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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

#41

Post by akharris »

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…

Yeah, the capital requirements are painful, as is the entire process behind getting a charter.

How are you figuring out what people actually want? What have you built and how have you started getting it into the hands of customers?

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#42

Post by tyre »

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 don't do RFPs, we have a single decision maker as a buyer, our background is in payroll so we know compliance + security, our sales cycle is not measured in months, etc.)

Turns out, probably 60% are just afraid of government because it is an untested market or sounds scary.

Question(s):

How do we screen for _genuinely_ visionary or mission-driven VCs/angels?

Who would you recommend we talk to?

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#43

Post by mwseibel »

kuisch wrote: post #40
mwseibel wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you driving traffic to the site and what are your conversion metrics? Have you done face to face user tests with at least 5 random people? Do people have to book right at that time or do you give them the ability to save/share a booking?

In terms of driving traffic, our SEO/SEA strategy so far has been considerably difficult to pull-of given our limited resources in light of the incredible budget of the traditional OTAs. FB/Twitter advertising has been somewhat better. Additionally, SEO/SEA is something that we feel will be much more relevant for the parties in the market that cater to those users that already know where they would like to travel to…

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?

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#44

Post by akharris »

MichaelFan wrote: post #38

Hi Aeron & Michael, we are building pastrynow.com: an easy kit that helps people to instantly start baking Michelin-worthy french pastries. No special utensil, no additional ingredient and no previous experience in cooking required. After many iterations we recently built a kit our users really love. We just started to have users talking to their friends about our latest kit! https://squareup.com/market/pastrynow/tar…

What have you done to increase your user base? How have you measured your experiments? What do your users say when you talk to them?

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#45

Post by Johnie »

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…

I'm curious about your model versus something like Aspiration [1] that is partnering with Radius Bank? Do you need to own a bank to provide the service?

[1] https://www.aspiration.com/summit

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#46

Post by MCProMatt »

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 about the interactive portion of the platform? A mix of both (what we're doing right now)

https://beam.pro/

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#47

Post by eckho28 »

mwseibel wrote: post #22
eckho28 wrote: post #16

Hi. My name is Stephen, and I built CleverTree - an on-demand medical marijuana delivery service based in Sacramento. I'm curious about your thoughts on fundraising in the marijuana space. I haven't really tried (except applying to YC and 500 Startups last year), because it seems like most big Angels/VCs are still too risk-adverse to the industry. So far we've been running for a years and have built revenues up to ar…

I think there are angels that are willing to invest - https://getmeadow.com/ is a YC company and they were able to raise an angel round - I think its helpful to look like a typical tech startup with strong engineering on the product team and a launched product before you start to fundraise.

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 on-demand platform from the ground up ourselves)

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#48

Post by akharris »

userium wrote: post #37
akharris wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you have a great problem. One of the funny things about building products is that you often don't know who your users are going to be until you actually release. This is why we tell companies to launch as fast as possible, and not spend too much time thinking about what might happen before they have any information about how users interact with what they've built. In your case, your company's goal is to h…

Thanks Aaron, yes our goal is to 1) help people get jobs and 2) help companies to increase diversity of their workforce. Another issue is how to retain users. Once a user finds a new job, and is not looking for a new one for a while, how do we keep them coming back to the website? I guess with great career content? Do you have any other ideas on how to keep users coming back?

This is one of the really hard parts about companies focused on hiring - your frequency of use is super low, which makes repeated engagement tough. Content is one way to do it, but this is the kind of thing you'll need to experiment with quite a bit to get right.

One of the cool parts here is that I don't think anyone has really figured this out over the long run, which means there's a massive opportunity up for grabs.

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#49

Post by akharris »

seeingfurther wrote: post #35
akharris wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi - What's the metric that you're looking at for growth?

# of clients... and everything that would go into increasing that number, fundraising, head count, marketing.

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.

Re: HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

#50

Post by chejazi »

Hi YC partners,

Founder of https://credhot.com here. We're a link shortener that uses interstitial advertising to make money. We rev-share with people who share content using our shortener, so they get paid based on their traffic.

People know about us in the Bitcoin community because we pay our users in Bitcoin. Bitcoin has benefits when it comes to microtransactions, so it's not just a marketing strategy. We think that sharing content via our service can help bring Bitcoin to the masses. ChangeTip is already doing this via the tipping model; we want to drive adoption with advertising.

First talking point: From your perspective, does paying users in Bitcoin help or hurt the viability of the idea?

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