Launch HN: Exams, tasks, K8, eCommerce, cell sites, health, data quality, travel
Direct links to each startup:
Portão 3 (YC S21) - Corporate travel for Latin America - https://portao3.com.br/, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27930563
Sitenna (YC S21) - A marketplace for wireless cell sites - https://sitenna.com/, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27930564
ContainIQ (YC S21) - Kubernetes observability based on eBPF - https://www.containiq.com/, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27930569
Appollo (YC S21) - A single API for launching to eCommerce platforms - https://www.tryappollo.com/, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27930570
Beau (YC S21) - Automate repetitive client-facing tasks - https://beau.to/, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27930568
Telm.ai (YC S21) - Real-time data quality monitoring - https://www.telm.ai/, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27930566
Filadd (YC S21) - Online courses for LatAm university - https://courses.filadd.com/, entrance exams https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27930567
Shimmer (YC S21) - Online video support groups for mental health - https://shimmer.care, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27930565
You are invited to share your questions, thoughts, feedback, and experiences in any of these spaces! Simply reply to the founder's post you want to discuss.
131 comments
[ 0.30 ms ] story [ 201 ms ] threadWe use maps and workflow tools to reduce the time it takes to deploy a new site by up to 75%, saving tens of thousands of dollars. Wireless carrier radio planners can easily search, identify and acquire sites for deploying antennae whilst the tower providers and real estate owners can market and monetise their assets to the telecom market.
I (Daniel) have worked in telecoms my whole career and worked in more than 30 countries. The same issue exists in every market so there is a rather big opportunity ($40B is spend on wireless infrastructure globally per year!) if we can get some solid product market fit. 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.
Is Sitenna US only? My FIL works on the telecom industry in South America doing location scouting for antennas, data centers, etc. He would really love something like this.
For HN this is a great idea because today the process of engaging cell operators is an absolute black box - literally fill in your contact info in a modal and hope for a call back.
Zero transparency, totally inefficient and the companies themselves are a giant pain in the ass to deal with.
Are you planning to open to the rest of the countries? Have you already customers in Chile, Argentina, Mexico?
Thanks!
If you look at the top right hand corner, you’ll see a globe icon. That icon handles translations - the site is available in Brazilian Portuguese, English and Spanish.
I have to say this is not intuitive and we actually purchased new domains for other countries yesterday and we will have dedicated websites for a lot of countries coming this weekend.
But yes, we do have customers in Brazil where we were born, but Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Colombia and Peru too!
As a previous corporate traveller, I agree with your value proposition. As a software engineer I was astounded by the very lacking systems we have here in South America. Most of the travel stuff was managed via email!! I absolutely hated every single second of having to manage my travels while working, since it meant digging through emails and even spam folders...
On another note, I'm based in Chile, and already have good connections with managers in key companies that may be interesting for you. If you're looking to expand to Chile, let me know so we can setup some talks ;)
My linkedin is in my profile.
I'm very skeptical about most startups business models but looks like you folks check two important boxes of my imaginary list:
[x] solving a real problem
[x] plenty of room to grow (generalist b2b)
I hope to see more of Portão 3! Best of luck for you :)
Wish all the best and success to you!
79% of young adults with mental health issues do not have access to care; the most common alternative, teletherapy, is expensive ($150/session), has significant churn (40% drop off after first visit), and lacks diverse representation (average age of 51 and 80% white). We've developed a curriculum incorporating material from expert group therapists at UCSF. This has led to a number of great outcomes including: providing care at a fraction of the cost of therapy ($50/month or $12/session), an 80% 4-month retention rate, and a diverse set of highly experienced facilitators that members can relate better to. If you're interested in trying Shimmer, you can sign up for a consultation call or a wellness workshop (both for free) directly on our website. Shimmer is led by three founders with extensive experience across healthcare and engineering. Having seen firsthand the severe effect that mental health issues have had on loved ones, we left previous roles (graduate programs at Berkeley MBA/MPH, UCSF MD and Salesforce SWE) to dedicate ourselves to improving the accessibility and affordability of mental health care.
The thing is if you're having say, 10 people for a 1 hour session, that gives each person about 6 minutes to share. But really more like 4 - 5 minutes after overhead. I think that is still worth _something_ (12 dollars per session sounds about right, edit: you may be able to go a few dollars higher), but you are basically trading off quality and cost here. It's going to be hard to actually build a connection and make it meaningful.
(edit: to be clear - the cost here isn't necessarily the lever - whether you charge 5 dollars per session or 25 dollars per session - you will need to make the 1 hour meaningful for the 10 people who are in the meeting, which will be the hard part IMO)
1) we do breakout rooms so members have more time to talk with one another. 2) groups are capped at the 8 person mark. 3) depending on the week, not everyone is always hoping to chat/share, sometimes members just wish to listen that day.
Seriously folks, wonderful work - this is really cool.
The best of luck!
How will you continue to find and supervise good group leaders as you draw more users?
Surprisingly there are a lot of thoughtful people out there with solid experiences facilitating discussions/conversations and this has not been a bottleneck for us!
Short-term: Every new invention needs to start somewhere. There are plenty of rich, middle class, and even lower-middle-class families that easily have $50 a month to help out a struggling child / sibling / cousin / ect.
Remember, new businesses need to start somewhere, and that somewhere is often selling to a very tiny segment of the market that they intend to serve. [Edit:] Many times this means starting at a higher price, and then lowering the price as the company streamlines itself and can handle more customers.
I have never pursued therapy but I'm sure it would be a minimum of $30 per session with insurance, if not more.
Not to say it couldn't be better, but at first glance this is a _great_ improvement from the status quo.
But how do you address the potential for groups of white men that lack diversity to breed toxic attitudes? I say this as a white man who would be reluctant to go to such a group out of this concern.
Fantastic website by the way. How are you planning to reach out to students in high school? The Pre-U market in Chile at least is brutal, and there are so many competitors that I imagine it might be hard to get some market-share.
I realized early on the sad reality that the ones getting approved weren't really paying the bill (80%+ discounts for promising candidates), while struggling students trying for the third consecutive year were closer to full price. It felt just and meritocratic when I got in the special few, but the selection bias for privilege was tragic: almost all of them were rich. Yet another wealth transfer from the poor to the rich.
I hope this marketplace will undo the consolidation trend and lower the prices a bit, but I won't bet on it.
Yes! I couldn’t believe how inefficient the process of sending dozens of documents over email to my immigration lawyers was. Glad to see someone working on that problem.
Beautiful landing page, too.
“Send a clients” typo on home page. Client should be singular.
Pricing page: not clear I could swipe plan cards to right. When attempting to swipe, could not get second card to come into view. Recommend letting them flow beneath.
I'm not sure if this is intentional, but the "Try for free. No credit card required" panel towards the bottom of the page looks like it's covering some of the sample use cases.
We have decades of experience with enterprise data and find that this approach towards data quality addresses a huge gap in data platforms. Detecting and investigating data quality issues is extremely tedious, time-consuming and expensive. Using Telmai, companies like Dun & Bradstreet and Myers-Holum are able to find and resolve such issues across millions of records in minutes. Ask us anything!
I wanted to give some feedback on the pricing page: it's very vague, to the point I don't know how much I will end paying if I go over the 500k values (is that the free tier?).
Also, this is only for data monitoring, or can be used for stuff like server monitoring too?
We dont monitor server or any infrastructure, we are designed for data quality monitoring we can flag issues like missing data, volume drifts, schema mismatch and where we stand out is monitoring actual accuracy of data at record value level. Example : We can flag anomalous titles, emails , overrepresented phone numbers etc
Looks interesting! I worked on https://github.com/capitalone/DataProfiler
We are looking to monitor correlation changes over time, see if sensitive data gets entered, track schema changes, etc and see the impact of down stream modeling, etc
I'm curious how heavy the input is? because usually these systems take a lot of effort to setup. Any idea?
One question about containiq though which I could not figure out with the skimming of the link. How it compares to (istio + prometheus + grafana)?
The amount of 1/2 broken prometheus/grafana setups we see is crazy.
From a feature perspective there is some overlap (ex pod/node CPU and memory). But we have features that you can't get from the solutions you mentioned (ex service latency, latency by URL path (coming soon!). And have a lot more in the roadmap too. :)
We are also housing and managing the data for our users.
If you are out there to replace existing monitoring stack like ELK, Prometheus-grafana, victoria metrics, i think it will be an uphill battle proving your value because there is high switching cost.
Also, In most of the organisations, core resources that people care about are well monitored. Just my 2 cents.
[1] https://grafana.com/grafana/plugins/grafana-kubernetes-app/
I’m on GKE. How does this compare against Cilium and the new Dataplane V2? https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/containers-kubernetes...
Sounds like you have more work curating dashboards at the least. And maybe this bolts on to the standard kube-proxy dataplane so folks don’t need to change that?
Exactly we bolt on to the standard kube-proxy setup. We put a lot of effort into ensuring that everything works right out the box.
https://pixielabs.ai/
The initial version of ContainIQ is in a similar space to what pixie has built, but our eventual vision has a few differentiators. I believe Pixie was built using BCC (an assumption based on the 2GB requirement and their BPF trace tooling) which requires llvm and the kernel headers to be installed on every node. This ends up requiring a lot of ephemeral storage. Since Kubernetes is most commonly used for stateless applications this ends up being a problem, because the default node storage allocatable is relatively low. We’re in the process of migrating out from BCC to libbpf which should alleviate a lot of the issues associated with the larger storage/memory footprint of BCC. We also have a few unique features in the pipeline that I believe are unique to our product (EX: P95, P99 http latency by microservice endpoint).
- ContainIQ just works. Comes pre-configured and you don't need a degree from DD University to know how to use it.
- We are only focused on K8s.
- We have differentiated features, easier setup and we take less time to maintain (ex our latency features like service latency and latency by URL path don't need to be instrumented on each application)
- transparent pricing. We are a flat rate of $250 per month up to 50 / nodes. You don't have to worry about insane bill spikes.
https://www.apollographql.com/docs/react/
I also took a quick look at your API documentation, and I couldn't figure out how I'd use this.
I run several popular Shopify and WooCommerce apps right now. Their primary integration point with the store is via injecting a script tag into all pages, using Shopify's ScriptTag API or WordPress's wp_head hook.
I couldn't find how I'd do this using Apollo.
A few comments & questions:
1. https://tryapollo.com fails to provide a secure connection?
2. Viewing https://docs.tryappollo.com/docs/introduction on mobile leads to the sidebar getting hidden - may want to copy your ToC into the How To Use This Doc section to not make it look like you have three doc pages total ;)
3. https://docs.tryappollo.com/reference#fetch-products - do I provide a "cursor" or a "page"?
4. The "media" object type is not separately documented. Based on the "Create a product" form it's {src:string, type:string} - what are the valid string values for "type"?
5. When I update a product, do I have to include all fields, or can I include only those I wish to update?
6. How do I append another product photo? How do I insert one? How do I remove one?
7. https://docs.tryappollo.com/reference#fetch-variant goes to the wrong spot on the page, it goes to Collections API section.
8. Ditto all questions for products also for variants (page vs cursor, media & how to do narrow updates to it).
9. https://www.tryappollo.com/pricing - your pricing page has as of right now no clear indication of your intended business model. Charge a fraction of revenue? Fixed $x/install? Something else?
10. Continuation of service: building an app is a non-trivial commitment. What happens if things don't work out for appollo?
Thanks!
2. Thanks for the feedback!
3. Yep! it is a cursor that we return to you after your first query
4. Thanks, we'll better document that! The type values are IMAGE & VIDEO
5. No only the newly updated values
7. Ah weird, which browser you using? for me it works.
8. Ditto all questions for products also for variants (page vs cursor, media & how to do narrow updates to it).
9. Atm we are discussing pricing based on customers needs, on a direct call with them
10. We are committed to making this work. If not we are open to many arrangements including helping customers run Appollo on-prem.
Phew! Thanks for all the questions haha!
BTW what happened to the live stream application/idea?
I was thinking.... WHY?!
But it is actually for ecommerce plugins/apps/add-ons and the customers are those companies making shopify plugins so they can develop once and deploy everywhere.
Echoing other comments - a more clear description / example or word other than "App" might help. I think Add-On or Plugin might be more clear in your one liner when referencing all the platforms.
Good luck on the launch! Hope the "meet the batch" thing doesn't flop.
First, Welcome! This is a huge arena and I think there's a million, nuanced areas for companies to tackle and really focus on amazing merchant experiences. THis is a very big (and growing) pie.
Second, I think you'd benefit from trying to increase the clarity of what you do and the value proposition, plus how it all works. For example, I'm not sure how you can provide broad-based api support for 3rd party developers without script injection or strong webhook support, but maybe you've got a new approach? I also admit to being skeptical when you mention a feature as surpassing platform rate limits; we have a continual pain point with shopify, query cost calculation and throttling as an example.
Third, we also use a platform-agnostic solution, but then build internally on this before exposing client-facing services. After several years we don't support nearly as many platforms as you; how do you stay on top of all these unilateral changes? Just shopify keeps us on our toes, and some of the ones you mention have little critical mass making them unattractive.
Finally, it would probably help adoption if you at least gave some indication of what your pricing is going to look like, even flat rate or %, or totally custom... You're asking people to build solutions on top of your product without any sort of idea of what the long term ramifcations look like. That's a hard sell.
Good luck with the venture!
Feels like nowadays every ecommerce platform has their own idea of how a product is structured, from variants to modifiers to attribute sets to tags and even the nitty-gritty like fulfillment rules.
Just when you think you've nailed down a universal model you'll look at bringing on another integration that brings a unique twist to your constraints. The sheer bullshit alone that you have to put up with when working alongside all of these integrations can drive a developer mad. There have been many times when integrations release critical bugs or become flakey and we end up on the hook after the dust clears and the customers data is not malformed. BigCommerce specifically loves to surprise it's developers with API deprecations on a moments notice, what a joy to be at the mercy of.
There are so many S21 startups wanting to launch on HN before Demo Day that I think we're going to be doing a lot of these, at least for the time being.
get your own name! >:[