What it does
Understand how California income, sales, and property tax actually work in plain English, then estimate your bill and see what you would pay in another state, so you can make a money decision with a credible number instead of anxiety.
Currently
Live MVP. A free, no-signup, client-side explainer plus estimator for California: read how income brackets, sales tax, and Prop 13 property tax work, enter your income, and get an estimate with a bracket-fill bar, a three-tax proportion view, and a live flip to Virginia to compare. Every figure is sourced and dated to tax year 2025. The honest gap is that the funnel is barely instrumented, so Weekly Engaged Estimates is not yet a number I can steer by, and nobody finds a new tax page until it ranks. Instrumentation is the next thing in.
Roadmap
/now-next-later-roadmapNow/Next/Later Roadmap- Instrument the funnel (entrance, results, compare-switch, explainer-engage) with ranged values only
- California explainer depth pass (Prop 13, the $1M mental-health surcharge, cap-gains as ordinary income)
- Live results: drop the Calculate gate so the bracket bar updates as you type
- Shareable result and compare URLs (fragment-encoded, no raw income to a server)
- FY2026 data-refresh checklist and a dated pre-season review ritual
- Add 5-8 highest-volume states to enrich the compare graph and ranking surfaces
- Compare-any-two-states mode, gated on validating compare search volume
- Methodology / how-we-calculate page plus inline official-source links at the result
- Embeddable compare widget (a distribution play disguised as a feature)
- Decision-shaped landing pages (remote job, same salary, different state)
- Paycheck-anchored entry for first-time earners
- Any monetization (affiliate, lead capture) only if traffic materializes
Recently shipped
- Jun 16, 2026Made the California page genuinely engaging: animated count-up total, a visual bracket-fill bar, a where-it-goes breakdown, real thumbnails, and a one-tap flip to Virginia to compare.
- Jun 16, 2026Shipped the MVP: the California explainer plus estimator went live on a shared, state-agnostic engine, income in, sourced 2025 estimate out, with sales and Prop 13 property tax.
How I know it's working
instrumented · awaiting trafficThe number of sessions per week that reach the California results view and take at least one understanding action: switch state to compare, expand the bracket detail, or read past the headline into the explainer.
The events are wired into a privacy-first store. Counts populate here as people use it. This is the honest part of the work: instrument first, claim later.
How it's built
How I built it
California State Taxes for Dummies started from a simple, recurring panic: a money decision that turns on state taxes, and no honest way to understand what you will actually owe without either trusting a black box or learning tax law. California is the highest-anxiety tax regime in the country, so it was the place to start. I ran the full product process on it, the same one I would run for a client, on a free one-page civic tool.
What the discovery surfaced
A jobs-to-be-done pass split the work into three jobs: estimate my bill, understand the system, and compare two states. The "for dummies" framing is an emotional promise as much as a content one. You are allowed to not know this, and you will not be made to feel stupid. Three personas fell out of it, with Maya the Mover, who wants the compare and the shareable answer, as the differentiated bet, and Devin the New Earner as the audience the explainer is built for.
That framing set the North Star: Weekly Engaged Estimates, a session that reaches the result AND takes an understanding action. It rewards the things that make this different, the compare flip and the bracket-fill bar, instead of raw calculator hits.
What's shipped, and what's honest about it
A competitive pass made the constraint obvious. Demand for California tax answers is enormous and recurring, but SmartAsset, NerdWallet, and the FTB own those search results with authority a new page cannot match head-on. So the strategy is distribution, not features. Win the long-tail and the two-state compare that incumbents serve badly, and compound authority by adding deep per-state pages over time. RICE put the unglamorous work on top, and a Now/Next/Later roadmap drew the line.
The estimator is client-side and deterministic, with no PII stored, so the data-stays-local trust position is built in. The honest gap is the unglamorous one a pre-mortem named first: there is no real instrumentation yet, so the North Star is not a number I can steer by, and accuracy drift is an existential risk that a dated review ritual has to guard. The first move is not a feature. It is a measurement tag, then watching whether the page ranks at all.
The strategy behind it
A snapshot of the product process this app was built from. Each artifact comes from a k8 skill you can run yourself. It reflects the original plan, not the live state above.
Jobs to be done
/jtbd-analysisJTBD Analysis| When I… I want to… | Importance | Frequency |
|---|---|---|
| When I am facing a California money decision that hinges on taxes, I want a credible estimate of what I will actually owe, so I can decide with a number instead of a guess or a CPA bill. | high | medium |
| When I see how much is withheld and do not understand why, I want the California system explained like a person would explain it, tied to my own numbers, so I stop feeling stupid about it. | high | medium |
| When I am weighing a move or a remote offer, I want to compare California against another state on one screen, so I do not juggle two tabs and mental math. | high | low |
| When a partner, parent, or recruiter asks what the California taxes would be, I want a confident answer I can share, so I sound competent instead of vague. | medium | low |
| When I land on a random tax site, I want to see sources and the tax year up front, so I can trust the math before I rely on it. | high | medium |
Persona
/persona-createPersona Create- Compare California against the other state on one screen, not two tabs
- Get a credible number in under a minute
- Share the result with her partner to decide together
- Every calculator is one state per page, so comparing means mental math
- She does not trust a black-box estimate with no sources
- The decision is high-stakes and the tools feel built for tax pros
Persona
/persona-createPersona Create- Understand why so much comes out before he worries about the number
- Learn what marginal rate means without reading IRS-speak
- Feel allowed to not know this already
- State revenue pages are written in jargon
- Reddit threads are unstructured and dated
- Calculators give a number but never teach him anything
Persona
/persona-createPersona Create- Understand how Prop 13 and California property tax would affect him
- Compare California against a lower-tax retirement state
- Value the property-tax view, not just the income estimate
- Most calculators bury or skip property tax
- He cannot tell from a single page how two states stack up
- He has the most at stake and the least patience for jargon
Prioritization and risks(the internal detail)
RICE prioritization
/rice-scoreRICE Score| Feature | Reach | Impact | Conf. | Effort | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Instrument the funnel (analytics) | 1000 | 3 | 100% | 0.4 | 7500 |
| FY2026 data refresh + dated review process | 900 | 2 | 100% | 0.6 | 3000 |
| Per-state explainer depth pass (SEO defense) | 900 | 2 | 90% | 1 | 1620 |
| Shareable result + compare URLs | 600 | 2 | 80% | 0.6 | 1600 |
| Compare-any-two-states mode | 600 | 2.5 | 60% | 1.5 | 600 |
| Add 5-8 high-volume states (deep content each) | 900 | 2.5 | 80% | 4 | 450 |
Pre-mortem risks
/pre-mortemPre-mortemNever ranked, so nobody found it: the page sits unindexed behind SmartAsset and the state revenue site, and the build is wasted because demand never reaches it.
highMitigation: Treat distribution as Objective #1: win the long-tail and compare intents incumbents serve badly, expand states to compound authority, and ship shareable URLs as a loop.
Tax numbers went stale and someone trusted them: a confident-looking but out-of-date California figure is worse than no tool at all.
mediumMitigation: A dated pre-season review checklist, a visible tax year plus cited sources on the page, an unmissable disclaimer, and a methodology page.
Programmatic state pages earned a thin-content penalty: templated near-identical calculator pages are exactly what Google's helpful-content system targets.
mediumMitigation: Make deep, genuinely California-specific explainer content (Prop 13, the surcharge) a hard gate before any expansion. Depth is the SEO defense, not decoration.
No analytics, so we optimized blind: without funnel instrumentation, every claim about whether distribution is working stays a guess for a year.
highMitigation: Instrument first, before any feature work, logging financial values as ranges only so we never store raw income.
Built like a product, returned like a portfolio piece: effort scaled for growth on a tool with a low revenue ceiling.
mediumMitigation: Name it honestly as a craft-grade SEO tool, scale state expansion to 5-8 states not 50, and harvest the brand value deliberately.
Built with these skills
/jtbd-analysisJTBD Analysis/persona-createPersona Create/north-star-metricNorth Star Metric/competitive-analysisCompetitive Analysis/okr-workshopOKR Workshop/opportunity-solution-treeOpportunity Solution Tree/rice-scoreRICE Score/now-next-later-roadmapNow/Next/Later Roadmap/journey-mapJourney Map/pre-mortemPre-mortem/prd-draftPRD Draft