A couple of weeks ago I asked my Tiny Coders to create tinytax.co.uk/community. Less than an hour later, it was live. As with launching any new product, service or even company, there’s always that moment of trepidation: will anyone actually use it? No posts, no customers, no revenue, no company — just a blank page with no traffic.
But it turns out the old mantra “if you build it, they will come” is holding true for TinyTax.
Fifty posts later, I’m really enjoying the direct connection and the back-and-forth with TinyTax customers. It’s already surfacing interesting edge cases — like a newly incorporated company trying to file its first accounts just days after forming and many months before they are due.
It’s all very reminiscent of what I was doing with Clear Books back in 2009. The difference today is AI. Back then I paid for a SaaS product called GetSatisfaction — a community forum to help us engage with early customers and dig up problems, ideas and questions. Eventually we invested development time to build our own forum so we could tailor it to our needs.
This time around, with my Tiny Coders, I haven’t spent a penny or any significant time — other than that one hour to spin it up. Quite incredible!