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Launch HN: Exams, tasks, K8, eCommerce, cell sites, health, data quality, travel
219 points by dang on July 23, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 124 comments
This is the inaugural "Meet the Batch" post that we discussed a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27877280. There are 8 startups in this thread. I've attempted to squeeze a reference to each in the title above. The initial order is random.

Direct links to each startup:

Portão 3 (YC S21) - Corporate travel for Latin America - https://portao3.com.br/, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27930563

Sitenna (YC S21) - A marketplace for wireless cell sites - https://sitenna.com/, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27930564

ContainIQ (YC S21) - Kubernetes observability based on eBPF - https://www.containiq.com/, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27930569

Appollo (YC S21) - A single API for launching to eCommerce platforms - https://www.tryappollo.com/, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27930570

Beau (YC S21) - Automate repetitive client-facing tasks - https://beau.to/, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27930568

Telm.ai (YC S21) - Real-time data quality monitoring - https://www.telm.ai/, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27930566

Filadd (YC S21) - Online courses for LatAm university - https://courses.filadd.com/, entrance exams https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27930567

Shimmer (YC S21) - Online video support groups for mental health - https://shimmer.care, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27930565

You are invited to share your questions, thoughts, feedback, and experiences in any of these spaces! Simply reply to the founder's post you want to discuss.




Hey HN! We’re Daniel and Brian from Sitenna (https://sitenna.com/). Sitenna is a marketplace connecting wireless carriers, tower providers and real estate owners. Think booking.com for telecom cell sites. Currently, it takes wireless telecom carriers up to 24 months to deploy a site because the process is based on screenshots, maps, emails, PDFs and spreadsheets. This is a particular issue with the advent of 5G which requires x6-10 (depending on which analyst you believe!) more cell sites in the network.

We use maps and workflow tools to reduce the time it takes to deploy a new site by up to 75%, saving tens of thousands of dollars. Wireless carrier radio planners can easily search, identify and acquire sites for deploying antennae whilst the tower providers and real estate owners can market and monetise their assets to the telecom market.

I (Daniel) have worked in telecoms my whole career and worked in more than 30 countries. The same issue exists in every market so there is a rather big opportunity ($40B is spend on wireless infrastructure globally per year!) if we can get some solid product market fit. We’d love to speak to any of you that are curious about what we’re doing or if you have any ideas/challenges for us.


Good luck. Yours is the only one in this batch that made me go: "Hey, that's a smart idea."


Thanks. We appreciate that. We have some big plans for the company


Awesome idea - we own ~44 commercial sites in dense / infill locations and growing quickly - how do we get in touch?

For HN this is a great idea because today the process of engaging cell operators is an absolute black box - literally fill in your contact info in a modal and hope for a call back.

Zero transparency, totally inefficient and the companies themselves are a giant pain in the ass to deal with.


Delighted to hear you agree! It's been a pain for operators in every market I've worked in so it's not a small problem but starting on HN is a good first step. Send me a DM and we'd love to chat. We've launched in the UK and gathering supply/demand for US so let's chat and see how we can help


No DM on Hn? And getting an error on your website form


Odd. The form appears to be ok after some testing. Can you send an email to sales at sitenna dot com


My house happens to sit right next to a freeway and a mall, and would be the prefect spot for a tower. Can I sign up as a landlord if the land I lord over is a small tract home?


Thanks jedberg. You can submit you land to the platform and our radio team will assess it for viability. All going well, you can absolutely manage one site or an entire portfolio


Hi Daniel. I'm probably just overlooking it, but I can't find a link on your site to submit my land for assessment. Should I just send an email to info at sitenna?


Hi Apayan can you send the details to sales at sitenna dot com


Thanks, Brian. I sent a message to the address but it bounced because the group address is configured to only receive messages from inside the org.


Hi Daniel, congrats on the launch!

Is Sitenna US only? My FIL works on the telecom industry in South America doing location scouting for antennas, data centers, etc. He would really love something like this.


Hi XzAeRosho Brian here Im the Sitenna co-founder and CTO. As you can see this is a worldwide problem that we want to solve! We will be expanding globally but the initial rollout is US and UK focused. We would definitely love to hear from your FIL on what he is working on at the moment to see how we might be able to help.


This looks awesome. For potential real estate investors, how feasible is it to use Sitenna to identify sites that are likely to work well?


Thanks, jamestimmins. We appreciate it! As we grow, we will be releasing learnings/white papers from the market including what site characteristics are the most sought after for various site types. The general rule of thumb with sites are: Rooftop - taller than the surrounding buildings, flat roof with easy access, power and fiber access, long line of site over population areas and/or beside areas of high concentrated footfall (eg campus, stadia, convention centres) Tower - land that is raised vs the surrounding area, close to a population area or major road network (eg beside an interchange on a highway)


It’s tough to tell if I’m in the target market for this (I just own one piece of land with a house on it) and what kind of benefits and drawbacks I’d get from this if so. This isn’t something I’d ever considered so maybe that means it’s already not for me?


Shimmer (https://shimmer.care) offers guided video support groups for people struggling with their mental health. Shimmer matches members with shared identities and experiences and places them in small groups that meet for weekly support sessions along with a qualified peer coach. During the rest of the week, members have access to our Community Platform (a mobile app and web app) to leverage resources like community events, mood tracking, and gratitude journaling.

79% of young adults with mental health issues do not have access to care; the most common alternative, teletherapy, is expensive ($150/session), has significant churn (40% drop off after first visit), and lacks diverse representation (average age of 51 and 80% white). We've developed a curriculum incorporating material from expert group therapists at UCSF. This has led to a number of great outcomes including: providing care at a fraction of the cost of therapy ($50/month or $12/session), an 80% 4-month retention rate, and a diverse set of highly experienced facilitators that members can relate better to. If you're interested in trying Shimmer, you can sign up for a consultation call or a wellness workshop (both for free) directly on our website. Shimmer is led by three founders with extensive experience across healthcare and engineering. Having seen firsthand the severe effect that mental health issues have had on loved ones, we left previous roles (graduate programs at Berkeley MBA/MPH, UCSF MD and Salesforce SWE) to dedicate ourselves to improving the accessibility and affordability of mental health care.


I have some personal experience with this. I think what you are trying to do is commendable. Group therapies are also pretty expensive and not accessible for most people except in extreme circumstances.

The thing is if you're having say, 10 people for a 1 hour session, that gives each person about 6 minutes to share. But really more like 4 - 5 minutes after overhead. I think that is still worth _something_ (12 dollars per session sounds about right, edit: you may be able to go a few dollars higher), but you are basically trading off quality and cost here. It's going to be hard to actually build a connection and make it meaningful.

(edit: to be clear - the cost here isn't necessarily the lever - whether you charge 5 dollars per session or 25 dollars per session - you will need to make the 1 hour meaningful for the 10 people who are in the meeting, which will be the hard part IMO)


Good points! We've thought a lot about this and how to make the 1 hour as meaningful as possible. Three things that may help with this:

1) we do breakout rooms so members have more time to talk with one another. 2) groups are capped at the 8 person mark. 3) depending on the week, not everyone is always hoping to chat/share, sometimes members just wish to listen that day.


Hey friends, you’re working on something extremely important and it’s a real honour to be here for your launch thread. I’m celebrating my four year anniversary of getting out of a cardiac ward and to be blunt, I wish this had been invented four years ago.

Seriously folks, wonderful work - this is really cool.


thank you <333


This is really great! A friend of mine recently stayed a clinic for two weeks for a mental health issue, and she said the best part was that she could talk to others in the group who had similar problems.

The best of luck!


Awww thanks! I'm glad your friend had the support she needed at the time <3.


This looks great, and clearly addresses a serious need. I'm curious about your plan for scaling. It seems like finding qualified group leaders would be a limiting bottleneck.

How will you continue to find and supervise good group leaders as you draw more users?


Currently we've adopted the requirements and interviewing strategies from leading support groups such as Mental Health America.

Surprisingly there are a lot of thoughtful people out there with solid experiences facilitating discussions/conversations and this has not been a bottleneck for us!


This is probably a great idea for people in marginalized groups who feel crowded out in group therapy settings.

But how do you address the potential for groups of white men that lack diversity to breed toxic attitudes? I say this as a white man who would be reluctant to go to such a group out of this concern.


Yeah that is a concern we think a lot about. It mostly comes down to the facilitator and protocols we've developed with our care and curriculum team that go into place when any "toxic topics" get touched on.


$50 a month is a lot of money for a lot of people with mental health issues. I get it's a lot cheaper then normal care by going to see a professional but I was expecting the student pricing I guess


From an American viewpoint at least, this is actually very reasonably priced. Paying < $20 for a session of medical services is essentially unheard of. I paid $30 as copay for PT every two weeks with rather nice insurance, and every time I walk into a doctor's office it's _at least_ $30.

I have never pursued therapy but I'm sure it would be a minimum of $30 per session with insurance, if not more.

Not to say it couldn't be better, but at first glance this is a _great_ improvement from the status quo.


Yeah it's really unfortunate how few people have access to insurance for therapy too.


Long-term: Maybe insurance or government equivalent can help?

Short-term: Every new invention needs to start somewhere. There are plenty of rich, middle class, and even lower-middle-class families that easily have $50 a month to help out a struggling child / sibling / cousin / ect.

Remember, new businesses need to start somewhere, and that somewhere is often selling to a very tiny segment of the market that they intend to serve. [Edit:] Many times this means starting at a higher price, and then lowering the price as the company streamlines itself and can handle more customers.


Yeah we're thinking insurance or B2B as potential avenues someday. Also will definitely be doing some streamlining as we build up :).


I agree. For now, we offer financial aid for those who can't afford the sticker price.


You should have added this to your pitch, above. I think your pricing is fantastic, but mentioning that you are willing to go even further for people who really need the help would have probably garnered a lot of goodwill around here.


good idea. we'll consider incorporating that moving forward!


Is Shimmer a health care provider?


No, we are not a health care provider in the traditional sense.


Hi YC, We’re Darrell, Jibril, and Robrecht, the co-founders of Appollo (https://www.tryappollo.com/). Appollo is a single API to launch your app to all eCommerce platforms. Appollo enables you to create 1 app with our APIs and launch it to all the eCommerce platforms while also letting you maintain it as 1 app. Previously, you had to create and maintain an app separately for Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce, Square, Wix, SquareSpace, Etsy, etc. Before Appollo, we were working on a live stream application for eCommerce stores, which was how we were confronted with this problem. Looking forward to your feedback!


At first I thought this was so you could sell retail products through all these different platforms.

I was thinking.... WHY?!

But it is actually for ecommerce plugins/apps/add-ons and the customers are those companies making shopify plugins so they can develop once and deploy everywhere.

Echoing other comments - a more clear description / example or word other than "App" might help. I think Add-On or Plugin might be more clear in your one liner when referencing all the platforms.

Good luck on the launch! Hope the "meet the batch" thing doesn't flop.


Disclosure: I work for an established (maybe?) competitor to this idea; I say maybe because it's really not clear what you do until I read most of this thread, nor how you do it (or what's planned vs. available).

First, Welcome! This is a huge arena and I think there's a million, nuanced areas for companies to tackle and really focus on amazing merchant experiences. THis is a very big (and growing) pie.

Second, I think you'd benefit from trying to increase the clarity of what you do and the value proposition, plus how it all works. For example, I'm not sure how you can provide broad-based api support for 3rd party developers without script injection or strong webhook support, but maybe you've got a new approach? I also admit to being skeptical when you mention a feature as surpassing platform rate limits; we have a continual pain point with shopify, query cost calculation and throttling as an example.

Third, we also use a platform-agnostic solution, but then build internally on this before exposing client-facing services. After several years we don't support nearly as many platforms as you; how do you stay on top of all these unilateral changes? Just shopify keeps us on our toes, and some of the ones you mention have little critical mass making them unattractive.

Finally, it would probably help adoption if you at least gave some indication of what your pricing is going to look like, even flat rate or %, or totally custom... You're asking people to build solutions on top of your product without any sort of idea of what the long term ramifcations look like. That's a hard sell.

Good luck with the venture!


As someone who also works in this space, the idea of a single source of truth for products alone is nuts. That doesn't mean I'm not rooting for Apollo though, and I hope they find a way to bring everything together.

Feels like nowadays every ecommerce platform has their own idea of how a product is structured, from variants to modifiers to attribute sets to tags and even the nitty-gritty like fulfillment rules.

Just when you think you've nailed down a universal model you'll look at bringing on another integration that brings a unique twist to your constraints. The sheer bullshit alone that you have to put up with when working alongside all of these integrations can drive a developer mad. There have been many times when integrations release critical bugs or become flakey and we end up on the hook after the dust clears and the customers data is not malformed. BigCommerce specifically loves to surprise it's developers with API deprecations on a moments notice, what a joy to be at the mercy of.


What are some competitors in this space? I would be a customer of one of these businesses.


Me as well!


Great point, we have ran into the problem that people misunderstand our product before, especially when they are not familiar with the eCommerce app stores. I'll start testing out plugin/add-on and see if that improves it, apprecaite it!


You have a pricing page but there's not a single dollar sign on it. I have no idea what this costs.

I also took a quick look at your API documentation, and I couldn't figure out how I'd use this.

I run several popular Shopify and WooCommerce apps right now. Their primary integration point with the store is via injecting a script tag into all pages, using Shopify's ScriptTag API or WordPress's wp_head hook.

I couldn't find how I'd do this using Apollo.


Hey, We are adding script tag support very very soon!


Doesn't the name kind of clash with some already existing, relatively well known software? I was sort of confused when I saw the name of your company.

https://www.apollographql.com/docs/react/


Hey, haha yh good spot! We picked appollo because we help people launch (apollo bit) apps (app bit).


this is the first time I have heard of 'apollo graphql', doesn't seem to be well known really.


Hey! As someone who isn't super familiar with this space, I'm a bit confused about who your target user is. At first I thought it was for people who have a mobile app and want to publish it on a bunch of stores, but the APIs are all about querying products and customers, so I guess it's for integrating with eCommerce platforms? A concrete example use case on your website would help explain this to me a lot!


Browsing a bit through the doc I believe this is targeted to developers that build "apps" that online merchants can (buy and) use on their e-commerce website. I agree with alex: a sample app would probably make it more clear!


Thanks guys! Yes correct! we are targeting developers that are building apps/extensions for the website. Great idea about the sample app, will add!


advice from someone ina similar area: STARTER app not SAMPLE app. The former gives your clients a starting point to build production applications; the later is usually some throw-away sample code that quickly goes stale and causes nothing but support headaches. By extension, you will need to dedicate ongoing resources to keep this up to date; that's what you expect of your clients, so I hope you enjoy dog food!


Hi, I run clippingmagic.com (a SaaS to clean & prep ecommerce product shots) so this could be a great fit for us - we've talked many times about integrating with the platforms, but...

A few comments & questions:

1. https://tryapollo.com fails to provide a secure connection?

2. Viewing https://docs.tryappollo.com/docs/introduction on mobile leads to the sidebar getting hidden - may want to copy your ToC into the How To Use This Doc section to not make it look like you have three doc pages total ;)

3. https://docs.tryappollo.com/reference#fetch-products - do I provide a "cursor" or a "page"?

4. The "media" object type is not separately documented. Based on the "Create a product" form it's {src:string, type:string} - what are the valid string values for "type"?

5. When I update a product, do I have to include all fields, or can I include only those I wish to update?

6. How do I append another product photo? How do I insert one? How do I remove one?

7. https://docs.tryappollo.com/reference#fetch-variant goes to the wrong spot on the page, it goes to Collections API section.

8. Ditto all questions for products also for variants (page vs cursor, media & how to do narrow updates to it).

9. https://www.tryappollo.com/pricing - your pricing page has as of right now no clear indication of your intended business model. Charge a fraction of revenue? Fixed $x/install? Something else?

10. Continuation of service: building an app is a non-trivial commitment. What happens if things don't work out for appollo?

Thanks!


I keep misspelling your domain, https://tryappollo.com/ (two 'p's, your site) fails to provide a secure connection, https://tryapollo.com/ (single 'p') works fine but is a completely different website.


Yh good catch! We'll fix that!


1. Thanks! we'll fix that!

2. Thanks for the feedback!

3. Yep! it is a cursor that we return to you after your first query

4. Thanks, we'll better document that! The type values are IMAGE & VIDEO

5. No only the newly updated values

7. Ah weird, which browser you using? for me it works.

8. Ditto all questions for products also for variants (page vs cursor, media & how to do narrow updates to it).

9. Atm we are discussing pricing based on customers needs, on a direct call with them

10. We are committed to making this work. If not we are open to many arrangements including helping customers run Appollo on-prem.

Phew! Thanks for all the questions haha!


I'm wondering what sort of "app" would be deployable to all these platforms? Any examples?



Looks really great. I have 2 ecomm side projects I'd like to start using this in right away.

BTW what happened to the live stream application/idea?


Hi! We actually came across the idea for Appollo whilst trying to distribute the live-streaming app to ecommerce stores. It looked like too much effort so we built what we wish had existed. This new market seemed a better founder/market fit and had much stronger customer "pull".


I'll follow up with you over email! Long story short, customers only used it once and didn't come back to the product. We also were more interested in working on this problem that we faced ourselves while working on the live stream application.


I love this. Now that you have a working version, what's next on your road map?


Thanks so much! We are building out more API endpoints so more customers can start building their app with our APIs. In particular some folks have asked for Front-end functionality e.g. to change the theme on the target website. If you have any suggestions of things you would like would love to hear about them!!


We are building ContainIQ (https://www.containiq.com/)! We provide Kubernetes native monitoring instantly with pre-built dashboards and easy to create monitors. A one-line install that takes 5 minutes to set up and it just works. By using eBPF we’re able to correlate kernel-level metrics with Kubernetes objects. Our current users are using our product to track and get alerted on things like p95/p99 latencies, Kubernetes jobs failing, pod evictions, among other things.


Congrats on launching!

One question about containiq though which I could not figure out with the skimming of the link. How it compares to (istio + prometheus + grafana)?


Thanks for reading! Our goal was to create an out of the box solution that didn't require on-going maintenance. Another goal was to make something that all engineers on the team would know how to use.

The amount of 1/2 broken prometheus/grafana setups we see is crazy.

From a feature perspective there is some overlap (ex pod/node CPU and memory). But we have features that you can't get from the solutions you mentioned (ex service latency, latency by URL path (coming soon!). And have a lot more in the roadmap too. :)

We are also housing and managing the data for our users.


Thanks for the reply. Is it available to self host? Or self manage in public cloud?


Currently no, not yet at least.


Half broken setup is a people problem. Prometheus and grafana is integrations is actually pretty solid and quite simple if you follow the docs [1].

If you are out there to replace existing monitoring stack like ELK, Prometheus-grafana, victoria metrics, i think it will be an uphill battle proving your value because there is high switching cost.

Also, In most of the organisations, core resources that people care about are well monitored. Just my 2 cents.

[1] https://grafana.com/grafana/plugins/grafana-kubernetes-app/


Congrats on your launch. Your site was a little light on details. Could you say how your product compares to Pixie which is also Kubernetes-native and uses eBPF?

https://pixielabs.ai/


Thanks so much!

The initial version of ContainIQ is in a similar space to what pixie has built, but our eventual vision has a few differentiators. I believe Pixie was built using BCC (an assumption based on the 2GB requirement and their BPF trace tooling) which requires llvm and the kernel headers to be installed on every node. This ends up requiring a lot of ephemeral storage. Since Kubernetes is most commonly used for stateless applications this ends up being a problem, because the default node storage allocatable is relatively low. We’re in the process of migrating out from BCC to libbpf which should alleviate a lot of the issues associated with the larger storage/memory footprint of BCC. We also have a few unique features in the pipeline that I believe are unique to our product (EX: P95, P99 http latency by microservice endpoint).


Sounds interesting!

I’m on GKE. How does this compare against Cilium and the new Dataplane V2? https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/containers-kubernetes...

Sounds like you have more work curating dashboards at the least. And maybe this bolts on to the standard kube-proxy dataplane so folks don’t need to change that?


Cilium has traditionally focused more on the security and performance side of Kubernetes networking. Cilium’s Hubble product more closely aligns with what we are trying to achieve, but with ContainIQ we simplify visualization, setup and host the data for you. Hubble currently sends the data to Prometheus, but we wanted to remove the headache of managing your own monitoring platform.

Exactly we bolt on to the standard kube-proxy setup. We put a lot of effort into ensuring that everything works right out the box.


Why choose Containq over Datadog?


Good question.

- ContainIQ just works. Comes pre-configured and you don't need a degree from DD University to know how to use it.

- We are only focused on K8s.

- We have differentiated features, easier setup and we take less time to maintain (ex our latency features like service latency and latency by URL path don't need to be instrumented on each application)

- transparent pricing. We are a flat rate of $250 per month up to 50 / nodes. You don't have to worry about insane bill spikes.


Nice! Would be cool to see a demo dashboard without "booking a demo"


You are right! We are looking into launching a live demo version that users can play around with.


How does this compare to using metadata (eBPF bases metrics).


Could you expand on what you mean a little? We’re a full service platform that collects, stores and visualizes the data for you.


Sorry got autocorrected on my phone. Netdata


Hi HN, we're Bianca and Fernando, founders of Portão 3 (https://portao3.com.br/). We help companies in LATAM (Latin America) with their corporate travel, expenses and payments. We traveled a lot to visit clients in our previous companies, and realized that the corporate travel market had a lot to evolve technologically. Latin America didn’t have a startup helping companies and work travelers with a real all-in-one experience. Our software includes features like a timeline that recaps the entire trip and a BI for 100% control at the end. We make it easy to understand expenses and manage them. B2B companies in LATAM like CredPago and Junco are using Portão 3 and reducing costs significantly (as in 30%). We founded Portão 3 in 2020 and are currently growing at 40% MoM (month over month).


Congrats on the launch!

As a previous corporate traveller, I agree with your value proposition. As a software engineer I was astounded by the very lacking systems we have here in South America. Most of the travel stuff was managed via email!! I absolutely hated every single second of having to manage my travels while working, since it meant digging through emails and even spam folders...

On another note, I'm based in Chile, and already have good connections with managers in key companies that may be interesting for you. If you're looking to expand to Chile, let me know so we can setup some talks ;)

My linkedin is in my profile.


Hey XzAeRosho! Bianca and I did a lot of corporate travel too, so we do feel your pain as well. I'll definitely reach out to you now, thanks for all the kind words!


Congratz! It's really nice to see fellow Brazilians featured here.

I'm very skeptical about most startups business models but looks like you folks check two important boxes of my imaginary list:

[x] solving a real problem

[x] plenty of room to grow (generalist b2b)

I hope to see more of Portão 3! Best of luck for you :)


Hey Gabriel! Thank you for the kind words and wishes! Bianca and I actually suffered from this exact problem and that is why we decided to build it.


As a fellow brazilian I'm happy for you guys. I don't know very much about corporate travel, but I loved the idea behind Anywhere Office. If it's any help, there's some text color issues on your website header, and the language dropdown is breaking on larger options.


Hey Vini! Thank you for the kind words. That actually helps a lot, working on it now.


Congrats on launching, it is always nice to see more startups in LA. The first question that came to my mind seeing your landing is that it's everything in Brazilian Portuguese. Your market now is only BR? Because the rest of the countries in LA speaks Spanish (with a few colony exceptions).

Are you planning to open to the rest of the countries? Have you already customers in Chile, Argentina, Mexico?

Thanks!


Hey pal (and anyone else having a similar issue)!!

If you look at the top right hand corner, you’ll see a globe icon. That icon handles translations - the site is available in Brazilian Portuguese, English and Spanish.


hluska is right, you can use the globe at the top to change languages.

I have to say this is not intuitive and we actually purchased new domains for other countries yesterday and we will have dedicated websites for a lot of countries coming this weekend.

But yes, we do have customers in Brazil where we were born, but Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Colombia and Peru too!


Thanks for answering! I noticed that after my posted my comment - the dedicated websites for each country (or at least language) sounds great. Congrats again!


Congrats on your launch! I’m just another Brazilian here cheering for more companies to be part of YC.

Wish all the best and success to you!


Thank you very much for the kind words, tucaz! #goBrazil


Hey friends, congratulations on your launch! I really dig what you’re doing and enjoyed reading your website. Excellent work!


Thanks for the support hluska!


Are you remote-friendly? How is your tech stack like?


Hi HN, we're the founders of Filadd (https://courses.filadd.com/). 80% of students in LatAm (Latin America) need private tutoring classes to prepare for university admission exams. The system is centralized and extremely high-stakes: exams only happen once a year and based on your score on the exam you can basically choose your university. If you don’t get the desired score, go home and come back the next year. So there is a huge market of private coaching for these admissions, and lots of academies that give face-to-face classes like a school. We offer online courses that include one-on-one tutoring to students who are preparing these exams. We have a revenue share business model with the teachers who work with the students—not a common model in the region. We also use Data Science to identify how well students are performing and we offer them the exact content they need to study.


Congrats on the launch!

Fantastic website by the way. How are you planning to reach out to students in high school? The Pre-U market in Chile at least is brutal, and there are so many competitors that I imagine it might be hard to get some market-share.


Hey, we have been operating in Chile for the last year, and we aquire users mostly with ambassadors. They refer our product and earn a commission. Most of our ambassadors are followers in IG (https://www.instagram.com/filadd.cl/). Most of our competitors are Tradicional academies that are losing more a more share with new Covid Paradigms


Always great to see more YC startups from LatAm and Chile!


Great opportunities in LatAm


The education market in Brazil has been on a strong consolidation trend in the past decade, having a few institutions owning the vast majority of students being approved in top exams (IME, ITA, federal universities, medicine).

I realized early on the sad reality that the ones getting approved weren't really paying the bill (80%+ discounts for promising candidates), while struggling students trying for the third consecutive year were closer to full price. It felt just and meritocratic when I got in the special few, but the selection bias for privilege was tragic: almost all of them were rich. Yet another wealth transfer from the poor to the rich.

I hope this marketplace will undo the consolidation trend and lower the prices a bit, but I won't bet on it.


For Medicine Admission it's very common what you have described: most students sit for 3 times or more until they get the score (this a reason why in Argentina there are so many Medicine Brazilian students, it's free and there is no admission) Our personalized courses and prices approach will undo this consolidation.


Beau (https://beau.to/) is a no-code tool that helps businesses automate customer interactions and onboarding. Customers use our software to collect documents, manage payments, send messages and more. For example, tax advisors use Beau to collect documents and send reminders, and immigration consultants use us to automate repetitive client-facing processes. Currently, businesses use a mix of form builders, website builders and CRMs to build this kind of thing. We launched Beau to make it easy for non-technical people to use just one tool to automate their onboarding workflows. We are a small team of 3 founders with an art, design and engineering background. We needed something like Beau when we were onboarding clients to a design agency, and realized we had to build it ourselves.


> immigration consultants use us to automate repetitive client-facing processes

Yes! I couldn’t believe how inefficient the process of sending dozens of documents over email to my immigration lawyers was. Glad to see someone working on that problem.

Beautiful landing page, too.


Thank you, glad to hear!


Just some quick feedback on your mobile site with iPhone Safari:

“Send a clients” typo on home page. Client should be singular.

Pricing page: not clear I could swipe plan cards to right. When attempting to swipe, could not get second card to come into view. Recommend letting them flow beneath.


Thank you for the feedback! Will fix this shortly


This looks really cool. I think there's a definitely need for a lightweight onboarding/CRM tool that non-technical people can easily start using, without having to dive into something more intimidating like Salesforce or Dynamics 365. I love the design of the website too!

I'm not sure if this is intentional, but the "Try for free. No credit card required" panel towards the bottom of the page looks like it's covering some of the sample use cases.


Incredible design on the landing page!


Thank you so much!


I absolutly love the art direction, such a nice break from Corporate Memphis.


Telmai (https://www.telm.ai/) is a real-time data quality monitoring platform that can automatically detect and investigate data quality issues as data is getting ingested. Our tool uses a statistical and ML engine that helps data product owners understand data anomalies and intuitively define correct versus incorrect data. These definitions are then used to proactively monitor and alert on data quality problems.

We have decades of experience with enterprise data and find that this approach towards data quality addresses a huge gap in data platforms. Detecting and investigating data quality issues is extremely tedious, time-consuming and expensive. Using Telmai, companies like Dun & Bradstreet and Myers-Holum are able to find and resolve such issues across millions of records in minutes. Ask us anything!


Telm.ai (YC S21) - Real-time data quality monitoring

Looks interesting! I worked on https://github.com/capitalone/DataProfiler

We are looking to monitor correlation changes over time, see if sensitive data gets entered, track schema changes, etc and see the impact of down stream modeling, etc

I'm curious how heavy the input is? because usually these systems take a lot of effort to setup. Any idea?


Thanks for your feedback and the link, it's indeed a very nice open source profiler. The complexity of initial analysis of the data in search for anomalies was one of the main drivers for us. Our approach is based on providing interactive experience through which you can see the impact of various statistical distributions, ML suggestions, narrow down the important criteria and explore actual data associated with it. All this helps in building much more accurate models of data correctness to be applied for the new data. And do it much less time. However as of now we don't do data classification, it's one of the future topics of interest


Congrats on the launch!

I wanted to give some feedback on the pricing page: it's very vague, to the point I don't know how much I will end paying if I go over the 500k values (is that the free tier?).

Also, this is only for data monitoring, or can be used for stuff like server monitoring too?


Thank you so much for this feedback. Regarding the pricing page we will tighten it and also add calculator, please stay tuned. For now the way it works is after first 500K values we charge $150 per 1M attribute values/month.

We dont monitor server or any infrastructure, we are designed for data quality monitoring we can flag issues like missing data, volume drifts, schema mismatch and where we stand out is monitoring actual accuracy of data at record value level. Example : We can flag anomalous titles, emails , overrepresented phone numbers etc


Just gotta say: I was really expecting to not like this batched format but actually it seems kind of okay.


Thanks for saying so. We're going to iterate on it so suggestions (from anyone!) are most welcome.

There are so many S21 startups wanting to launch on HN before Demo Day that I think we're going to be doing a lot of these, at least for the time being.


> Beau (YC S21) - Automate repetitive client-facing tasks - https://beau.to/, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27930568

get your own name! >:[


K8, with no "s," eh? I've been seeing this more and more...


Oops I forgot the 's'. It was fortuitous, though, because the current title is exactly 80 chars and HN doesn't allow 81.




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