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Launch HN: CommodityAI (YC W24) – Shipment management for commodity traders

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Re: Launch HN: CommodityAI (YC W24) – Shipment management for commodity traders

#41

Post by KyleManuel »

singhrac wrote: post #27
KyleManuel wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our first few customers are agriculture based. Sugar, Coffee, Cocoa and more things like this that have similar distribution supply chains. We believe we have the tools and expertise to expand to energy and metal in the future. They are much different, but we believe with the tools we have developed, they can be repurposed quickly to support a wide range of commodities.

I used to trade those products, but futures only. It sounds like this is software for physical traders, so I can't offer much in the way of feedback, but wish you luck. A question based on my past experience: are you required to report transactions on your platform, and if not, would you publish some aggregated data anyway? Just curious because I always heard physical volume was always several orders of magnitude sma…

Today we are not doing transactions on our platform.

Today our tools come into use immediately after a contract is closed and handed off to operations.

It gives a single place for traders and operations people to view and manage their shipments and related documents.

Re: Launch HN: CommodityAI (YC W24) – Shipment management for commodity traders

#42

Post by Svdc »

alexpetralia wrote: post #16

My opinion is that this is not really a tech problem, this is a business problem. Will the traders at Cargill, Vitol, Exxon, Trafigura, Glencore buy it? Do they want to take the time to "learn" another tool? Does it "just work", without any "let me get back to my product people"? Also, of course, every commodity market is completely different and has a whole web of intricate details in logistics, regulation, product,…

This is exactly one of the main issues if not the biggest issue of B2B products.

>> Will the traders at Cargill, Vitol, Exxon, Trafigura, Glencore buy it? Do they want to take the time to "learn" another tool?

I worked for this company that was built on a consortium of the biggest players, and adoption requires a lot of effort. Not only on the relationships you have to build, either by the account management team or by a product person, and trust also plays a big role - a lot of babysitting and support is required.

But trust me when i say that if they find that "yet another tool" provides the time-savings and the cost savings they are after, then they will use it. It will take take, which for most companies is not an option, but patience is key.

My experience also tells me that what one company is after does not mean it is translated easily to another. A Trader in one company might be very open to new tools and new business processes, others not so much. I would also say that if a specific role has so many nuances from company to company, that will also be true from commodity to commodity.

On another note, we had in the past product specialist to help on the product development side, and they had come from very robust backgrounds from logistics operations. But what they knew was very specific to how the companies they worked before operated and that didn't resonate sometimes for other clients.

Its a difficult industry to penetrate, smaller to medium sized companies are more likely to adopt disrupt technologies, while bigger ones tend to take longer.

Re: Launch HN: CommodityAI (YC W24) – Shipment management for commodity traders

#43

Post by Svdc »

secondcoming wrote: post #21

Just curious as to how well AI and OCR can handle locale issues in documents? E.g. is 1.000 is 1000 in German. There was also the famous Xerox scan bug.

We just had that same bug when we used a conventional ML engine to OCR a document. Thats very common on quantities. The new LLMs allow for prompt engineering, so we were able to solve it.

Re: Launch HN: CommodityAI (YC W24) – Shipment management for commodity traders

#46

Post by bradj »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #12
KyleManuel wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have had this thought was well. It's tough to go into a vertical with software because you end up with tools that make it easier to get an edge, and then why not just trade yourself? Generally, we just enjoy building software and it suits our personalities better. But we do believe that it is a good benchmark for our product to think, "could we use our tools to have a better edge in the market if we were a trade h…

Right, fair enough. It does seem like some of the very big trading houses (glencore, trafi etc) could be built from scratch with a modern stack.

I really doubt that, trade capital and relationships are what define those houses, not their tech stack. Some of them are already pretty advanced from an in-house development perspective and could compete with the best of commercial-ready in the market trading platforms and data sources.

Re: Launch HN: CommodityAI (YC W24) – Shipment management for commodity traders

#48

Post by danielmarkbruce »

bradj wrote: post #46
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, fair enough. It does seem like some of the very big trading houses (glencore, trafi etc) could be built from scratch with a modern stack.

I really doubt that, trade capital and relationships are what define those houses, not their tech stack. Some of them are already pretty advanced from an in-house development perspective and could compete with the best of commercial-ready in the market trading platforms and data sources.

Yup, I should have worded that a bit more carefully. It would appear to me that they could be rebuilt, but still need the key ingredients of a trading house.
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