[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Pry (YC W21) - Finance for Founders
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Launch HN: Pry (YC W21) - Finance for Founders
Hey HN! I'm Andy Su and I'm here with my cofounders Hayden Jensen,
Tiffany Wong, and Alex Sailer. We are the cofounders of Pry
(https://pry.co). Pry is solving finance for founders. Instead of
using Excel, founders and finance analysts can use Pry to manage
their budget, hiring plan, and cash runway. As a long time HN
lurker, I'm excited to share this project with you. In a previous
life, I cofounded a tech-enabled accounting company. We help
thousands of companies keep their books (accounting) up to date.
While growing, I could feel Javascript improve year after year but
the way our finances were done in Excel just got worse and worse.
The product I wanted was simple: something to replace the Excel
files that the finance gurus use. I looked around and couldn't find
anything that did what I wanted so I decided to start working on it
(originally http://budgithub.com) two years ago. There is a lot to
build. Most Excel files have these components: - A summary view
with budgets and actuals - Separate tabs for different departments
- A hiring plan (list of employees) and a hidden pivot table to
make things work - A revenue model - A dashboard Today, I'm
happy to announce that we have finally launched a release that
covers all of these components and it's available for anyone to try
for free. We built this tool to serve the startup and small
business community. Our pricing ranges from $50-$100/mo and we're
determined to continue offering our full suite of functionality at
an affordable price. We have a lot to build still - integrations,
currency support, etc, but if you are using Quickbook Online, Xero,
or don't have accounting set up, give us a try. We connect to most
US banks, and we have a few happy overseas customers using Pry +
Xero. One of our guiding design principles is the Ruby on Rails
"convention over configuration". We've done a lot of things the
hard way. Happy to answer any questions over the next few hours.
Author : sudizhe
Score : 80 points
Date : 2021-03-16 17:03 UTC (5 hours ago)
| narrationbox wrote:
| Does the accounting system support Canada and other commonwealth
| countries? Or is this US only?
| sudizhe wrote:
| We have some happy customers from outside of the US. They
| usually use Xero and integrate that to Pry. We do have
| customers using Quickbooks online in Canada.
|
| If you have a bank that is not supported by Plaid, it's not
| going to work. We will build more API integrations.
| smalter wrote:
| pry is an awesome product that i use in several companies that i
| run. feel free to ask me any questions about it.
| forgotmysn wrote:
| how does your product compare to Jirav? IIRC they had a similar
| mission
| Artistry121 wrote:
| Jirav is super slow. Causal is a pretty close competitor to
| this but more "general purpose" and built for complex
| forecasting.
| sudizhe wrote:
| Yeah. I like Taimur, Lukas and the Causal guys a lot more :)
| sudizhe wrote:
| We are built for founders and normal people. You should not
| need a finance background to use our software. We've spent a
| lot of time designing things differently :)
| alexanderrofail wrote:
| Are you any different from https://finmark.com/ in the last YC
| class?
| sudizhe wrote:
| Yes. I have worked on this product for over two years. Our
| pricing does not scale with revenue and we are ready for
| general access; 14-day free trial for anyone to try.
| wyck wrote:
| Looks cool , some points
|
| 1. Lot very early stage start-ups will simply use excel instead
| of 50$/month. You should have an easier price point to onboard
| just the planning features. As they grow they upgrade.
|
| 2. The docs leave a lot to be desired, not going to go through
| all work of sign-up without better docs.
|
| 3. Security is no where to be found, double authentication,
| policies, something..
| sudizhe wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback!
|
| 1. There are several tools that offer only the planning
| features. Our view is that budgets and actuals should be on the
| same system for the product to provide value over time. We may
| offer a free version with just the planning features in the
| future, but I built Pry for myself and I wouldn't like to use
| it that way.
|
| 2. Agreed. Documentation is one of those - if they complain,
| we'll improve it kind of things. And we've certainly heard some
| complaints about it here today.
|
| 3. Got good feedback on this from another user earlier too.
| We'll look into making our security practices more visible on
| our site since we work with finance data.
| samstave wrote:
| Sounds like your platform would be helpful to help personal
| finance management. Release a free student version for personal
| finance management - and teach people how to manage money?
| sudizhe wrote:
| I actually use it for my personal finances and so does Alex I
| think! I know this is a much bigger problem for businesses so
| we're trying to solve for them first. Plus they can help pay
| for improvements for our product. Will consider building this
| for personal finance management when we are ready to tackle
| that problem.
| jeffwass wrote:
| This is interesting!
|
| It's great you're dogfooding your own product for personal
| use, but I'm curious how your offering (which seems
| specialised for businesses) compares to something like Mint
| which is designed for personal use?
| sudizhe wrote:
| We give month by month data in much more detail. Also
| thinking of building some custom models for buying a house,
| retirement, college education, etc. But again, this is
| probably not happening for a couple years - or unless we
| struggle to enter the small business market.
| randtrain34 wrote:
| How does this compare to https://twitter.com/runwayco ?
| sudizhe wrote:
| Runway.com is a good team that is recently backed by a16z. They
| are still in early access development so I am not sure how our
| products differ. I think there are several people tackling this
| problem and that's a good thing for founders and entrepreneurs
| overall.
| bberenberg wrote:
| I think it would be helpful if you had a "Signup + QBO to Value
| from Pry" guide.
|
| Also, can you speak to why you chose total spend as what you base
| your price on?
| sudizhe wrote:
| Yes! We've updated our landing page but our docs pages are
| still not updated yet. We chose total spend because our value
| is helping businesses manage spend. We also only have one
| benchmark - $100k/mo in spend. Our gauge is that anyone who
| spend more than $100k/mo are able and usually willing to be on
| the $100/mo plan.
| bberenberg wrote:
| FYI we spend more than 100k/mo because we're a reseller. This
| means we transact a lot of dollars, but it's not really
| "spend". Not saying you should optimize for edge cases like
| us, but giving you an explanation of a failure mode.
| sudizhe wrote:
| Yeah, we may move this to a $100k in expenses instead in
| the future. If your costs are in "COGS" then it won't
| count. For now, we do not allow for this because we don't
| want to incentivize founders to stuff as much stuff in COGS
| just to pay us $50/mo less. I have seen people do silly
| things like this before.
| CapriciousCptl wrote:
| I'd love to sit on that board---
|
| Chairman: WHAT THE #$%$ happened to our gross margins?
|
| CEO: Let me tell you how we saved $600 on our new
| accounting platform...
| sudizhe wrote:
| More like: you know, we need to advertise to make sales
| so that's like a cost of revenue... insurance too...
|
| We ran into this at inDinero.
| tmpz22 wrote:
| Hey I like the product so I'm going to give the most critical
| feedback I can think of.
|
| * Are you going to be around 3 years from now? Do you want to
| work on this project for the next 3+ years?
|
| * If initial attempts at monetization don't work could customers
| become the product?
|
| * How do I get data OUT of the product if I outgrow it or switch
| to a different platform later on.
| sudizhe wrote:
| Glad to hear that you like what you see.
|
| * I will keep this around as long as people find it useful. My
| last company was founded in 2009 and is still around. There is
| still a lot more I want to build for Pry so 3+ years is no
| problem for me.
|
| * I actually really hate the idea of customers as the product.
| I know this product has valuable financial data. We have raised
| funding and I have always tried to prioritize good investors
| who align with this value over the ones offering the most
| money. You'll have to take my word on this one.
|
| * You can export the report data to google sheets. Our formulas
| cannot yet be exported. We will work on an API at some point to
| address this.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| It sounds really useful, but it's a non-starter if I need to give
| sensitive financial data to some startup where any engineer can
| probably log into the DB and check how much money I have left.
|
| I saw a tweet recently to the effect of "I'm not sure who I'd
| rather have my data, a giant megacorp or a startup with 5
| employees who can query the DB from their laptop." I think this
| is a good example of that.
|
| I would use this if it included encrypted data storage with
| client-side computation, and/or was self-hostable (you can still
| charge a license fee!)
| sudizhe wrote:
| Totally understand. The web platform is still the fastest to
| develop on (at least for me). I have an idea for moving
| everything to native apps and keeping data offline, but it's
| pretty far down on the roadmap T.T
| Androider wrote:
| I think what would help is, and what I've seen other
| companies do:
|
| - First add a security page, I need to know you're doing
| basic things like encrypting the data on your end etc.
| Hopefully you're using at least something like KMS for your
| at-rest encryption (all DBs and disks) if using AWS.
|
| - Then also publicly state on the security page something to
| the effect of "No Pry employee has the ability to access
| customer data without your explicit approval, and all access
| is audited". Meaning, if you need to work a support case for
| some customer, you have to ask them before you look at their
| data, and you have to track when this access occurs
|
| - Ultimately you'll get something like a SOC2 cert to show
| that you actually have these controls in place that you say
| you do
|
| I think with this, you'll be able to overcome some of the
| fears. Native apps is a shrinking market and a distraction
| for you IMO. Your customers are already fine with cloud
| solutions, since they're using Quickbooks Online, Xero etc.
| by definition, you just need to convince them you're
| trustworthy as well.
| sudizhe wrote:
| Good call. Thanks for the feedback!
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| You might find this helpful on this topic:
| https://latacora.singles/2020/03/12/the-soc-starting.html
| bberenberg wrote:
| Can you share what makes your financial data sensitive? This
| isn't intended as a ridiculous question. I want to understand
| what harm / thread model you are worried about with Pry staff
| seeing your company finances.
| wongarsu wrote:
| - Even the rumor that a company isn't doing well financially
| can easily sink them. Who knows what Pry employees say to
| someone they want to impress in the pub.
|
| - Pry knowns my transactions, so they know who my customers
| are, and how much I'm charging them. Maybe one of my
| competitors could bribe a Pry employee to divulge this
| information. Same for suppliers, etc. Maybe not important for
| B2C SaaS, but for many companies this is a real threat.
| vcvc wrote:
| Pry staff may leave and work for a competing company of the
| end user
|
| Is it possible for Pry staff to do any actions in the
| accounts such as withdraws?
|
| Does third part access void TOS with banks that have
| protections in place?
|
| If Pry is sold to another company, how is data transferred to
| the new company? Does the end user have the option of
| preventing the transfer?
| sudizhe wrote:
| Pry staff cannot do any withdrawals. We use Plaid for our
| third party access and they are widely used. If we sold, I
| have no idea. But we have 24 months of runway right now and
| no plans to sell.
| neximo64 wrote:
| This is nonsense in a startup its very transparent.
| choxi wrote:
| Isn't this true for any traditional accountant you might use as
| well? Any form of outsourcing financials seems like it would
| have the same risk.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Accounting is a highly regulated field. My local accountant
| is properly certified, and takes information security very
| seriously (in part because of well established precedent
| around liability and professional misconduct).
| nrmitchi wrote:
| > takes information security very seriously
|
| I don't mean this as a giant joke, but where do you find
| these accountants?
|
| I'm not saying that they don't _try to_ , but things that
| would be major security no-no's to people on HN are often a
| regular part of business for others (emailing photocopies
| of 'secure' documents, copy/pasting passwords, etc).
| sokoloff wrote:
| It varies. My tax preparer will not even open PDFs that I
| want to send him due to the risks he perceives there.
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(page generated 2021-03-16 23:01 UTC)