HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

Starting at 11 am PST today, Michael Seibel and I are going to do online office hours. If you'd like help with your startup, please post a top-level comment with a one or two sentence description of what you do and the first thing you'd like to talk about.

Update: We're just going to try to answer as many questions as we can. Let's get started!

Michael: hey folks really excited to meet as many people as possible and talk about startups!

Update: We've gotta run, but this was great. Thanks so much and enjoy the weekend.

We're building a new kind of bank - Yes, an actual real bank. We're starting with a small acquisition and re-building the underlying tech from the ground up. The ultimate goal is creating a bank consumers would actually love to use.

Think of paying your bills via "push" vs "pull" so instead of simply paying someone on autopay and authorizing them to debit your account at their will we'd actually say something like "hey, PG&E wants you to pay $55.86, would you like us to send that over now" when you respond they'll get your money but not your actual account info.

Basically instead of using the typical system of handing out your actual account numbers we generate an account number that works for only that vendor and if that account number ever got stolen it wouldn't matter because its locked down on a unique vendor or amount basis.

The main pain point for us right now that we'd like to talk about is re-thinking savings and loans and what the largest consumer pain points are in modern (or lack thereof) banking.

Hi Michael and Aaron,

I built Supertask (http://supertask.co/) to make web automation easier and more accessible. Supertask allows users to write shareable, composable automations that make testing webapps and repeating complicated workflows a breeze.

Automation scripts are written in a new intuitive language called Flytrap, and are interpreted by a library called Flytrap.js (https://docs.flytrap.io/). Each automation has its own secure url and can be referenced by other scripts, allowing for code re-use.

I'm curious as to your initial thoughts on the product and whether or not my pricing model aligns with what you might expect. Pricing is hard!

Additionally, at this point I wonder about the opportunity cost of putting effort into applying to/going through an accelerator (assuming I could even get into one) since the product is basically built, and the most important thing is gaining initial traction. I lean towards plowing ahead with trying to gain customers. But obviously, it's a daunting road especially as a solo founder with a 9-5.

I am in beta so no one is actually being charged right now.

Thanks for checking it out!

bill@supertask.co @supertaskco

We are building Stripe for life insurance http://back9ins.com:5000#

FYI we have applied twice to YC. We have early demand from customers and know it's a big opportunity. Our engineering team is only 2 people and we want to raise money to grow that and execute the plan with enterprise level websites. How do we take the next steps?

Portuspine is a wearable device solution to provide posture coaching to people who wants to prevent backpain, primarily people with desk job.

We provide them haptic feedback whenever they are sitting in a wrong posture, we encourage activities and better sleep so as to holistically improve ones wellness.

The user can visualize how posture affect their daily activities and sleep. The wearable device can be worn by the user 24/7 on their wrist and when they sit in front of the workstation, can be click-removed and clipped on to the chest area when it starts to monitor posture.

http://portuspine.com