US Tax Season? Mandatory ITIN? Do You Need an Overseas Entity for Global Selling?

Preface: I won't talk about specific tax filing or company registration details because I charge for that. But if you read patiently, you'll gain a lot.

Today I want to talk about my only paid service business currently in operation: UK/US entity registration. Especially from the perspective of a shovel service provider, how do I think about a service product.

I'm quite confident that if you're thoughtful, this article will help many beginners learn how to think about product selection, branding, product positioning, product optimization, and marketing.

Masterclass (PUA + Chicken Soup + Ad) Begins

The shame of making money makes me rarely mention and promote this paid service (haha because the main resource slots are given to the paid Max community). Occasionally when someone asks in the group, I'll "narcissistically" mention my own service; or if there are community members present, they'll directly help me say you can find Lvsao.

Why the shame? Honestly, the essence of this type of product is still basic information asymmetry (because I always arrogantly think I should earn more from high-barrier things, not just information gaps). On the other hand, these simple information gap products essentially have very low barriers - anyone with hands-on ability can do it, and you can even find someone to solve it for a few hundred bucks out there.

Mapping this to global selling, it's very similar to how people do product selection and traffic generation for independent stores. The biggest problem beginners face in product selection is: these generic products are already being sold by others, what should I sell then, I'm not playing! Or what's there to promote about these junk things, what should I shoot, what should I write! I'm not playing!

How do I think about and optimize these relatively standardized, low-barrier service products?

1. Product Positioning: Research Competitors and Industry, More Importantly, Ground Yourself in Improving Your Own Product (Industry) Professionalism

At any time, the product itself must be solid! If I'm selling this shovel, I must be as professional as possible. Thus defeating competitors on basic product capability: small workshops like me (price competition but weak professionalism and poor trust), domestic professional overseas accounting services (high price but weak business scenarios), foreign agents and service providers (language barrier, poor user experience, weak business scenarios).

Next is to find differentiated positioning and audience through self-improvement:

1. I need to spend more time learning about UK/US company and tax law knowledge. This way, I'll know more than those who only sell for a few hundred bucks, thus surpassing them.

2. I own a UK entity and a US entity (for over a year, because I need to experience a complete fiscal year). Not only that, I must conduct real business operations through these entities to encounter the real business problems that clients face. This way, I'll have more business sense than those domestic and foreign professional company tax service providers, able to truly solve the pain points of users in my industry, thus surpassing them.

3. My continuous, sincere, and helpful sharing persona may win some basic trust.

Mapping back to global selling again, many people who want to lie down and make money from independent stores may have given up by now, because they see here that the barrier is too high, and they never want to truly and solidly research the categories and industries they should study. So I want to ask, when you don't even understand or are professional about your product and industry, why would users buy your product? Is any of your description and promotional language professional enough?

This isn't PUA, this has always been my self-reflection, and also the most basic common sense. It's just that too many newbies are dazzled by the "no barrier" claims online, don't want to do anything, just want to start flying from zero frames.

On the other hand, I know many viral product players won't be happy at this point, "I'm not that professional about the products I select, stop bragging. You're wrong." But you may not realize that every professional viral product player has already achieved sufficient professionalism in traffic strategies for specific scenario categories - it's just that everyone goes deep in different directions, but at minimum, everyone needs to go deep.

2. Product Optimization: Continuously Improve Your Product Capability to Avoid Price Competition

Most people hate low-price competition, but most people are actually doing low-price competition themselves. We can actually think about how to improve our product capability. And so-called product capability improvement isn't always as difficult as redevelopment; sometimes even some product combinations can greatly enhance your product competitiveness.

1. Target precise user pain points, optimize products, and aggressively address their pain points. What scenarios drive your users to need your product? Then study that scenario and try to solve all their pain points. You can even simply understand this as "bundled sales" - on one hand increasing user benefits, on the other hand increasing average order value.

2. Deliver seriously and provide after-sales service seriously, grow together with customers, always preparing for your next product iteration.

Besides the above benefits, I've also been silently absorbing new business pain points while serving 100+ clients this year, and actively delivering "extra" value to these users within my capabilities.

For example, mid-way I found many users still struggled to activate SP, so I offered users free Shopify Payments activation as a safety net.

For example, I found many UK entity clients wouldn't proactively learn about maintenance matters after opening accounts, so I actively and freely activated business tax (similar to domestic tax registration) for every UK company client, thus avoiding penalties as much as possible.

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