razin
Born on August 17, 2009•10912 Karma
- Are you willing to spend the next 7-10 years of your life on this idea?
- If you run into hard times and it’s not working out (this could be years), would you be willing to push through?
- Do you have real conviction and passion for the space or do you just want to start a company?
- Are you willing to compete against 15-20 competitors with the same idea, and do you think you will win? Why will you win?
- Is your personal network supportive of you starting a company?
- Do you have sufficient savings set aside to sustain you while you fundraise?
Boost/Sure are good services, but they don't provide the same level of transparency and control. They work more like agencies/outsourcing than insurance infrastructure
Say you want to embed insurance into your product - i.e., let your users purchase it or automatically get from your sale/membership, etc.
You have to do 3 things:
* Design: figure out what you want to protect, the options you offer, when in your user journey, if you charge for it, etc. And find an insurer to take the risk.
* Launch: you have to write code to plug the logic on your website, how to keep track, know who paid what, implement the logic that the insurer requires (e.g., don't insurer users younger than 25yo), etc
* Optimize: after launched, you need to figure out if it's working (conversion, profitability, etc), what do you need to improve, and actually make the changes. It's a ongoing optimization problem.
Our platform provides the tools to help your team do all of that, in different modules. We abstract all the complexity from your core product and give a GUI so your business users can launch and make changes (e.g., increase the price to certain categories of policies, remove age restrictions, etc) without asking you to change hard-coded rules in your product.
I hope this helps, we'd be happy to chat more with you or any others that have questions or suggestions!
1. Are you targeting commercial insurance or personal lines?
2. Looking at US or international markets?
3. How are you reaching insurance carriers? e.g. referrals, direct connections for standard products, borrowing comparative rater APIs, agency or MGA or other capacity arrangements?
4. How are you dealing with producer licensing requirements? e.g. acting as the agency, getting your embedder partners licensed, some other referral scheme?
1. Today we work mostly with commercial lines and get master policies that cover our clients and their customers. From our experience the boundaries between commercial and personal are becoming increasingly blurry.
2. Most of our carrier partners are in the US today, so we have better coverage here.
3. We configure their rating logic on our platform or plug to their APIs if they prefer
4. We're licensed brokers and can play this role or can assist our clients get licensed when required. It depends on the program structure and how the insurance
I'd be happy to jump on a call and explain more if you'd like, please let me know.
1) What are your thoughts on services such as Stripe Atlas, Clerky and others? Which one would you recommend (if any)?
2) After I complete incorporation, what are my options for moving to the United States at some point in the future, preferably later this year?
- preparation for a sale
- raising capital for the spin out, but not the parent company
- the spin out is not part of the parent's core focus, and is something of a distraction
- the parent is transitioning to more of a holding company, and looking to make further acquisitions that have nothing to do with the spinout
- the spin out is an idea developed by a parent company team, and that team wants to leave the company to develop the idea, so they work out a deal where the company and the team both get a stake
Mailgun meets that criteria, it has all of the components of being a full 'company' or can get the ones it was missing, and it has a customer base, product, and revenue (and its profitable according to the post).
So someone bought Mailgun and that owner is treating it like a separate company. Sometimes its the original founders that buy it back, sometimes it is another firm that thinks they can do a bit of work and then sell it or take it public.
Other things that are typically sold off are real estate holdings, patents and other IP, trademarks, and sometime infrastructure contracts. So if for example Rackspace had a long term contract to host company X, they might sell that contract to another Colocation company like Equinex or Coresite.
The idea is that you can sell off all the bits for more money than you paid originally and make a profit. It is not unlike buying a wrecked car and selling it off for parts.
My 2 cents on why for Mailgun? It is a developer focused service and while Mailgun may have customer overlap with Rackspace's overall base it is a different decision maker / buyer inside the company than the person who's choosing where to host the IT system or website, etc. So while you may have customer overlap you don't have sales and marketing buyer overlap.
- Digital Service https://thedigitalservice.org/ (this was made by YC partner, Adora Cheung)
- Bayes Impact http://www.bayesimpact.org/
- DataKind http://www.datakind.org/