Most business owners file VAT only once or twice a year, and the official government tool is complex enough that first-timers really struggle with it. We saw an opportunity to make the whole thing far simpler, but the risk was real. VAT season only opens one launch window a year, so if we built the full product and got it wrong, we'd lose months with nothing to show for it. Rather than guess, I started by building a lightweight estimation tool, just enough to confirm whether people genuinely wanted this. They did.

That validation set up the harder challenge: two months to tax season, a single designer, and a product that had to handle 12 different filing situations, since people track their sales and expenses in so many different ways. To pull it off in time, I kept everything as simple as possible, building each feature in its most basic form and testing constantly with real users. Easy filings ran automatically, while complex ones were routed to real tax accountants. What follows is the full story of how it came together: navigating constant ambiguity to build the first mobile VAT filing service for SMB owners.