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Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #4

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Re: Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #4

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what would prevent us from accepting minors as our clients or lowering our commission? Both would be possible with the push of a button and some changes in our TOS. We probably won't do either and there are reasons for that. Just trying to dismiss this point. Interesting discussion overall...greetings from Hannes (CEO SkinBaron GmbH)

You are right, you could do that. It would mean some changes to your KYC flow, and probably also a few chats with the bank to stay compliant. Lowering comissions sure. I am not aware of your costbase but could be doable. Now that you are here, why do you charge so high fees? And what are your thougths about Netease looking towards the west?

NetEase's success will depend on their willingness to understand and adapt to EU mentality. There are many big failures of marketplaces that tried to expand to different continents, look at Rakuten's failed EU expansion for example. Also one of the reasons why we don't do an expansion to Asia or the US (yet).

So NetEase is the least of our worries for the future, macro factors and the success of CS:GO including Valve's strategic decisions with the game play a much bigger role than any competition in my opinion.

Why do we take high fees? We could obviously outsource employees and other expensive tasks to lower the cost base significantly, but it would not be needed. The margin is very good with our current cost basis already.

Raising our fees from 10 to 15 % was a decision made after OPskins and BitSkins both played themselves and went offline / took a pause. We had more inflow of users than we could handle. Now we can handle the inflow, but don't see a reduction from 15 to 10 % as the right decision to drive user growth. Of course if the market adapts as a whole and everyone takes a lower commission, we would have to do the same in the end.

Re: Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #4

#162
post #157

We are building Titipku ( https://titipku.com/ ) which is "Instacart" for local markets in Indonesia, where we help households to buy daily groceries from nearby local markets in their residence areas. The Covid 19 has made people unable to buy their daily needs from local markets, meanwhile merchants in local markets are also suffering and need help to sell their goods. We solved this by helping to on board all merc…

I'm from Malaysia and I once tried to do something very similar. What makes this better than other services like Foodpanda, Grab, and HappyFresh? What does Titipku do better? Also what's your policy on non-halal groceries in the app? One of the things that put me off was seeing pork and alcohol on the front page, which implies it might get mixed with halal deliveries. Titipku implies that it buys "anything".

We have feature that customer can order many products from multiple merchants in the local market. This order is treated as one order. We give the sign for customer to inform which products that labelled as non halal. Thanks

Re: Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #4

#163

We are Ali and Omair of Abhi ( http://abhi.com.pk/ ). We are a financial wellness platform in Pakistan, focusing on providing early wage access to the salaried class. Most employees in Pakistan live paycheck to paycheck, not having savings for emergencies or random bills. Many pay their bills late, as payroll disbursement often does not coincide with bill cycles, incurring hefty payment fees. Fewer than 20% of the po…

Out of curiosity, does your revenue stay in Pakistan, or do you transfer it to a bank in the USA or elsewhere? I find it interesting I can use Wise to send money to Pakistan, but not from Pakistan. Just wondering if y’all have a similar challenge and/or how your deal with it.

Re: Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #4

#164

We are Ali and Omair of Abhi ( http://abhi.com.pk/ ). We are a financial wellness platform in Pakistan, focusing on providing early wage access to the salaried class. Most employees in Pakistan live paycheck to paycheck, not having savings for emergencies or random bills. Many pay their bills late, as payroll disbursement often does not coincide with bill cycles, incurring hefty payment fees. Fewer than 20% of the po…

Out of curiosity, does your revenue stay in Pakistan, or do you transfer it to a bank in the USA or elsewhere? I find it interesting I can use Wise to send money to Pakistan, but not from Pakistan. Just wondering if y’all have a similar challenge and/or how your deal with it.

Yes the revenue stays in Pakistan There are restrictions on outward remittance from Pakistan except for special cases.A large remittance from a company account requires permission from the central bank. Hope this answers your question.

Re: Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #4

#165
post #10

We’re Aditya and Karan, the co-founders of Warrant ( https://warrant.dev/ ). We build APIs and infrastructure to help developers implement authorization and access control in their apps. Implementing flexible authorization that grows with your application is difficult. Many products only need authentication early on but eventually require authorization; however, adding complex authorization to a mature, high usage pr…

This looks really great! Would have loved something like this a couple of years ago before rolling our own, this would have saved so much time and effort.

Borrowing a lot of LaunchDarkly's playbook for feature flagging will serve you well here. Server Sent Events and providing a self host-able "relay proxy"[1] will be extremely valuable in terms of perf and redundancy.

[1] https://github.com/launchdarkly/ld-relay

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