
Leaky (YC S11) is Hipmunk for Car Insurance - jasontraff
http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/08/yc-backed-leaky-is-hipmunk-for-car-insurance/#yc
======
martingordon
If I'm going to be handing over my personal information to someone, I don't
want it to be to some fly-by-night operation. I'm not saying you guys are but
you need to eliminate all appearances of it:

1\. Hide the About Us page, or make it less specific (instead of "four guys",
call it a "team of entrepreneurs". A grainy cell phone picture of the team
playing video games in lawn chairs with a messy coffee table doesn't lend any
more confidence to the average consumer.

2\. Get rid of the "design credit goes to Square until we can hire a
designer". The average consumer will wonder why you haven't hired a designer
yet and will be turned off by whatever answer you give them.

3\. This one is more for the nerds than the average consumer (though the
average person might spot that something is wrong even if they can't pinpoint
it): that iPad on the homepage is badly photoshopped (it's extra wide and the
Safari toolbar doesn't extend the width of the screen).

4\. The word leaky has a negative connotation. Your product offers a positive
outcome (saving money on car insurance), so you need to come up with a more
positive name for your business.

~~~
AltIvan
<https://leaky.com/about_us/> Alcohol, video-games and four guys that couldn't
get together for a photo in formal suits... introduction, you are doing it
wrong.

~~~
johnx123-up
Hmm.. I think, the world doesn't need another _tied_ slaves.

------
joelmichael
There is actually another company that has this concept: CoverHound. I'm one
of the co-founders. We started a few months before Leaky.

We went through the AngelPad incubator during the Winter 2011 class.
TechCrunch covered us in a little blurb at the time. Since then we've received
VC funding and have built out our team a little bit.

There's no publicly available pricing API for insurance carriers yet, so I'm
curious as to how Leaky comes up with their numbers.

~~~
lacker
I don't think it's really the same concept. On Leaky, you type in your
information once, and then they show you insurance quotes. Whereas CoverHound
just gives me links to insurance companies' websites, and then I have to fill
out my information on each of those websites. If I were you guys, I would
switch to the Leaky model, because it seems a lot easier for the user to only
type in their information once.

~~~
elbelcho
The product that cover hound is offering at this moment (as far as I can tell)
is practically without use. It just gave me links or phone numbers for 4
companies that sell car insurance in my state. I can get similar results by
searching for "Ohio car insurance" and clicking the ads that come up.

What appears to be their full featured future product looks EXTREMELY
interesting. It appears that coverhound will almost work like an automated
insurance agent, for example, give them your info once, and they'll check
rates for you on a regular and recurring basis. THAT product seems extremely
valuable to me and would be doing the world a great favor.

------
JunkDNA
Congrats on launching! Some comments:

1)Even though I know you guys are from YC (and not for example the Russian
mob). I still bailed when you asked for my driver's license # and SSN. It's
not enough for you to just say "trust us".

2) I checked it out from the couch quickly on my iPhone. The experience was
not that good. The form drop-downs were slow loading and left me staring at
empty pick lists. I had to scroll side to side to read the label on each
field.

3) I was prompted twice to enter my email as an early adopter (once for each
car I was entering presumably). This did not instill me with confidence about
supplying personal info.

Hope that's info you guys can use. Good luck!

------
yid
Just curious -- how are you guys storing all this super-personal information,
or is it ephemeral while you make API calls to various insurance provider
backends? That's quite the identity theft kit that I'm being asked to upload
to a site called "leaky".

~~~
darrennix
The information is transmitted via HTTPS to the carrier. Once your session on
Leaky ends, the data is gone -- there is no data store.

~~~
yid
Interesting -- so are you ruling out the possibility of storing the data in
the future for features like periodically checking for updates in my rate?
That sounds like a killer feature (that I would even be willing to pay a
subscription for), but then I'd also want to be damn sure that you're storing
that data well.

EDIT: in fact, for a subscription based service, you could figure out the
optimal pricing quite easily. If the annual price of your subscription were
less than the typical insurance savings by having it monitored, you'd have a
hell of a business model.

~~~
jasontraff
Yeah -- we'd certainly love to, but we didn't think that we'd be able to
securely store the data at the moment -- so we didn't want to risk it. That's
absolutely a feature that we'd like to implement though!

~~~
lurker19
Protip: Consumers don't care about security.

------
sahillavingia
Great idea, but I think you should differentiate a little bit more from
Square, design-wise:

<http://www.leaky.com/> vs. <https://squareup.com/>

EDIT: I realize they say "until we can hire a designer of our own." — but
don't they have the Start Fund + YC + SV Angel money?

~~~
prawn
"All design credit goes to Square. We based our design on their home page
until we can hire a designer of our own."

With their permission?

~~~
yid
Why would they need permission?

~~~
prawn
Because they've blatantly copied someone's design?

It's not like a new car company starts with someone else's body shape until
they can design their own car or copies their TV ad for a few months. I can
appreciate that Square might've OKed this or look kindly on a temporary copy
from a startup, but for about the same level of effort they could've
differentiated their site a fair bit more (even just a different hue for the
background).

~~~
almightygod
why does it matter, the typical consumer wont care. The square design has been
successful for them, why not piggyback on that success

~~~
prawn
Because, without permission, it's not the right thing to do, and the right
thing to do need not be expensive?

I'm not sure if I'm missing something here - looking at code/designs and
tweaking them to learn is one thing, but is basing a funded company on
something so blatant now considered OK? I'd like to know if this is the
thought pattern for people who are designers or programmers.

Is Square within the YC stable, is that it?

Should I be doing this with my side projects, to piggyback on that success?

(Keep in mind that I'm assuming in this case that they don't have permission.)

~~~
almightygod
but THEY have permission...clearly lifting another companies design w/out
permission is illegal and should be frowned upon

~~~
prawn
The whole branch of this comment thread was based on:

"Why would they need permission?"

That's what I've been replying to.

------
ccollins
Heads up guys: I am getting 500 errors when I enter a zip code on your site.

~~~
mey
ditto

~~~
darrennix
Our database servers aren't able to handle the traffic. We're working on
increasing space.

~~~
wuster
Curious: are you guys using cloud infrastructure or using your own machines?

~~~
darrennix
Cloud. Turns out it was an issue with whether you landed on
<http://www.leaky.com> or <http://leaky.com>. 302 Redirect has now fixed some
of the errors.

------
akent
Perhaps I've just not been paying attention, but I'd never really heard of
Hipmunk before.

The "X for Y" only works if X is sufficiently common. Surely better to define
in simple terms what the site actually does.

------
krschultz
So I ran my information through even though I'm not really in the market for
changing since I just just switched a few months ago.

\- The homepage is hit or miss, the pictures really conveys what youare about
but there are a lot of words clouding the message

\- I thought the interface was very responsive and intuitive through the
initial steps

\- I didn't like how the 'options for coverage' was buried below the fold,
everything looks cheap when they offer $50k/100K liability, you really have to
compare apples to apples on that page if you want to tell me how much I am
saving

\- I only was shown a quote from 1 insurance company, that's no big deal for
me right now but obviously that limits the usefulness, I got a prompt saying
'we're not available in your area' and took my email so at least you won't
lose customers who see what I'm seeing right now

\- [BUG] The 6 month premium shown in the left hand column with all the
insurance companies is different than the 6 month premium shown in the 'buy
now' box.

------
jerrya
It's probably a terrific service and I look forward to using it, but wow, just
to get a quote I have to give out enough information to own me good, not just
in cyberspace but IRL.

    
    
      Name
      DOB
      Address
      Make, model, year of car
      Drivers License
      Optional Social Security
      Sex
      Marital Status
      Student/military affiliation
      Optional Employer
      Optional Professional/Alumni Associations

~~~
mahyarm
How is that different than esurance.com, a close competitor?

~~~
jerrya
It may not be. I was just going to Progressive which I think does something
similar and iirc they say if they can't get you the best quote themselves,
they're okay with that.

Otoh, how IS leaky different from esurance? I don't understand that from their
website either.

~~~
mey
esurance and progressive actually sell insurance. This site appears to be an
aggregation who gets revenue through referral bonuses.

~~~
marvinkennis
But for the users, that wouldn't really matter?

------
ck2
Wow, quotes without having to get a credit and background check on every
insurance site?

Oh wait, DOB and SS# and driver's license?

Um, NO - there is no need for this kind of info to get a general quote - I've
had it with big insurance harvesting personal info. There really ought to be a
law.

Car insurance quote should be three questions:

    
    
        1. What zip code do you live in
        2. What year were you born
        3. What do you drive
    

(and obviously if you've had accidents recently)

Insurance tables shouldn't work like they do. What they are trying to figure
out from all your personal info is if you own or rent, where you work, how
many times you have moved recently, etc. That's a bunch of bull.

~~~
rorrr
No, insurance depends on your previous fuckups, so you definitely need DOB and
SSN. Otherwise they might misquote you, which can end up in court.

~~~
ck2
They they should have two types of quotes.

A "soft" quote based on general information.

A "hard" quote based on very specific information.

They'd never convince me they cannot do this, especially with all the
extremely misleading commercials on television.

~~~
rorrr
They probably can, but why would you want to see it? It would be a quote for
some "average" person, and might be off by a an order of magnitude from your
particular case.

~~~
ck2
Because I have no accidents/tickets for over a decade and pay only $300 for a
year, but since they raise my rate every six months by 10% "just for the heck
of it" - I'd like to see what everyone else quotes me.

A soft quote would be just fine for me and probably many others.

~~~
dfc
Well seeing as you were only paying $100 a year 5.5 years ago you cant
complain that much. I can not believe you got such good rates 5 years ago.

------
lozofsky
Interesting site. But not really new. I work at Answer Financial
(www.answerfinancial.com) we're a national auto and home insurance agency that
represents over 20 insurance carriers. You can get quotes and buy online from
our carriers in 49 states. We do this via direct XML connections into the
carriers we've contracted with. We're also the company that powers comparative
quotes on esurance.com (our sister company).

I very much like this concept though, its much like Confused.com in the UK as
the techcrunch article pointed out. The challenge is getting enough carriers
to actively participate so there's a high quality customer experience. I would
guess Leaky is screen scraping the carrier sites. A bit easier in CA since you
can't use credit scoring to price auto insurance here.

------
krisneuharth
Am I missing something about the name? Leaky abstraction? It sounds more like
a service targeting people in need of a plumbing repair quote.

~~~
ebiester
Or, at least homeowner's insurance. The last thing I want my car to do is go
"leak."

------
FraaJad
Sorry guys, but you have to work on the delivery a lot more.

I spent not less than 15 minutes filling out all the information on your site
and the site back with NOTHING. The quotation page kept spinning and spinning.

My experience with regular insurance company websites has been a lot better
and that's why they have my money.

I gave my(and my spouse's) personal info and time because this is a YC
venture. Disappointing.

------
rjett
Filling out the survey was a breeze but it took at least 3 minutes to
calculate quotes and then when it was finished, it listed quotes for each
insurer as N/A... buggy and anticlimactic. I'll check back later when they've
worked kinks out.

------
pplante
Maybe its just me, but I hate the idea of giving all my personal information
to a site called leaky. It fails to instill confidence.

The design is pleasing on the eyes, thanks square!

------
rglover
Not sure why they ripped off Square so blindly (and no "All design credit goes
to Square. We based our design on their home page until we can hire a designer
of our own." doesn't cut it), but I'll be honest, that discouraged me from
using their app. It's the little things that matter, folks.

~~~
jcc80
I think they ripped it off because Square's design is great. And, personally I
think it's pretty decent they acknowledge it. I've seen plenty of designs
ripped off and nobody ever has the guts to give credit.

------
grep
I'm wondering how they are going to reach users. Given that PPC for
"insurance" can cost $50++ per click, how to reach users?

~~~
prawn
Word of mouth will work if the benefit is there.

------
JoshTriplett
Looking at your homepage, you say "car insurance" in the smaller text, but the
big text just says "quotes from every major insurer" and doesn't say "car";
you also don't have any images anywhere that hint at which type of insurance.
Since you very specifically cover car insurance, you should make that more
clear.

I'd also really appreciate it if you added "why do we ask this" flyouts next
to each field. For instance, when you ask about home ownership, you don't
actually provide homeowner's insurance, so you should make it clear why: "Some
car insurance companies give you a discount if you own your own home."

For some reason, the text "(including your spouse)" seemed like an odd bit of
reminder text. Do people forget this often? In any case, the flyout reminders
could help here too, since you could add more detail: "This includes anyone
who will drive any of your vehicles---you, your spouse, your kids, etc"

------
muppetman
Am I the only one that thinks "I don't want to type my personal details into
leaky!"

What a bizzare name choice. Looks like a good product though, but isn't this
sort of thing fairly old? Or is it just new for car insurance? These sort of
price comparison websites have been the staple of UK Prime Time TV advertising
for the last 3 years.

------
iwd32900
After going through all that, I just get a page full of "N/A" as quotes. Cool
idea though.

~~~
mark242
Yes, total and complete fail, after going through what seems like a pretty
standard 2-driver use case.

There's no sort of progress meter, so I don't know how long I have to wait,
and after the N/A quotes there's still a spinner running, so I'm unsure as to
whether I should wait, or what.

Idea: great. Execution: really sub-par.

------
craigmc
In the UK pretty much every second advert on TV is for a car insurance price
comparison site. The 3rd best selling book last Christmas was the fictional
account of the character of one of these adverts (a meerkat called Aleksandr).
Meanwhile the market leader is a FTSE 250 company. As such I couldn't believe
it when I read (in the TC article) that Leaky is the first (or even the 10th)
real-time aggregator in the US.

These sort of sites aren't a perfect solution by any means, but a large % of
people in the UK now use them to buy car insurance, and so presumably Leaky is
on the road (see what I did there...) to being a household name by doing the
same thing in the US.

~~~
jasontraff
Hi Craig, yes -- we too someday we hope to have a mascot as cute as Aleksandr

~~~
craigmc
They've even started giving you a free Aleksandr when you use
Comparethemarket.com... Which was almost enough to get me to switch my loyalty
from Confused.com.

Of course in the States you guys have that old bloke and his gecko to compete
with... and he has pretty deep pockets ;)

------
seasoup
What would be neat instead of filling out a bunch of questions and then
getting results would be to list one question at a time and have it adjust
your estimated totals as you complete questions. You could spin it positive by
listing your savings, starting with $0 and as people fill in information, have
it raise their savings based on the information they fill in. And don't
require people to fill in all of their information, allow them to bail out at
any time and go get the insurance. You could even have people enter their
current rate and compare what you can get them against that, so they see
themselves saving more and more. That would actually end up being kind of fun
to fill out, and I would be enticed to enter more and more information to see
if I saved more. If I do not save more, I would want an indication of why for
that question I did not save more. You could contract with a game designer for
this, since they have experience making things fun.

------
blackboxxx
The name "Leaky" is such an obviously lousy name, I'm suspicious it's a
marketing ploy. Are you going to change your name a few weeks from now to get
more ink from Techcrunch et al?

It's the only reason my mind can fathom.

------
puls
I got a 500 error after entering my ZIP code. So much for that.

------
Shenglong
An note about claims histories:

When I worked briefly for an UK-based insurance company, I realized they had a
strange policy: non-fault claims raise your premium more than at-fault claims.
Why? Because statistically, they've found that people who get into a non-fault
claim typically end up in a serious at-fault claim within the next two years.
Creepy huh?

If there is no API available for the US carriers, I'm very curious as to how
internal information like this is being collected.

------
sendos
Besides the name issue (leaky) and the giving-your-sensitive-data-to-a-small-
startup issue, one other thing that I question is how sticky is this startup?
That is, how often will you visit it? Once a year, tops.

If you find an insurance that you are happy with, you'll likely stick with it
for a couple years at least, and there is no reason to visit this website
during these years.

Given the above, I don't see how they can ever make a ton of money.

~~~
waterlesscloud
I suspect that the referral fees from the insurance companies are paid out as
percentage of the premium for the life of the policy. If so, that would add up
fast.

~~~
sendos
Assuming people pay ~$500/year, and assuming 200 million drivers, and leaky
gets x% of the drivers and y% of each premium, then they get $10 _x_ y million
per year

If x% is 1%, and y% is 1%, that leads to about $10 million per year. Not too
bad, if they can get those sorts of numbers for x and y.

One question would be, how long will people use them for, once they find a
good insurance company? I've stuck with one insurance company for the last 10
years. I suspect that x will start low, and then grow as the company becomes
known, and then shrink as people stop using it.

------
mtogo
Hmm.. the mixed content on the homepage is not very reassuring about your
security practices, esp. with all the personal information you're asking for.

------
Stratego
Who gives a shit about appearances, nothing looks more respectable on the
surface than insurance companies, yet they are some the most opaque and
dubious businesses there is. This is precisely what the insurance business
needs, a breath of fresh Web air.

I'll be eagerly waiting for this service to make it to Florida. Good luck
guys.

------
jamiequint
It just hangs here for me after I took the time to fill in all that
information: <http://o7.no/pHl2qg>

Do you have plans already for filling the top of the funnel here? Its going to
be really hard to compete with established businesses buying traffic in this
market.

------
auston
This is quite interesting! I suppose your plans are to revolutionize the
entire Insurance industry? I personally know how bass-ackwards it is to get a
quote for things like general liability.

Is there any chance you guys are going to break into the commercial insurance
space? I'd love to talk to you!

------
jergason
One slight UX issue: The "Next" buttons seem like they have two different
controls on them. I wasn't sure if clicking the arrow would do something
different than clicking the text of the button. I think it would be more clear
without the extra arrows on the buttons.

------
salem
I'm looking forward to using this. I hope it exposes a certain insurance
companies practice of underinsuring people to make it appear they are cheaper
and get the sale. Save 15 minutes to get less insurance than you need, for
more than it would cost elsewhere...

------
dfc
Who is hipmunk? i am not a huge start up junkie so I am assuming it is another
YC funded company. On your actual website you say you are orbitz for car
insurance. I would stick with the orbitz analogy. (Or is it simile, i always
forgot which is which.)

~~~
akent
Who are Orbitz? Why not just explain what the site does without namechecking
other companies.

~~~
dfc
Come on you have never heard of Orbitz?

~~~
akent
I kid you not, I have only vaguely heard of Orbitz before now. Suspect it is
US-centric? A generic term for this kind of thing might be "price comparison".

~~~
dfc
I guess it is US centric. I was going to try and make a marmalade
joke/comparison/analogy but could not come up with anything that was funny:)

I guess if you have never heard of orbitz you most likely are not in the
market for american car insurance.

On a side note everyone talks about how global the internet is but I wonder
how many "internet based services" outside of media portals are actually
global...

------
flomincucci
I actually worked for a company making a product exactly like this, but for
Argentina. They launched almost 6 months ago: <http://www.123seguro.com.ar>

------
watty
Is there an option to hide the (YC ##) spam?

~~~
jergason
A greasemonkey script would do it pretty easily. That is the traditional HN
solution, it seems.

------
vaksel
um, is it me or aren't there like a hundred other insurance comparison sites?
Granted I'm not sure if they are realtime, but insurance lead generation is a
MAJOR business.

I'd think a site that makes 40 million a year off lead generation would be
able to offer anything like this as well.

------
philfreo
We need a Hipmunk for pretty much every type of insurance...

------
Hisoka
So they get paid once for every affiliate they refer. Seems like a site
someone will visit once or twice in their lifetime.. and not a "sticky" site
like Reddit. What are they going to do if Google penalizes their site (even by
mistake) for something incredibly dumb, and they lose all their traffic, and
all their income because it's not recurring revenue?

~~~
hugh3
_Seems like a site someone will visit once or twice in their lifetime_

If you're smart, you'll visit every six months and see whether someone else is
cheaper. At the very least you should visit every time you get a new car.

If _they're_ smart they'll send you a reminder email every six months to get
you to try again every time your insurance is up for renewal. Heck, they could
recalculate everything for you (based on the new set of assumptions) and email
you a set of quotes -- that's one semi-spammy email I wouldn't mind getting at
all.

However, I can't get the site to work. Maybe it's getting hammered, maybe it
doesn't work yet, maybe there's something iffy about my input (I did put in a
fake licence number because I was too lazy to find my real one). All I'm
getting is a bunch of "N/A"s. Never mind, I renewed my car insurance last
month anyway, so they've got four months to fix it.

~~~
wheels
_If they're smart they'll send you a reminder email every six months [...]_

Eventually that would just drive down the affiliate fees. The reason that
they're (presumably) high is that they've factored in the lifetime value of a
customer. If you systematically lower that, then the referral fees will
follow.

~~~
hugh3
Perhaps, but you'd get more of 'em.

Still, lifetime value, really? I admit that I've been letting my car insurance
roll over from year to year because I'm too lazy to go looking for new quotes
(though this site, once it's working, will significantly lower that barrier)
but next time I get a new car I'll certainly shop around to see who'll give me
a good rate.

~~~
tptacek
Eh. I'm Progressive and disinclined to change; auto insurance is a place where
customer service actually matters.

------
pitdesi
We are very similar but in a b2b space... <http://feefighters.com> \- Love
what you guys do... it is in many ways exactly what we do (as for the site
layout, hey - it looks good!)...

The trick is convincing people that what you're providing is different from
the standard lead gen sites. You've done a good job in the description, but
people will always be wary. Drop me a line if you want to talk shop

Question: anyone know if someone has a similar model in the health insurance
space? It's sorely needed.

