[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Sane IT; mobile mechanics; chat teams; Zo...
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Launch HN: Sane IT; mobile mechanics; chat teams; Zoom events; spas
and beauty
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
Author : dang
Score : 57 points
Date : 2021-07-29 13:09 UTC (9 hours ago)
| athenot wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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!
| verdverm wrote:
| Launch HN in groups of 5 since there are so many companies
| now
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27877280
| jffry wrote:
| Yeah I got that, I just didn't quite catch the "Launch HN"
| instead of "Show HN" prefix on this post at first glance
| 1123581321 wrote:
| The titles for these crack me up. Each time I quickly imagine one
| startup incorporating all the descriptions.
| codetrotter wrote:
| 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
| tobr wrote:
| 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.
| antupis wrote:
| Sane it for mobile chats would be pretty good startup idea.
| [deleted]
| dang wrote:
| 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?
| throwaway889900 wrote:
| You could say "Launch HN Batch" instead of just "Launch HN",
| which would give enough context to the following text without
| making the title too long.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| I think semicolons may help. Will have to see when I read the
| next one. By the way, I didn't mean my comment to be mean-
| spirited.
| dang wrote:
| Oh no worries! like I said it sort of does the same to me.
|
| Edit: oh - I guess I originally said that but then edited
| it out.
| verdverm wrote:
| I still had the same feeling after the ';' edit. (didn't see
| it beforehand)
|
| Perhaps with time we will recall this new format. This is my
| first time seeing it and I had to read the initial blurb
| before remembering you posted this 10 days ago
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27877280
| rexreed wrote:
| 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?
| asdff wrote:
| >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.
| maomorales wrote:
| 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.
| ciguy wrote:
| How is this different than established players in the space
| like GeekBot?
| maomorales wrote:
| We're building a whole ecosystem of tools and add-ons for
| async work. Bots like geekbot are focused on stand-ups, and
| this is only a piece of what we're doing now - our goal is
| to replace several bots/apps with our toolkit, and
| implement security standards that are not followed by
| current bots; we're also available in more chat apps, not
| only in Slack.
|
| DailyBot lets you give kudos to teammates, have a
| watercooler in a chat channel, random 1:1 coffees, run a
| virtual commute that reminds you to disconnect from work
| each day, run countdowns, pomodoros, and more. You can even
| build public web forms that are connected to your chat
| channels through the bot. In the end, we want to make the
| chat 10x better and at the same time provide only one
| dashboard that connects all that data.
|
| Our product is extendable: you can connect your check-in
| responses to over thousands of apps through Zapier, and
| build your own chat commands without technical knowledge.
| For example: you can create a command that responds with
| your predefined text, like to access information quickly
| inside the chat, or to trigger a form, or get data from
| your back office tools, kind of useful for chat-ops.
|
| We created a 2min video that shows a bit of it:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHZnGl4c-9g
| ahmedomar701 wrote:
| 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!
| foolinaround wrote:
| 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.
| jchallis wrote:
| 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.
| galuggus wrote:
| Are you seeing a lot of growth?
|
| Is this just for maintenance or includes repairs?
| skulle16 wrote:
| 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!
| dsr_ wrote:
| 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.
| skulle16 wrote:
| Great memory. When GTE merged with Bell Atlantic to form
| Verizon, they had to spin out their Internet assets which
| became Genuity. Genuity was a large publicly traded ISP but
| ultimately went Ch 11 when Verizon did not buy them. Level 3
| bought their assets, Qwest (now Lumen) bought Level 3 .
|
| We always liked the name and did check on the mark.
| skulle16 wrote:
| Qwest became Centurylink then Lumen :).
| pizzetta wrote:
| 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?
| skulle16 wrote:
| Thanks for taking a look and great questions. The premise of
| Genuity is smaller customers can get better pricing together
| by bundling lower demand into a single delivery system.
| Typically, smaller companies are harder to reach and service
| with a direct salesforce and are typically services by
| resellers and VARs like CDW. We believe our model lowers
| costs for customers but also the vendors by cutting the fat
| out of the system using software. As an example, we are
| running a promotion on MSFT and save customers 15% versus
| what is on their site. In the future we are also thinking of
| allowing customers to share what they are paying as well.
|
| Also, today in our marketplace we integrate these apps
| directly for billing, provision, etc. so we handle all the
| support elements.
| maomorales wrote:
| 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!
| vladsanchez wrote:
| @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.
| maomorales wrote:
| Oh, thanks! I shared this comment with my team - they're the
| ones behind what we're building. I'm glad to see you're
| finding value in what we're doing. Stay tuned for what's
| coming next!
| finkin1 wrote:
| 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.
| maomorales wrote:
| We landed at this pricing: $3/mo per user (in a basic plan)
| and $5/mo per user in a standard plan that includes more
| security features, anonymous check-ins, culture/team values
| for kudos, API/webhooks, and some other details.
|
| The reasoning behind hiding pricing: we've been running a/b
| tests for different pricing setups inside our web app. We had
| to hide it from the public page because of a technical
| limitation in our a/b implementation. Public site and web app
| are completely separated and we didn't want to spend time
| integrating more things to track users/sync info between both
| apps - it soon will be over.
| sanedigital wrote:
| Super interested in your product as an alternative to
| GeekBot. But putting a "Pricing" page in your navigation
| and then _not having pricing on that page_ is pretty
| aggravating.
| maomorales wrote:
| I appreciate your feedback. We're moving fast here to
| solve that confusion, and it's done:
| https://www.dailybot.com/pricing
| ishbaid wrote:
| 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!
| pionar wrote:
| 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?
| RankingMember wrote:
| Teams already has this, so it's only a matter of time before
| Zoom adds it.
| ishbaid wrote:
| There's always risk of a big company doing this, but in
| general, no. We're not worried.
|
| Most startups die by suicide, not homicide.
| rexreed wrote:
| 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.
| ishbaid wrote:
| I totally see your confusion. Our intended audience is online
| cohort-based programs.
|
| Think online courses, bootcamps, or private commmunities.
|
| Google calendar is great for 1-on-1 and small groups, but
| when you're managing hundreds of zoom events for a number of
| different subgroups within a larger community, it's a
| nightmare.
| llampx wrote:
| I used to do meetups for some hobbies before the pandemic.
| For me, managing no-shows is very important. Many events have
| an attendance limit, and everyone who flakes takes space from
| someone who intended on going.
|
| I only started getting no-shows and late cancellations under
| control once I started kicking people out for doing more than
| X no-shows. Also, it really helps to take money for reserving
| a spot, contrary to your assertion.
|
| For me, especially with pandemic restrictions, managing no-
| shows is a very important feature.
| rexreed wrote:
| I run dozens of events a year. Online and even now in-
| person. I don't have any "space" issues with virtual
| events. Which platform that you're using has registered
| attendee limits (vs. actual live attendee limits) and how
| does a no-show at a virtual event take away space from
| someone who is going?
|
| All the streaming / event platforms I use charge based on
| actual viewers and attendees or active users on the
| platform. If I had a limit of 100 live, I could literally
| have 1000 people registered with 900 no-shows and that
| wouldn't be any issue. The no-shows are not taking anything
| away from the shows.
|
| The only reason to manage no-shows is to manage active
| engagement. And that's more of a community building thing
| than a platform thing.
|
| Virtually, from what I can tell, is managing Zoom events,
| which are entirely online events, so live in-person
| attendee limits don't seem to be a factor here.
| [deleted]
| Anahi2016 wrote:
| 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!
| unixhero wrote:
| CDMX only :(
| Anahi2016 wrote:
| CDMX and QRO only (for now) :)
| unixhero wrote:
| I get why. But why not MTY. Those maggafakkers in San Pedro
| are _riiiiiiiiich_.
| Anahi2016 wrote:
| Soon. We want to perfection our product before we take
| all Mexico and then Latam!!!
| sergiomattei wrote:
| 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?
| Anahi2016 wrote:
| Hi Sergio! Exactly what you are describing is what we want to
| solve: we want you to be confident that you will get a
| standard quality service when you book with Glitzi. Now, we
| have learned that good professionals (trained and using good
| quality products) invest in their work & tools, therefore,
| they expect a higher pay than a cheap non-quality service
| (and that makes sense!). So our prices are not cheap but are
| not crazy expensive (also consider that these services are
| at-home, the professionals have to travel to your house). Our
| haircuts for men are $18 dollars. However, we think that as
| Glitzi grows (we have more bookings), we will be able to
| reduce prices as professionals will earn the same or more but
| will have more appointments per day.
| dksidana wrote:
| 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.
| Anahi2016 wrote:
| Ohhh Urbancompany.com we know about you guys! Great work! Is
| it true that your main services are beauty and wellness? I
| will love to talk to you to share notes.
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