HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris • Hacker News Board

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#101

Post by mwseibel » Fri, Jan 22, 2016, 8:05 PM UTC

Headhanchoarod wrote: post #96

Hey Michael and Aaron, thank you for doing this. A few questions I'd love to hear your answer. What advice would you give to yourself at 21 for launching and building your own startup? Well being in college or working your day job, what's the most important thing(s) to work on to get your company bootstrapped to take on Full time? What's your best advice for those applying to the Fellowship program. Thanks!

Team team team - make sure you are working with 1-3 smart and passionate people who you are friends with. The more technical team often the better. Next step - build the simplest and easiest MVP possible and launch.

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#102

Post by pramodliv1 » Fri, Jan 22, 2016, 8:05 PM UTC

pimdewitte wrote: post #13

Thanks so much for this. We built Upfit ( https://upfit.co ), an on-demand fitness streaming app for at home workouts, ran by video creators. We launched on Android & iOS with Upfit and are currently tackling other industries with the same platform. Think about it like a social Netflix for X. We would love to chat! - Pim from Whitespell (Pim at Whitespell dot com)

I tried signing up on the web using my email and password (I don't trust Facebook) and it did not work. So I refreshed the page, by which time I'd forgotten my username. It would help if you have other social logins.

Why require the user to signup in the first place? I was reminded of a talk by Neil Patel, "It's like asking, Will you marry me as soon as you see someone". (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRnsuzcfHr0)

Why not embed a video similar to this 10 minute video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7w6M4bOXJ_s, ask the user follow along, record their own video using their phone / Webcam, share it with friends and use this data to improve your marketing, all without signing up.

As a potential customer, I miss the following features on YouTube and I would pay for and recommend Upfit if you address:

1. Is this exercise safe considering my medical conditions?

2. Is my technique correct / improving? (Feedback from experts)

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#103

Post by akharris » Fri, Jan 22, 2016, 8:07 PM UTC

dvt wrote: post #77

akharris wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi - funding for hardware is certainly difficult, but there are quite a few investors who do it, and it is easier than it was even six months ago. If I were you, I probably wouldn't determine whether or not I wanted to focus on the company based on the perceived ease/difficulty of raising money, but on whether or not I thought I were solving a big problem with big potential. I don't know enough about the market you a…

Thanks for your reply! The largest cheating scandal (that happened about a year ago), had $250k up for grabs[1]. With that said, the exact number is difficult to quantify, as if the cheater is successful, then no one is the wiser. [1] http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/11/25/csgo-esports-communit...

Got it. You might need to think about the size of the market that you're targeting. When I think about what makes a company or product interesting as a startup, I try to think about markets that will expand over time because of what the company does - and not what the market looks like today.

That means that a market doesn't have to be large now, but it has to have the possibility of growing to be something significant. Do you think that solving this problem is going to be worth hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in ten years?

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#104

Post by matisoffn » Fri, Jan 22, 2016, 8:08 PM UTC

akharris wrote: post #67

reiderrider wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Answering for @reiderrider, the bulk of life insurance is still sold face-to-face and purchased from an agent or agency local to the consumer.

Not only could big banks + financial institutions plug in our js to sell life insurance online (from quoting -> application -> signature & medical exam), but also smaller agents/agencies that do business locally could accept online apps. Currently, agents meet in person and/or have plenty of phone calls with a client to figure out what coverage they need and then they sell the policy.

With our product, agents can direct their clients to their website which will walk the consumer through the process.

The Stripe analogy makes sense because Stripe & PayPal make it so easy for companies to accept payments online via their HTML button/JS script, which is what we are trying to do here. They also (both cos) provide great dashboards to the consumer (an insurance agent/agency for us) to track their data (which is in the pipeline for us).

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#105

Post by tyre » Fri, Jan 22, 2016, 8:08 PM UTC

mwseibel wrote: post #86

tyre wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

1) You need to be more clear about what the product does - Ticketing cloud service / CRM are jargon - how would you describe it to your mother and father? 2) When sizing the market you need to either go top down or bottom up? How much money is spent by governments on this type of software per year right now or if every target government in america was using your product how much revenue would you generate? 3) 50%-100…

1) When someone calls into a local government department (elected official, public works, utilities, parks & rec), the staff needs a centralized system to track their issue, collaborate with everyone who can help solve it, and identify important issues across the municipality.

2) Bottoms up: $3bn in ARR as our pricing stands today, (90k gov * 15 depts/gov * 5 users/dept * $480ARR/user). Our customers keep saying our pricing is cheap so we need to revisit that — 2016 goal to expand ARPU 50%. That's without building anything else, but we have numerous higher-value expansion points in mind with one starting pilot phase.

3) Notable customers in Oakland, Chicago, and Miami. Last I checked we were at ~2k MRR but we just closed a few this week so I'll have to check. (Don't worry, we have a great accountant ;)) EDIT: Just added San Antonio

4) Penetrate toughest markets first (see #3) to build reputation before moving down. Target early-adopters in those markets then leverage those relationships to expand (localgov is a tightknit community.) 2/3 local government leaders hit retirement from 2014-2018, so a new wave of tech-savvy leadership is taking the reigns.

5) Right now we are seeing 7 on average, but we think 4-5 is more typical.

7) We'd hit profitability before $1m so $2-4 is reasonable. We're a small team and CAC is pretty small. Less about the number than proving a repeatable growth engine that can turn capital into many times that capital.

Bonus) Yes, when we didn't know what the hell we were doing :) That was about a year ago. I agree we shouldn't have gotten in.

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#106

Post by mwseibel » Fri, Jan 22, 2016, 8:10 PM UTC

kuisch wrote: post #80

mwseibel wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your cost for acquiring a booking from Facebook and how much money do you make from that booking? For your user testing - what was one part of the product that at least 3 people found confusing? Do you make account sign up painful?

So far the FB CPC hovers around $0.70. We need >200 users per flight booking. A hotel booking has not been made through our platform yet. Not much data has been collected though, seeing as we've only been live for 2 weeks. It might be important to note that, at this point, we're not so much interested in how much we make from the actual booking as much as we're interested in the conversion rate itself. We use the Exp…

Taking a look at the product here are a couple thoughts

1) You push me onto a landing page instead of right into the product - why?

2) The initial form you ask me to fill out is a bit intimidating - perhaps it can be broken up a bit

3) On the results page - its unclear at first what I'm supposed to click on - and you dont tell me anything about the flight or the hotel you've chosen for me

4) Results page loads slowly

5) No button to book trip

6) You are choosing a 1 star crappy hotel for me...

There is a lot of product refinement you can do to improve this experience / conversion rate

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#107

Post by akharris » Fri, Jan 22, 2016, 8:10 PM UTC

kartikkumar wrote: post #100

akharris wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a bigger problem with finding demand for parts, or with listed supply?

Supply listing is the bigger problem. Demand seems to be taking care of itself, right up to the big space agencies. As a side question, we're also not sure whether to grow the suppliers as quickly as we can by offering free listings, or to charge suppliers from the get go.

If you have a lot of demand, you should be able to go to parts listers and say "Hey! I've got money for you! Come get money by listing." Ok...not quite that simple, but that's a great carrot to use.

If that's not enough to get them to list, you might need to find another strategy. Is there something else that the suppliers really need, and don't have, that you could give them which would also give you access to up to date parts information?

You can also fake the marketplace, to some extent. If someone comes looking for a part you don't have, make sure you still take the request, and then go fill it manually. If you do this enough, you should be able to earn the trust of the suppliers, and get them to be more active participants.

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#108

Post by mwseibel » Fri, Jan 22, 2016, 8:11 PM UTC

tlawal87 wrote: post #82

Hi Aaron & Michael, There is a 20-year-backlog of life-saving therapies that are left sitting in university laboratories untested and 30 million Americans suffering from untreatable rare diseases who have no idea these potential cures exist. My best friend and I are developing a medical research discovery platform. We allow people passionate about a condition to discover, promote, and eventually fund cutting-edge res…

Why do you need to work with university administrators at all?

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#109

Post by akharris » Fri, Jan 22, 2016, 8:12 PM UTC

jamesk_au wrote: post #85

akharris wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What have your experiments looked like? How were you measuring them, and at what rate was your revenue growing? What's your current core metric, and what's been happening to it over the last few years?

One experiment involves offering a subscription service to online premium study notes. We measure number of subscribers, downloads, and revenue. Students who subscribe typically keep and use the subscription until they finish school: the biggest problem is the very low conversion rate in the first place. We know that students want study notes, because they download free notes from our site all the time, but very few…

Have you grown to other states?

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#110

Post by reiderrider » Fri, Jan 22, 2016, 8:12 PM UTC

akharris wrote: post #67

reiderrider wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Agreed. Smaller websites and every insurance agent that we've talked to say that they would love to have this and asking weekly if it is ready. We have not asked any large websites but their motivation is that it is extremely profitable with little financial resources required to implement (although it's a major decision to partner with a third party). Smaller customers will be good beta customers and we are happy to start there. We'll have great developer docs, beautiful UX, and vet the sites that can use it for quality. What are your suggestions to help us grow/afford our engineering team?