[HN Gopher] Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #5
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Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #5
Here's the fifth "Meet the Batch" thread for YC's S21 batch. The
previous thread was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28073548,
and if you're wondering what it's all about, the description is at
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27877280. There are 7
startups in this thread. The initial order is random: Launch HN:
Clarity (YC S21) - Run your distributed team with a single weekly
doc - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28128962 Launch HN:
Mentorcam (YC S21) - Get advice from public figures -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28128958 Launch HN: Sirka (YC
S21) - Tackling obesity in Southeast Asia -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28128964 Launch HN: Echoes HQ
(YC S21) - Measure the effectiveness of engineering organizations -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28128961 Launch HN: PayHippo
(YC S21) - Loans to small businesses in Nigeria -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28130022 Launch HN:
ContraForce (YC S21) - All-in-one cybersecurity platform -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28128959 Launch HN: Palenca
(YC S21) - Payroll API for Latin America -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28128960
Author : dang
Score : 92 points
Date : 2021-08-10 14:01 UTC (8 hours ago)
| billclerico wrote:
| The encouraging comments on these threads are reminiscent of old
| Launch HN at its best. Great idea, dang.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| It's such a horrible idea. This is what you get for giving 7%
| of your company to YC these days - not even your own thread.
|
| A Show HN is free and you don't even need to write twenty
| paragraphs about how you noticed an opportunity to disrupt the
| market after spending your career in back office sales for
| insurance claims for dogs.
| tuxguy wrote:
| Not trying to be mean, but the poor english in your post,
| immediately turned me off.
| intev wrote:
| > Not trying to be mean, but the poor english in your post,
| immediately turned me off.
|
| What a terrible comment. It's people like you who discourage
| people from sharing and undermine the confidence of non English
| speakers on their journey to becoming better. Also prefacing
| anything with "not trying to be mean" usually means that's
| exactly what you are trying to do. Looking at their site,
| clearly English speakers aren't even their target customers, so
| his English really isn't even an issue. I'd also like to point
| out your sentence has poor grammar. "dangling phrase". Look it
| up. Immediately turned me off.
|
| Not trying to be mean, but I hope you stop commenting on posts.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site
| guidelines yourself. Personal attacks are particularly
| gratuitous and not allowed here.
|
| " _Don 't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them
| instead._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| dang wrote:
| Please don't be an asshole on HN. This is an international
| community with millions of non-native English speakers. The
| astonishing thing, on the whole, is that their English is as
| _good_ as it is. We should be welcoming them, not posting
| putdowns.
|
| If you'd like to help someone with their English, that's fine,
| but then the burden on you is to make sure that the context is
| appropriate and that your "help" isn't going to come across as
| an insult. "Not trying to be mean" doesn't cut it, and in fact
| often signifies the opposite.
|
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28128964.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| [deleted]
| runelohrhauge wrote:
| Hey HN community! We are Ben and Rune, founders of Mentorcam
| (https://mentor.cam/), a marketplace where people can access
| public figures and high-profile individuals for personalized 1:1
| advice. These types of individuals tend to be difficult to access
| and usually don't make themselves available for advice to people
| they don't know, but often get bombarded with inbound requests.
| By letting them set their own price to answer questions privately
| via short, asynchronous video messages on our app, we make it
| feasible to offer individually tailored advice without having to
| schedule anything.
|
| For example, one of our mentors is Chris Yeh, a VC and the co-
| author of Blitzscaling. He uses Mentorcam to give fundraising
| advice, feedback on pitches, input on GTM strategy, etc. to
| people that wouldn't have access to him otherwise.
|
| Users have told us that they've had the most impactful
| "conversation" of the their life on Mentorcam and that they've
| found the inspiration to fight through difficult phases of their
| life through their interaction with their mentor. Our customers
| have used Mentorcam to do things like get fundraising advice,
| decide on where to go to college, transition careers, and find a
| girlfriend. The latter surprised us, but demand for dating advice
| has turned out to be high, even though it's not what we're
| focused on.
|
| Happy to answer questions and read comments!
| reilly3000 wrote:
| Great idea! I think it would be a neat UX if mentors could have
| a drop-in (iframe) widget they could put in their contact page,
| link tree, or other common contact points. "Looking for
| advice?" That would make it easy to funnel those types of
| requests into paying customers, but perhaps more importantly
| cut down on their volume of inbound requests. I see you already
| have a decent stable of mentors- how have you recruited them so
| far and how do you plan to expand the network?
| runelohrhauge wrote:
| Thank you! The widget definitely makes sense--right now, we
| give each mentor a unique link that directs to their profile
| page on a browser, which we encourage them to share in social
| media profile bios etc. The early mentors all came in through
| our own outreach. Now we are getting about 50% from referrals
| and inbound requests.
| wizwit999 wrote:
| You mentioned interest in dating advice is high but I would be
| wary on how to approach that, it could 'cheapen' the feel of
| your platform (it was a slight turnoff for me).
|
| Good luck.
| runelohrhauge wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback. Our observation has been that people
| primarily seek out mentorship to help them make decisions and
| offer guidance on topics that affect them on a personal
| level. We have kept the categories where we see users coming
| back frequently and dating seems to do that because the
| advice tends to be personal by nature. I hear you that it is
| very different that career type of advice, though. Appreciate
| the input.
| danpalmer wrote:
| What's the expectation about the depth of question and
| response?
|
| Given the example of the feedback on a pitch, would the mentor
| be expected to watch a 10 minute pitch in full?
|
| If I were looking for feedback on a 10 minute pitch, I think
| the most valuable feedback would be in the form of a 15-30
| minute discussion with the person so that you can clarify, dig,
| and get to the necessary depth.
|
| What sort of reply length are you considering? For the prices
| I'm guessing this is closer to a 30s-5min Cameo video?
| runelohrhauge wrote:
| These are great questions. In the fundraising example, the
| mentor wouldn't watch the pitch in full, but instead answer
| specific questions around a pitch, for example what valuation
| cap to set, KPIs to highlight, when to raise and from whom
| etc. The typical interaction goes beyond just one question
| and answer. The duration of each response is capped at 3
| minutes but a mentor can respond with multiple recorded
| messages. The biggest reason we haven't started offering live
| calls yet is because of scheduling challenges; that said the
| asynchronous format is just a start and we are thinking about
| other formats and features for future releases.
| danpalmer wrote:
| Glad you're thinking about all of this. I personally can't
| imagine getting a useful response in 3 minutes to a one
| sentence question. I suspect it's either going to be
| generic advice not tailored to me, or an answer that I
| could have just looked up.
|
| That said, connecting these sorts of mentors for longer
| form feedback/input, or perhaps customised talks for
| companies, that could be really impactful and you'll have a
| good platform on which to build those.
| dvdsgl wrote:
| Congrats on the HN launch, Rune!
| runelohrhauge wrote:
| Thanks Dave! :)
| stangolubchik wrote:
| Hey HN! We are Stan and Ricky from ContraForce
| (https://www.contraforce.com). ContraForce is a cybersecurity
| platform that simplifies the integration of your security tools,
| security analytics, and incident response workflow in one place.
| How Rippling made HR a simple one stop shop for your HR needs, we
| are aiming to do the same for IT and security teams.
|
| The current problem in the cybersecurity industry is that there
| are too many solutions that don't work cohesively with each other
| to share security alert information. This causes months of
| implementation time, and to effectively to understand how to
| detect threats requires knowledge of specific query languages.
| It's why the cybersecurity consulting and service market will
| reach over $72B globally this year. It currently takes on average
| 280 days for a breach to be contained and a company to be brought
| back to a normal healthy state. Our platform looks to reduce the
| need of security engineering, and other expense security experts
| in order to help companies reduce alert noise by 90% and reduce
| the time to remediate to minutes.
|
| We have over 20 years of experience in the cybersecurity space.
| Working with thousands of customers, we saw they struggled with
| successful implementation consistently and lacked effective
| measures to detect most threats and to pivot to stopping the
| spread of an attack in their environments quickly. We are on a
| mission to democratize security operations for any size company,
| and we believe we can up-level even IT operators to become
| skilled security talent. We look forward to your feedback!
| tomashertus wrote:
| Congratulations on the launch.
|
| How this is different from similar solutions - XSOAR from Palo
| Alto Networks, Securonix SOAR or Splunk Phantom?
|
| Why should a vendor to choose you over existing and trusted
| security service provider?
| stangolubchik wrote:
| Thank you!
|
| In regards to the vendor solutions you mentioned. While those
| are all strong solutions as a stand alone product, they must
| be bought separately and integrated together to gain the
| maximum value out of end to end threat detection and
| response.
|
| Splunk as a standalone analytics problem still requires
| engineering talent to increase the efficacy of detection of
| malicious activity, and then you have to purchase Phantom
| (SOAR) separately at an expensive cost to benefit from
| automated incident remediation workflows. This leads to
| lengthy implementation cycles, and post sales management that
| can rival the license cost itself. Also there is the
| component of human error when it comes to creating the
| detection logic and response logic necessary with consultants
| doing the work on the behalf of the customer.
|
| We actually have MSPs and MSSPs leveraging our platform to
| deliver security services for their customers. We take the
| Managed Security Service component off of their plate, and
| they hire only security analyst to drive their monitoring and
| response as a service. Some customers will want a full suite
| of services that could be out of our scope, but if a customer
| is looking to gain insights and a simple to operate security
| operations platform then ContraForce would be a great fit!
| Lastly, the cost typically associated per User/month for
| MSSPs are quite expensive. This makes it a costly check-box
| for many companies and they have to hope that the MSSP has
| amazing engineering talent to not miss malicious activity in
| their environment.
| sjg007 wrote:
| There's always room for one more and perhaps another existing
| security vendor will buy them to complete their enterprise
| offering etc...
| overboard2 wrote:
| >We are on a mission to democratize security operations for any
| size company
|
| What does this mean?
| ignoramous wrote:
| They are Cloudflare to your Akamai. S3 to your GFS.
| Instagram/TikTok/YouTube to your media production houses.
|
| Blue ocean to your red.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Ocean_Strategy
| stangolubchik wrote:
| This is a good way to look at it. From our perspective, we
| are at a tipping point in the cybersecurity industry were
| AI/ML is becoming the core strategy of many businesses.
| Also services providers and enterprise companies can only
| afford a full SOC in house. Some of the most expensive
| areas of a SOC include engineering, data scientist, and
| architectures. There are analyst in that equation, but we
| believe we can up-level IT operators to bridge the skillset
| gap in security.
|
| We believe our solution can bring these components together
| into one single platform, so even a small business can
| utilize security operations even on a a smaller budget.
| samstave wrote:
| This looks really nice. Would like to see how you grow, I have
| some questions for you, what would be best way to contact you?
| stangolubchik wrote:
| Thank you! We would be happy to answer any questions you
| have. Please send an email to info@contraforce.com an we will
| be happy to help.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| I'd like to know more about your target user base. For example,
| would your product be a good fit for a small, bootstrapped SaaS
| provider?
| stangolubchik wrote:
| Yes! It would be a great fit. We understand that small
| companies are strapped the most for resources. With that in
| mind, we wanted to ensure we could provide day zero security
| for those who are just getting started.
|
| I would be happy to chat further. We do provide a trial and
| can get any small business started.
| pierre62360 wrote:
| Hey HN, we are Pierre, Jose Carlos and Antoine, co-founders of
| Palenca (https://www.palenca.com/). We make it easy for companies
| in LatAm to verify employment data and identity, enabling them to
| run background checks and provide financial services.
|
| In emerging markets it's extremely hard to validate income,
| identity and behavior as most of the worker's data is fragmented
| and inaccessible. As a consequence, countries like Mexico
| encounter poor credit penetration (20%) and high levels of fraud
| (2x the global level). Moreover, 80% of the transactions in LatAm
| are in cash. As soon as workers are paid, they are withdrawing
| all the money out of the ATM to spend it in cash. This means the
| vast majority of financial and employee information can not be
| accessed through the bank accounts.
|
| We were previously building a lending company and had a hard time
| validating earnings and behavior that we needed to underwrite
| credit. We tried to do it first with bank accounts, but the
| information we were getting was either incomplete or inexistent.
| To solve that we built integrations with other platforms. Later
| we realized that the infrastructure we built to get access to the
| data was way more valuable than the lending business we had
| before.
|
| We integrate directly with payroll systems to provide access to
| any worker account via our API. We already cover 90% of the Gig
| Economy in LatAm (e.g: Uber, Rappi, Didi). We are currently
| expanding to other payroll systems (e.g: Starbucks, Walmart). We
| are providing 4 types of information: Personal Information (e.g.
| Full Name, Tax ID, Photo), Profile (e.g. Rating, Acceptance Rate,
| Lifetime Trips), Earnings and Events (e.g: Trips, Delivery)
|
| Our product works the same way as open banking. The end-user
| provides his credentials and his consent. We get his data on his
| behalf, and we pass it on to the company that is providing the
| service (e.g: Lending, Insurance, Recruitment). Right now, our
| main use cases are lending (cars, motorcycle, unsecured loans),
| direct deposit switch (change the account in which the users
| receive their money) background checks (validating quickly the
| data of a Uber Driver for a new marketplace, checking that
| they're not fraudulent, already experienced) and insurance (pay
| per km, check if the driver was taking a trip when an accident
| occurs).
|
| You can check out the demo here: https://www.palenca.com/demo
| abraae wrote:
| If I understand this correctly, your clients are people like
| lenders (e.g someone who lends money to Uber drivers who want
| to buy a car) who need assurances about the their customer's
| status, e.g whether they truly were an Uber driver for the last
| 2 years.
|
| So with your system the driver will supply you with their Uber
| credentials, and you will log into Ubers system on their
| behalf, extract key information such as the number of rides
| they have done, and pass that info back to your client. Like
| open banking as you say.
|
| I hope I have that right, I initially thought that an API for
| payroll meant that you offered a service that paid people and
| handled taxes in Latin America. (Just my worldview since we are
| in the HR business). However I now understand that you are in
| fact an API to extract data from any number of payroll systems.
|
| Just thought I would share that with you as I found it
| initially confusing, but that's probably on me, and your
| messaging may well be perfectly on target.
|
| Good luck going forward and I hope for your success.
| pierre62360 wrote:
| You are perfectly right, your description is perfectly on
| point, even though our description confused you at first.
|
| To be honest, I'm not too much a fan of Payroll API too, but
| it seems it is the term that is now coined in the US for what
| we are doing (see that article from a16z:
| https://a16z.com/2020/10/20/payroll-apis/)
|
| If you happen to have an another idea about a very quick way
| to describe what we are doing (less than 10 words), that
| would be great !
| abraae wrote:
| That is an interesting article indeed. I see that after the
| headline, they immediately revert to talking about
| "payroll-connected APIs". They use this phrase 3 or 4
| times, then they switch back to "payroll APIs" towards the
| end.
|
| All in all I don't know that "payroll-connected API" is any
| better for you - quite a mouthful and sounds way more
| techy.
|
| Personally I would like "Payroll verification API" but
| maybe that's just because we're having this discussion and
| that fancy will disappear like dust in the wind by the end
| of the day. It might also preclude you from getting into
| some of the juicier areas that a16z are talking about (i.e.
| things that are > just verifiying data), but of course you
| can always change your tagline :)
|
| FYI this area is of interest as we briefly explored
| automating some nasty govt systems using selenium or
| similar (aka RPA). We would run the robot in a VM that was
| torn down at the end of every session for security. We
| presented the UI to the user via guacamole - then once they
| had entered their credentials, the robot took over.
| Interesting but not the path we took in the end.
| indiantinker wrote:
| Enhorabuena !! Hopefully, this makes this makes gig economy
| more equitable for the gig workers.
| pierre62360 wrote:
| Thank you !
| icecrime wrote:
| Hi HN! I'm Arnaud, founder of Echoes HQ (https://echoeshq.com).
| We build dashboards on the activity of engineering teams,
| focusing on the value of engineering work.
|
| I'm passionate about developer empowerment and building
| engineering organizations. This is what got me into engineering
| management in the first place, and why I later joined Docker to
| lead the core team. Throughout my career I've come to realize
| that organizations are often held back not by a lack of developer
| productivity or talent, but by the lack of proper context to
| achieving good results (a theme commonly discussed here in
| comments).
|
| To help companies solve this, we surface _why_ engineers are
| doing what they do in the simplest way we could think of. You
| define within Echoes what you're investing efforts into (e.g.,
| the categories of work, ongoing initiatives, or OKRs relevant to
| your organization), which Echoes publishes across all of your
| GitHub or GitLab repositories as labels. Applying these labels on
| pull requests is all it takes to surface how teams are truly
| allocating their efforts over time. You can later connect intents
| to external measurements, showing you whether efforts are
| actually making a difference.
|
| Engineering managers can use this data to inform decisions on
| priorities, confront the plans to the reality, and communicate on
| the activity to their CEO / bosses / business partners with the
| right level of detail. One of the first use case we're using to
| illustrate what Echoes can do is the very common challenge of
| balancing the amount of efforts that should go into features
| versus technical work (https://www.echoeshq.com/recipes/managing-
| technical-debt).
|
| If you'd like to learn more: we have a two-minute demo video
| (https://youtu.be/3ZRGdZq7v24), or I'd be happy to discuss and
| run you through a live demo (https://calendly.com/arnaudp/echoes-
| demo). We look forward to hearing your feedback and answering
| your questions!
| Gabriel_h wrote:
| This is such an important problem and a really interesting
| approach.
| icecrime wrote:
| Thank you! It is important: there's so much potential wasted
| in suboptimal organizations, and no amount of engineering
| productivity can compensate for that.
| rgbrgb wrote:
| Love the approach of keeping the planning very close to the
| execution. It's very similar to what we did at Open Listings
| (though the labeling system was maybe a little more complex and
| applied to both PRs and Issues).
|
| Anything you can share about a grand vision here? In 5 years is
| Echoes a tool for product managers (OKR alignment), engineering
| managers (IC performance management), a replacement for one of
| those functions?
| bignis wrote:
| I can see this being very useful for the managers, if the
| engineers reliably add the labels. In your experience, how do
| you overcome the problem of "laziness" where the engineers skip
| over the labeling step?
| icecrime wrote:
| Great question :) There are several answers to it.
|
| 1. We integrate with the GitHub Checks API and surface
| missing labels as a failure (similar to failed tests), which
| acts as a reminder to add the labels. GitLab doesn't have an
| equivalent to our knowledge, but we have a Docker image and a
| snippet of yml you can include as a build stage for a similar
| result.
|
| 2. We had customers ask for a JIRA integration which we are
| about to ship that can help with that. It creates a custom
| field on your JIRA instance which gets populated with your
| configured intents, just like GitHub labels. GitHub pull
| requests which reference a JIRA issue will automatically
| inherit its labels, meaning that if the intent was expressed
| at planning time, then there's no additional work to do for
| these.
|
| 3. When discussing with organizations who request that every
| pull request be linked to a ticket for the sake of reporting,
| it's a no brainer: would you rather file a ticket for every
| commit or add a label?
|
| 4. Remaining untagged pull requests can be examined and
| labeled directly from the product itself (making it easy to
| erase the pesky leftovers).
|
| Finally, the product is indeed targeted at managers at this
| time, but we have plans to make it more directly useful for
| the engineers too.
| MattyMatt wrote:
| This is really great! Thank you
| icecrime wrote:
| Thank you Matt!
| nickstinemates wrote:
| Very cool take on an age old problem - productivity
| measurement/context for developers.
|
| Signed up for a demo - looking forward to it.
| icecrime wrote:
| Thank you Nick! Age old problem indeed, which is why we
| believe that trying something different is way overdue :-)
| jjtang1 wrote:
| This is quite interesting, I didn't think of this type of
| approach. When I was at Instacart I could have seen this being
| really useful. I always had IC eng ask me "why does my work
| matter".
| icecrime wrote:
| Thank you JJ! Indeed, most engineers care about their impact
| and how their work contribute to the big picture.
| Unfortunately, the incentives structure in many companies in
| not designed to encourage that. That's why we're trying to
| create this missing link between engineering work and
| business results.
| wdanilo wrote:
| Congratulations, Arnaud! I really like the idea of your tool. I
| was using many tools to track dev productivity in the past -
| with all kind of charts and plots. Somehow, I never got answer
| to the question "what do we really spend time on? Is this
| mostly bug fixing, delivering new features, and how does it
| affect our KPIs?". I like that Echoes focuses exactly on that.
|
| I've got one question - would it be possible in the future to
| generate some kind of alerts for the managers when for example
| the technological debt is growing above some threshold?
| icecrime wrote:
| Thank you! We do get asked about alerts, both on metrics (as
| in your example) and on allocation (for example when the
| activity is significantly and durably diverging from the
| current expectations).
|
| We haven't started work on this but it's very likely to
| happen at some point indeed.
| hpagey wrote:
| How is this different from Jira Epics ? You can always run a
| report in jira to figure this out?
| icecrime wrote:
| You are correct that you could achieve similar activity
| reports with JIRA epics but it requires a level of rigor and
| homogeneity that I believe is hard to achieve in practice.
|
| 1. JIRA most often captures what we _plan_ to do rather than
| what we _actually_ do. You cannot build exhaustive activity
| reports from JIRA unless you request all contributions to be
| linked to issues. This is especially true for technical work
| which tends to not be tracked and become invisible.
|
| 2. Most sizable organizations have an inherent diversity of
| processes and tools across teams which makes producing
| consolidated dashboards extremely hard (e.g., one team using
| JIRA, a second using Linear, and a third using GitHub
| issues).
|
| For these reasons, our approach is to capture work where it
| happens rather than where it is described, and to use a
| central definition of intents as the ontology. Finally,
| capturing efforts is only one part of the equation: we allow
| you to associate intents with metrics to evaluate impact.
| danpalmer wrote:
| Hi Arnaud. Looking good! Looking at the pricing I don't think
| it would work for us. While we have 10 engineers, we have many
| more people who commit very irregularly. Some months we'd
| certainly go over the "active contributor" limit, but we
| wouldn't be getting any value out of tracking those additional
| contributions. Do you have an allow-list of contributors?
| icecrime wrote:
| Thank you, and yes! We only account for contributors who are
| dispatched into teams within Echoes configuration. This is
| also meant for open source projects who don't want to track
| contributions from the community, or for very large
| organizations who want to ramp-up progressively on the
| product.
| danpalmer wrote:
| Amazing! Nice one thinking of that.
| geekjock wrote:
| How do you handle PRs that are for release trains/branches?
| icecrime wrote:
| We don't filter on branches, so any merged work counts.
|
| By default all pull requests are considered equally weighted,
| but there's a set of labels that allow you to optionally
| influence that weighting (using basic XS to XL t-shirt
| sizing), so you could already tag it XS and have it count for
| very little. We actually had that question from a user
| yesterday, and we might add a way to ignore a pull request
| entirely (i.e., give it a weight of 0).
| richiebonilla wrote:
| Hey HN! We're Richie and Eni, the founders of Clarity
| (https://clarity.so/).
|
| Clarity is a SaaS product for distributed teams to track tasks,
| plan projects, and build long-term knowledge in one place.
| Instead of consulting multiple tools or maintaining a bespoke
| system, teams have a single weekly doc that pulls together their
| projects, tasks, and notes.
|
| In order to function well, teams must maintain a shared mental
| model of their work. This is especially difficult for distributed
| teams because we don't have a physical space to reinforce
| context. To solve this, the Weekly is your team's front page
| throughout the week.
|
| We've both been working remotely since 2014 and we met on a
| mutual client project in 2018. Clarity started as a side project
| to help us run our client work. Our clients were happy, but we
| were running it all manually behind the scenes. Last year we
| dropped everything to turn that system into a self-serve SaaS
| product.
|
| What's unique about our approach is the combination of real-time
| collaboration, a knowledge graph, and a formal project management
| feature set. With a knowledge graph, teams can capture & retrieve
| information quickly without the friction & fragility of folder
| organization. Clarity's project management functionality can
| leverage the graph to centralize tasks and surface what's
| important to your work. This creates a high-context workspace
| without the maintenance overhead.
|
| Distributed work is only becoming more popular. We believe the
| next decade of the Internet will be more collaborative than the
| last. As a result, we'll need tools built specifically for
| collaborative Internet squads to assemble around a project or a
| cause. We're building the spaces on the Internet where that
| happens.
|
| Check out our demo video: https://youtu.be/PDKgvD5BEgE.
| version_five wrote:
| I'm interested in this. I'm curious if you have any comments or
| thoughts on how a team would react it I just show up one day
| and say "hey guys, we're going to start using Clarity now". It
| may sound silly but I don't want to SaaS startup fatigue my
| team and as we are already trying another product (in an
| unrelated space) I'm curious about best practices for getting a
| team on board.
|
| Also curious about pricing, and if you have any ancillary
| business model I should know about, like selling or otherwise
| using data or some other derived metrics based on user's
| activity.
| richiebonilla wrote:
| Not silly at all, it's an important consideration. The
| following is based on what we've seen work well.
|
| The first place I'd start is by outlining your team's week in
| the Weekly. I'd finish any ongoing projects in their current
| tools and link to those other tools from the Weekly. This way
| those projects aren't disrupted, but you've now gained a
| central hub for your team.
|
| As you start new projects, you can create a project doc in
| Clarity for each of them. Eventually the existing projects
| will be finished, or you can migrate what's left.
|
| Next, I would start to conduct meeting notes in Clarity
| because any action items that come out of those meetings can
| be delegated and managed alongside your projects and their
| tasks.
|
| Finally, you can start posting articles, ideas, research, and
| customer feedback in the shared notes feed in Clarity (rather
| than posting them in Slack/chat). This way chat is less
| distracting, and you can resurface those notes later by using
| tags. The notes feed gives everyone a chronological feed of
| notes shared by the team, without the distraction of chat.
|
| Rather than conducting a huge migration from your current
| tools to Clarity, I find it's less overwhelming if you bring
| information over as it's relevant to your work. Not only is
| this less up front work, it also starts your knowledge graph
| off with a useful foundation.
|
| Happy to elaborate further and answer any scenario-specific
| questions.
|
| As for pricing, we are rolling that out this week. All
| Clarity bases are free to use for an unlimited period of time
| and with unlimited members. Each base has 1,000 free blocks
| per month [1], and can have up to 100 active tasks [2].
|
| When you exceed either of these usage limits, you'll have the
| option to upgrade your base to a Pro subscription that is
| billed per member per month.
|
| This is our only business model. We do not sell your data or
| any metrics derived from user activity. Privacy is our top
| priority.
|
| [1] - A block is a unit of content (e.g. a paragraph of text,
| an image, a video embed, a checklist item). All documents in
| Clarity are composed of blocks. The 1,000 block limit resets
| at the start of each calendar month.
|
| [2] - Tasks created, but not marked done, are considered
| active.
| dmode wrote:
| Just checked out the demo video. Feel like I can accomplish
| most of these by just using Google docs. Is there enough of a
| difference to take the the leap from using a free docs software
| to a SaaS product
| richiebonilla wrote:
| Funny enough, our early prototypes were done using Google
| Docs. There are features in Clarity that were impossible to
| simulate there, which is what drove us to build custom
| software in the first place.
|
| The two most obvious are: 1) declaring tasks across documents
| and visualizing them in a single task database to create
| filtered views of work 2) interconnecting docs by topics and
| keywords so that you can navigate your knowledge base more
| effectively
|
| There's also a shared notes feed for async information
| sharing, nested projects, in-app notifications, and other
| features that fill in the whole picture. The outline block
| structure also makes your information queryable beyond basic
| string search, which enables new types of exploration through
| your knowledge base, notes, and conversations.
|
| I also wouldn't underestimate the power of a default home
| screen. There's a lot of power in having an enforced front
| page vs a doc the team must remember to check.
|
| It's a cohesive set of functionality built to support
| teamwork vs a generic collection of documents.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| Why would I use this instead of just creating a page in Notion?
| I get that it's supposed to be some combo of Notion/Jira/Trello
| but I don't really see the need for it. My manager uses OneNote
| to guide meeting agendas and it works great.
| richiebonilla wrote:
| Great question. If you're looking at a single weekly doc,
| then you could write it anywhere. However, if you're working
| across multiple weeks, and you have a few projects in various
| stages of development, then Clarity saves you a lot of time &
| effort. Widgets summarize the work happening across your
| base, and backlinks help you look back across Weeklys,
| projects, notes, and conversations to resurface information
| according to keywords.
|
| The issue with tools like Notion is that you need to do
| everything manually. The more powerful your system, the more
| work you have to do. This leads to what the Notion community
| refers to as "breakdowns"--where a workspace is overwhelming
| and must be redesigned & refactored to be useful again.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| Heads up: your site is broken on Brave with shields up. Your
| frontend code probably depends on some tracking stuff that
| isn't being loaded with adblockers.
| richiebonilla wrote:
| Thanks for the heads up. Our app only uses Intercom and
| Mixpanel. Are there any best practices for how to handle this
| so that Brave users can use the app and keep their privacy
| preferences intact?
| strooltz wrote:
| Came here to say the same thing. :/
| svcrunch wrote:
| Hi Richie. I watched your demo video. Good luck with Clarity!
|
| I noticed you have a search feature, and I'm guessing it's
| keyword based (Algolia/Elasticsearch)? If you searched for
| "team is overworked", could it return the retrospective that
| states "This lead our teammates to feel spread thin" (from the
| demo video)?
|
| I'm asking because semantic search can solve this problem. I
| have a research background in this area, and I cofounded ZIR AI
| (https://zir-ai.com/) to provide an easy-to-integrate semantic
| search.
|
| So, if better search is a priority, let's connect :-) I would
| love to collaborate.
| richiebonilla wrote:
| Sweet, we should connect. My email is in my bio. Feel free to
| ping.
| jacob_rezi wrote:
| First thought before sign up - cool, seems easy. I'll try.
|
| Second thought post sign up - this is notion :(
| richiebonilla wrote:
| Third thought's the charm!
|
| Have a look at our demo video, those workflows are not
| possible in Notion :)
| navd wrote:
| This is interesting. Any way to post the documents to be read
| publicly?
| richiebonilla wrote:
| Yep, you can make any document public & readonly. We plan to
| add more options for public pages too.
| pkiv wrote:
| This is cool. I like the idea of using something separate than
| Notion, because Notion tends to get too distracting.
|
| Have you considered adding some operating templates for
| startups? I imagine your user is signing up because they need
| new process, and giving them some inspiration to play with may
| accelerate onboarding. (I signed up hoping to get that template
| you used in your demo video)
|
| I'm not a fan of the superhuman interface, I've found that it
| create a big learning curve for what is could be a simple
| interface. At the same time I'm glad you guys drew inspiration
| from Linear, they have some great design too. I feel like they
| balance the hotkeys + clickable elements really well.
|
| Slack integration is great. I think Loom would be big in my
| workflow too.
|
| Happy to do a user interview etc to help out. email is in my
| profile.
| richiebonilla wrote:
| Totally agree with you about templates.
|
| Definitely see what you're saying about the Superhuman-like
| interface. We're still iterating there. We need to enable
| pro-level usage without hindering accessibility to casual
| users. We're continuing to simplify simplify simplify :)
|
| We are currently testing an integration using the Loom SDK.
|
| Will definitely take you up on the user interview. Thanks!
| Rifanditto91 wrote:
| Hey HN! We're Ditto and Dito, co-founder of Sirka
| (http://sirka.io/). Sirka is a subscription-based mobile app that
| helps customers lose weight by connecting them with dietitians.
| Think Noom for Southeast Asia.
|
| There are more than 150M people in Southeast Asia struggling with
| overweight, obesity and diabetes. Sirka cuts through 'fads' and
| low accountability by creating evidence-based plans supported by
| daily communications with registered dietitians. Our customers
| love using our product to get daily advice, reminders, and
| encouragement through their diet journey and on average have 5%
| weight loss after completing our program.
|
| I have 5+ years of experience in Product and Growth for SEA
| online consumer services, including Grab, and my co-founder Dito
| previously worked as the strategy health insurance for Grab. 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.
| langitbiru wrote:
| As an Indonesian, it's nice to see an Indonesian startup
| accepted in YC. You have a noble cause.
|
| The challenge is probably in marketing. There is a positive
| body movement. Any body should be accepted as they are. Any
| body is beautiful. So when you try to market your app to obese
| or overweight people, things can get awkward. So good luck!
|
| I, myself, try to gain weight. So I'm not your target. :)
| hyuuu wrote:
| your username reminds me of indonesian version of patlabor
| anime ending haha, good times after school anime :)
| indiantinker wrote:
| Great job guys! Congrats on the HN Launch. More power to you.
| jadk157 wrote:
| Indonesian here - always cool to see Indonesian startups in YC!
|
| Ditto and Dito, what made you want to work in this space? Any
| stories? (personal or from talking to users)
|
| Also, what alternatives do people trying to lose weight in your
| target market usually use?
| PayHippo wrote:
| We're Chioma, Uche, and Zach, cofounders at Payhippo. We give
| loans to small businesses in Nigeria in less than 3 hours. Here's
| our website: https://payhippo.ng
|
| Most of these businesses are creditworthy, but traditional banks
| and lenders often don't lend to them because there are no credit
| scores and collateral requirements are too high. That's why we
| assess businesses, build their Payhippo Scores, and provide
| financing to them.
|
| Speed is everything for these business owners that are buying
| goods and need capital. For example, a supermarket may run out of
| inventory and not have the cash on hand to buy new goods. With
| PayHippo's instant financing, that supermarket has the liquidity
| to buy inventory and make sure to retain the customer in their
| store. We deliver loans 21x faster than the next faster
| competitor. We slowed down our disbursement time from 3 hours to
| 6-9 hours one day. Almost immediately we got emails from two
| separate borrowers saying that they are disappointed at how long
| it is taking. This was validation about how important it is for
| us to be able to serving working capital needs on-demand.
|
| Through our mobile-friendly web app, businesses can apply in just
| a few minutes. After 10-20 minutes our system has automatically
| verified and underwritten the business' loan. Once a human
| double-checks this verification and underwriting, (1-2 hours wait
| time) a business receives a loan offer. Once they click accept
| then funds are automatically disbursed to their account.
|
| Please ask us any questions or provide any comments!
| Geekette wrote:
| Congrats on launching. Is your customer base currently in
| Nigeria or across Africa? Your intro here lists the former
| while the website states the latter.
|
| Also curious as to how you determine sufficient collateral for
| borrowers and what tools you use to hedge against default: Do
| you focus on lending to businesses with resellable capital
| assets (equipment, inventory, etc), setup autopay/direct debit
| as condition of loan, etc?
| PayHippo wrote:
| Thanks for the note. You're right there's an inconsistency -
| we haven't figured out which to say so often flip back and
| forth. Our customer base is in Nigeria but we know our
| mission is broader.
|
| Per collateral: Our lending is unsecured
| Geekette wrote:
| Consider a tagline that incorporates your vision and
| current mission/status, e.g. "Lending to small African
| businesses starting with Nigeria" or "Financing small
| African businesses, one country at a time".
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Do you plan to offer your underwriting and portfolio management
| services to funds or other investment vehicles?
| PayHippo wrote:
| This could be really cool! No concrete plans but did you have
| any examples of when you've seen this done well?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| The canonical examples that would come to mind would be
| https://prosper.com and https://lendingclub.com (each have
| sections on their site for institutional investors). I've
| participated in https://kiva.org as well, but their
| microlending model leaves a lot to be desired.
|
| By supporting such a model, you could enable more capital
| to flow to creditworthy borrowers in your market than you'd
| be able to aggregate as a single org.
| PayHippo wrote:
| Thanks! I'll take a look
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