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'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'd like to talk about.

Update: We're just going to try to answer as many questions as we can. Let's get started!

Michael: hey folks really excited to meet as many people as possible and talk about startups!

Update: We've gotta run, but this was great. Thanks so much and enjoy the weekend.

[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?

[Johnie]

I'm curious about your model versus something like Aspiration [1] that is partnering with Radius Bank? Do you need to own a bank to provide the service?

[1] https://www.aspiration.com/summit

[rajacombinator]

Not very thoughtful 2c: success or failure of a bank is driven more by where you choose to invest your capital than trying to improve the consumer experience and secure deposits. Due to the way the system is set up, the consumer is almost irrelevant in the equation. So while their might be some margin to squeeze in improving the consumer experience, it's probably insignificant vs. say, picking the right bundle of mortgages to buy.

What about building a frontend as a service and selling it to other banks? That sounds like a better way to focus on a tech/product edge.

[sgoraya]

Are you creating a 'traditional' bank or considering a Credit Union model?

(Should have read further down :), looks like 'traditional' bank - please correct me if I'm wrong.)

[corybrown]

This sounds great. What type of fees are you considering?

[wjg]

Hi Michael and Aaron,

I built Supertask (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/). 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!

[email protected] @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!

[akharris]

Hi Bill - How many people are using supertask right now?

[userium]

Hi Michael and Aaron,

I'm the co-founder of 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.

[akharris]

Starting a new reply thread because we nested too far.

I think my biggest fear is the exact thing we just talked about: frequency. Creating long term customer engagement is super hard. I think it's also hard for recruiting cos to build distinct and valuable brands as opposed to becoming commoditized resume lead gen.

One question I had on hitting the site was "what is the main purpose here?" It has the feel of a content site, but your goal is to get people hired.

[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.

[akharris]

What have your experiments looked like? How were you measuring them, and at what rate was your revenue growing? What's your current core metric, and what's been happening to it over the last few years?

[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?

[lazyant]

Hello, I've ben looking for a travel site like this, for example if I have a family of 3, live in Toronto and have a budget of $3k - $4k, where can I go to a tropical beach for a few days (flexible days but need a few days to prepare)?

I just tried it and it didn't work too well for me:

- currency is in Euros - time was fixed to 4 days' vacation couldn't figure out how to change - no range for budget - I asked for "beach" and the results were: Baltimore, Beijing, Berlin, Bucharest, none of them with beaches

[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 ).

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.

[seeingfurther]

Hi Michael and Aaron,

I'm the co-founder and CEO of PsychSignal (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?

[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...

[2] http://dvt.name/2015/finishing-what-intel-started-building-t...

[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?

[kartikkumar]

Hi Michael, Aaron,

I'm co-founder of satsearch (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?

[samstave]

Oktopart for space!

Sounds pretty cool.

[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.

[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?

[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?

[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/ 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.

[reiderrider]

We are building Stripe for life insurance 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?

[chejazi]

Hi YC partners,

Founder of 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?

[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

[sashakozak]

We’re building the first in its kind ads/promotion barter platform: 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

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’

[pimdewitte]

Thanks so much for this. We built Upfit (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)

Why not embed a video similar to this 10 minute video: 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)

[akharris]

Sounds cool, Pim - how can we help?

[twlng]

Hey Michel and Aaron,

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?