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HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

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Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#21
post #3

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 "h…

I think there's a huge need for an actual new bank that is built on technology. It's one of those obvious big need problem. One of the big problems founders usually run into when doing this, though, is dealing with the mass of regulatory requirements involved. How are you thinking about this? Which of the many different services offered by a bank will you target first? Is it going to be that payments piece you are de…

One of the hardest parts of the regulatory requirements is the Capital on hand and getting a federal charter.

Because we've targeted a handful of very small institutions with those charters in place and the banks are in good standing it actually allows us to skirt some of the pain points of trying to charter one ourselves but also allows us to hit the ground running on the technology front.

We think the bill pay/secured payments could be the one to target first because we think there is value in just being a great traditional savings and loan bank. However, the main thing we're thinking through now is if this is a big enough segment to gain real traction with consumers or if we need more of a WOW product for mass adoption.

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#22
post #16

Hi. My name is Stephen, and I built CleverTree - an on-demand medical marijuana delivery service based in Sacramento. I'm curious about your thoughts on fundraising in the marijuana space. I haven't really tried (except applying to YC and 500 Startups last year), because it seems like most big Angels/VCs are still too risk-adverse to the industry. So far we've been running for a years and have built revenues up to ar…

I think there are angels that are willing to invest - https://getmeadow.com/ is a YC company and they were able to raise an angel round - I think its helpful to look like a typical tech startup with strong engineering on the product team and a launched product before you start to fundraise.

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#23
Hi Michael, Aaron,

My name's Aron and I'm building Wanderlust (www.wanderlust.ly): a travel website that shows where you could go based on how much you can spend and what you're interested in.

Wanderlust provides users with a complete trip, including a destination, flight, and accommodation, as well as an overview of the best things to do and see during their stay in that particular destination - after which users may customize the options we recommend and book or, if they’re not sure yet, simply save the itinerary and flip to the next trip that matches the criteria they've entered.

Our main issue:

Low conversion rates (visitor/booking). Particularly due to the fact that we're higher up in the funnel (vs. traditional OTAs) and don't have a lot of credibility in the early stages.

Although I realize this is quite a broad question, any insight on how we might improve would be super helpful!

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#24
post #2

Hi Michael and Aaron, I'm the co-founder of StayInTech.com ( https://stayintech.com/ ), a career website for women in tech. We built this website for skilled female engineers looking for a new job, but we seem to appeal to a wider audience than we initially planned. We have lots of male users, and also women who are just starting out in tech. Is that a problem, does it matter in the long run? Should we address our ta…

Sounds like you have a great problem. One of the funny things about building products is that you often don't know who your users are going to be until you actually release. This is why we tell companies to launch as fast as possible, and not spend too much time thinking about what might happen before they have any information about how users interact with what they've built.

In your case, your company's goal is to help people get jobs (it seems). As long as you can do that, do it for every user that wants your help. You may have to adapt your messaging to fit the broader base, but that's a good (if hard) thing. If you find that widening your approach hurts your ability to get people jobs, then you'll probably have to change things up.

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#25

We are not up and running yet. But we are building a subscription management tool that helps SaaS businesses manage , view their user's subscription. We are going to solve a lot of problems that come with subscription like taxes, usage rules, customer portal, price a/b testing , dunning management etc... we are going to support multiple payment gateways like braintree and stripe. We are working on this product becaus…

This sounds like a cool idea - when do you plan on launching your v1?

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#26
post #14

Our current focus is mass market, ad-based apps for Android, mostly based around a spreadsheet-like framework. The company is called Unwrapped Apps ( http://www.unwrappedapps.com ) and our latest Android app was launched yesterday ( https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.unwrappeda... ). The main thing we'd like to talk about is our prioritization and focus - are we spending our time the best way we can?

Feel free to ask your question :)

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#27

Hi Michael and Aaron, I'm the co-founder and CEO of PsychSignal ( https://psychsignal.com ) PsychSignal is a provider of real time 'Trader Mood' data, analytics and indices for financial institutions & investment professionals seeking an edge. Essentially we've built the next generation squawkbox. When I was a trader back in the day we used to use one of those old school squawk-boxes connected to the S&P Futures pit…

Hi - What's the metric that you're looking at for growth?

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#28
post #23

Hi Michael, Aaron, My name's Aron and I'm building Wanderlust (www.wanderlust.ly): a travel website that shows where you could go based on how much you can spend and what you're interested in. Wanderlust provides users with a complete trip, including a destination, flight, and accommodation, as well as an overview of the best things to do and see during their stay in that particular destination - after which users ma…

How are you driving traffic to the site and what are your conversion metrics? Have you done face to face user tests with at least 5 random people? Do people have to book right at that time or do you give them the ability to save/share a booking?

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#29

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?

I'm not sure I understand what you're building. Is it a white label life insurance api to allow financial institutions to sell life insurance?
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