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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

#121

Post by userium »

akharris wrote: post #88
userium wrote: 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…

Starting a new reply thread because we nested too far. I think my biggest fear is the exact thing we just talked about: frequency. Creating long term customer engagement is super hard. I think it's also hard for recruiting cos to build distinct and valuable brands as opposed to becoming commoditized resume lead gen. One question I had on hitting the site was "what is the main purpose here?" It has the feel of a conte…

This was very useful, thanks! We will try to improve our message, figure out how to provide more value for our users and recruiters, and in the long run explore how to build a valuable brand.

Many thanks, Aaron!

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#122

Post by jamesk_au »

akharris wrote: post #109
jamesk_au wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

We have at least a small user base in every state, and also a small user base amongst students who started with us and went on to be accepted into universities and colleges, but to date we haven't invested significant time or effort into growing either. We've been too focused on trying to work out what the business model will be at the end of the day. Would you recommend a different approach?

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#123

Post by akharris »

sashakozak wrote: post #115

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…

Cool - feel free to ask your question :).

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#124

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?

[deleted]

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#125

Post by samstave »

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…

I was thinking about this recently - there is a need for a meta banking service - basically a p2p banking service much like Venmo -- but also allowing for vendors.

The actual funds can still be housed in a traditional bank - but you can still have an account or CC number which you would give a vendor.

Whenever the vendor attempts to charge your CC number the amount goes on escrow hold only in the meta-space until you the user will auth it to actually come out of your account.

It sits between the real bank and the vendor and you and gives one more control over their money.

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#126

Post by Headhanchoarod »

Hey Michael and Aaron,

I'm currently working on Workmand. An on-demand labor service for businesses. Our biggest struggle is acquiring users. What strategy(s) would you recommend to get the traffic to use our product.

Also what's the best way to learn from your first early customers to know what features to build and focus on, so that users love your product. Since those are our two biggest focus for now.

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#127

Post by chejazi »

akharris wrote: post #118
chejazi wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Here's a graph of the transaction volume:

http://imgur.com/ScNqb4I

The big spike in the beginning was before we implemented fraud checks (eg, users directing botnets at the shortlinks).

Since then, the transaction volume has been growing at a similar rate, at 70% growth in the past 30 days (compared to 79% user growth).

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#128

Post by akharris »

kartikkumar wrote: post #119
akharris wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sounds like you did answer it yourself, which is awesome. I actually like your approach of aggregating and sending it out to the suppliers. You could send it to all of them and tell them they have a limited time to respond, and then creating a ranking system based on who is best at meeting customer demands.

That way, you have a preferred list that gets more business by virtue of the fact that they're better. That's fair to all the suppliers, gives them something to work towards, and makes your customers happy.

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#129

Post by seeingfurther »

akharris wrote: post #113
seeingfurther wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…

Yes they did ;-)

No we are not keeping out clients that want our data. But there are precious few clients that proactively seek data sets like our first client did with us. We are however (up until very recently) retraining outreach. We needed to encourage proper academic research which took time to acquire, create solid marketing collateral which took time to get right and even understand what clients wanted to see, we needed to harden our infrastructure, improve the technology, and we needed to understand what client concerns would be and how they could use our data. It's like having electricity, knowing it's valuable, but not knowing how to get your clients to use it to turn on a light bulb. If we screwed up at any stage it would burn our reputation. The sentiment space is similar to the blogging space. Literally almost anyone can hang out a shingle, use generic software and start a sentiment business. Just like blogging. It is, however, extremely hard to get right and our clients know this.

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#130

Post by zbruhnke »

samstave wrote: post #125
zbruhnke wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I was thinking about this recently - there is a need for a meta banking service - basically a p2p banking service much like Venmo -- but also allowing for vendors. The actual funds can still be housed in a traditional bank - but you can still have an account or CC number which you would give a vendor. Whenever the vendor attempts to charge your CC number the amount goes on escrow hold only in the meta-space until you…

Thats exactly the idea that got us to this point Sam.

To be honest we had no intent of sharing this much publicly before there was more to play with out there but we couldn't pass up getting some advice from Aaron and Michael as we've been going through this process and trying to figure out more pain points for the end users.

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