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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

#61

Post by wjg »

akharris wrote: post #36
wjg wrote: post #5

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 autom…

Hi Bill - How many people are using supertask right now?

Just one: me. I've been in stealth mode and I basically "finished" building the website within the last week and have done no advertising (in fact this is the first time I've talked about it online). That leads to the obvious question of how to acquire more customers for a Saas product (which ties to my accelerator question). I'm hoping to gain some insight on the product's broad viability from this post and maybe a ShowHN. People who I talk to in person love the idea and are enthusiastic but none are really in a position to buy it. Thanks for the reply!

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#62

Post by [deleted] »

zbruhnke wrote: post #21
akharris wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/secu…

[deleted]

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#64

Post by ismdubey »

Hi Michael and Aaron, We started as a digital health company powered by data science. Gradually, what we have discovered is that a lot of our competitors in digital health want to use our data science engagement platform. Now, we have two questions: (a) should we continue doing the weight loss or pivot fully towards a data science engagement platform company ? (b) If we should switch to data science engagement platform, should we focus on health or should we go towards all consumer apps?

Thanks, Ashu

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#65

Post by tyre »

mwseibel wrote: post #52
tyre wrote: post #42

Our team is building SaaS software for local governments (CRM + constituent service ticketing). We have users who love us in major cities across the country, all of whom are paying us. When we start talking with VCs and angels, everyone sounds good on paper. Innovative, risk-taking, focused on building long term companies, visionaries, mission-driven, etc. So we start a dialogue and answer all of their questions (we…

The fundraising process of often about creating leverage over investors. Companies need to think about raising VC rounds (and large angel rounds) as a reward for creating a growing product in a multi-billion dollar market. Also many companies screw up fundraising by running the process in serial vs in parallel. Here is a mini guide for a 2 minute pitch - why don't you fill it out so I can see where you are (each answ…

Thank you, that's helpful.

1) Romulus (https://romulusapp.com) is a CRM and ticketing cloud service for local governments. Think SalesForce + ZenDesk for constituent services.

2) There are 90,000 local governments, each with 10-15 departments that interface directly with constituents and need our software as it is today. ARR per customer (department) is ~$9k.

3) 50-100% MoM growth for the past 6 months. Sales is focused on penetrating new cities, then we've had great success with referrals from existing customers.

4) Building a better product isn't the hard part, since "best government software" is a super low bar. Innovation is in the business model — avoid RFPs, find one decision maker, lower CAC with growth through referrals — which means our growth engine is exactly the same as startups in other sectors.

5) Per-user recurring subscription. Right now $40/user/month, lots of room for expansion there.

6) Founders were early engineers at Gusto, so we know how to bring delightful products to unsexy problems and build a mission-driven culture. We are passionate about solving this particular problem and have worked for over a year to de-risk the business before asking for investment.

7) $2,000,000 to get to $1m ARR, at which point we raise a Series A.

P.S.

I don't think of fundraising as a reward or a goal in and of itself. It is a means for us to achieve our potential. We hold ourselves to a high bar for product and impact. If potential investors recognize that, cool, but we're not in this to be on TechCrunch.

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#66

Post by MCProMatt »

mwseibel wrote: post #59
MCProMatt wrote: post #46

Hey Michael, Aaron! We're working on a streaming platform that lets viewers interact with the games streamers are playing in realtime, think TwitchPlaysPokemon but built for any game, a visual control set and sub-second stream delay. It's a bit of a foreign concept for a lot of folks that don't know about collaborative gameplay, and I'm curious what direction we should go about our landing page. Show streams? Talk ab…

I went to your site and I am watching this stream: https://beam.pro/Noplix - how do I participate in the game play?

That stream doesn't have interactive controls enabled, try heading to one of the streams labeled as interactive from the home page.

You might need to log in to get interacting, you can use: User: testaccount2 Pass: DummyPassword

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#67

Post by akharris »

reiderrider wrote: post #57
akharris wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It allows any website with traffic (ideal targets are banks and financial institutions) to sell life insurance on their website using our JavaScript web app. A BOFA user cannot currently buy life insurance on Bofa.com, but can by going into the bank. A bank could offer life insurance online via our white labeled modal and take their users from getting a quote to e signing the policy. We handle the entire process with…

Ok - so you could approach this in a few different ways. Here are two:

One way is to try to sell big enterprise contracts to big banks. This is really hard for startups to do, unless you have a product you know they really want, have deep connections or experience selling to banks, and have all the compliance and security requirements in place.

Another way to try this is to sell to smaller sites. They're more likely to adopt quickly, but you'll need to make sure that you maintain quality, are generating enough traffic and conversions to be worthwhile after the rev share, and don't devolve into something that appears scammy.

Do you know who actually wants what you are building? How have you figured that out?

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#68

Post by mwseibel »

dynofuz wrote: post #58

Building a product search engine ( https://percht.com ) Percht has a few goals: 1) give you the lowest price for any product online 2) develop an assistant that’ll buy you whatever at x price automatically 3) build an unbiased gameified community around shopping What do you think are the biggest issues with the approach many other shopping search engines have taken that have prevented them from beating entrenched mon…

Personally, I prefer to go to Amazon over shopping comparison sites for a couple reasons: I already have an amazon account so I don't have to create an account and put type in my cc info and I know amazon can ship quickly. I wonder if you can build a shopping comparison site that holds my cc and shipping info so that I can literally check out on the shopping comparison page...

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#70

Post by corybrown »

zbruhnke wrote: 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…

This sounds great. What type of fees are you considering?
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