Launch HN: InstaKin (YC S21) - Help immigrants to manage tasks in home countries

Hi HN, we’re Yasir and Zain introducing InstaKin to you (https://www.instakin.com). We’re a platform to help immigrant communities manage tasks in their home countries.

Every year, 250M migrants send $550B back home to pay for tasks for themselves and their families. Migrants far away from their native countries are dependent on family friends or unknown vendors to make decisions on their behalf. What many folks don’t know is that it is common for these funds to get misused, or for migrants to send funds to a vendor back home and receive poor service or get cheated.

Zain and I are originally from Pakistan and have been living in the US and Europe for 12 years. We have regularly sent funds back home to pay for tasks for ourselves and family members. Whether it is for paying home bills or a home renovation, we have done it all – just like millions of other migrants in the US – and experienced all the problems: funds getting misused, vendors pushing for advance payments and then disappearing…you name it and we have seen it. This got us thinking about a platform where we could connect migrants with vendors back home — something to reduce misuse of funds and ensure that vendors perform tasks as agreed.

We talked to hundreds of migrants from India, Bangladesh, Philippines, Uganda, and more, and found that lack of access to reliable vendors and misuse of remittance funds back home are common problems. Just last week, we came across a migrant from Senegal living in the USA who mentioned the same challenge.

Initially we operated on WhatsApp to receive orders from migrant customers and also get their feedback. Thousands of migrants contacted us within the first few months of launching our startup. That validation convinced us to build a full product—a solution for migrants built by migrants. We have focused on two key features: (1) provide migrants with access to services back home, and (2) pay vendors based on milestones to eliminate payments fraud.

Historically, companies focusing on the migrant community have pushed for making it easier to send remittances back home easily though even today it can cost between 2-8% just to remit funds. Our key insight, though, is that money transfer is not enough. It is only transactional. What’s needed is to ensure last-mile fulfillment. With InstaKin, migrants don’t send funds back home ‘blindly’ hoping that things will get done — you pay for fulfillment directly.

Migrants use us to do things like: hiring a ‘runner’ to manage last-mile tasks for their aging parents back home; connecting to a vendor for verification and attestation of educational documents; ordering personalized gifts and having them delivered; paying contractors for home renovation projects.

We started off with helping Pakistani migrants but our goal is to become the platform of choice for migrants globally. The best part is that while we were reaching out to Pakistani migrants, we started getting requests from other communities (Indian and Bangladeshi migrants).

We’ve been surprised at how strong immigrant networks are globally. When we launched, we thought we would receive orders from migrants in a specific city or location only. Turns out that is not true. We have had referrals from all over the world (example: a migrant customer living in London referred us to a migrant living in Chicago who referred us to a migrant living in Singapore). We hope what we are building will help migrants not just from one country but from everywhere in days to come.

We would love to hear back from the community! If you are a migrant yourself, please share your experiences with us and feel free to reach out.

My partner and I were recently discussing this very problem. She has extended family in rural Vietnam and she is remitting a substantial amount of money to pay for their healthcare: it would be more cost effective to use health insurance but arranging it from overseas is very difficult due to bureaucracy, literacy etc.

We discussed possible solutions -- hiring someone local who is literate, versed in health insurance etc. -- to manage the process for her, and so InstaKin is exactly what we need, but healthcare (for example) is an ongoing process and needs ad-hoc support when filing claims. Do you see InstaKin as capable of supporting this sort of need, or is it for more transactional and easy to validate needs? Do you have a long term vision that better supports this type of need?

Thanks,

Thank you for highligting a key problem area. As a new entity, we believe that we first have to build trust with migrant communities by helping them with more standardised everyday tasks. As we build trust, we will onboard vendors for healthcare related services.

We have already helped customers who needed access to at-home care for their parents back home but that was more on an ad-hoc basis. In the long term, we plan to standardise access to such service as well.

I think I get what you're going for and see some value but my gut reaction is that the person receiving the remittance and who is on the ground probably has more local knowledge/context to decide what to do with the money than you or the person sending it (with exceptions like if they have diminished mental faculties). In my understanding, this is why charities like Givedirectly which does direct cash transfers to the worlds poorest people, have focused on this approach - because a donor (or remitter) has less knowledge and less at stake than the person receiving or purchasing services. I guess my main complaint is that it just feels really paternalistic.

This. If free-marketeers actually believed people were rational economic actors they would fully support direct cash payments.