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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

#111

Post by chejazi »

akharris wrote: post #91
chejazi wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've had around 2.8k signups so far (launched in October). We have about 200 users active per day. I just checked and 89 of them have been active in all previous 5 days. We have a few outspoken believers in the concept (< 10). We just solicited feedback from our base and got only 20 responses, so probably could do better there.

Got it - is it growing? How quickly?

Just generated this graph:

http://imgur.com/iqnaGem

We had 38 signups yesterday, grew ~44% in the last 30 days.

EDIT, mathfail: grew 79% in the last 30 days.

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#112

Post by mwseibel »

tyre wrote: post #105
mwseibel wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

1) That is a better description - although I feel like this only describes a small set of things that a government does - is this just for constituent services? Is that a small or big part of the day to day work of a local government?

2) cool

3) cool

4) very cool

5) cool

7) Good

RE: YC - you guys should apply - email me at michael@ycombinator.com - this is a space I'm very interested in (I'm a poli sci major) and I think you have a good shot at getting into the summer batch

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#113

Post by akharris »

seeingfurther wrote: post #71
akharris wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you make money per client? Why are you artificially constraining that? Growth != loss of trust reputation if you have a good product that your users trust and want.

We're learning. Move fast & break shit doesn't work on Wall St. We knew how to build the best financial sentiment NLP in the world, but we had no clue about the space we would eventually sell into. It's cautious, slow to act, skeptical, very sophisticated and secretive. We had to find a client who knew exactly what to do with our data without any handholding and was a bit forward thinking, even experimental in that t…

Did they also sign a paying contract with you? That's the best of all :).

I agree with you that you can't just break things when you're working with financial firms. That doesn't mean you have to artificially constrain growth. It's probably a matter of degree, and I don't have a good enough sense of where you sit to have a more informed opinion.

How are you actually constraining yourself? Are you keeping out users who want in? Are you limiting the number of companies to whom you are trying to sell?

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#115

Post by sashakozak »

We’re building the first in its kind ads/promotion barter platform: http://appstore.com/postforpostforinstagram it allows you to find peers in social networks and exchange shoutouts, e.g. promote each other on Instagram, so that both participants of the deal get additional followers for free, and grow together.

It is known as #sfs #s4s #shareforshare, over 150m associated hashtags accross major apps. It is especially popular among professional and millenial influencers in the low/mid segments (e.g. 1K-100K IG followers). Due to sfs’ viral nature, our influencer base turned out to grow a lot faster than traditional influencer/brand marketplaces – this could make us a lot bigger and better place to buy/sell influencer ads than all these 120+ identical marketplaces in the list: https://angel.co/influencer-marketing-2

The influencer ads are like the hottest advertising trend of the upcoming years :) We see we’re up to something great here and start thinking how we get the biggest piece of the pie in the long term. In order to sustain this product strategy competition-wise we’ve even submitted Patent App for the concept 'Advertising Barter in Social Networks'.

…though what’d be a lot more interesting, I just realized an hour ago: rather than compete with all of them, try to create interface layer – build API for them, etc. I would like to discuss this – would be great to hear your recommendations/roadmap thoughts mb, other than ‘getting big enough first’

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#116

Post by zbruhnke »

akharris wrote: post #94
zbruhnke wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way we've figured out so far is really learning from a failed past experience. We built a product in the past which was a kind of Yodlee or Plaid competitor ( http://spout.co ) and learned alot of what consumers cared about along the way while never hitting an actual nerve with clients who were willing to pay us money. I think we started like most people would here, by partnering with existing banks. So we have a…

That seems like a pretty good way to start getting relationships with customers. How is it going? What have you learned from seeing how they use your product?

Well since we started with the pilots I’ll go there first. They progressed very quickly at first. One meeting turned into three which turned into 5 more and then we actually got wireframes and mockups made. And then everything seems to go into super slow-mo.

When that happened with one bank we used the first relationship to leverage into a second one with another large bank, after going through a near identical process we realized that big banks all move much slower than we can (even the ones that claim they can move very quickly).

At that point we started pursuing relationships with smaller banks and those seem to be significantly faster albeit still very slow in comparison to a startup.

The most recent revelation with the bill pay stuff has literally been over the course of the last 7-10 days because we threw out what we thought was a hairbrain idea to buy a small bank to an investor we knew well.

He got excited and offered to fund the entire deal if we could find one that we thought could work well.

That kind of kicked ideas into hyperdrive about what we could build to attract users now instead of waiting, and the tool to identify bills within emails was thought up and began progress on just so us and some of our friends can try it.

It’s not a launched product yet, but its close to something we could stick in the chrome store as an extension and see the feedback we get.

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#117

Post by matisoffn »

AbdulBahajaj wrote: post #99
mwseibel wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

We mainly have two questions. 1) Once we launch how do you sell your product to get the first 50 users. Our best guess is to use ads channels like google ads. 2) How do you approach figuring out problems that users have. The way we are approaching this problem right now is by building features that we wanted previously. We would also appreciate it if you have any additional advise.

You got a user here, definitely need something like this.

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#118

Post by akharris »

chejazi wrote: post #111
akharris wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Got it - is it growing? How quickly?

Just generated this graph: http://imgur.com/iqnaGem We had 38 signups yesterday, grew ~44% in the last 30 days. EDIT, mathfail: grew 79% in the last 30 days.

Cool. Is your transaction volume growing at the same rate?

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#119

Post by kartikkumar »

akharris wrote: post #107
kartikkumar wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yea that's essentially the path that we're trying to take. We are logging all the search queries for which we don't have product listings and aggregating that to show to suppliers.

We actually switched from the idea of charging users to charging suppliers because a bunch of suppliers told us directly that they'd pay us a 10-15% provision for every sale we bring them. I've asked the suppliers I've directly spoken with what they'd wish for if they could wave a magic wand and all of them basically said more sales.

I guess I'm maybe answering my own question, but to fake the marketplace, should we concentrate for a while on just being resellers for a couple of suppliers to earn the trust? We've tried to avoid that to convince users that we're neutral in the marketplace.

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#120

Post by [deleted] »

mwseibel wrote: post #55
eckho28 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, I should have mentioned, the main thing that differentiates us from Meadow is that we actually handle the marijuana product in-house as opposed to being purely a tech platform. If we were a pure tech play, then I think it wouldn't be an issue, but what is your perspective on an actual marijuana company like us in the tech space. (As far as engineering goes- I, with the help of an ex-PayPal engineer, built the…

hmm - yes that is much much harder - why do you want to handle the product in house?

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