Tributi
In 2017, Tributi founders Andrés Vélez and Simón González were fed up with the painful, confusing, and costly process of filing taxes in their home country of Colombia.
“It is common for the preparation of the income statement to be more expensive than the payment of the tax itself, which is not an efficient tax structure.” - Andrés Vélez, Founder and CEO of Tributi.
The founders wanted to build a tax management software like TaxAct and Intuit (which owns TurboTax) to automate and simplify the tax filing process for all South and Latin Americans. Velez and Gonzalez had a clear vision for the product and user experience they wanted to build, they simply didn’t have the background in programming to do it.
To get around the programming barrier, Tributi partnered with Airdev to quickly build and launch a fully functional product on the no-code development platform Bubble.
The results?
- $800k in early investment from players like Y Combinator, Foundation Capital, and Graph Ventures to help grow the startup
- Latin American taxpayers and accountants can now prepare tax returns within 30 minutes, saving them an average of COP$100-$300K (US$100-175) on their tax returns
The OBJEctive
Tired of agonizing over filing taxes, Tributi’s founders spotted an opportunity to build a tax filing app for Colombian taxpayers.
They saw how automating the process could facilitate better tax filing preparations for an entire society and make it easier for South and Latin American governments to generate revenue – qualifying it as a socially viable product. So they set out to build a software product that would accomplish this, along with a simple user interface that would generally improve the stressful experience and make taxpayers feel in control of the process at all times.
The SOLUTION
With experience in the finance industry and as taxpayers themselves, Vélez and González had a clear vision of the tax engine and user experience they wanted to build, but simply didn’t have the background in programming to build it the way they dreamed, on the timeline they needed it.
When time started running out, Vélez looked for ways to get around the programming barrier. He turned to the no-code tool Bubble as a speedier development option, and started working with Airdev.
“Working with Airdev to build on Bubble put the power of building the product back in my hands and we were able to build very quickly, that we could iterate on ourselves. So that basically changed the dynamic for us.” - Andrés Vélez
Airdev’s approach
To ensure everyone was one the same page about what to build, Airdev’s dedicated Product Manager worked closely with Vélez and González to translate their vision into detailed product specifications and wireframes. This included determining what questions taxpayers would need to answer about their finances, as well as understanding tax codes. By going through this essential front-end scoping process, Tributi was able to avoid rework due to miscommunication – meaning it could launch its product faster with full confidence.
Using the detailed requirements and wireframes created during scoping, Airdev’s visual development team started building the app. With everything in place, Tributi was able to sit back and wait for Airdev to provide weekly updates where they could test the product to make sure it was on track or if it needed adjustments.
Once the product launched, it received national news coverage and scaled to thousands of daily active users overnight. With Airdev’s ongoing support, Tributi’s no-code tax engine built on Bubble successfully handled the surge.
THE RESULT
By building with no-code, Tributi was able to hit the market in time for tax filing season, supporting 20k daily users, with a functional and well-designed product. It even became a part of Y Combinator's Winter 2018 batch within four months, which they wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise.
This led to an early $800k investment in the company from Y Combinator, Foundation Capital, and Graph Ventures to help the startup grow. With this early product prototype built with Airdev on Bubble, Tributi has since been able to hire their own engineering team in Latin America and expand the service to new countries.
The company now enjoys a growing user base that mainly comes from word-of-mouth referrals. Taxpayers are able to use the online platform to file taxes for significantly less time and money than through traditional accountants, and tax accountants are able to digitize their paperwork and stay on top of constantly changing tax codes.
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