Scaling an Early-Stage Product Through Rapid Data-Driven Iteration
Sarmiza is an app designed to simplify tax residency and immigration compliance, providing tools to set day limits, create timelines, and track progress. With a focus on privacy, it operates entirely offline, processing data on-device, and requires no signup.
As the sole designer and product manager, I led Sarmiza’s development from conception to product-market fit. This required embracing ambiguity and frequently revisiting assumptions. I learned to extract growth opportunities from user feedback, refine them into actionable improvements, and collaborate closely with engineers to iterate quickly.
Maintaining focus was challenging, especially with an async, remote-first team. Clear, consistent communication—mainly through memos and collaborative documents—became essential for keeping everyone aligned amid constant changes.
Identifying a Market Gap in Tax Residency Compliance
Navigating tax residency and immigration across jurisdictions is a stressful and tedious task. Existing solutions—like spreadsheets, analog calendars, and apps—often fall short. Recognizing this gap, the Nomikos team saw an opportunity to build a user-friendly solution.
Defining Clear Goals Amidst Ambiguity
Our primary goal was to create an MVP that would validate our product strategy while addressing both customer and business needs. For our users, we aimed to identify an ideal customer profile, understand their pain points, and design features that directly addressed those issues. On the business side, we needed to validate our idea, develop a product roadmap, generate revenue, and iterate toward product-market fit.
📱 Customer-centric goals
Identify an ideal customer profile (ICP)
Understand user pain points
Design features addressing these pain points
📊 Business-centric goals
Create an MVP and validate strategy
Develop product roadmap
Generate revenue while iterating toward product-market fit
Leveraging User Research to Uncover Pain Points
We conducted extensive user interviews and competitive analysis to understand the landscape. After speaking with 50 potential users, we identified business travelers as our ideal customer profile due to their frequent travel, higher income, and acute compliance needs. The main pain points that emerged were the inconvenience of manual tracking and the anxiety over potential compliance errors.
User Interviews
I developed a targeted set of questions and conducted user interviews with business travelers, including:
What tools do you currently use to track travel and manage tax compliance
What are your biggest challenges in managing tax obligations across multiple jurisdictions?
When and how do you prefer to log your travel data?
How does frequent travel impact your tax residency status?
Can you describe a recent tax compliance issue you faced due to travel
How do you currently manage and organize tax-related travel documentation?
Competitive Analysis
In addition to non-digital alternatives like spreadsheets and calendars, several existing apps aim to tackle tax residency and visa compliance. I conducted a competitive analysis of three such apps—Monaeo, Taxbird, and Flamingo—to assess how they handle the key pain points identified in user interviews. For a detailed breakdown of pricing, UX, app screenshots, and more, please see the full analysis.
The objective was to uncover weaknesses and areas for differentiation or counter-positioning. I found that ease of use, privacy, and reliability were the primary shortcomings of these competitors. This insight guided the prioritization of features and the development of an MVP that would address these gaps effectively.
Building an Effective MVP by Prioritizing User Needs
Using a prioritization framework I developed, we focused on high-demand, high-impact, and low-effort features for our MVP. Key functionalities like at-a-glance residency threshold widgets, progress monitoring watchlists, and precision location tracking were prioritized. This strategic approach allowed us to develop and release our MVP within 8 weeks, ensuring we addressed the most critical user needs first.
✅ Feature Prioritization Framework:
Demand (1-3): Importance to solving our ideal customer's problem
Impact (1-3): Potential to achieve our business goals
Effort: Estimated weeks for implementation
Driving Rapid Iterations Based on Data Insights
In the ten months following launch, we released 21 versions of Sarmiza, averaging a new version every two weeks. By closely monitoring user feedback and in-app analytics, we iterated quickly to enhance core functionalities, improve user experience, and assess our product-market fit.
Key inflection points included transitioning from a freemium to a paid-only model, streamlining onboarding with a “photos to timeline” feature, and adding offline functionality. Each update focused on refining the app to better meet user needs and market demands.
From Freemium to Trials
Switching from a freemium model to a 7-day opt-in trial for Sarmiza+ marked a pivotal moment in our growth strategy. Initially, we believed that offering a free version to drive paid user acquisition would support growth. However, we quickly realized it split the team’s focus between managing two separate product experiences.
Analytics and user feedback showed that free users weren’t converting because they lacked access to core features, especially the paywalled precision tracker. Moving to a 7-day trial allowed us to focus development on one high-quality experience while giving users a risk-free way to explore the app’s full value.
Soon after, we introduced a $79.99 annual plan in response to users’ willingness to commit long-term once the app’s value was clear. Together, these changes clarified our monetization path, improved user experience, and streamlined product development.
Timeline Creation as a Critical Bottleneck
Funnel analytics showed that timeline creation was a critical bottleneck in the onboarding process, with 68% of users abandoning the app at this step. Recognizing the need for improvement, I worked closely with engineers to find a solution. One engineer noted that we could use photo metadata to generate a detailed timeline using on-device processing, eliminating the need for manual input.
The resulting Photos-to-Timeline feature transformed timeline creation, reducing onboarding from 15 minutes to under 2 minutes and increasing trial conversion from 9% to 15%. User feedback confirmed this impact, with one user calling it “magical,” as the app instantly recreated years of travel history.
Counterintuitive Benefits of Offline-First Onboarding
In contrast to our approach with the Photos-to-Timeline feature, which reduced onboarding friction, we chose to add intentional friction by requiring users to go offline before starting. This “Offline-First Onboarding” was designed to highlight our privacy-first approach and the precision tracker’s offline functionality. Unexpectedly, this added step became an effective filter for high-intent users.
Analytics showed that, while 30% more users dropped off on the first screen, our install-to-paid conversion rate doubled from 7% to 14%. Additionally, the offline requirement created a “pattern break” from competitor apps, with 65% of users mentioning privacy positively in App Store reviews. This approach also reduced customer support tickets about data security by 84%, as users understood our privacy commitment right from the start.
Benchmarking Product Market Fit
To measure our progress toward Product Market Fit (PMF), I adapted Superhuman’s PMF Engine and paired it with our North Star Metric of install-to-paid conversions. By regularly asking users how they’d feel if they could no longer use our product and focusing on those who answered “very disappointed,” we gained a reliable and repeatable benchmark for PMF.
This approach also deepened our understanding of our ideal customer profile, allowing us to refine product development and growth strategies across the funnel—from awareness through to post-conversion. This targeted focus was reflected in more effective acquisition efforts, both paid and organic, leading to a significant improvement in our Lifetime Value to Customer Acquisition Cost ratio, which rose from 2 to 4.
Takeaways and Reflections
This project underscored the importance of focus, agility, and data-driven decision-making in product management. Leading a high-stakes, ambiguous project required balancing strategic planning with rapid execution. Close collaboration with cross-functional teams was essential in swiftly bringing a valuable product to market. Moving forward, these lessons will inform my approach to leading and scaling products effectively, ensuring that user needs remain at the forefront of innovation.