Launch HN: Sane IT; mobile mechanics; chat teams; Zoom events; spas and beauty

[dang]

Here's the second issue of our new Launch HN format ("Meet the Batch") - previous one was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27930562, meta is at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27877280.

There are 5 startups in this thread. The order is randomized. Here are direct links.

Odiggo (YC S21) - Connect car owners with mobile mechanics in the Middle East https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27996058

Genuity (YC S21) - SaaS for companies to manage IT and buy business software https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27996059

DailyBot (YC S21) - Chatbot and toolkit for team collaboration and asynchronous work https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27996060

Virtually (YC S20) - Easily manage Zoom events https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27996061

Glitzi (YC S21) - At-home beauty and spa services for Latin America https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27996062

[Anahi2016]

We are Ana and Luis, the founders of Glitzi (https://glitzi.com.mx/). We provide certified beauty and spa services, same day and delivered at home, in Latin America.

In Latam, lack of regulations and licencing means that people struggle to access quality beauty and wellness services. Beauty salons and spas also offer very poor working conditions to professionals, who live mostly off tips or low commissions. As a Latin woman I always thought this was normal, but when I lived abroad I realized that it has more to do with lack of licensing standards. Latin men and women spend significantly more on these types of services than any other region. We deserve better!

Our platform connects customers with vetted, trained independent beauty and spa professionals. We allocate each appointment to the best suited professional in our network according to availability, distance and skills. We also train our professionals based on standardized protocols that we have developed, so we are becoming the quality standard in the industry. Most startups in this space in Latam are SaaS solutions for salons or spas. We believe in empowering who really matters in this space: the customers and the professionals. And it's really both: happy professionals are as important as happy customers.

Some of our best customers are working mothers and business owners who have little time to take care of themselves or go to the spa or salon. 95% of our network of third-party professionals are women who can decide when and how many hours they work at Glitzi, therefore they can continue with their professional careers when they become mothers. Not only that, but they can earn a lot more (as much as 3x more) than in salons or spas.

Comments, questions, and feedback are welcome!

[sergiomattei]

Wow, this is a very real problem and I'm glad to see it addressed.

Every Friday my Abuela calls a stranger for manicure/pedicure they've known for years that she heard about from another friend, from another friend... Word of mouth, like most things in LatAm. They're not certified or anything, but they do a decent job.

I've always wondered about their background because they seem to hang out for too long at the house, and it sketches me out.

On my end, finding a good barber shop or beauty salon for my hair has always been a huge pain. The quality of cuts is extremely variable and online reviews are scarce, aside from maybe Facebook. There's no scarcity for cheap $10 cuts but the variability is incredible in quality. Some dude at the $10 barber shop could be a fantastic, trained stylist. But then next time you come in some other asshat ruins your hair.

Aka it's a bit of a crapshoot but it's all you know and what's accessible. I'm a broke college student and can't afford much more than that.

You're damn right that the beauty industry in LatAm is a bit of a wild west. I have a quick question: what are costs for customers like?

[drnex]

Me encanta verte aquí Anahi. Q orgullo, muchas felicidades, haz llegado lejos y van a crecer mucho mucho más. -nes

[dksidana]

Congratulations on launch. We , Urbancompany.com, have launched similar services (and more services like plumbers, technicians as well) in India around 6 years back and few countries in Asia. Customer response has been really positive.

[sophialiuliuliu]

Well except where thee clientes are, you also have to where the least competition is right? So another approach to look at this is the door dash way, where is the real big market without much competition!

[unixhero]

CDMX only :(

[skulle16]

Hey HN, I’m Colum, a co-founder of Genuity (https://www.gogenuity.com) - a SaaS platform for companies to manage IT: things like keeping track of laptops, managing employee support requests, and buying software at wholesale prices. We are trying to solve two major problems: (1) there is no QuickBooks of IT - most IT solutions are costly, hard-to-use enterprise offerings; and (2) lower volume = higher prices. We believe we can fix (1) with better software and (2) with a marketplace with collective buying power - effectively building a community that grows stronger together.

At my previous company we paid full price for all our software, not realizing that larger companies were able to get 50% discounts. We didn’t have a central system to track everything like our assets, contracts, vendor licenses, and support requests. We even had a seven-figure contract auto-renew for a service we were migrating away from because nobody tracked it. Painful!

We have a unique business model designed to align our interests with customers: we charge $29 per company monthly and a small % on all transactions in our marketplace. This means if we can’t save companies money, we won’t make any.

We’d love to hear your feedback and would be thrilled if you would sign up at https://secure.gogenuity.com/users/sign_up/about_you and try it and let us know what you think!

[pizzetta]

How can one tell how much is being saved through your service compared to contracting directly with a SaaS (Box, Okta, for example.) keeping in mind, that rarely are list prices what small companies pay to begin with, though admittedly, larger companies can get bigger discounts.

When technical issues come up, does one get support directly from the vendor; if not, how does that work?

[dsr_]

Genuity was a data-center operator in Arizona; it was purchased by GTE, then used as the name for the network operating company which was later sold by Verizon to Level3. L3 was bought by CenturyLink, now part of Lumen.

I suspect Lumen still owns the Genuity trademark for network related activities, and IT management is rather close to that.

[ishbaid]

I'm Ish, the founder of Virtually https://www.tryvirtually.com/calendar. We're the easiest way to manage Zoom events for private communities.

Managing virtual events for more than a few people is a pain. Either you paste emails from spreadsheets into Google calendar or you rely on internal mailing lists, which get out of date and make calendar invites hard. If you want to do events for subgroups, or send out reminders, or track attendance, it gets worse. We make it all easy, for both one-off and recurring events.

We initially built Virtually as an LMS (Learning Management System) for online bootcamps in YC's S20 batch. However, over the past year we learned that our users love us specifically for managing their events. So we split out our events manager into its own product.

We've got an API that can sync with any database, for example to keep track of rosters or roles, and a Zapier integration is coming. Also, the same technology can be used to send out announcements in a targeted way. This will be a prominent feature in an upcoming release.

Our customers include some top cohort-based programs like Building a Second Brain, Flockjay, and Ali Abdaal's PTYA. Building a Second Brain used us to manage 150 live sessions for 1500 students. Throughout their 5-week program, we facilitated 7900 session joins. I would love to hear any feedback that the HN community might have for us!

[rexreed]

What is the intent for showing how many people were late or no-shows? Is this app for internal meetings? That would explain the no-show / attendance thing.

Or is it for external events? In which case, what is the importance about late attendees. No-shows is to be expected, especially for free events (And even paid events have a substantial no-show rate).

I'm confused as to who the intended customer audience is meant to be.

[pionar]

Are you worried about Zoom basically taking your idea and baking into their product?

Also, what does this have to do with Zoom specifically? Is it just the attendance tracking?

[maomorales]

Hi HN — we’re Mauricio and Sergio from DailyBot (https://www.dailybot.com). We provide tools for async work and team collaboration. It's currently a chatbot with support for Slack, MS Teams, G Chat, and Discord and others coming soon. Here's a 2-minute video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHZnGl4c-9g

We've been working in distributed teams for over 6 years and even for us, async work was still challenging. We faced pains like having too many meetings. overusing calls, and processes that could and should be chat-driven, automated, or optimized. We wanted some sort of chat assistant that we could adapt to our daily workflows. We found a few bots with partial solutions but they didn't care much about privacy and security, and we didn't want to cobble a bunch of different apps together. So we started building a tool for teams like us!

DailyBot adds features that don’t exist in Slack - our goal is to replace many apps/bots you use, all integrated in one and with a web dashboard that combines insights from these add-ons in a simple way. You can use @DailyBot to automate daily stand-ups, periodic team check-ins, give kudos to your teammates, track team morale, and even run a virtual watercooler or random 1:1 coffees across the company. All inside your chat. We also made it customizable so teams can build their own chat commands that respond with predefined texts or with data from their APIs.

We’re building it with security and privacy in mind: we don’t read messages from Slack channels, nor private conversations, except when you tag @dailybot. We use granular scopes and get only the necessary API permissions, we encrypt data in transit and at rest and implement different roles/permissions at the web dashboard. DailyBot is being used mainly by product and engineering teams, to run stand-ups, agile routines and build their own chat commands. We offer a free trial, and seat-based pricing starting at $3/mo/user.

We’d love to hear any ideas on how you would like to see chat assistants evolving, for example: a) a command to send anonymous feedback to a person; or b) a better reminder feature, etc. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback!

[finkin1]

Hi - this looks like a service that would be valuable to my remote team.

I'm interested to know the pricing before signing up. I'm curious what the reasoning is behind hiding the pricing behind a signup process.

[vladsanchez]

@maomorales Thanks and congrats on a great product! I've been using DailyBot for a long time now for daily standups and it's the best way to keep everyone accountable and best way to end stupid and unnecessary meetings. Mil Gracias! Wish you continued success.

[ahmedomar701]

We are Ahmed Nasser and Ahmed Omar of Odiggo (YC S21). We connect car owners with mobile mechanics in the Middle East. Our mobile app lets you schedule a tire change, an oil change, replacing any car part, or basically any service for your car in minutes. The mechanics come to where your car is.

As a kid I used to wake up very early on Friday to fix or do something to my fathers car, it was like a never ending process. Since then I always had one question, why can't the mechanic come to me? I started my own ecommerce setup during college, and then started an app back in 2014 for car owners to book their regular car service checkup online, but it was a disaster as customers booked but garages would not use any of our tech. Then in 2017 we started a marketplace selling pre-owned cars online, but eventually we pivoted and returned to my old idea, thinking that enough had changed that now it would be possible.

So now users can download Odiggo, add their car information (make-model-year), then find all the services and products that are compatible with their cars in one single app. Not only that, with certain APIs and integrations that we are working on, you (as a car owner) will be able to connect the car to the app to automate the process.

Our average user spends almost 7% of their life in their car. We can at least save them the hassle of going to the mechanic and wasting time and effort. We want to make this service as easy as buying your groceries and be the fastest out there. Looking forward to hearing your comments!

[jchallis]

Hi Ahmed - I'm a very heavy user of YourMechanic in the US. One of the biggest benefits I've heard for mechanics is that without the overhead of a garage they can run their own operations much more profitably. Being able to recruit good mechanics who have more favorable economics lead to happier customers.

[foolinaround]

the tools at a garage are very physical - a good jack that raises the car up feet vs inches, all the tools that might come handy, additional supplies, etc?

I once had a mechanic come to my place, then he realized that due to a leak, he needed a different supply that is not there, then had to reschedule an appt etc.

[galuggus]

Are you seeing a lot of growth?

Is this just for maintenance or includes repairs?

[rexreed]

I'm seeing a trend of apps that help to (micro)manage distributed / remote workforces. Virtually keeps track of who is late and no-show to Zoom events, Dailybot has automated standups that basically keeps tabs on employee work and productivity.

I'm curious to hear from the founders as to what motivated the creation of the apps and whether WFH plays a significant part in the value proposition. Would you need either app in a traditional work-from-office environment?

[maomorales]

DailyBot was born out of our own need - we’ve been WFH for many years and needed to stay in-sync with each other. There was a behavior we were not happy about: managers or people coming to others asking about what they’re working on or requesting status updates, often. We wanted to change that behavior with our product, if you get some written updates on a periodic basis, the team will get more aligned, managers won’t need to bother (that frequent), and likely you’ll reduce the amount of unnecessary meetings.

Then we started extending the product around async work practices. Traditional work-from-office environments can indeed benefit from improving collaboration practices, getting more work done inside the chat, and (of course) decreasing the pointless meetings for things that could be written updates.

It could happen that teams use DailyBot improperly for micro-management purposes - that’s why we’re also creating a catalog of best practices and proper question templates; asking the right questions is key. We'll go further by adding more features to DailyBot so it becomes a highly useful personal assistant at work.

[asdff]

>Virtually keeps track of who is late and no-show to Zoom events

Wow, back to high school. They don't track attendance in undergrad even. Why do companies need this sort of information? If the person is important to the meeting, them being a no show will be pretty evident. If they are so irrelevant to the meeting that they could just dip out and no one would be the wiser, why are they even wasting their time in the zoom meeting to begin with? Just email whatever information you need to get out if the zoom meeting is going to just be an announcement or one sided lecture.

It also wouldn't be hard to write a little script that automatically connects you to zoom meetings that are coming up. You probably only need a few lines of bash to write your own if you have a tool like icalbuddy where you can grep for upcoming zoom meetings in your calendar.

[athenot]

For a moment, I thought all these things were from 1 company that specializes in providing benefits to workforce... until I noticed it's "Launch HN", not "Show HN" :)

[jffry]

I was also attempting to work out how a company called "Sane IT" was undertaking such myriad endeavors. It was an accidentally good hook to get me to read more!

[1123581321]

The titles for these crack me up. Each time I quickly imagine one startup incorporating all the descriptions.

[tobr]

I thought it was some keyword stuffing SEO spam that had accidentally ended up on the frontpage.

Cramming multiple unrelated things into one post like this doesn’t feel very HN-y.

[dang]

Not sure how to do the titles for these so I'm kind of winging it. The names of the startups wouldn't mean anything to most readers, and might not fit in the 80 char limit anyhow. The current style is kind of inspired by The Browser newsletter, which digs up assorted links on the web.

If anyone has a different idea for what to put in the title field for these, I'm all ears!

Edit: do semicolons help?

[codetrotter]

Same here. Even though as recently as yesterday I was wondering when the next installment of the launch HN group thread was going to be posted, and I even checked dang’s submissions yesterday to see if I’d missed one. And yet I read this title and for each word I read my jaw opened more and more as I was imagining one startup doing all of these things xD

[antupis]

Sane it for mobile chats would be pretty good startup idea.