
Launch HN: Hivy (YC W17) – An App to Get What You Need at the Office - paulinetordeur
Hi HN,<p>I’m Pauline, the co-founder of Hivy (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hivyapp.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hivyapp.com</a>). We&#x27;re part of the YC Winter 2017 batch.<p>Hivy is an office management platform that makes it easy for employees to tell their office managers what they need to be comfortable at the office.<p>I started Hivy after working in big companies where it was always complicated to get what I needed to work efficiently. I once spent 6 months with the slowest computer, and gave up trying to change because there was no clear way for me to request a repair &#x2F; new one.<p>We&#x27;ve developed a Slack app, an iPad app and a web app to make the request process for employees easy and fast.<p>You can use Hivy to make orders (snacks, supplies, perks, business travel) and suggestions to improve your life at the office. Office management teams review these orders, manage them and collaborate on Hivy to keep employees happy and productive.<p>We&#x27;re really excited about what we are building and would love you and your Office Manager to try it out. If your team is on Slack, I’m sure you’ll love our Slack integration :)<p>You can try Hivy for free here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;app.hivyapp.com&#x2F;signup" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;app.hivyapp.com&#x2F;signup</a>. Just don’t forget to invite your Office Manager!<p>Happy to answer questions about Hivy, our users, and our plans for the future.<p>Edit: replaced &#x27;desktop&#x27; with &#x27;web&#x27; above.
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ploggingdev
* The pricing page does not contain any info about the pricing. Could you briefly mention how your pricing works?

* Did you find that large companies are welcoming of Hivy or was there any resistance to adopting a third party service?

* What was your growth rate like between the start of YC and demo day?

Best of luck with Hivy!

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paulinetordeur
Hey! Thanks for your comment. Our pricing is based on the number of employees
and admins using the app. For now we haven't witnessed any resistance from
companies to adopt a third party service. They find value in our vendors
curation and appreciate they don't have to change all their service providers
thanks to our system. We grew 40% monthly during YC.

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tedmiston
I want to second that it would be nice to see actual pricing.

Are you live outside of the Bay Area, in cities where you might not have
recommended vendors yet, for example?

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paulinetordeur
As I said, we are flexible. We try to stay close to 1$/employee/month. We are
live in the Bay Area and in Paris. And we have opportunities to open the
services in other cities very soon.

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woqe
I haven't re/viewed the product/website, but I do want to mention that I
immediately pronounced the product name as "H-IVY" (aitch-ivee) in my mind.
There may be a stigma associated with that pronunciation.

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paulinetordeur
Finding a new name will probably be on our 2018 Roadmap ;)

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nadc
I winced at the name from associating it with the skin disease Hives
(Urticaria) [1].

For when you're exploring rebranding - I'd recommend looking at AppAnnie [2]
and their previous branding [3] for some inspiration. I'd imagine a similar
brand would work well exceedingly well for an employee facing office
management platform.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hives](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hives)

[2]: [https://www.appannie.com](https://www.appannie.com)

[3]:
[https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/screen-...](https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/screen-
shot-2016-01-12-at-11-55-14-am.png)

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J_Sherz
Will Hivy have vendors built into the system? Allowing employee's to search
for products they want and then have the office manager buy the items through
Hivy seems like a great potential revenue stream.

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paulinetordeur
Great question! We've already built an Amazon integration that lets office
managers convert employees requests into direct purchases on Amazon. And we
plan to build many more in the future.

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SeeDave
Any plans to integrate with existing procurement systems, manage approved
vendors, handle approval levels/purchase limits, asset tracking/management,
invoice management, etc.?

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paulinetordeur
Yes, we do have features that let you manage and approve vendors and multiple
approval workflows. Invoice management is on the way. What procurement systems
were you thinking of?

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SeeDave
If you're planning to go in the big-enterprise space... the big one is Oracle
Financials. Many companies use it to manage vendors, purchase sites, GL codes,
buyers, approval levels, an item master, net payment terms, etc.

You guys are on the right track, but eventually you're going to hit a wall
where you'll need some serious maturity with procure-to-pay.

I'm not sure how the tone of this comes across, or if it's in any way negative
because you guys are onto something... but have a lot of competition that is
often deeply integrated (see Service-Now catalogs for example).

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paulinetordeur
Thanks for your analysis! The market is huge. There's a lot to be achieved on
the SMB market before hitting a wall luckily.

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eldavido
I noticed you didn't launch to the web. Any comments there? This seems like a
common line-of-business tool that would traditionally make sense for a simple
web application.

Did you do your desktop apps using electron?

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paulinetordeur
Sorry for the misunderstanding, we are building a web app and we are not
planning to provide any desktop application for now.

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bambax
Toujours sympa de voir ce que font des frenchies! ;-)

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paulinetordeur
Thanks Bambax!

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ikeboy
What kind of vendors do you deal with? How would I go about seeing if we could
integrate?

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paulinetordeur
Anything Office Managers look for: IT support, travel arrangements, catering
... We feature providers only if they've been recommended by office managers
from our community. But we can evaluate the fit together. Feel free to reach
out at hey@hivyapp.com.

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sinak
We're interested too - sent you an email.

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paulinetordeur
Ok, thanks! We'll get back to you asap.

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fatherofone
hmm...not sure I can make use of..it but Good Luck !

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paulinetordeur
Thanks!

