financing offer.

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

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

Have you had a real social life since the company was founded?

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

If an investor would give you 500.000 €, what would you do with the money?

We are in the fundraising process right now, so we have a very detailed table about how much money we need and what we will do with it. But to summarize the next big step: to get the prototype ready to go into production so we can start.

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

I would change the currency to Bitcoin for one day, so that everyone can experience how easy and fast it is to use a crypto currency.