[HN Gopher] Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #5 ___________________________________________________________________ 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 ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-08-10 23:00 UTC)