Crystal Harrison Full Interview Transcript
From Bookkeeper to Founder: Why Crystal Built SnapTax
AJ: Today, my guest is Crystal Harrison. Crystal, I'm so delighted to have you on the podcast today.
Crystal: Yeah, I'm really excited to be here. Thanks, AJ.
AJ: What was your path to building SnapTax? Tell us a little bit about SnapTax, what you're working on, and what got you started building it?
Crystal: I started off as a bookkeeper. For 20 years, I had a part-time business helping small businesses—mostly referral-based—doing bookkeeping for them. I've been doing QuickBooks for almost 25 years.
People would come to me saying their books were a mess, and I'd spend lots of time getting them straightened out. Over the years, I kept seeing the same pattern: most of my clients were solo entrepreneurs, independent contractors, and consultants. QuickBooks was overkill for them.
Even though I did the books for them, they were still responsible for managing their customers and filing their own taxes. I was just making sure they entered all the data correctly so they had clean filings at the end of the year. But my clients hated QuickBooks. Not because it didn't do the job, but because it was overkill for what they needed.
About a year ago, a client came to me and said, "I get hives literally every time I open up QuickBooks. I freak out and close it, then call you. There has to be something easier than this. I can't even look at it. It terrifies me."
I went on a hunt for tools that were easier to use and had just what solo entrepreneurs needed. The other side was the tax aspect. Every quarter, clients would ask me, "How much do I need to pay?" I'd have to get a spreadsheet out, calculate it, and figure out what they needed to pay. They'd have to pay me to do that.
When I was looking for a tool, I wanted something that was easy to use but also incorporated tax planning for quarterly tax payments. There wasn't anything on the market that really fit. Everything was true accounting software built for bigger companies with payroll, balance sheets, and inventory—things consultants just don't need.
I'm sure your audience feels that way too. They don't need all that stuff. But they still gotta track their books and pay their quarterly taxes.
About a year ago, I started thinking hard about this. I'm not a technical person—I'm a bookkeeper. I started researching how I could do this. Do I need to hire somebody to help me build this tool?
With AI coming around the way it was, I started figuring out that I might actually be able to do this myself. That was really interesting because I'd never done anything like that. Most of the companies out there today are technology companies that built something but don't understand the real pains my clients were going through. I had a unique perspective in building this.
When I found the tools that made it possible for me to actually build this, I went through two iterations of tools. My first set of tools were much more complicated and took a long time. After about 3 months, I went on a hunt for another tool and found one that was better. I converted everything over and was able to bring everything I wanted to SnapTax to life.
Every single feature I wanted, all the simplicity I wanted to drive into it—it was so exciting to me to start building and creating things that I knew were gonna be useful for people like your audience. That's how SnapTax came around. It was out of a need in the market and a passion to help people.
The Biggest Challenges: Marketing and AI Visibility
AJ: Tell us about one or two of the biggest challenges you've faced building SnapTax so far, and how you've worked through them.
Crystal: I thought learning the technology would be a challenge, and it actually was easier than I thought. Where my real challenge came in was the fact that I worked on a referral-based business. I never had to worry about my website being pristine and SEO optimized. I didn't have to run Google Ads or do marketing. People just came to me. I had more business than I could handle.
When I moved into the world of building SnapTax, I built this incredible tool, and I was like, okay, now how do I tell people about it? How do I market it? How do I get it out into the industry?
There were really two sides of that. One is getting new customers to try it out and use it. The other is visibility in AI, because everybody's kind of moving from traditional search to AI answers.
I'm competing with the big boys—QuickBooks and TurboTax—that are name brands with all kinds of brand authority. They get cited over my tool, even though my tool is vastly better in my mind.
Not only am I trying to get to a point where AI realizes I'm out there with a good product, but I'm also getting that product into the right audience. My audience is very specific: solo entrepreneurs, consultants, contractors, Uber drivers, gig workers.
That's probably one of my biggest challenges. I launched in February, and while I'm growing and making progress, it's not as fast as I'd like it to be. Everything I'm doing to get visibility into AI search is still a 6, 8, 12-plus month process to really move up in those rankings.
The customer acquisition side has been a little easier than I thought, but it did require investment—probably more than I originally expected. I've tried different things, and over the last 4 months, I've been testing different methods, turning things on and off that didn't work.
Now I'm getting to a point where I think I've got a plan for customer acquisition that's working. And I'm constantly working on all the things in the background for AI visibility.
There's a multitude of areas you have to do for that: starting a blog (never done that before), getting published in articles, finding publications that are trustworthy with the right audience, finding influencers and working with them on messaging, building up organic channels from basically zero on social media, putting out content every single day, getting listed in software directories, and staying active on those platforms.
All of that leads to my biggest challenge, which is time. I still have a full-time job with my bookkeeping clients, and I have SnapTax, which is my passion project. I know it's the future for what I want to do because with my bookkeeping business, I can help a handful of people. With SnapTax, I can help a multitude of people.
One of the things that drives me as an individual is helping people. That's part of why I got into bookkeeping. It started with my husband's business, and people heard I was doing it and wanted help too.
But I have to figure out how to manage my time so I can do all of those things and still have a family and husband and all those other responsibilities. I've had to really hone in on time management and put a structured process in my day.
I know I'm gonna spend this much time on SnapTax in marketing every day. I've got a list: go touch these things, do these things, tackle these things, review these things. I set that time aside, and it's first thing in the morning—the first thing I do. I do the rest of the things I have to do throughout the day, and then in the evenings, I sit down and respond to all the emails from users and my bookkeeping clients, and then I think about what's next for SnapTax.
That's probably my favorite part of the day—when I sit down and get an idea from a user. I had a user give me feedback the other day about how they wanted a Shopify integration. I went to work on it this weekend and already have a working prototype ready for that user to beta. Those are the kinds of things that really get me excited—building that tool into everything I know it can be. But juggling all those things is a challenge I have to work at every single day. I have to be intentional about it.
Managing Burnout: Setting Boundaries and Prioritizing What Matters
AJ: How do you keep from burning out with all of this?
Crystal: With all of this? A lot of coffee!
I do still take time for myself. I've cut out some of the extraneous things that I decided were not important, like watching my favorite TV show. I haven't watched TV since December. My husband will walk by me and chirp at what's going on in the news, and that's about all I get for entertainment.
I'm an avid volleyball player, and that's kind of my time to recharge my brain. I make sure on the weekends I go spend 2 hours doing that every weekend, and that gets me kind of refreshed and reset for the week.
When I do feel like I'm going through the day and I'm doing all these things, I take the time to reprioritize. If I feel like I can't work until 11 o'clock tonight because I'm tired and it's Thursday or Friday, and I've been doing that all week long, I'll consciously say, I'm not gonna build tonight. I'm not gonna get on and do something new, and that's okay. It might mean a feature comes out a week later, but that's okay, especially at the speed I'm building right now.
So I have to consciously monitor my timing and schedule, and prioritize what's truly important, what has to get done right now. For me, that's always customer attention. You talk a lot about this, AJ—it's one thing to get a pipeline of customers in, it's another thing to convert them into clients and nurture them throughout the process.
The way my marketing is set up, I get a lot of leads through my website. So I have to make sure they're nurtured properly so I can turn them into customers. That takes priority over anything else. When I'm looking at my day and I've got a shift because I need to refresh and I can't work a 16-hour day today, I'm gonna move something out, but that always stays at the top of the list.
Revenue-Generating Activities vs. Foundation-Building Work
AJ: I love that. James Wedmore, a big-time business coach, talks about revenue-generating activities. He says 20 percent of what we do on any given day truly are revenue-generating activities.
You know, the trick is knowing what they are. And you've identified it's like the people that come in on your website and the people that email you and the users that give you feedback—those are revenue-generating activities. Either now or in the future.
Crystal: Yeah. Well, and also there's activities that don't feel like revenue-generating activities today, but they're laying the foundation for it. For me, going in every day and spending 30 minutes on Reddit, commenting as an expert bookkeeper on people's questions with no mention of SnapTax whatsoever—only to build up my authority—that's something that will compound over time.
I don't necessarily see anything out of it for a while. But it's going to be a revenue-generating activity, so I have to prioritize it. I know that's something that's going to pay off in the long run, so I have to invest in that.
The Two-Pronged Strategy: Customer Acquisition and AI Visibility
AJ: And that's good discipline. That challenge with revenue-generating activities is that you're not getting immediate payout. That leads me to something you talked about in our pre-interview. You said your strategy is two-pronged: sign-ups on one side, visibility and trust on the other.
Crystal: Yes. The AI visibility part takes time to build. It's just like the Reddit comment I just made. You spend the time becoming an expert, being known as an expert, without trying to be salesy in marketing. Then AI starts to recognize you as an expert.
There's several places where you have to do that. Same thing with your social media presence. You can't ignore that. You have to do that every single day, and I'm religious about that.
I have a game plan. I use AI to help me with that, which helps keep me organized and makes sure I've got a plan. I do all of my creative thinking on the weekends, so I build out my plan for the week and I know what I'm gonna be doing. It's not that scramble.
From a strategy perspective, AI visibility isn't just those things. Finding influencers, I have to spend a lot of time on LinkedIn hunting for tools to help me with all of these things. There's a tool I use called Flow AI that's a LinkedIn tool that allows me to go target specific self-employed individuals and outreach to them.
As they connect, then it opens a door for me to nurture them and to start communicating with them and to share my brand with them. And all of those things—AI visibility is just like this ladder. The more you do, the more trust you gain.
But there's no instant gratification whatsoever to it. I have tools that manage what my visibility is with AI, and I watch it slowly creep up. Every month I gain like a half percent.
But you have to do those things. That's foundational. Otherwise, you never get into those searches, and search is where the industry is going. Google just had a conference where they basically said they've completely redone SEO and they're moving away from it, and they're going almost entirely to search and long-form questions in their platform, instead of the standard search SEO you were used to.
So you can't ignore that. It's absolutely critical, and you have to build a strategy for whatever niche or market your listeners are in. They need to be paying attention to that.
The easy part for me is to go spend some money, run some ads, and drive traffic. That's where user acquisition happens. My tool is a very low-dollar tool. On the high end, I'm $20 a month. On the low end, I'm $5 a month. That's a cup of coffee a day, right?
So it's really about just getting people to my site and seeing that, and then having the right content and the right information there to get them to click on my free calculator and give me their information so I can start nurturing them and turn them into users.
That side of my business is where I grow and get that instant gratification. The hard part is just figuring out the right channels, where's the best use of my ad spend? But you have to do both. You really do.
Google Ads as the Best Channel for Low-Dollar Products
AJ: You mentioned that Google is your biggest sign-up driver right now.
Crystal: Yes, it is.
AJ: What did you have to learn or get right for that channel to work?
Crystal: I've done Meta ads before for my husband's businesses and didn't feel like Meta ads was the right platform for my tool. The cost per click and all those things are really, really high. It's very saturated. Because my software is such a low dollar amount, it's really optimized for more of a search online tool.
A lot of people are out there asking questions like "how do I figure out what my quarterly taxes are?" It's a very highly searched thing, or "what is self-employment tax? Why do I need to pay it?" Those kinds of things.
I haven't moved into the realm of trying social media ads yet, except for Reddit. I did try Reddit ads and had some initial success, but Reddit's community is not really an ad-friendly community. I was monitoring and running them both at the same time, and really monitoring where my bang for my buck was. I was getting 3 times the lead flow with half the ad spend on Google search. So I ended up turning off Reddit and focusing in on Google.
The challenge I had with Google was it's not the easiest tool to use. Their ads are not user-friendly. I'd never done Google Ads before. So I actually turned to my same platform that I built SnapTax on, where I also built my website, and I had that tool build me an optimized Google Ad Wizard. So I didn't even have to mess with it, and I could do all my optimizations right there in my AI tool.
It worked fantastic and it's driving lots of leads. I get leads flowing in every single day, and people converting to users, so that's been really positive.
AJ: And the Google Ads drive them to your website?
Crystal: They do. They go to my website, and then on my website, I have a series of free things I give away. I have free calculators, like a free quarterly tax calculator, a free self-employment tax estimator, and a bunch of free "is-this-deductible" tools. They can go in and type in, "I'm not sure about this expense, is it deductible?" It walks them through a little wizard. That's built into SnapTax, so I have a version of that on my website that's free.
I also have a full quarterly tax estimate and tax calculator on my website where they put in their email address and name. If they fill in a little bit of information, they get an email that says "this is what your next quarterly tax would be." That's how I capture my leads.
AJ: Which of those free tools on your website has the highest conversion rate? Where do you get most of your qualified leads?
Crystal: From that 1099 calculator, yeah.
AJ: And how many of those convert into actual clients?
Crystal: I would say right now it's probably about a 25% conversion.
And I'm nurturing all of those leads as they come in. There's personal outreach from me. I have built an email campaign that follows them for 12 months as well. I make sure that every single person that comes in—first of all, I read every email personally, and secondly, I respond to every single person. If you have touched either my app or my website and I've captured your email address, you will get a personal email from me that says, "You know, hey, I'm the founder, I'm here, I'm a live person, I'm real. I'd love to hear your feedback. How can I help?"
Advice for Google Ads Failures and Optimization
AJ: What advice would you tell someone who maybe has tried Google Ads, didn't see the results, and walked away?
Crystal: Usually if you're not seeing the results on Google Ads, it's probably because you don't have those ads set up for optimization. The tools are getting better. While I was building my own kind of AI to manage my Google Ads, and mainly because time is an issue for me, I'm always trying to figure out how I can do things faster and quicker. That allows me to do that faster and quicker.
But I still went in and looked at what Google had done and how they were set up. They have now implemented AI, which did make it a lot more useful than when I looked at it years ago, because I had tried it before and failed miserably.
This time, I was able to go in, type in natural language into Google Ads, and say, "I need to optimize for this, I need to do that." It made recommendations and helped me through it. It took me a while to do it manually, which is why I ended up building my own tool so I could skip the manual and let my tool automate it for me.
It's so much better now that you really have to get all of those dials and knobs turned. When I did that, because my first set of ads I ran on a previous website on Wix, there was no optimization whatsoever. The quality was very, very low. I was getting very little traffic.
Since I went in and optimized using the AI tools in Google Ads, my traffic has quadrupled. So that's something I would highly recommend: spend the time, go in, do that. If you're ambitious and like to code, there's AI tools that can help you build your own little automation engine on the front, like I did.
Financial Patterns in Solo Entrepreneurs
AJ: You work with solo entrepreneurs and consultants. What patterns are you seeing in how independent consultants run their finances? And what does that tell you about how they're running their businesses overall?
Crystal: First of all, you love what you do as a consultant. Running the back office is, for most of them, a headache. It's like "ugh, if only I didn't have to do that, right?" Finances are a big part of that back office. Marketing is a big part of that back office too. But it's unfortunate—it's required.
What I have found is that consistency is what will help calm you. The reason I say that is because almost every client that I work with doesn't have a system for their finances. It becomes April 1st, and one of my clients called me literally on April 5th saying, "I'm trying to do my taxes and I can't figure it out."
I opened her QuickBooks and said, "Let's walk through. We've got it all here. I've been doing it for you this year." She goes, "Yeah, but I've been spending all this money on my credit cards, and none of it's in there."
I was like, "Yes, well, you probably want those as write-offs. We gotta get them in there." I said, "Do you have your statements? Do you have your receipts?" She was like, "No, I don't know where they all are."
I sent her off to gather everything up, put it all together, take pictures of it, email it to me, and we'll start extracting that and getting it into QuickBooks so you can file your tax returns. That cost her about $2,000 worth of my time to organize all of her receipts and get them into her books.
And it cost her a week of pulling her hair out.
So that's one of the things: if you have tools and you don't know how to use them, or you don't know how to use them properly, what I see most independent contractors do is they just avoid it and don't do anything with it. Then April hits and they are in a panic.
They also make guesstimates on what they should pay every quarter. Sometimes they get it right, sometimes they get it wrong, sometimes they don't pay at all, and then they get a penalty at the end of the year.
So what I try to tell my clients, and one of the big key tenets of why I built SnapTax, is that you can do your end-of-month back office finance in 10 minutes.
10 minutes. I made it so super simple. 10 minutes. Put it in your calendar on the 5th of every month. You sit down, you hit "Upload Bank Statement," you hit "AI categorize," you review, make sure you're good, hit save. And you're done. Then it tells you, you need to save this much per month, and it gives you a reminder: on this date, you need to pay this amount for your quarterly taxes.
At the end of the year, all that scramble's gone.
So that's why when I built SnapTax, simplicity and ease of use was so important to me—so that you can be consistent with it. Because the greatest tool on the planet, if you don't use it or you don't use it properly, you might as well not even buy it.
AJ: Exactly. So what do you do for people that use credit cards? Those up in their bank statement is going to be the credit card payment, not the individual transactions. Do you have an upload of credit card statements?
Crystal: Yeah, that's one of the beauties of SnapTax. You can upload any statement—business, personal—it does not matter. When SnapTax uploads it, AI will attempt to say, "is this business or personal?" If it sees McDonald's versus "customer ABC," it intuits that's business versus personal and marks it that way.
Then you can say, "Oh, actually, that was a business lunch, let me change that to business." It tells you, if you have a cell phone—a lot of people write off their cell phones as a business expense. But you don't use it 100 percent for business. So when that cell phone expense comes up, you mark it as business and say, "I use it 50 percent of the time," and SnapTax will automatically put the 50 percent in your P&L and disregard the rest.
It looks at business use and business percent use and categorizes that. And it learns your behaviors over time. So the first month, you might spend a little more time categorizing, but next month it knows that Spectrum is your cell phone and it's 50 percent business use and that's what pops up.
So it's very smart like that—really helps streamline—and it gets better and better over time because it's AI-based and it learns.
Simplicity and Quarterly Tax Planning: The Heart of SnapTax
AJ: It sounds impressive.
Crystal: Yeah. Simplicity was the core value proposition. The other side of this is the quarterly tax planning—something no other tool does. Every month, you go in, you upload all your statements. It gives you a P&L for that month, and it automatically updates your tax liability as your income changes. Because the one thing that consultants have is feast or famine.
Their business is like this, and like this, and like this, and like this. So your tax adjustment needs to adjust with your income swings.
And that's exactly what SnapTax does.
Most people either just ignore it and hope for the best. And in my mind, when you're dealing with financials, hope for the best should never be a strategy. Or they try to do it on a spreadsheet and get it wrong half the time anyway.
AJ: Because it's still manual.
Crystal: Still manual. And the best-laid plans, they might—if it's not an easy-to-use system, that consistency falls off. They start off strong the first couple of months, and then it just gets too hard to maintain and track. Then it's not quite right, and it's not accurate, and they're like, "I'm not doing it anymore."
AJ: And then you get churn.
The Setup Service: Why Charging Matters
AJ: That leads me to a question. You discovered something important: that small operators ignore SnapTax the same way they ignore QuickBooks unless someone walks them through setup.
Crystal: Yes.
AJ: And you turned that into a paid offer.
Crystal: Yes.
AJ: So tell me how you spotted that pattern, and what made you decide to charge for the setup instead of giving it away?
Crystal: It came from the first handful of users that responded back to me. I always asked, if you have questions, if you need help with setup, let me know. I actually had a couple of users come back and say, "Yeah, I've got some questions."
When I built SnapTax, I built it with training everywhere, videos everywhere. You can click a little icon and a video pops up and tells you what it does. So when I built it, I thought, "Oh, this is gonna be so easy. Nobody's ever gonna need any help."
Well, I was wrong about that. People said, "Hey, I need some help." So when those first couple of users came to me, I got online with them and said, "Oh, sure, let's just jump on a quick web call, and I'll walk you through it."
In 10 minutes, I was able to show them the basics. I said, "Do you have a statement? Let's upload one. Let me walk you through it. Let me show you where your tax liabilities are. Show you how it gets updated in real time." They were like, "This is really easy."
Some people just need a little bit of personal attention—one, to make sure the setup is right. And it also helped me because I realized they were like, "Well, I don't understand what this means." I was like, "Okay, I definitely need a helper text right there."
I needed to make a couple of tweaks in my workflow. I actually changed things because as I was going through it with the user, I understood where they were getting stuck. So for me, it was very valuable feedback, but from the user's perspective, they went away and were like, "This is really helpful. I'm ready to go." They gave them the confidence they needed to see that this was not going to be difficult to use.
So I thought about it: do I give this away, or do I charge for it? The reality is, I believe that anybody who truly wants to improve or learn or get better at something—if you give it to them for free, they value it as free. If they pay for it, they show up.
They come prepared because they've made an investment. Even if it's not a big investment, it's still an expense. You know that they're committed.
AJ: That's an adage I've heard: people who pay, pay attention.
Crystal: Yes, that is exactly right.
AJ: So how did you decide what to charge?
Crystal: Given that my tool is a low-cost tool, it's not a lot of money. I wanted it to be attainable. I wanted anybody to be able to afford it. But I also needed to justify my time. I'm gonna spend a half hour with somebody, walking through and giving them my knowledge, answering their questions.
I needed to get something in return for that. So I looked at what my bookkeeping rate was per hour. I basically said, I'm not gonna quite charge that, but I wanted to do something a little bit below that. That's where I came up with $49 for a 30-minute session. My normal hourly rate is about $150 an hour.
So that was a little bit less than what I charge for bookkeeping. That's kind of how I came at it.
AJ: Do you offer an annual subscription?
Crystal: I do. So you can pay monthly, or you can get a 30% discount for buying an annual upfront.
AJ: Because the set up could be part of that.
Crystal: Yeah, oh, that's true! Oh, that's a very good idea. I hadn't thought about that. Throw in a setup.
Building in Public: Listening to Users and Shipping Features Fast
AJ: So you're building in public, which means your users are pinging you with feature requests, and you're actually responding and changing your software.
Crystal: Yeah. Those customers that have reached out to me, when I reach back to them and say, "Okay, I'm working on that," I actually have a couple of them where I've said, "I would love to interview you because I want to make sure I get this right and interpret what you're saying." They were kind enough to get on a call.
One user spent 3 hours with me, walking through a brand new feature that I plan to bring to market very soon. It's going to be an add-on to SnapTax, integrated into the tax engine, but a little bit different. We're calling it the SnapTax Smart Store.
For those e-commerce users that have a storefront, we're gonna build in a kind of smart PO, smart inventory, and connected to their store and their website to ingest all that, manage that, and then push it all to SnapTax. So that one took a while, right? 3 hours.
And I'm gonna be developing that. She's like, "I want to be your beta user. I want to be your beta user." So she's offered up a sandbox for me with her Shopify store so that I can connect to it and test all of that.
That's been a really great relationship. And now I'm working with her. This was a new user—not one of my bookkeeping clients. My bookkeeping clients I have a really good relationship with because I was on the phone with them every month, talking through their books for years for some of them.
For a brand new user on my platform who didn't know me from Adam and really took the time to trust me with this feature, was so rewarding to me. Really, really rewarding to me.
I've had other users with just small requests, like, "It would be nice if SnapTax did ABC." I was like, "Oh, that's great!" And I'd push it out like a day later and I'd send them a note and say, "I loved your feedback, and I've already deployed it."
One of those examples was my child tax credit. I initially launched SnapTax and didn't include a place to put in the child tax credit. Somebody emailed me via my feedback button and said, "It would be really nice if you included that in there so I don't have to manually figure that out." I was like, "How did I forget that?"
The very next day it was there, and the user was like, "Wow, that was fast!"
Where Crystal Sees SnapTax in 3 to 5 Years
AJ: Let me turn to where you're going with SnapTax. You launched it in February?
Crystal: Yes.
AJ: Are you where you expected to be after 4 months?
Crystal: No, I'm not.
Crystal: If you read all of the AI business plans I built, I was supposed to be way further along than I'm at today. I will impart some of that up to restarting on a new platform. Some of it is not realizing how monumental of a task the marketing aspect was gonna be. And the trial and error part that I had to go through—when you spend 6 weeks just trialing and erroring the different methods to finally land on one that's now producing, and that's only been in play for maybe 2 weeks.
Yeah, that slowed me down. The AI visibility part—when I started, I didn't even know that was a thing. Having to learn that slowed me down. The software directories, oh dear Lord, that takes an enormous amount of time. There's a million of them, it feels like. Every other day, I'm like, "Okay, I gotta go sign up for this one now." So you show up everywhere.
Now I'm turning my focus to reviews because I think that's another big trust thing in the market. I finally have users giving me feedback that are willing to talk about the product.
So am I aware I told you in the beginning, I'm impatient? So I'm nowhere near where I wanted to be. But I'm highly confident I'm on the right path. I really am.
AJ: What you just talked about with all of the things that slowed you down—it strikes me that the tasks and the learning curve may be different for self-employed consultants, but it is so true that we don't anticipate that it's going to be nearly as hard as it turns out to be.
Crystal: Yes. Yes, it is by far the hardest thing I've had to do. Building was easy. That was fun!
AJ: Where do you see SnapTax in the next 3 to 5 years?
Crystal: I see us as one of the top producing apps out there, I really do, in the financial tax planning industry. I want to own self-employed tax planning tools. I want to be the number one thing that's recommended.
And that's a huge task in front of me, which means I have to really, really focus in on marketing because that's what's going to get me there. Building the best tool on the planet is not going to get me there. It's focusing on the nurture, focusing on the marketing, focusing on all the things I'm doing, and never letting up, being relentless about it. That's what gets me there.
AJ: As your software starts to take off, companies like Intuit are gonna—I mean, there's nothing that's gonna stop them from doing something similar. So you have to get this authority built pretty darn quickly to competitively insulate you from, you know, having basically steamrolled by one of the behemoths when they—I mean, I think what is interesting about QuickBooks is that QuickBooks did develop a QuickBooks for Self-Employed.
AJ: And from what I've heard from people who use it, it's a nightmare.
Crystal: Yes.
AJ: Which is so counterintuitive to me because it's like, it's for the self-employed, it should be—you shouldn't need someone else to walk you through it to make it work. And you know, which is what I think is so fascinating about what you've done, is that you've done what QuickBooks was not able to do. They were, you know, because you started fresh.
Crystal: That's exactly what they did. If you look at their interface, I mean, I have enterprise clients, bigger clients that have payroll and all those things. Everything that's in my kind of enterprise version, it's almost all there in the solo entrepreneur. And I'm like, they don't even know what a journal entry is. I have to explain that to them. It's just so overkill.
If you look at their messaging, they'll tell you they do quarterly tax estimates. They really don't. It's basically a one-time setup at the beginning of the year based on some estimate. It doesn't change over the year as your income changes. You set it at the beginning of the year and you're done. You don't ever look at it again. It tells you every quarter based on whatever you thought it was in January.
But the reality is your income goes up and down, up and down. So it changes quarter to quarter. It's so important for cash flow and investment strategies for consultants and solo entrepreneurs. If you need to go out and invest in equipment or something and you're trying to balance whether I can make this expense or not and you're looking at your financial health and picture and what your liabilities are, taxes are one of those liabilities.
If you don't have the right information up front, you could make a decision that's to your detriment.
AJ: Right. How many solopreneurs know in January what their income's gonna be for the year?
Crystal: Yeah.
AJ: I mean, you're in a great position if you do, but I don't know many consultants that can predict for the year unless they have all retainer clients.
Crystal: Yep, exactly. Exactly.
Special Offers for Thriving Through Listeners
AJ: Well, you have given us a special offer. You put together a special offer for Thriving Through listeners. So tell us about those offers, and then I'll tell you where you can go. I mean, I guess I'll start out by saying the links that Crystal talks about will all be in the show notes. So go to the show notes on ajriedel.com to get the actual links. But tell us about these offers.
Crystal: Yeah, so the first offer is 50% off for your first 3 months, and that's on top of the trial. So there's a 14-day trial for my builder program. I have 2 plans, so I have a starter plan and I have a builder plan.
The starter plan doesn't have all the automation features. It's more kind of just basic tax planning. Whereas the builder plan has all the AI categorization, mobile receipt capture, mileage tracker, and everything you could need to manage your expenses and pay as little tax as humanly possible.
So that plan has a 14-day trial, then plus 50% off for your first 3 months. It's $19.99 a month after that. So you'll pay $9.99 a month for the first 3 months, and then $19.99 a month after that. There's no contracts. You can cancel anytime. I hope that you don't. I hope you fall in love with it and it does everything that I promised that it would.
And then to get your listeners off to a great start, I'm offering 50% off on the setup as well. So that $49 turns into $25. So you get to spend half an hour with me, but when we're done, your tool will be set up. You will have entered your first statement, seen how it works, walked through, answered your questions, you'll see your next tax estimate, and you'll be off and running.
AJ: Cool. And tell us—so you've got a special page on your website.
https://snaptaxapp.com/Thriving
How to Connect with Crystal
AJ: All right, and now, final question: How can listeners connect with you if they want to learn more about you and your work?
Crystal: A number of ways that you can connect with me. Email is probably easiest and fastest: [email protected]. That gets right into my inbox. I'd say [email protected] works too, but a lot of people spell my name wrong, so info's a little better.
That's the best way to get in touch with me quickly. We are also on just about every social platform out there, from YouTube to Instagram to Facebook, TikTok, all of those. We monitor that as well. Our website has a connect with us option there as well.
Final Thoughts
AJ: Is there anything else you want to answer that I haven't asked?
Crystal: No, I think this has been fantastic. I hope your listeners get something out of it. I know I'm not a consultant per se, but as a bookkeeper for years, it was consulting my clients on bookkeeping. I understand the pains and the frustrations that your listeners go through.
The thing I just want them to really take away is: find a tool that works for you and do it consistently. Then take the time to do the hard things every single day. Nothing in life is easy. Nothing worth having is easy.
And that's what thriving through is all about, right? You gotta take the good with the bad and make the best of it. Know that when you do the work, you come out on the other side thriving.
AJ: Crystal, thank you so much for being on the show today.
AJ: For those of you listening or watching, until next time, keep thriving through.