Launch HN: Pry (YC W21) – Finance for Founders
As a long time HN lurker, I'm excited to share this project with you. In a previous life, I cofounded a tech-enabled accounting company. We help thousands of companies keep their books (accounting) up to date. While growing, I could feel Javascript improve year after year but the way our finances were done in Excel just got worse and worse.
The product I wanted was simple: something to replace the Excel files that the finance gurus use. I looked around and couldn't find anything that did what I wanted so I decided to start working on it (originally http://budgithub.com) two years ago.
There is a lot to build. Most Excel files have these components:
- A summary view with budgets and actuals
- Separate tabs for different departments
- A hiring plan (list of employees) and a hidden pivot table to make things work
- A revenue model
- A dashboard
Today, I'm happy to announce that we have finally launched a release that covers all of these components and it's available for anyone to try for free.
We built this tool to serve the startup and small business community. Our pricing ranges from $50-$100/mo and we're determined to continue offering our full suite of functionality at an affordable price.
We have a lot to build still - integrations, currency support, etc, but if you are using Quickbook Online, Xero, or don't have accounting set up, give us a try. We connect to most US banks, and we have a few happy overseas customers using Pry + Xero.
One of our guiding design principles is the Ruby on Rails "convention over configuration". We've done a lot of things the hard way. Happy to answer any questions over the next few hours.
52 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 114 ms ] threadIt’s great you’re dogfooding your own product for personal use, but I’m curious how your offering (which seems specialised for businesses) compares to something like Mint which is designed for personal use?
Also, can you speak to why you chose total spend as what you base your price on?
Chairman: WHAT THE #$%$ happened to our gross margins?
CEO: Let me tell you how we saved $600 on our new accounting platform...
We ran into this at inDinero.
I saw a tweet recently to the effect of "I'm not sure who I'd rather have my data, a giant megacorp or a startup with 5 employees who can query the DB from their laptop." I think this is a good example of that.
I would use this if it included encrypted data storage with client-side computation, and/or was self-hostable (you can still charge a license fee!)
- First add a security page, I need to know you're doing basic things like encrypting the data on your end etc. Hopefully you're using at least something like KMS for your at-rest encryption (all DBs and disks) if using AWS.
- Then also publicly state on the security page something to the effect of "No Pry employee has the ability to access customer data without your explicit approval, and all access is audited". Meaning, if you need to work a support case for some customer, you have to ask them before you look at their data, and you have to track when this access occurs
- Ultimately you'll get something like a SOC2 cert to show that you actually have these controls in place that you say you do
I think with this, you'll be able to overcome some of the fears. Native apps is a shrinking market and a distraction for you IMO. Your customers are already fine with cloud solutions, since they're using Quickbooks Online, Xero etc. by definition, you just need to convince them you're trustworthy as well.
Is it possible for Pry staff to do any actions in the accounts such as withdraws?
Does third part access void TOS with banks that have protections in place?
If Pry is sold to another company, how is data transferred to the new company? Does the end user have the option of preventing the transfer?
- Pry knowns my transactions, so they know who my customers are, and how much I'm charging them. Maybe one of my competitors could bribe a Pry employee to divulge this information. Same for suppliers, etc. Maybe not important for B2C SaaS, but for many companies this is a real threat.
I don't mean this as a giant joke, but where do you find these accountants?
I'm not saying that they don't try to, but things that would be major security no-no's to people on HN are often a regular part of business for others (emailing photocopies of 'secure' documents, copy/pasting passwords, etc).
If you have a bank that is not supported by Plaid, it's not going to work. We will build more API integrations.
* Are you going to be around 3 years from now? Do you want to work on this project for the next 3+ years?
* If initial attempts at monetization don't work could customers become the product?
* How do I get data OUT of the product if I outgrow it or switch to a different platform later on.
* I will keep this around as long as people find it useful. My last company was founded in 2009 and is still around. There is still a lot more I want to build for Pry so 3+ years is no problem for me.
* I actually really hate the idea of customers as the product. I know this product has valuable financial data. We have raised funding and I have always tried to prioritize good investors who align with this value over the ones offering the most money. You’ll have to take my word on this one.
* You can export the report data to google sheets. Our formulas cannot yet be exported. We will work on an API at some point to address this.
1. Lot very early stage start-ups will simply use excel instead of 50$/month. You should have an easier price point to onboard just the planning features. As they grow they upgrade.
2. The docs leave a lot to be desired, not going to go through all work of sign-up without better docs.
3. Security is no where to be found, double authentication, policies, something..
1. There are several tools that offer only the planning features. Our view is that budgets and actuals should be on the same system for the product to provide value over time. We may offer a free version with just the planning features in the future, but I built Pry for myself and I wouldn't like to use it that way.
2. Agreed. Documentation is one of those - if they complain, we'll improve it kind of things. And we've certainly heard some complaints about it here today.
3. Got good feedback on this from another user earlier too. We'll look into making our security practices more visible on our site since we work with finance data.
I've been poking around with Pry for Runway, and I think their approach is super compelling. There's a lot of overlap between our approaches, and some meaningful philosophical differences in product strategy.
Overall, the problem space is enormous and I'm super impressed by how much Andy has built with a small team.
Out of all of other products in the space that are publicly available, I consider Pry to be the most impressive one I've seen. And I strongly agree that we need more people in this space innovating on finance, so more options is a good thing.
wave :)
Pricing is good.
My only skepticism is that it can model our forecast the way we need it modeled. Gonna check it out.