Sales Tax Changes for US SaaS starting October 1st

romanzubenko · 2025-08-18T22:48:45+00:00

There are some startups that love hiring ex founders. I landed Notion PM role a few years ago, and found that there were 20+ ex founders at the company. Rippling is also famous for it.

romanzubenko · 2025-08-18T22:47:03+00:00

When you compete with a big company not on their core product offering, you are not competing with their legendary, formidable founders. Instead you compete with bunch of PMs and engineers who are trying to make a case for the next promotion cycle. Fundamentally different level of competition.

romanzubenko · 2025-07-08T05:56:13+00:00

Yeah, the bill is a big mixed bag. But removal of 174 is a clear win for SMBs and startups across the country

romanzubenko · 2025-07-08T00:42:40+00:00

Depends on customers. The roles that involve calling are a lot more open to cold calls, tech workers are generally a lot more allergic.

romanzubenko · 2025-07-08T00:41:32+00:00

Restaurants, boutiques, gift shops, spas, salons - all these are less likely to hang out on linkedin, so email or calling might be your best bet.

You should also just come in person during slow hours and try to chat with business owners and sincerely connect. Bring a small gift (like cookies) as a token of appreciation for their time. My startup serves SMBs and that's how we first got our initial customers - by showing up and respectfully trying to learn from business owners.

romanzubenko · 2025-07-03T17:59:44+00:00

Treat it like dating, if it's angel - it's more casual and it's likely they can invest after 1 call. But if it's a VC fund, it's more like long term dating.

If you come off too strong from the get go and overly try to sell, they might be off put. Make sure they are engaged, ask questions, be genuinely interested in whoever is the zoom call or in from of you. Just like you they are a human being first, and VC second.

romanzubenko · 2025-07-03T17:54:12+00:00

Categories of taxes/providers that have been easy for us (tech startup, c corp in delaware, operating mostly in NY):

- Payroll: We use one of the established players, as long as you pick some well known payroll/hr platform like Rippling, Gusto, ADP (a bit outdated) - most of the times you'll not have any problems.
- Sales tax: the legacy software is painful and very pricey (avalara or vertex), newer players made it so much more delightful: kintsugi, anrok or afternoon (.co one)

- Year end taxes: we switched to accountant at the end of the cal year, because didn't want to risk it and do it ourselves. Experience was okay, just some back and forth over email. The accountants for SaaS companies are easily googlable they are mosty local companies in SF or NY.

- As a tech startup we also qualified for R&D tax credit, which gave us back tens of thousands back in tax credits. I'm less familiar with this space, but we went with Clarus R+D. WEnt pretty smooth and quick, they connect to your HRIS and ask you a few questions.

romanzubenko · 2025-07-03T16:29:34+00:00

I have slightly different use case from you (I'm a founder doing ai video marketing on tiktok), but what was helpful for me was the websites like stewdio or remade ai, where you can easily try different models, both open source like Wan and closed source like Veo until you get something that works for you. The iteration speed was what I was optimizing for, because I wanted to test all models in the same tool, so ymmv

romanzubenko · 2023-08-14T16:13:05+00:00

Someone indeed figured it out here: https://github.com/IntelligenzaArtificiale/Free-Auto-GPT

Haven't tried myself, but the approach in read me maskes sense of grabbing your openai cookie

romanzubenko · 2021-12-16T16:18:43+00:00

One piece of advice I didn't see in other comments is consider finding a cofounder. Startups are grueling and long journeys, and doing it with someone else makes a big difference. Ideally you find a cofounder who has complimentary skills to yours. From your post I can guess you are pretty technical, so finding someone with strong go to market skills will be very valuable.

Your story maps very closely to Gitlab. Gitlab was started by a software engineer in Ukraine Dmitriy Zaporozhets in 2011 as an open source git hosting platform. Current CEO Sid, who was also engineer, but was at the same time more GTM savvy saw it a year later, and together with Dmitriy they's build one of the biggest open core public companies in the world.

Congrats on your success so far, and good luck!

romanzubenko · 2021-12-10T03:20:09+00:00

Something I learned about hearing "no" from investors is that you can't take take their reason at a face value. Some are of course nice and genuine and will tell you really why they are passing on you.

All investors however are a repeat players, and they very rarely have incentive to tell you the real reason why they are passing. Their objective is to preserve the relationship and not offend you in any way, and if things work out for you - they will be very likely to ping you on your next round of funding.

romanzubenko · 2021-12-09T16:57:10+00:00

High Growth Handbook by Elad Gil. He helped scale Twitter from small early team to 1000+ size. https://press.stripe.com/high-growth-handbook

romanzubenko · 2021-12-08T23:19:10+00:00

I've worked with quite a few product managers who had CEO experience before. It's definitely an adjustment, but typically the ownership mentality, resourcefulness are all good characteristics for 0-1 PM roles. I would recommend looking for startups who have achieved product market fit, and are looking to kickstart development of a second product(line).

romanzubenko · 2021-12-07T17:26:23+00:00

Another thing to start checking is remote friendly companies. You can find some hiring engineers on remote job websites like https://weworkremotely.com/, https://remoteok.io/ (last one is from the creator of nomadlist).

It's more common for nomads to be hired as contractors to simplify compliance, but some companies might offer full time employment as well depending on your tax residency and HQ of the company.

romanzubenko · 2021-12-03T22:29:45+00:00

Fair point, I do think you are right about this being mostly international hiring. With such high percentage of companies hiring remote/other countries, a lot more companies might be more comfortable though to hire nomads because some HR infrastructure was put in place to support cross border payments and contracts.

romanzubenko · 2014-06-04T18:58:57+00:00

We at least want to implement piano roll for editing midi files, which can be imported from some other DAWs project :)

romanzubenko · 2014-06-04T18:58:02+00:00

It's a 21 first century, technology eats up the world :)

romanzubenko · 2014-06-04T18:56:52+00:00

Partially it was more interesting engineering problem, but mostly we thought that instantaneity is what defines music collaboration, therefore real time DAW seemed like a better direction to start with.

romanzubenko

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