“A startup journey is a rollercoaster life.” Chris Eberl, Co-Founder of RelaxTax, takes us behind the scenes of launching a startup fully remote during the COVID-19 pandemic, in a very conservative industry. Starting as a side hustle, he takes us from the initial idea to the successful launch of the user-centric app that revolutionizes the tax industry. Hear all about the challenges and highlights in his story!
“A startup journey is a rollercoaster life.” Chris Eberl, Co-Founder of RelaxTax, takes us behind the scenes of launching a startup fully remote during the COVID-19 pandemic, in a very conservative industry. Starting as a side hustle, he takes us from the initial idea to the successful launch of the user-centric app that revolutionizes the tax industry. Hear all about the challenges and highlights in his story!
Chris: (00:02)
I feel like a startup journey is always like a roller coaster life. I mean anybody who tried it before and, it’s like part of that industry knows that. So our company philosophy is also like to have a very relaxed approach to that. We said, we want to do this as long as we can, on the side to like our main jobs, just because it all started as like a hobby.
Christine: (00:24)
Welcome to the Lost in Transformation podcast series dedicated to the complex world of Digital Transformation. We feature guests from large corporations, start-ups, consultancies and more, to shed light on the success factors around Innovation, Transformation, and adjacent topics.
We share first-hand insights and inspiration from experts for all the intrapreneurs, entrepreneurs, and anyone curious about Digital Transformation.
Christine: (00:53)
Chris Eberl is a Software Engineer for Special Projects at the Red Bull Media House, as well as the Co-Founder and CTO of RelaxTax, an automated tax filing app in Austria. Chris shares how he built the app from scratch during the Covid-19 pandemic, and what challenges he overcame on his way to launching a user-centric app that revolutionizes the tax industry. We hope you enjoy this episode.
Christine: (01:20)
Hi Chris, thanks so much for joining me today on our podcast on Lost In Transformation. I'm very excited to have you here as a guest today, and thanks so much for taking the time. So you are a software engineer at the Red Bull Media House and are also the co-founder and the CTO at RelaxTax which is a company that you founded last year. And, today you are going to take us along the entrepreneurial journey that helped you found RelaxTax. And I'm also super excited to learn more about all the challenges and the highlights. So without further ado, let's jump right into it. And to begin with, I'd like to learn more about yourself and your background first, basically more about your role and your background that makes you the entrepreneur that you are today. Could you share more about that?
Chris: (02:05)
Of course. First of all, Christine, thanks for having me, and thanks for the opportunity to talk on your podcast. Basically, I'm part of Red Bull Media House. So first of all, I want to explain what Red Bull Media House actually is. So we do digital, we do TV, we do print and music for like the so-called world of rapport. So we are more likely than media company for the brand or like for the beverage brand and as a beverage company, it's quite uncommon to have such a big media company in place anybody can benefit and learn from internally. So really for me on my seven-year journey, the sky was like the limit so far. So I was able to not only dive deep into my coding and science skills. I also learned from the best when it comes to marketing and product development.
Chris: (02:51)
When we launched our beverage drink, present across 65 locals in 191 countries when it came to agile planning for tight timelines that require pivoting on things you can't influence, a Red Bull, does all these crazy cool events out there, people might know. There's sometimes a lot of uncertainty wages to have to react while being on the spot. There were internal and external media pitches, where I did premiere pro and after effects projects, which was really fun and like, not really the coding part I'm usually doing, sort of stuff there to do as well. And especially what I like the most, I feel like it was within the same seven years when we were at like actual onsite at like events in a production track. And like things got south or like things didn't work out so well. And you actually had an opportunity to work, like hands-on, like Lollapalooza music festivals and Chicago areas, San Diego, or like the EDC Las Vegas, which were like the bigger ones I was part of. And all of this kind of like shaped my journey with Red Bull, and all other kinds of crazy cool projects I was allowed to do there.
Christine: (03:51)
Cool. It's super exciting to hear about the cool projects and the work that you do. And now, besides Red Bull, you're also a co-founder of the startup, RelaxTax. Now on a first glance, the two companies and industries sound very different. How come you entered such a different industry and how did your role at Red Bull help with that?
Chris: (04:13)
So it's in fact a completely different industry. And that also comes with something or like an intention that was on purpose. When you work for a big company like Red Bull, you never want to interfere with any interests. And secondly, building something like RelaxTax for the tax industry has some personal attachments also like with my co-founder. We both lived abroad for quite some while in our life. Like he lived in Latin America for a little bit. I'm now since four years in total, I was living in the US, so our main residency was sometimes out of our home country. So he's Austrian, I'm Austrian. And like that, that comes with an interesting question when it comes to like where you declare your taxes and no matter what country you are in. And he's actually a tax specialist, he worked at like the head of tax in different companies before. As a tax specialist, in big companies, like Paysafe. And you know Innocent Drinks, also funny that it was like a beverage company there.
Chris: (05:08)
But in total, when it comes to like all those tax questions, there's never really an easy way how you can do it no matter I feel which country you live in, each country has different regulations and different requirements. And at some point I was just telling him like, can't we just simplify that at least like for one country at first. And then thinking about scaling this up, where else could this go? So we started with that in our home country and founded RelaxTax last July after a lot of prototyping and iterating about ideation and stuff. We just said, let's give it a try with the knowledge we have based on our current life, and let's lean on that.
Christine: (05:46)
Super interesting. So you're saying that you've actually been through a lot of struggles with your own tax experience, and you wanted to simplify the whole experience, also living in different countries and so on. And if we look at the tax industry before you enter the market with RelaxTax, how would you describe the status quo? Or why was there a catalyst for change to introduce in this industry?
Chris: (06:09)
So I want to say it's very unique, especially in Austria. I feel like it's the only system I know, or I've worked with, that requires two passwords and the number two login, and even those credentials can change if you move within the country of Austria. And almost like anybody you talk to is like, oh, I don't want to even log in because I need to look for my credentials. And it just doesn't fit as like a browser would, save your passwords as well. Or like one password, how it would apply that because there's just one field too many, pretty much. So that being said, that's already a challenge, the air to it, like to get in the system, but like even more, there is no real, I want to say good guidance within the tool itself that will help you do your taxes from like a very easy standpoint.
Chris: (06:59)
There's a lot of key figures. And, there might be an input field here where you put in a number and the input field there. Sometimes I heard stories that your parents would like to pass on that knowledge to you on how to do that. But, I feel like this shouldn't be the time you spent with your parents about educating you about your tax return in Austria. So my question I had at my co-founder Dominick was couldn't we come up with something like a questionnaire, like big tax companies doing Austria when you pay them a lot of money, that addresses this purpose and automate the stuff behind it. And I can get more into the technical stuff later there. But that was our baseline pretty much saying we have a system out there from the government that is not working user-focused. So just like no customer obsession built around it. It fulfills the purpose. It works perfectly fine. It's totally legit, but it's not as we would know a modern product being user-focused. And like with that drive of like customer obsession pretty much.
Christine: (07:57)
So you want to highlight that user focus a bit more and make it simpler for the user. And now fast forward to today, you've since launched the RelaxTax app, it's available and running. So obviously your own experience with taxes let you then also to the path that you're on right now. And, you're also saying you can dive a bit more into the technical stuff. So I kinda like to know more about the start of your journey with RelaxTax. What did any of your first approaches to transforming the industry or bringing this idea to life look like?
Chris: (08:32)
So when we started that, and we started in February 2020, for four months or two, we couldn't really think of a way how to automate the submission part, because if you work with a government system, it's pretty much a black box for you. And there's barely anything about the interfaces, but in fact, there's one, which we occasionally found, I want to say through like a misformed Google search, actually. So a couple of pages about an interface that is for software developers that are actually for cash registers for restaurants. There, nothing like square comparably, I want to say in Austria. So the restaurant owners are required to type in any earned amounts and get a summary at the end of the day that will be sent to the financial department. So they actually can file whatever they made, during the day.
Chris: (09:16)
And the structure of that interface is a so-called SOAP interface, and it has some XML inputs attached to it. And since those restaurants uploaded daily, we looked at it and I was like, well, let's see if there's like some test environment. And if we can upload our taxes to it just for playing around with it. So that was like our first, I want to call it a mini hackathon because it was all pretty safe. It was against the test system of the government. We made sure that we don't step on any toes there. And we found out it as possible, that you can actually submit your tax return for that interface that wasn't meant to be because it was available for it. It's just not surfaced anywhere because like the schema, that interface is designed for it, but nobody really uses it for it.
Chris: (10:00)
So when we looked into that, we faced the challenge of like legality pretty much of seeing, would we be allowed potentially doing that? And what would we need to collect from the user when it comes to like, does the user need to sign his or her tax return? Does the user give us some extra allowance that we would be allowed to do their taxes? And that way, what we found with that interface though, is like the ultimate schema, how the Austrian government pretty much defines the tax return, which is that XML file I was talking about. And with those findings, we were able to in the end now, like fast-forwarding to the end product to automate the submission in a different way. So that was definitely one of our biggest learnings before we even have founded the company to find that out, and as I said, it was literally a misfire on a Google search, that we actually found that input.
Chris: (10:50)
So it was quite funny. And the other point is like finding test users is really hard, right? So like finding tests, users for your tax, or is like, if you want to do it right, you gotta do it real. So we ran out fairly quickly on family and friends of testing our system with, so whatever you develop there, whatever you release or launch, in your rollout process has to be like working in legit all the time, because testing is hard. If you don't have that many real people you can reach out to and test their texts or transcript.
Christine: (11:20)
I feel like, those challenges probably you don't know them at the beginning, but when you jump into the journey, you're like, maybe you didn't consider this or that. And also, this industry is kind of an industry where change hasn't really been happening for a longer time, I'm assuming. So you stepping in and wanting to automate the whole processes. I think that's like a first in the field probably.
Chris: (11:46)
Yes. A hundred percent. So in all fairness, and with a respect to our competitors out there, there are apps that have tried to be in the market of doing that, but they've completely different approaches.
So basically what would we try to focus on was like making the app available in multiple languages, because we realized there's quite a potential there having multiple people from different countries, coming into Austria and all they want to focus on is work. And they don't want to deal with their taxes. As the Austrian government site is obviously only available in German right now, and in my opinion, German is one of the hardest languages to learn. So we want to open the gate there and say like, well, how about we are available in German and English at launch? We're looking at Spanish right now. We are looking at all the Eastern European languages. We also look at Italian and languages like that, just to be really an innovator in that space, because we fought about, well, reinventing the wheel is nice and fine. And bringing that product that was working into more like a digital 2021 world. But also thinking again, what are really the user needs. And that one was like the questionnaire. And secondly, bringing in multiple languages.
Christine: (12:57)
It's cool to see how you try to basically transform the industry and also try to innovate a bit more in that field to make it more modern and automated and everything. And you stepping into the techs industry with RelaxTax, with your co-founder. I mean, you're coming from the software engineer side, him obviously having the tax background, but I think you're both quite new in this endeavor, to kind of transform in this industry. So I'm hearing a lot about your successes and what went well and that it's running now. But I'm also quite curious to hear about, perhaps any mistakes, anything that you tried and failed at and learned from anything that you would like to share here.
Chris: (13:43)
There have been quite many. I feel like a startup journey is always a roller coaster life. I mean, anybody who tried it before and it's like part of that industry knows that. So our company philosophy is also like to have a very relaxed approach to that. We said we want to do this as long as we can, on the side to like our main jobs. Just because it started all as a hobby. And one thing we definitely encountered was we built out the app. We obviously were hyped about our product. We had the questionnaire in place, we held multiple languages. And within the first one, we had hundreds of users, it was great. Like nobody of us would have expected that like immediately, people were yeah, let's use the app.
Chris: (14:22)
But what stopped them from literally pushing through was we didn't provide the feature of letting the new user know how much they actually get in return, which is like the pre-calculation of your refund pretty much. And we were hesitant of doing that because our philosophy or approach was we should not ask the user about their salary because we thought that's too personal. We always wanted to have this approach of like, well, you have an account with us, but you can always ask us to literally delete all the data. Like, once you did your taxes once, or you keep the account, or do you do it next year again? So we didn't have that feature in place at first. And now we actually working on that and, working it in, because to just increase our percentage of purchases.
Chris: (15:04)
We right now look at like 15 to like 20% of users that use our app, who actually in the end, like purchase the tax return with us, which is quite a good percentage. However, we think we can build more trust with our consumers or users if they actually see what they get in return. And the reason why we didn't do the return is we want it to be as accurate as possible. There would be a solution out there where you can just do it, like a little bit, and say, well, that's an estimate of what you will get. And for sure, the only thing we can provide as well as only an estimate about what your tax refund, in the end, will be. However, we want to be as precise as possible. So we almost I want to say two months now, to follow up, as we thought about it, how we can do it. We coded it. We were like 80% there right now. So we are polishing it. And like somewhere within April, I want to say we will launch it, that feature as well.
Christine: (15:53)
Cool. So you're consistently renewing and basically pivoting based on the feedback that you also get from the users. I think that's super interesting. And you were also mentioning that the app is called RelaxTax and you have that relaxing aspect basically in the mindset as well. And you also found the company basically during COVID last year, so it's kind of a project that is going on the side of your full-time job. And I'm also curious to learn more about how COVID perhaps somehow changes the future of RelaxTax and the work that you're doing there. Do you think there are advantages or disadvantages because of COVID?
Chris: (16:36)
So when it comes to myself, I haven't been in an office since we started RelaxTax as a side hustle, which is a pretty funny side note. So I was used to going to the office on a daily basis and spend time in the car around like two hours. I want to say my daily commute. My co-founder, who lives in Vienna, uses the subways. So he has a decent commute as well, but it's not as bad as like on my end. He was in the home office for quite some time, but now he likes continuous going back to the office again with testing and everything in place obviously. What definitely changed for us as well is realizing we can be pretty much anywhere, when it comes to founding a company or when we want to work together or also timelines.
Chris: (17:19)
Obviously, we have our roadmaps in place. It's actually here on a whiteboard in my apartment with post-its. So we went like the non-digital approach there and laid it on, we like transformed it into a plain access sheet for simplicity. But we just try to keep it simple, we call on a weekly basis, late at night on my end because I'm in Los Angeles, and he's in Indiana. So it's early for him in the morning. We talked for 45 minutes to an hour, once a week, we go through our tasks, and for the rest, we pretty much just use Slack and work on it fully remotely.
Christine: (17:53)
I think it's super fascinating to hear how you basically use the time and COVID, that you are saving now on the commute to create something from scratch and build the app and to dive into the industry and do something that you've always wanted to do together with your co-founder. So I think that's super motivating as well, to hear how to make use of that spare time basically, and dive into transformation. And I'm now looking at the future. I know, we're just at the beginning of RelaxTax's journey and there's obviously so much more to come. Is there anything you're especially looking forward to, or in general, something that's next for you that you can share with us?
Chris: (18:34)
I mean, for us it's year zero basically. So, we said, we will take this very easy. We'll see how the first year goes. So far with the users, we are right now in 2000, let's say quite a good amount of people, who are purchasing a tax return. The next big thing we're going to launch is the refund calculation pretty much around that. What we also looking to is how we can work at our company rather than working in the company. It's a funny quote, my co-founder brought up lately. And what he means by that is, can we think of any corporations? I'm a huge fan of, for example, tuber tax in the US. So what they came up with when I did my tax return this year with, tuber tax in the US they say, how about you make a bank account with us that is dedicated to your income and if you on a yearly basis to do your taxes, and we will use that bank account for you.
Chris: (19:27)
So obviously there's opportunity. We haven't really looked into that. It was just like an ideation state, and other areas as well. We had some cases there where people would like to move out of Austria again. So they did their taxes, they did their expert here or whatever, and then they have the wrong address on file. So, what we definitely need to look into is how to handle those cases more elegantly, because right now we also still like the customer support team pretty much. So we also looking into solutions, how we can upscale our customer service representative across not only across social media but also like, is there a way how we can educate people on tax returns? Generally speaking, this could be in webinars in social media groups on Facebook, because in the end, all we care about is pretty much that people know what they need to do with the taxes.
Chris: (20:21)
We felt like the topic around taxes is like for the majority of people, it's such a black box to say, okay, there's something at the end of the year. And I need to take care of it within the first half of the following year. And hopefully, there will be a positive refund. So there's a lot of things we can educate people on in general. And, we also just want to give this back as a service from our end to just build up our brand pretty much.
Christine: (20:45)
So there are so many opportunities out there, as you're saying, you know, to educate other people and also what you're mentioning with other tax apps out there, whatever opportunities they have and, that you might also be looking into. So I'm seeing that there's a lot on the way, of exciting things. So I think we basically covered all of the journey from the beginning until today for RelaxTax. And it's been super interesting also for me to hear about how this basically came to life.
Chris, thank you so much for sharing your personal journey with us with Red Bull and especially with RelaxTax. It's really fascinating to hear about creating it from scratch and all the successes and the mistakes along the way. It's been a real pleasure having you here, and I'm excited to see what the future holds for you. Thanks again.
Chris: (21:35)
Thank you so much. And thanks again for the opportunity to share our digital transformation on your podcast.
Christine: (21:42)
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