
HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris - akharris
Starting at 11 am PST today, Michael Seibel and I are going to do online office hours. If you&#x27;d like help with your startup, please post a top-level comment with a one or two sentence description of what you do and the first thing you&#x27;d like to talk about.<p>Update: We&#x27;re just going to try to answer as many questions as we can. Let&#x27;s get started!<p>Michael: hey folks really excited to meet as many people as possible and talk about startups!<p>Update: We&#x27;ve gotta run, but this was great. Thanks so much and enjoy the weekend.
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zbruhnke
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 "hey, PG&E wants you to pay $55.86, would you
like us to send that over now" when you respond they'll get your money but not
your actual account info.

Basically instead of using the typical system of handing out your actual
account numbers we generate an account number that works for only that vendor
and if that account number ever got stolen it wouldn't matter because its
locked down on a unique vendor or amount basis.

The main pain point for us right now that we'd like to talk about is re-
thinking savings and loans and what the largest consumer pain points are in
modern (or lack thereof) banking.

~~~
akharris
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
describing?

~~~
zbruhnke
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/secured payments could be the one to target first
because we think there is value in just being a great traditional savings and
loan bank. However, the main thing we're thinking through now is if this is a
big enough segment to gain real traction with consumers or if we need more of
a WOW product for mass adoption.

~~~
samstave
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.

~~~
zbruhnke
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.

~~~
samstave
Cn I contact you and give you all my personal pain points, I have actually
been thinking about this for months -- but only internally. I'd like to vent
and give you some context as to why.

Ill gladly sign an NDA - you actually dont need to tell me too much - but I'd
like to just brain dump on you in the ___hopes_ __that my issues will be
addressed by someone.

I want to opt out of the traditional banking system 100%.

~~~
zbruhnke
please email me ... no NDA needed - z@zbruhnke.com - would love to chat

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wjg
Hi Michael and Aaron,

I built Supertask ([http://supertask.co/](http://supertask.co/)) to make web
automation easier and more accessible. Supertask allows users to write
shareable, composable automations that make testing webapps and repeating
complicated workflows a breeze.

Automation scripts are written in a new intuitive language called Flytrap, and
are interpreted by a library called Flytrap.js
([https://docs.flytrap.io/](https://docs.flytrap.io/)). Each automation has
its own secure url and can be referenced by other scripts, allowing for code
re-use.

I'm curious as to your initial thoughts on the product and whether or not my
pricing model aligns with what you might expect. Pricing is hard!

Additionally, at this point I wonder about the opportunity cost of putting
effort into applying to/going through an accelerator (assuming I could even
get into one) since the product is basically built, and the most important
thing is gaining initial traction. I lean towards plowing ahead with trying to
gain customers. But obviously, it's a daunting road especially as a solo
founder with a 9-5.

I am in beta so no one is actually being charged right now.

Thanks for checking it out!

bill@supertask.co @supertaskco

~~~
samstave
Been looking for something like this!

Does it basically replace the need for Selenium.

Let me share this with my CI eng from my last co who was using a lot of
selenium to test the webapp for QA.

Thanks!

~~~
wjg
Thanks! That's exactly what I'm shooting for. It is meant to be a substitute
for Selenium while making it easier to create and share them! I appreciate the
reply and would love to hear your coworkers's feedback, good or bad!

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userium
Hi Michael and Aaron,

I'm the co-founder of StayInTech.com
([https://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 target audience
more clearly?

~~~
akharris
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 help people get jobs (it seems). As
long as you can do that, do it for every user that wants your help. You may
have to adapt your messaging to fit the broader base, but that's a good (if
hard) thing. If you find that widening your approach hurts your ability to get
people jobs, then you'll probably have to change things up.

~~~
userium
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?

~~~
akharris
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.

~~~
userium
Thanks again Aaron. Here are my last questions. :)

1) What are your biggest worries about companies focused on hiring? What type
of problems do you foresee for us in the future?

2) What was your initial reaction when visiting our website? Was there
something that annoyed or puzzled you?

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jamesk_au
I'm a co-founder of a website for Australian high school students. It's a
forum-based community where students help each other, share resources, and
make friends by bonding over the high school experience—especially for
students in their final year as they study for our equivalent of the SAT.

For the past couple of years, we’ve averaged more than 350k users, 500k
sessions, and 1.5mil page views per month (Google Analytics). Traffic peaks
every year during the final exam period and after the final results are
released, when the average session duration sometimes exceeds 8 minutes.

It’s a thriving community. Can it be a thriving business? Some of the big
obstacles to using traditional business models are:

(a) students don’t have much money;

(b) students really dislike ads; and

(c) advertisers apparently see better results from programmatic advertising
platforms than from direct campaigns with us.

We’ve experimented with things like selling premium notes and resources;
partnering with tutoring agencies; and running seminars, all of which appealed
to students, but small margins meant that revenue was very modest.

What other ways might there be to tap into the value that is inherent in a
community like this without detracting from the user experience? What else
should we be thinking about?

~~~
danieltillett
James I think you are focusing on the wrong market. Your potential paying
customers are not students, but their parents who have the money. One idea
might be to allow parents to track what their little darlings are doing on the
site. Another is to provide regular feedback (email, newsletter) to the
parents about how their children are progressing.

~~~
spike021
Not sure how things are where OP is located, but some parents may not be able
to afford something like this depending on their income.

If this works well integrated with school activity maybe it could be payable
through that?

~~~
danieltillett
The OP is in Australia like me and while there are lot of parents that can’t
afford to pay, there are lots of that could. The key here is to build your
business around the customers that can pay, not those that happen to use it.

One other idea might to try and partner with companies that are trying to lock
in young people. The obvious one is banks which are always trying to target
this age demographics. You could offer, for example, premium notes to those
students that had an account with the sponsoring bank.

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kuisch
Hi Michael, Aaron,

My name's Aron and I'm building Wanderlust (www.wanderlust.ly): a travel
website that shows where you could go based on how much you can spend and what
you're interested in.

Wanderlust provides users with a complete trip, including a destination,
flight, and accommodation, as well as an overview of the best things to do and
see during their stay in that particular destination - after which users may
customize the options we recommend and book or, if they’re not sure yet,
simply save the itinerary and flip to the next trip that matches the criteria
they've entered.

Our main issue:

Low conversion rates (visitor/booking). Particularly due to the fact that
we're higher up in the funnel (vs. traditional OTAs) and don't have a lot of
credibility in the early stages.

Although I realize this is quite a broad question, any insight on how we might
improve would be super helpful!

~~~
mwseibel
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?

~~~
kuisch
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 and just need to find their flight and/or
accommodation. We cater to those earlier in the cycle, wondering 'where can I
go?'. This is the feeling we try to associate ourselves with, which is why
brand advertising might prove more useful than direct response. Again, this is
tricky with a small budget (<€1000)

Yes, we've tested with >5 random people. Users don't have to book immediately,
but can create an account and save the itinerary for later.

Conversion metrics we're tracking: 'happy 1st visit' (i.e. views more than 5
trips), visit/search, search/save, search/book. account signup

~~~
mwseibel
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?

~~~
kuisch
So far the FB CPC hovers around $0.70. We need >200 users per flight booking.
A hotel booking has not been made through our platform yet. Not much data has
been collected though, seeing as we've only been live for 2 weeks.

It might be important to note that, at this point, we're not so much
interested in how much we make from the actual booking as much as we're
interested in the conversion rate itself. We use the Expedia & SkyScanner
APIs, which was more practical from a technical perspective to get to MVP as
soon as possible. But the affiliate fees for flights are close to nothing ($2
if we're lucky) and we have different solutions in mind.

We only ask for the user to sign-up once she clicks the 'save itinerary'
button, which we believed would be the most seamless. The most confusing part
of the product so far has been the fact that we currently have two 'book now'
buttons once the user tries to book her flight, something we're addressing.

~~~
mwseibel
Taking a look at the product here are a couple thoughts

1) You push me onto a landing page instead of right into the product - why?

2) The initial form you ask me to fill out is a bit intimidating - perhaps it
can be broken up a bit

3) On the results page - its unclear at first what I'm supposed to click on -
and you dont tell me anything about the flight or the hotel you've chosen for
me

4) Results page loads slowly

5) No button to book trip

6) You are choosing a 1 star crappy hotel for me...

There is a lot of product refinement you can do to improve this experience /
conversion rate

~~~
sixQuarks
I agree, you're wasting potential leads by having that landing page. Just let
them see and use the service right away.

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joannakaufman
We've built a bug reporting tool that captures a screencast along with the
network traffic, which leverages WebRTC and a browser extension, capturing
bugs in real time. ( [http://www.bugreplay.com](http://www.bugreplay.com) ).

1) We have a good number of qualified leads that are interested in beta
testing our product. Does it make more sense roll out our beta in small
batches at a time, to get more feedback from a smaller number of vocal
qualified leads, or to cast a wider net during the beta process? What were
some of the best beta rollouts you've seen and why did they go as well as they
did?

2) What's some of the most interesting uses of WebRTC you guys are seeing now,
and are there any pitfalls you folks have seen with the technology that you
would advise us to look out for?

~~~
buzzdenver
Really cool app, I signed up for a demo. Some sort of continuous recording
move would also be nice, where you could go back say 1 minute and document
transient bugs.

~~~
joannakaufman
Thanks! Some other people have requested that as well, we're brainstorming a
number of ways to make that possible.

------
seeingfurther
Hi Michael and Aaron,

I'm the co-founder and CEO of PsychSignal
([https://psychsignal.com](https://psychsignal.com))

PsychSignal is a provider of real time 'Trader Mood' data, analytics and
indices for financial institutions & investment professionals seeking an edge.

Essentially we've built the next generation squawkbox. When I was a trader
back in the day we used to use one of those old school squawk-boxes connected
to the S&P Futures pit in Chicago. A guy would call the market all day long
and you'd get a great feel as to where the market was going just based on the
mood of the announcer and the mood of the crowd you could hear in the back
ground. Fast forward to today, no more pits, but traders are online and they
are talking... a lot. Voila PsychSignal.

Besides fundraising which is a challenge for everyone on here I'm sure, our
concern is strategy, specifically growth. We've relied on our instincts in
much of the creation of PsychSignal and growth is something we have restrained
purposefully. We are in it for the long haul. To us the fin-tech space is a
special beast one where new technology adopts slowly and reputation is hard
won over a long period of time. This really goes counter to everything you
read on here so it's always a lingering doubt for us. Wondering your thoughts.
Thanks for your time!

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

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

~~~
akharris
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.

~~~
seeingfurther
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 they take chances on startups. We found
that perfect client (actually they found us!) and they could see the value of
what we built right away, probably better than we could. They loved us so much
they eventually invested in us so we knew we were on the right track and
they've been helping us ever since. Growing client #s required us to become
experts in a number of different areas so we took our time getting them right.

Yes we make money per client. Large ARR contracts

~~~
akharris
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 who want
in? Are you limiting the number of companies to whom you are trying to sell?

~~~
seeingfurther
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.

------
dvt
Hi Michael and Aaron,

I built Game:ref (www.gameref.io) last year. It's a hardware anti-cheat device
meant to be used in local and online eSports competitions to make sure that
sponsors aren't being swindled out of huge prize pots. Cheating is a multi-
million dollar problem[2] and I thought I would do something to fix it.

Even though I was featured in PC Gamer, Polygon, Vice Magazine, Tom's
Hardware, and a few others, I failed to get any traction. Since, I've gotten a
comfortable and well-paying "real" job, but I still work on the project in my
free time. I heard that funding hardware is notoriously difficult. Is this
true? If so, is it worth it? What would be the best way to move forward, if
any?

Thanks!

PS: If you're interested in the technical details of how it works, you can
check out this[2] blog post.

[1] [http://www.pcgamer.com/hacks-an-investigation-into-aimbot-
de...](http://www.pcgamer.com/hacks-an-investigation-into-aimbot-dealers-
wallhack-users-and-the-million-dollar-business-of-video-game-cheating/)

[2] [http://dvt.name/2015/finishing-what-intel-started-
building-t...](http://dvt.name/2015/finishing-what-intel-started-building-the-
first-hardware-anti-cheat/)

~~~
akharris
Hi - funding for hardware is certainly difficult, but there are quite a few
investors who do it, and it is easier than it was even six months ago.

If I were you, I probably wouldn't determine whether or not I wanted to focus
on the company based on the perceived ease/difficulty of raising money, but on
whether or not I thought I were solving a big problem with big potential. I
don't know enough about the market you are describing. If you 100% fixed it,
how much money would you save esports sponsors?

~~~
dvt
Thanks for your reply!

The largest cheating scandal (that happened about a year ago), had $250k up
for grabs[1]. With that said, the exact number is difficult to quantify, as if
the cheater is successful, then no one is the wiser.

[1] [http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/11/25/csgo-esports-
communit...](http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/11/25/csgo-esports-community-
shaken-following-revelation-of-cheating)

~~~
akharris
Got it. You might need to think about the size of the market that you're
targeting. When I think about what makes a company or product interesting as a
startup, I try to think about markets that will expand over time because of
what the company does - and not what the market looks like today.

That means that a market doesn't have to be large now, but it has to have the
possibility of growing to be something significant. Do you think that solving
this problem is going to be worth hundreds of millions or billions of dollars
in ten years?

~~~
dvt
I think so. With amazon buying Twitch for 1B a few years ago, I think the
competitive gaming industry (which Twitch primarily caters to) is well into
it's rising phase.

A major gaming peripheral company reached out to me about Game:ref (they
wanted to make sure the anti-cheat hardware is compatible with their mice) and
a major game developer also reached out (asking about how the hardware would
theoretically integrate with their games). Unfortunately, apart from courtesy
calls, however, I haven't been able to really get to the next level.

~~~
samstave
Totally. Come up wit hthe marketing of "Powered by Game:Ref! -- Know your wins
are legit!" type of thing to get them to sell and thereby ___secure more
sponsors for the events as they know they wont be wasting money to cheating_
__

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kartikkumar
Hi Michael, Aaron,

I'm co-founder of satsearch ([https://satsearch.co](https://satsearch.co)):
B2B search for the space industry. Searching for parts to design a satellite
is a real pain, especially with the rapid growth of the small-satellite
sector.

I've worked on designs for a few satellites and spent countless hours trying
to Google specs: time that doesn't get spent on engineering. So to solve this
problem, we're building parameteric-search.

The biggest problem people have faced when they've tried this before has been
to keep the data updated. We're trying to incentivize suppliers to do it
themselves by giving them insight into new markets & products they can target
through search analytics.

The difficulty we're experiencing is that it's a low-volume, high-value market
and suppliers seem to be worried that we're going to eat into their margins.
At the same time, we've had multiple suppliers tell us that if being listed
means they even sell one more part, it's worth it.

Any tips on how we can reduce the shot-term friction with suppliers?

~~~
akharris
Do you have a bigger problem with finding demand for parts, or with listed
supply?

~~~
kartikkumar
Supply listing is the bigger problem. Demand seems to be taking care of
itself, right up to the big space agencies.

As a side question, we're also not sure whether to grow the suppliers as
quickly as we can by offering free listings, or to charge suppliers from the
get go.

~~~
akharris
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 date
parts information?

You can also fake the marketplace, to some extent. If someone comes looking
for a part you don't have, make sure you still take the request, and then go
fill it manually. If you do this enough, you should be able to earn the trust
of the suppliers, and get them to be more active participants.

~~~
kartikkumar
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 what they'd wish for if they could wave a magic wand and all of
them basically said more sales.

I guess I'm maybe answering my own question, but to fake the marketplace,
should we concentrate for a while on just being resellers for a couple of
suppliers to earn the trust? We've tried to avoid that to convince users that
we're neutral in the marketplace.

~~~
akharris
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.

~~~
kartikkumar
That's interesting! Ok so I'm guessing this is the crux of the "do things that
don't scale" mantra. Thanks!

------
JOfferijns
Hi Michael, Aaron, I'm a co-founder of an educational games platform based in
the Netherlands. At the moment, games on the market that are targeted at K-6
students are not that much fun, they are not thoroughly aligned to school
curriculums (just to CCSS goals in the US), and they're not connected in terms
of content + analytics.

We've built 4 games, generate content for math questions (and soon starting
work on literacy), and have a dashboard for teachers/parents. Early pilot
results are quite positive (most importantly, children want to play the games
at home).

I've been thinking about the next step in 3-6 months: should we expand to a
neighbouring country (e.g. France, UK) or start looking at the US. The latter
seems to be the first choice for most startups originating from Europe, but
our improvement over existing competitors is much more in non-English speaking
countries than it would be in the US (as 90% of educational apps are English).
Any thoughts on this?

Also: what is YC's view on EdTech startups? It seems there haven't been many
in recent batches.

~~~
S4M
Hey!

Also working on math education. I am targeting middle schoolers, and my
approach is to build a system based on symbolic math and AI to help the
students. I have things that could be used in primary schools as well, maybe
we could partner somehow?

------
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?

~~~
mwseibel
The fundraising process of often about creating leverage over investors.
Companies need to think about raising VC rounds (and large angel rounds) as a
reward for creating a growing product in a multi-billion dollar market. Also
many companies screw up fundraising by running the process in serial vs in
parallel.

Here is a mini guide for a 2 minute pitch - why don't you fill it out so I can
see where you are (each answer should be 1-2 sentences at most): 1) what does
your company do? 2) How big is the market? 3) Describe your month over month
grow? 4) What do you understand about this market that others do not? 5) How
do you make money? 6) Why is your team the best team to tackle this problem 7)
How much are you raising?

~~~
tyre
Thank you, that's helpful.

1) Romulus ([https://romulusapp.com](https://romulusapp.com)) is a CRM and
ticketing cloud service for local governments. Think SalesForce + ZenDesk for
constituent services.

2) There are 90,000 local governments, each with 10-15 departments that
interface directly with constituents and need our software as it is today. ARR
per customer (department) is ~$9k.

3) 50-100% MoM growth for the past 6 months. Sales is focused on penetrating
new cities, then we've had great success with referrals from existing
customers.

4) Building a better product isn't the hard part, since "best government
software" is a super low bar. Innovation is in the business model — avoid
RFPs, find one decision maker, lower CAC with growth through referrals — which
means our growth engine is exactly the same as startups in other sectors.

5) Per-user recurring subscription. Right now $40/user/month, lots of room for
expansion there.

6) Founders were early engineers at Gusto, so we know how to bring delightful
products to unsexy problems and build a mission-driven culture. We are
passionate about solving this particular problem and have worked for over a
year to de-risk the business before asking for investment.

7) $2,000,000 to get to $1m ARR, at which point we raise a Series A.

P.S.

I don't think of fundraising as a reward or a goal in and of itself. It is a
means for us to achieve our potential. We hold ourselves to a high bar for
product and impact. If potential investors recognize that, cool, but we're not
in this to be on TechCrunch.

~~~
mwseibel
1) You need to be more clear about what the product does - Ticketing cloud
service / CRM are jargon - how would you describe it to your mother and
father?

2) When sizing the market you need to either go top down or bottom up? How
much money is spent by governments on this type of software per year right now
or if every target government in america was using your product how much
revenue would you generate?

3) 50%-100% MoM is great - whats your Mrr and are their any particularly
notable towns who are customers?

4) Your unique insight is really in how to sell software to a government
without long lead times / large sales teams - can you be a bit more specific
about your technique here

5) Great - how many potential users are there per typical customer

6) Cool

7) $1m ARR isnt actually that high of a bar anymore when it comes to raising
series A - much easier if you hit $2-$4m ARR - also that should get you to
break even which makes raising an A easier

PS: Did you guys apply to YC?

~~~
tyre
1) When someone calls into a local government department (elected official,
public works, utilities, parks & rec), the staff needs a centralized system to
track their issue, collaborate with everyone who can help solve it, and
identify important issues across the municipality.

2) Bottoms up: $3bn in ARR as our pricing stands today, (90k gov * 15
depts/gov * 5 users/dept * $480ARR/user). Our customers keep saying our
pricing is cheap so we need to revisit that — 2016 goal to expand ARPU 50%.
That's without building anything else, but we have numerous higher-value
expansion points in mind with one starting pilot phase.

3) Notable customers in Oakland, Chicago, and Miami. Last I checked we were at
~2k MRR but we just closed a few this week so I'll have to check. (Don't
worry, we have a great accountant ;)) EDIT: Just added San Antonio

4) Penetrate toughest markets first (see #3) to build reputation before moving
down. Target early-adopters in those markets then leverage those relationships
to expand (localgov is a tightknit community.) 2/3 local government leaders
hit retirement from 2014-2018, so a new wave of tech-savvy leadership is
taking the reigns.

5) Right now we are seeing 7 on average, but we think 4-5 is more typical.

7) We'd hit profitability before $1m so $2-4 is reasonable. We're a small team
and CAC is pretty small. Less about the number than proving a repeatable
growth engine that can turn capital into many times that capital.

Bonus) Yes, when we didn't know what the hell we were doing :) That was about
a year ago. I agree we shouldn't have gotten in.

~~~
mwseibel
1) That is a better description - although I feel like this only describes a
small set of things that a government does - is this just for constituent
services? Is that a small or big part of the day to day work of a local
government?

2) cool

3) cool

4) very cool

5) cool

7) Good

RE: YC - you guys should apply - email me at michael@ycombinator.com - this is
a space I'm very interested in (I'm a poli sci major) and I think you have a
good shot at getting into the summer batch

~~~
tyre
1) Constituent services are at the heart of every local government and the
data surrounding them are its vital signs.

From an operations (top-down) perspective, constituent services tell you which
departments are living up to their civic mandate. Think CSAT and NPS in SaaS
companies — two metrics that predict retention and growth, that measure how
you're doing and customers' faith in your future.

If, bottoms-up, you want to drive democratic decision making with real data,
look at the hundreds of millions of interactions constituents have with their
local government. It's only by improving the day-to-day that governments get a
high-level view of what structural changes need to be made.

The product focus of Romulus is on those day-to-day users right now, but it's
really the level above — the chiefs of staff, elected officials, city managers
— that love the potential.

YC) Will do. As a philosophy major, I'm glad to see more liberal arts around
here.

------
tlawal87
Hi Aaron & Michael, There is a 20-year-backlog of life-saving therapies that
are left sitting in university laboratories untested and 30 million Americans
suffering from untreatable rare diseases who have no idea these potential
cures exist.

My best friend and I are developing a medical research discovery platform. We
allow people passionate about a condition to discover, promote, and eventually
fund cutting-edge research.

We've been working to seed the platform & overcome the regulatory barriers
that have previously prevented success in this space. How can we balance the
slow bureaucratic requirements of university administrators to correctly
implement our solution with the early rapid growth needed for our startup?

~~~
danieltillett
It sounds like you are trying to build a kickstarter version of the NIH. The
way to get this going is to offer real money to both the academics and the
administrators - once you do this then they will come running to you with open
arms.

Can I suggest that you spend the next month reading Derek Lowe’s blog “In the
Pipeline” [1] (especially all the comments). You will learn why so much never
makes it out of the lab.

1\.
[http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/](http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/)

~~~
srunni
Another excellent resource is the LifeSciVC blog:

[https://lifescivc.com/](https://lifescivc.com/)

[https://lifescivc.com/category/from-the-
trenches/](https://lifescivc.com/category/from-the-trenches/) (the posts here
aren't included on the main page)

------
eckho28
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
around 45-50k a month. I feel like with any other bootstrapped startup this
may attract investor interest, but because of the industry in this situation,
it would still be very difficult. What are you thoughts of the investor
climate with regards to marijuana?

~~~
mwseibel
I think there are angels that are willing to invest -
[https://getmeadow.com/](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.

~~~
eckho28
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)

~~~
mwseibel
hmm - yes that is much much harder - why do you want to handle the product in
house?

~~~
eckho28
We started out wanting to do a similar model as Eaze/Meadow - but we found we
weren't adding enough value to existing dispensaries/delivery services to
warrant a decent fee/percentage (since they already had customer bases and we
were starting from 0 with no outside funding like the other companies).

Then after running everything in-house for a while, I realized that it was
actually a much better model to handle everything in-house because then we
have complete control over product quality, customer experience, drivers, as
well as being more profitable (we we profitable within our first two months).
We've tried a few partnerships with outside delivery services and it never
worked out because they were never able to replicate the very high standards
of service that we require (coming from a background in hospitality management
myself). I know there are all these companies purporting to be the "Uber for
weed", but that's not really that accurate. If Uber were doing the same thing
as these other startups in transportation, then the proper parallel would be
Uber partnering with existing Taxi companies rather than independent drivers.
Uber cuts out an established middle-man, but the other on-demand marijuana
startups are partnering with established middle-men rather than cutting them
out of the value chain.

However, I think the single biggest reason to go in-house is that services
like Eaze/Meadow can never compete with us on price. I consider our prices to
be somewhat high right now, since our cash flow is still so fragile, yet we
are still undercutting Eaze by around 20% on most products even as they have
over $11 million in funding.

~~~
mwseibel
Interesting - I would still apply - you dont have to worry about the fact that
we have funded Meadow. The major barrier is the questionable legal picture
currently. Have you been able to get a bank account etc? Where are you
currently operating?

~~~
sfoung
Yes, we do currently have a bank account, though it is purely for the
technology side - currently we are cash-only as far as orders/deliveries go.
(We launched using Stripe, but they shut us down after about $30k or so flowed
through our Stripe account - however, they were very sympathetic and wanted to
work with us, but their hands were tied by their banking partners).

Currently we are in Sacramento only. We tried to launch briefly in San
Francisco last year with a delivery service partner, but that fell through and
we withdrew to focus on building/learning more in Sacramento before trying to
scale out again - however, we were able to make over $16,000 in San Francisco
in our first and only month with very little marketing.

The legal landscape is definitely still not where we'd like it to be, but in
starting this company, I'm essentially placing a bet that the legal landscape
will change in our favor in the very near future and that I'm getting in at
exactly the right time (not so early where the business is unfeasible, but not
too late where risk drops so low that too many big players get in the
space...I was actually surprised that Eaze and Meadow popped up at the exact
same time as I did). I think that the momentum that we see across the country
is definitely promising.

The most interesting thing is that, delivery in Sacramento itself is
technically illegal - however, it isn't enforced. I appeared on the top-3 news
outlets last year stating exactly what I was going to do here, so if the City
wanted to stop me, I definitely wasn't hiding from them. Since then, I've
spoken with the city council, and am working with the vice-mayor of the city
to work in a new law for delivery here in Sacramento.

------
reiderrider
We are building Stripe for life insurance
[http://back9ins.com:5000#](http://back9ins.com:5000#)

FYI we have applied twice to YC. We have early demand from customers and know
it's a big opportunity. Our engineering team is only 2 people and we want to
raise money to grow that and execute the plan with enterprise level websites.
How do we take the next steps?

~~~
akharris
I'm not sure I understand what you're building. Is it a white label life
insurance api to allow financial institutions to sell life insurance?

~~~
reiderrider
It allows any website with traffic (ideal targets are banks and financial
institutions) to sell life insurance on their website using our JavaScript web
app. A BOFA user cannot currently buy life insurance on Bofa.com, but can by
going into the bank. A bank could offer life insurance online via our white
labeled modal and take their users from getting a quote to e signing the
policy. We handle the entire process with the user on the BOFA website.

~~~
akharris
Ok - so you could approach this in a few different ways. Here are two:

One way is to try to sell big enterprise contracts to big banks. This is
really hard for startups to do, unless you have a product you know they really
want, have deep connections or experience selling to banks, and have all the
compliance and security requirements in place.

Another way to try this is to sell to smaller sites. They're more likely to
adopt quickly, but you'll need to make sure that you maintain quality, are
generating enough traffic and conversions to be worthwhile after the rev
share, and don't devolve into something that appears scammy.

Do you know who actually wants what you are building? How have you figured
that out?

~~~
reiderrider
Agreed. Smaller websites and every insurance agent that we've talked to say
that they would love to have this and asking weekly if it is ready. We have
not asked any large websites but their motivation is that it is extremely
profitable with little financial resources required to implement (although
it's a major decision to partner with a third party). Smaller customers will
be good beta customers and we are happy to start there. We'll have great
developer docs, beautiful UX, and vet the sites that can use it for quality.
What are your suggestions to help us grow/afford our engineering team?

------
chejazi
Hi YC partners,

Founder of [https://credhot.com](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?

~~~
akharris
I think it's hard to say without knowing more. On the one hand, paying in btc
probably restricts the number of people willing to use your product by virtue
of there being not that many people who have btc accounts. On the other hand,
it might make you more popular with a small group of people.

Most great products start with a core of really happy users, and then expand
over time. Do you have users that love you and use your product every day?
Many times a day?

~~~
chejazi
We've had around 2.8k signups so far (launched in October). We have about 200
users active per day. I just checked and 89 of them have been active in all
previous 5 days. We have a few outspoken believers in the concept (< 10). We
just solicited feedback from our base and got only 20 responses, so probably
could do better there.

~~~
akharris
Got it - is it growing? How quickly?

~~~
chejazi
Just generated this graph:

[http://imgur.com/iqnaGem](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.

~~~
akharris
Cool. Is your transaction volume growing at the same rate?

~~~
chejazi
Here's a graph of the transaction volume:

[http://imgur.com/ScNqb4I](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).

------
jerriclynsjohn
Portuspine is a wearable device solution to provide posture coaching to people
who wants to prevent backpain, primarily people with desk job.

We provide them haptic feedback whenever they are sitting in a wrong posture,
we encourage activities and better sleep so as to holistically improve ones
wellness.

The user can visualize how posture affect their daily activities and sleep.
The wearable device can be worn by the user 24/7 on their wrist and when they
sit in front of the workstation, can be click-removed and clipped on to the
chest area when it starts to monitor posture.

[http://portuspine.com](http://portuspine.com)

~~~
akharris
Hi - I'd love something to fix my posture, so this seems cool. Feel free to
ask a question.

------
sashakozak
We’re building the first in its kind ads/promotion barter platform:
[http://appstore.com/postforpostforinstagram](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 popular among professional and millenial
influencers in the low/mid segments (e.g. 1K-100K IG followers). Due to sfs’
viral nature, our influencer base turned out to grow a lot faster than
traditional influencer/brand marketplaces – this could make us a lot bigger
and better place to buy/sell influencer ads than all these 120+ identical
marketplaces in the list: [https://angel.co/influencer-
marketing-2](https://angel.co/influencer-marketing-2)

The influencer ads are like the hottest advertising trend of the upcoming
years :) We see we’re up to something great here and start thinking how we get
the biggest piece of the pie in the long term. In order to sustain this
product strategy competition-wise we’ve even submitted Patent App for the
concept 'Advertising Barter in Social Networks'.

…though what’d be a lot more interesting, I just realized an hour ago: rather
than compete with all of them, try to create interface layer – build API for
them, etc. I would like to discuss this – would be great to hear your
recommendations/roadmap thoughts mb, other than ‘getting big enough first’

~~~
akharris
Cool - feel free to ask your question :).

~~~
sashakozak
Well, frankly that was the question hah. Ok, I realize it’s too industry-
specific.

Let me ask you more practical question then:

It is time for us to fundraise – our team of 3 is running out of cash to
finance full-time involvement. This investment round should include marketing
expenses as well.

We can measure our viral growth, but our core monetization is to be
commissions on the influencer ads sales. It is quite deferred – more like the
2nd product phase – the shoutouts for shoutouts will be accompanied by
shoutouts for cash over time. So at this point I can't really make any
judgement re marketing spend vs. ARPU / MRPU etc. – the nature of our
influencers is pretty different from the other companies in the industry
because, as I said, we cover lower segments of influencers. ...and it is
awesome, because it's the hardest market segment to cover, it's the major part
of the market and at the same time it has the highest level of credibility /
engagement for advertising effect …but we have no time / resources to test it.

Moreover, we haven't tried any paid methods yet – so, we'll have to start
trying different ones before we figure out what works best for our case.

Any ideas re how we justify our marketing budget for the investor?

For now, I am thinking to: (1) take something like industry-average number for
marketing spend – probably $7-14k per month (not sure how it'll work out but
at least I have public reference to this number) and start trying out
Instagram ads; (2) get at least your respectful opinion and refer to it in
talks, i.e. it is normal for such a first-in-its-kind venture like us not to
know this stuff for sure – Aaron told me :))

------
pimdewitte
Thanks so much for this. We built Upfit
([https://upfit.co](https://upfit.co)), an on-demand fitness streaming app for
at home workouts, ran by video creators. We launched on Android & iOS with
Upfit and are currently tackling other industries with the same platform.
Think about it like a social Netflix for X. We would love to chat!

\- Pim from Whitespell (Pim at Whitespell dot com)

~~~
pramodliv1
I tried signing up on the web using my email and password (I don't trust
Facebook) and it did not work. So I refreshed the page, by which time I'd
forgotten my username. It would help if you have other social logins.

Why require the user to signup in the first place? I was reminded of a talk by
Neil Patel, "It's like asking, Will you marry me as soon as you see someone".
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRnsuzcfHr0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRnsuzcfHr0))

Why not embed a video similar to this 10 minute video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7w6M4bOXJ_s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7w6M4bOXJ_s),
ask the user follow along, record their own video using their phone / Webcam,
share it with friends and use this data to improve your marketing, all without
signing up.

As a potential customer, I miss the following features on YouTube and I would
pay for and recommend Upfit if you address:

1\. Is this exercise safe considering my medical conditions?

2\. Is my technique correct / improving? (Feedback from experts)

~~~
pimdewitte
Hey!

Thanks so much for the feedback. We'll be sure to take it in and I'll
personally let you know when the bugs are fixed. We'll also definitely think
about your suggestions.

All the best, Pim

------
twlng
Hey Michel and Aaron,

[http://www.twlng.com](http://www.twlng.com) is buffer for content, i.e. post,
schedule, manage Tweets with > 140 characters.

We've seen little traction despite being featured here on HN and ProductHunt,
what steps would you advise following to get more users, considering we have 0
cash and are bootstrapping this as a side project?

------
standan
Hi Michael and Aaron,

I am cofounder of AllThingsMine.com We have built the App and Site for a
single place where you can store all the information about the things that you
own/wish to own. It is a single point of access to
specifications/warranties/manuals/recalls/reviews/videos of a product. You can
also connect to friends to discuss about the products. We have tried to make
it as easy as possible to add your product and are also working to make it
easy to add from email/online receipts. We bring in news feed from various
sources pertaining to products that you have in your lists. Curated list of
popular and top products in different categories

We welcome feedback as to what other things users would like to see to be able
to maintain their items with minimal effort. Our biggest hurdle is how do we
increase adoption.

Thank you

------
fananta
Hi Michael + Aaron,

We're building a smarter way to share product updates
([https://productmap.co](https://productmap.co)).

So far we've received a great amount of interest (waitlist) and have users
already integrated that are coming back over and over.

The next steps would be to build out some of the feature requests as it's
fairly early right now. One of those requests is having custom domains and
users are happy to pay $10-$20/mo for it.

The vision for ProductMap is much larger though -- to tackle the fragmented
way companies handle communication and feedback with their customers.

Do you think charging for custom domains would be self-limiting in nature?
It's a fairly trivial thing to offer for free.

Thank you in advance! (and meeting with Yuri when he's in Toronto this
weekend.)

~~~
mwseibel
Why do you believe charging for domains would be self limiting?

~~~
fananta
Users won't be able to use the product for what it's intended value is (better
feedback and communication) if they're turned away so early.

Better put, a custom domain isn't part of the value we add, it's just a
gateway to realize the value. Should we be charging for something that's not
really tied to the value we provide?

~~~
mwseibel
Why would custom domains turn users away?

~~~
fananta
Ex. A user wants to try it out but paying for a custom domain scares them.
They stick to a free subdomain, but never really promote it since it conflicts
with their own branding.

Admittedly you're making a good point here that users _would_ get more value
this way through increased branding.

~~~
mwseibel
I think giving your customers what they want is the central theme behind most
of our advice

~~~
fananta
Absolutely, but would charging them for a (technically) trivial feature be
self-limiting to our growth?

Another question: Would be worthwhile to apply to YC with a product of this
nature?

This was super helpful. Thank you for taking the time Michael.

~~~
tkmcc
Addressing your first point, Heroku charges $20/mo for HTTPS support and
plenty of people pay for it:
[https://elements.heroku.com/addons/ssl](https://elements.heroku.com/addons/ssl)

~~~
fananta
You're right, that's a good example. Thanks!

------
MichaelFan
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/tarte-aux-
framboises](https://squareup.com/market/pastrynow/tarte-aux-framboises).

Questions: 1) Would you like to try? 2) Our user base is quite small: how do
we know if it is a communication or value proposition problem?

M.

~~~
akharris
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?

~~~
MichaelFan
1) Initially, we sold "pastries for catering" to very small size start ups in
our area. With the money we generated from the sales, we built the first
prototypes that we used to deliver the pastries we promised.

And when we delivered to these small companies, we explained to the employees
(who really liked the pastries they had) how they can do it at home. We closed
our first (3) sales like that.

2) Then, we spent a lot of time wandering around Costco and Safeway's "baking"
department with baked samples to pitch everyone we see passing by (when they
eat the samples, we tell them they can do exactly the same at home). It wasn't
effective because we haven't closed anyone though everyone said "it's a great
idea, I'll definitely try".

3) Same for the neighbors: we literally went to all our neighbors with the
same strategy. But still no sales (though they eaten all the samples). We also
put some flyers in the mailboxes of people who weren't at home and somebody
sent us an email to tell us it is forbidden and he'd sue us... and even even
signed "welcome to america"

4) Then we started hustling our colleagues, friends, family. We sent direct
emails, called them or even visited them. This way, we closed almost all our
sales (15).

5) We also started reaching out bloggers. Now, we are super-limited because we
can't deliver out of the bay area (I'm literally driving myself and delivering
each kit by hand). So we pitched the top 66 bloggers in the Bay Area who are
talking about baking. 16 replied, 10 of them showed some interests, we
delivered to 5 bloggers and one of them published an article (we never asked
for it): dessertfirstgirl.com/2016/01/pastrynow-raspberry-tart.html This
didn't drive any sales yet.

Finally, we have also given about 20 kits "for free". We typically don't like
to do that. And none of the "free user" have ever ordered. We spend a lot of
time with every user to discuss and the number one "issue" they find is: "it's
too expensive".

And that's a huge problem because literally none of them complains about the
kit. They all say "it's incredible, I don't bake at all and the outcome is
exactly like the picture" BUT, still, the price seems to be a blocker.

That's why we can't decide if our unique value proposition is too low or if we
haven't successfully communicated our value to our users.

M.

~~~
MichaelFan
We have decided to change our landing page. We thought maybe there is a
disconnect between how people perceive us (kids, toys) and what we'd like to
be (high end)

~~~
alain94040
I'd be very interested in your product, except your website completely fails
at convincing me. The way it's presented, I pay you $85 for a framboise tart,
and I have to bake it myself on top. I might as well buynit already made, for
cheaper, and at least I won't mess it up.

If you really have a product that helps me repeatedly and reliably make such
tarts, then show it.

------
alantrrs
I'm building a platform for scientists to run and share their experiments
(anything computable) including their whole research environment. Since
experiments usually require specialized expensive hardware (like GPUs), I'm
thinking about ways to make this affordable to individuals and academia. I'm
planning a few modalities for experiments to run: 1) on their localhost
(targeted towards individuals) 2) on the cloud (targeted towards academia) 3)
on their own servers (enterprise version).

Technically, I know this is right sequence for each modality to be built. But
businesswise, is it the best way to be launched?

Also, What are your thoughts on this space/market?

~~~
akharris
I'm not one of your target users but...When you start a company, the optimal
launch order is usually the one that gets you actual users. You can figure out
the rest later.

------
Ologn
Our current focus is mass market, ad-based apps for Android, mostly based
around a spreadsheet-like framework. The company is called Unwrapped Apps (
[http://www.unwrappedapps.com](http://www.unwrappedapps.com) ) and our latest
Android app was launched yesterday (
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.unwrappeda...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.unwrappedapps.android.devicedata)
).

The main thing we'd like to talk about is our prioritization and focus - are
we spending our time the best way we can?

~~~
mwseibel
Feel free to ask your question :)

~~~
Ologn
Over the past six months we've been writing an Android framework with two
uses. One use is to spin apps off of the framework. The other use for the
framework would be for the ultimate goal of publishing a spreadsheet app for
Android from it.

We just published our first app based off the framework yesterday (linked in
parent post). The framework work we have done so far was put into yesterday's
app (a browsable, searchable spreadsheet-like front end to the Android
device's call log, text messages, calendar etc.)

Our next step will be to implement in the framework the feature to save and
share a document. The spreadsheet ultimately can use that, but it can also be
used in the nearer term for spinning off an app to save an Android phone's
text message history.

We also plan to have an app using this framework which can handle Microsoft
Access databases. The features needed to do that will help in the ultimate
goal of a spreadsheet.

The main prioritization conflict for us is how much work to do on these cast-
off apps, versus how much to do on our ultimate long-term goal of a
spreadsheet. Especially work which can't be rolled back into the longer term
goal.

So the question is if the game plan of writing a framework with an ultimate
goal of a spreadsheet, casting off apps from the framework on the way to that
ultimate goal - does that sound like a decent game plan?

------
AbdulBahajaj
We are not up and running yet. But we are building a subscription management
tool that helps SaaS businesses manage , view their user's subscription.

We are going to solve a lot of problems that come with subscription like
taxes, usage rules, customer portal, price a/b testing , dunning management
etc... we are going to support multiple payment gateways like braintree and
stripe.

We are working on this product because we struggled to find a subscription
management tool for the right quality and price in our last subscription
product I hope that you choose us because we really need the help XD.

~~~
mwseibel
This sounds like a cool idea - when do you plan on launching your v1?

~~~
AbdulBahajaj
We mainly have two questions.

1) Once we launch how do you sell your product to get the first 50 users. Our
best guess is to use ads channels like google ads.

2) How do you approach figuring out problems that users have. The way we are
approaching this problem right now is by building features that we wanted
previously.

We would also appreciate it if you have any additional advise.

~~~
matisoffn
You got a user here, definitely need something like this.

~~~
AbdulBahajaj
We are really excited that this is something that you are looking for You can
sign up for updates here:
[https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1sdb0lFy7bIh2qHQAizGP4y3F-jw...](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1sdb0lFy7bIh2qHQAizGP4y3F-jwe07jEIyieutrooPc/viewform)

We will send you an email when we launch.

------
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/](https://beam.pro/)

~~~
mwseibel
I went to your site and I am watching this stream:
[https://beam.pro/Noplix](https://beam.pro/Noplix) \- how do I participate in
the game play?

~~~
MCProMatt
That stream doesn't have interactive controls enabled, try heading to one of
the streams labeled as interactive from the home page.

You might need to log in to get interacting, you can use: User: testaccount2
Pass: DummyPassword

~~~
mwseibel
Seems to me like you should be featuring interactive streams on the frontpage
- its hard to showcase your value prop if its hidden

------
anunciorcks
@YC Thanks for hosting this.. Great founder learning ! Team @anuncio_rocks

~~~
mwseibel
you're welcome :)

------
dynofuz
Building a product search engine ([https://percht.com](https://percht.com))
Percht has a few goals:

1) give you the lowest price for any product online 2) develop an assistant
that’ll buy you whatever at x price automatically 3) build an unbiased
gameified community around shopping

What do you think are the biggest issues with the approach many other shopping
search engines have taken that have prevented them from beating entrenched
monopolies like amzn and goog which dont have complete results or 100%
consumer alignment.

~~~
mwseibel
Personally, I prefer to go to Amazon over shopping comparison sites for a
couple reasons: I already have an amazon account so I don't have to create an
account and put type in my cc info and I know amazon can ship quickly. I
wonder if you can build a shopping comparison site that holds my cc and
shipping info so that I can literally check out on the shopping comparison
page...

~~~
sharemywin
why not dollar shave club for everything? yes you can buy onetime purchases
but I need personal shopper that reorders. Here's everything I buy find me the
best prices at the time of purchase and how often I want them. oops, I have
too many of this hold off a week. And you have $5 maybe $10 per month to do
it.

------
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.

------
eugenev3
Hi Michael and Aaron,

For first time entrepreneurs creating an early stage startup, it can be very
expensive to incorporate and do all the IP and necessary legal things to form
the corporation. I made the mistake of incorporating in Texas and just
recently formed in Delaware. I looked at Clerky, but their service seems
costly as well.

Do you know of anyone who does low cost legal advice for early stage startups?

~~~
mwseibel
Clerky is probably the best bet here - looks like they will do it for $400 all
in

------
source99
Hi Michel and Aaron,

2 friends and I started an infrastructure inspection automation software
company. We have 1 big customer.

2 out of 3 of us see big potential in expanding the software and customer
base. The 3rd has very little drive and wants to milk our 1 big customer for
every penny. We but heads every time we discuss anything.

When we started the company we split the equity 1/3 each(big regrets).

Suggestions on how to move forward?

~~~
mwseibel
How is the board organized and is there a vesting schedule?

~~~
source99
There is nothing more than a handshake. No vesting schedule. 1 LLC.

We have been close friends for 20 years.

~~~
akharris
Sounds like it is time for the three of you to have an honest conversation
about what you each want and whether or not you should be working together on
a startup.

Hopefully like you've been friends long enough to get through the pain to the
right answer and keep your friendship.

------
Headhanchoarod
Hey Michael and Aaron, thank you for doing this. A few questions I'd love to
hear your answer.

What advice would you give to yourself at 21 for launching and building your
own startup?

Well being in college or working your day job, what's the most important
thing(s) to work on to get your company bootstrapped to take on Full time?

What's your best advice for those applying to the Fellowship program.

Thanks!

~~~
mwseibel
Team team team - make sure you are working with 1-3 smart and passionate
people who you are friends with. The more technical team often the better.
Next step - build the simplest and easiest MVP possible and launch.

------
bbrennan
We built DataFire (DataFire.io), a cloud-based framework for working with
APIs. Similar to zapier but geared toward developers (and as a consequence 10x
more powerful).

We've gotten a lot of engagement and positive feedback from existing users,
but after the initial launch haven't seen as much growth as we'd like. What
can we do to attract new users?

~~~
sharemywin
I didn't see any costs on the site? Also, I think you need to blog various
solutions for startup problems. Then post the articles on here and other
places developers hang out. "For instance how to hack together a marketplace
with nothing but a little javascript and $X/mo." To me your in the MVP
business. but than again that's what I'm looking for.

~~~
bbrennan
That's a great idea. So far we've had mixed success posting solutions to
specific problems (e.g. sync your github issues to a spreadsheet), but each
solution only appeals to some small subset of people, and doesn't convey the
enormity of the set of problems DataFire can solve. A higher level post that
uses DataFire to solve multiple problems aimed at a single goal would do more
to stimulate people's imaginations.

------
margeypargey
Hi Michael and Aaron. Just a curious general entrepreneur question. If you had
to name one uncommonly known success factor beyond the standard-fare hard
work, baseline intelligence, persistence etc., that you immediately look for
in other successful entrepreneurs, what would that be?

~~~
mwseibel
Can they clearly communicate what they are working on in 2 sentences in a way
that any parent would understand? Do they believe the measurement and testing?

------
Richallen1
Hi Micheal and Aaron

Our startup is called Streamly and is a live video platform for artists to
share their live shows with fans round the world. We're in the early stages
with a few users.

My question is based around traction channels for my startup. And another
question if you have time based around co founders

~~~
mwseibel
Feel free to ask your questions :)

------
Dejital
As an engineer looking to launch an app with a wide target audience, should I
focus on marketing to individual niches and gain traction, or explain how my
tool can actually help _everyone_?

~~~
mwseibel
Can you be more specific? What is your idea?

~~~
Dejital
A web app to manage human relationships. Reminders to ping people over varying
periods of time, emphasizing note-taking to help stir up conversation topics.

I see myself using this in my personal life, with former business colleagues,
as well as when job interviewing.

------
thenomad
I literally only just saw this, and I'd definitely have had a question.

Any chance these can be announced a bit further in advance in future?

------
fabiosalvo
Michael, we are disrupting the real estate rental market with
[http://www.gromia.com](http://www.gromia.com), a platform that replaces
realtors. We have good traction and first revenues in Europe and would
consider to test in SF. We aim to be the Airbnb (I know you scouted them in
2009) for mid-long term residential rentals. Would you consider us for an
acceleration at YC?

~~~
mwseibel
Thanks for the note - can you tell me more about the business? How much
traction - which cities in Europe do you support? What is the ideal usecase
for your product?

------
anunciorcks
@YC Thanks for hosting this. Great learning for founders and startup teams.
Team @anuncio_rocks

------
ismdubey
Hi Michael and Aaron, We started as a digital health company powered by data
science. Gradually, what we have discovered is that a lot of our competitors
in digital health want to use our data science engagement platform. Now, we
have two questions: (a) should we continue doing the weight loss or pivot
fully towards a data science engagement platform company ? (b) If we should
switch to data science engagement platform, should we focus on health or
should we go towards all consumer apps?

Thanks, Ashu

