I'm looking forward to using this. I hope it exposes a certain insurance companies practice of underinsuring people to make it appear they are cheaper and get the sale. Save 15 minutes to get less insurance than you need, for more than it would cost elsewhere...
It's probably a terrific service and I look forward to using it, but wow, just to get a quote I have to give out enough information to own me good, not just in cyberspace but IRL.
Name
DOB
Address
Make, model, year of car
Drivers License
Optional Social Security
Sex
Marital Status
Student/military affiliation
Optional Employer
Optional Professional/Alumni Associations
That could be -- it's been awhile since I checked.
There does seem to be a bit of chicken and egg barrier though. I may be willing to give out this information to allstate.com or statefarm.com or progressive.com but I am not sure I or others will be as willing to give it out to leaky.com.
Maybe they are awesome, and maybe it's just me, but if you want me to give this information out on the spur of the moment, I guess I would like a site that somehow exudes a bit more trust.
Are you speaking from your perspective, or from the perspective of Random Joe User? The fact that they're YC backed at earns my trust, at least to the extent that they're not planning anything malicious with my data (not necessarily trust that their security is competent).
I'm speaking from my perspective of other's perspectives.
That they are YC backed encouraged me to click and try it out. Otherwise, I would probably not have clicked at all.
(But YC backing isn't really enough for me to eagerly give out all that information, not until pg and yc is providing ebay like yc-clickers-insurance on their portfolio. :) )
Regarding the average user, I suspect that insurance companies have names like Prudential, All State, State Farm, and symbols like the Rock of Gibraltar, big old granite columned buildings, and stuffy images for a reason.
I think you're wrong. For instance, there are health insurance search sites that demand more than this, and there's clearly enough affiliate money in health insurance to keep those things up and running. I think you're probably just a part of a small sliver of the market that is hypersensitive to this stuff.
It may not be. I was just going to Progressive which I think does something similar and iirc they say if they can't get you the best quote themselves, they're okay with that.
Otoh, how IS leaky different from esurance? I don't understand that from their website either.
So they get paid once for every affiliate they refer. Seems like a site someone will visit once or twice in their lifetime.. and not a "sticky" site like Reddit. What are they going to do if Google penalizes their site (even by mistake) for something incredibly dumb, and they lose all their traffic, and all their income because it's not recurring revenue?
Seems like a site someone will visit once or twice in their lifetime
If you're smart, you'll visit every six months and see whether someone else is cheaper. At the very least you should visit every time you get a new car.
If they're smart they'll send you a reminder email every six months to get you to try again every time your insurance is up for renewal. Heck, they could recalculate everything for you (based on the new set of assumptions) and email you a set of quotes -- that's one semi-spammy email I wouldn't mind getting at all.
However, I can't get the site to work. Maybe it's getting hammered, maybe it doesn't work yet, maybe there's something iffy about my input (I did put in a fake licence number because I was too lazy to find my real one). All I'm getting is a bunch of "N/A"s. Never mind, I renewed my car insurance last month anyway, so they've got four months to fix it.
If they're smart they'll send you a reminder email every six months [...]
Eventually that would just drive down the affiliate fees. The reason that they're (presumably) high is that they've factored in the lifetime value of a customer. If you systematically lower that, then the referral fees will follow.
Still, lifetime value, really? I admit that I've been letting my car insurance roll over from year to year because I'm too lazy to go looking for new quotes (though this site, once it's working, will significantly lower that barrier) but next time I get a new car I'll certainly shop around to see who'll give me a good rate.
Was able to get through a ways, but I'm hanging on Farmers insurance. Hope you saved a cookie so I don't have to re-enter that... Never thought I'd say that !
It is definitely not alright. They must have permission. An acceptable looking ThemeForest template is a $20 cash outlay; who would risk their launch over this?
It's awesome if Square actually "loaned" them their design. That seems like a genuinely useful thing an established company could do for a fledgeling one.
Even then, it leaves them needing to adjust their branding/L&F at some point which may be jarring for users. Wouldn't be that difficult to borrow the best of the Square layout but use their own fonts, colour scheme, etc and have something of their own.
Because they've blatantly copied someone's design?
It's not like a new car company starts with someone else's body shape until they can design their own car or copies their TV ad for a few months. I can appreciate that Square might've OKed this or look kindly on a temporary copy from a startup, but for about the same level of effort they could've differentiated their site a fair bit more (even just a different hue for the background).
Because, without permission, it's not the right thing to do, and the right thing to do need not be expensive?
I'm not sure if I'm missing something here - looking at code/designs and tweaking them to learn is one thing, but is basing a funded company on something so blatant now considered OK? I'd like to know if this is the thought pattern for people who are designers or programmers.
Is Square within the YC stable, is that it?
Should I be doing this with my side projects, to piggyback on that success?
(Keep in mind that I'm assuming in this case that they don't have permission.)
Because ripping off web designs in whole or in part is copyright infringement, and if they really didn't get permission they're a takedown notice away from losing one of their most important assets.
My understanding is that media and copy may be subject to copyright, but not layouts of websites. I don't think copying a wireframe CSS design or page navigation mechanics or general theme is legally copyright infringement (I could be wrong).
It depends on how unique the copied is and how similar the copier is.
From a decision about magazine covers: "None of the individual elements [...] ordinary lines, typefaces, and colors — qualifies for copyright protection. But the distinctive arrangement and layout of those elements is entitled to protection as a graphic work."
Wow, quotes without having to get a credit and background check on every insurance site?
Oh wait, DOB and SS# and driver's license?
Um, NO - there is no need for this kind of info to get a general quote - I've had it with big insurance harvesting personal info. There really ought to be a law.
Car insurance quote should be three questions:
1. What zip code do you live in
2. What year were you born
3. What do you drive
(and obviously if you've had accidents recently)
Insurance tables shouldn't work like they do. What they are trying to figure out from all your personal info is if you own or rent, where you work, how many times you have moved recently, etc. That's a bunch of bull.
Yes, and the price difference between the hypothetical quote and the real quote is so big as to make the hypo quote irrelevant. Insurance quotes that don't take your PI are bait-and-switch ploys, not services.
A smart thing to do here might be to figure out a way to do progressive quotes/queries; take the DOB+zip+car information just to start, then let the user decide whether the variance in the results (which will be the best-case ones) merit coughing up more info.
So as a hypothetical ignorant consumer, they'd bait me into providing more information. The effort to get my initial quote would require significantly less data - I'd see the results, like what I see (a.k.a. establish trust) and then it wouldn't be much more effort to get that SSN/DOB at that point.
They probably can, but why would you want to see it? It would be a quote for some "average" person, and might be off by a an order of magnitude from your particular case.
Because I have no accidents/tickets for over a decade and pay only $300 for a year, but since they raise my rate every six months by 10% "just for the heck of it" - I'd like to see what everyone else quotes me.
A soft quote would be just fine for me and probably many others.
Except that you don't know what the "soft" quote is. Why does it have to be for your particular case? I'd imagine a decade of no tickets and no accidents is pretty rare.
Filling out the survey was a breeze but it took at least 3 minutes to calculate quotes and then when it was finished, it listed quotes for each insurer as N/A... buggy and anticlimactic. I'll check back later when they've worked kinks out.
Just curious -- how are you guys storing all this super-personal information, or is it ephemeral while you make API calls to various insurance provider backends? That's quite the identity theft kit that I'm being asked to upload to a site called "leaky".
Interesting -- so are you ruling out the possibility of storing the data in the future for features like periodically checking for updates in my rate? That sounds like a killer feature (that I would even be willing to pay a subscription for), but then I'd also want to be damn sure that you're storing that data well.
EDIT: in fact, for a subscription based service, you could figure out the optimal pricing quite easily. If the annual price of your subscription were less than the typical insurance savings by having it monitored, you'd have a hell of a business model.
Yeah -- we'd certainly love to, but we didn't think that we'd be able to securely store the data at the moment -- so we didn't want to risk it. That's absolutely a feature that we'd like to implement though!
In the UK pretty much every second advert on TV is for a car insurance price comparison site. The 3rd best selling book last Christmas was the fictional account of the character of one of these adverts (a meerkat called Aleksandr). Meanwhile the market leader is a FTSE 250 company. As such I couldn't believe it when I read (in the TC article) that Leaky is the first (or even the 10th) real-time aggregator in the US.
These sort of sites aren't a perfect solution by any means, but a large % of people in the UK now use them to buy car insurance, and so presumably Leaky is on the road (see what I did there...) to being a household name by doing the same thing in the US.
They've even started giving you a free Aleksandr when you use Comparethemarket.com... Which was almost enough to get me to switch my loyalty from Confused.com.
Of course in the States you guys have that old bloke and his gecko to compete with... and he has pretty deep pockets ;)
1)Even though I know you guys are from YC (and not for example the Russian mob). I still bailed when you asked for my driver's license # and SSN. It's not enough for you to just say "trust us".
2) I checked it out from the couch quickly on my iPhone. The experience was not that good. The form drop-downs were slow loading and left me staring at empty pick lists. I had to scroll side to side to read the label on each field.
3) I was prompted twice to enter my email as an early adopter (once for each car I was entering presumably). This did not instill me with confidence about supplying personal info.
Yes, total and complete fail, after going through what seems like a pretty standard 2-driver use case.
There's no sort of progress meter, so I don't know how long I have to wait, and after the N/A quotes there's still a spinner running, so I'm unsure as to whether I should wait, or what.
Hmm.. the mixed content on the homepage is not very reassuring about your security practices, esp. with all the personal information you're asking for.
There is actually another company that has this concept: CoverHound. I'm one of the co-founders. We started a few months before Leaky.
We went through the AngelPad incubator during the Winter 2011 class. TechCrunch covered us in a little blurb at the time. Since then we've received VC funding and have built out our team a little bit.
There's no publicly available pricing API for insurance carriers yet, so I'm curious as to how Leaky comes up with their numbers.
You need more clarity on the homepage. It's obvious that it's car insurance but the process is information->information->start, which Leaky makes it obvious and it basically goes start->figure it out.
Get the user started on the conversion funnel while you explain to them what the service does - I'm pretty certain (based on my lead generation experience) that this will end in a far superior conversion rate for you.
I agree with this guy. CoverHound.com reads like the envelopes I get from Progressive...a few pages more than I am willing to read.
edit: To find this page I went to the bottom of the home page, tried to click on the Pennsylvania state outline, clicked the Pennsylvania text link, looked for my car on the most stolen cars lists, found "Car insurance quotes get started" at the bottom http://coverhound.com/step1
I greatly appreciate you will help me find insurance that protects my car from alien abduction. Does that cover me, my passengers, and cow, or is it just for the vehicle itself? :)
I don't think it's really the same concept. On Leaky, you type in your information once, and then they show you insurance quotes. Whereas CoverHound just gives me links to insurance companies' websites, and then I have to fill out my information on each of those websites. If I were you guys, I would switch to the Leaky model, because it seems a lot easier for the user to only type in their information once.
Currently, our recommendation engine is the only publicly available product. We're building a platform similar to what Leaky portrays, but it's still in development. Displaying truly accurate and actionable rates is not a simple task.
The product that cover hound is offering at this moment (as far as I can tell) is practically without use. It just gave me links or phone numbers for 4 companies that sell car insurance in my state. I can get similar results by searching for "Ohio car insurance" and clicking the ads that come up.
What appears to be their full featured future product looks EXTREMELY interesting. It appears that coverhound will almost work like an automated insurance agent, for example, give them your info once, and they'll check rates for you on a regular and recurring basis. THAT product seems extremely valuable to me and would be doing the world a great favor.
Is it just me or does Coverhound and Leaky just look like lipstick on a pig? It's backed by big names like YC, but in the end what distinguishes them from "thin affiliate" sites that get penalized by Google? Ok, so they both have slightly better web designs than the average affiliate site, what else? I'm not saying these sites aren't useful, but if you're gonna punish thin affiliates, you might as well penalize these guys too if you don't want to be hypocritical
sorry, your company is just one more of those 'we will send your email to every company around'. I just filled both forms. one is email passive, the other is just showing a list of companies that do not give me no more information than a link and phone number.
The change leaky (or coverhound) has of succeeding, is if they do what mint did. provide a way to work with insurance companies, even if there's no 'publicly available pricing API'. There will be the magic that is missing in this market.
but, of course, once you have your service mandated by the gov (as is here in cali) you will make it harder and harder for the public to be informed about prices of your service. That's the gotcha with car insurance. no company benefits being transparent about rates.
It just hangs here for me after I took the time to fill in all that information: http://o7.no/pHl2qg
Do you have plans already for filling the top of the funnel here? Its going to be really hard to compete with established businesses buying traffic in this market.
Not sure why they ripped off Square so blindly (and no "All design credit goes to Square. We based our design on their home page until we can hire a designer of our own." doesn't cut it), but I'll be honest, that discouraged me from using their app. It's the little things that matter, folks.
I think they ripped it off because Square's design is great. And, personally I think it's pretty decent they acknowledge it. I've seen plenty of designs ripped off and nobody ever has the guts to give credit.
Am I the only one that thinks "I don't want to type my personal details into leaky!"
What a bizzare name choice. Looks like a good product though, but isn't this sort of thing fairly old? Or is it just new for car insurance? These sort of price comparison websites have been the staple of UK Prime Time TV advertising for the last 3 years.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 204 ms ] threadThere does seem to be a bit of chicken and egg barrier though. I may be willing to give out this information to allstate.com or statefarm.com or progressive.com but I am not sure I or others will be as willing to give it out to leaky.com.
Maybe they are awesome, and maybe it's just me, but if you want me to give this information out on the spur of the moment, I guess I would like a site that somehow exudes a bit more trust.
That they are YC backed encouraged me to click and try it out. Otherwise, I would probably not have clicked at all.
(But YC backing isn't really enough for me to eagerly give out all that information, not until pg and yc is providing ebay like yc-clickers-insurance on their portfolio. :) )
Regarding the average user, I suspect that insurance companies have names like Prudential, All State, State Farm, and symbols like the Rock of Gibraltar, big old granite columned buildings, and stuffy images for a reason.
And um, leaky isn't doing it for me.
ymmv
Otoh, how IS leaky different from esurance? I don't understand that from their website either.
If you're smart, you'll visit every six months and see whether someone else is cheaper. At the very least you should visit every time you get a new car.
If they're smart they'll send you a reminder email every six months to get you to try again every time your insurance is up for renewal. Heck, they could recalculate everything for you (based on the new set of assumptions) and email you a set of quotes -- that's one semi-spammy email I wouldn't mind getting at all.
However, I can't get the site to work. Maybe it's getting hammered, maybe it doesn't work yet, maybe there's something iffy about my input (I did put in a fake licence number because I was too lazy to find my real one). All I'm getting is a bunch of "N/A"s. Never mind, I renewed my car insurance last month anyway, so they've got four months to fix it.
Eventually that would just drive down the affiliate fees. The reason that they're (presumably) high is that they've factored in the lifetime value of a customer. If you systematically lower that, then the referral fees will follow.
Still, lifetime value, really? I admit that I've been letting my car insurance roll over from year to year because I'm too lazy to go looking for new quotes (though this site, once it's working, will significantly lower that barrier) but next time I get a new car I'll certainly shop around to see who'll give me a good rate.
http://www.leaky.com/ vs. https://squareup.com/
EDIT: I realize they say "until we can hire a designer of our own." — but don't they have the Start Fund + YC + SV Angel money?
With their permission?
It's not like a new car company starts with someone else's body shape until they can design their own car or copies their TV ad for a few months. I can appreciate that Square might've OKed this or look kindly on a temporary copy from a startup, but for about the same level of effort they could've differentiated their site a fair bit more (even just a different hue for the background).
I'm not sure if I'm missing something here - looking at code/designs and tweaking them to learn is one thing, but is basing a funded company on something so blatant now considered OK? I'd like to know if this is the thought pattern for people who are designers or programmers.
Is Square within the YC stable, is that it?
Should I be doing this with my side projects, to piggyback on that success?
(Keep in mind that I'm assuming in this case that they don't have permission.)
"Why would they need permission?"
That's what I've been replying to.
The Tesla Roadster, IIRC, uses a Lotus body. But they actually licensed it from Lotus.
From a decision about magazine covers: "None of the individual elements [...] ordinary lines, typefaces, and colors — qualifies for copyright protection. But the distinctive arrangement and layout of those elements is entitled to protection as a graphic work."
http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=3745368693852483...
Oh wait, DOB and SS# and driver's license?
Um, NO - there is no need for this kind of info to get a general quote - I've had it with big insurance harvesting personal info. There really ought to be a law.
Car insurance quote should be three questions:
(and obviously if you've had accidents recently)Insurance tables shouldn't work like they do. What they are trying to figure out from all your personal info is if you own or rent, where you work, how many times you have moved recently, etc. That's a bunch of bull.
A smart thing to do here might be to figure out a way to do progressive quotes/queries; take the DOB+zip+car information just to start, then let the user decide whether the variance in the results (which will be the best-case ones) merit coughing up more info.
A "soft" quote based on general information.
A "hard" quote based on very specific information.
They'd never convince me they cannot do this, especially with all the extremely misleading commercials on television.
A soft quote would be just fine for me and probably many others.
EDIT: in fact, for a subscription based service, you could figure out the optimal pricing quite easily. If the annual price of your subscription were less than the typical insurance savings by having it monitored, you'd have a hell of a business model.
If so, you need to encrypt it first. Storing sensitive data in the user's session is akin to writing it to disk in plaintext.
These sort of sites aren't a perfect solution by any means, but a large % of people in the UK now use them to buy car insurance, and so presumably Leaky is on the road (see what I did there...) to being a household name by doing the same thing in the US.
Of course in the States you guys have that old bloke and his gecko to compete with... and he has pretty deep pockets ;)
The design is pleasing on the eyes, thanks square!
1)Even though I know you guys are from YC (and not for example the Russian mob). I still bailed when you asked for my driver's license # and SSN. It's not enough for you to just say "trust us".
2) I checked it out from the couch quickly on my iPhone. The experience was not that good. The form drop-downs were slow loading and left me staring at empty pick lists. I had to scroll side to side to read the label on each field.
3) I was prompted twice to enter my email as an early adopter (once for each car I was entering presumably). This did not instill me with confidence about supplying personal info.
Hope that's info you guys can use. Good luck!
There's no sort of progress meter, so I don't know how long I have to wait, and after the N/A quotes there's still a spinner running, so I'm unsure as to whether I should wait, or what.
Idea: great. Execution: really sub-par.
We went through the AngelPad incubator during the Winter 2011 class. TechCrunch covered us in a little blurb at the time. Since then we've received VC funding and have built out our team a little bit.
There's no publicly available pricing API for insurance carriers yet, so I'm curious as to how Leaky comes up with their numbers.
Get the user started on the conversion funnel while you explain to them what the service does - I'm pretty certain (based on my lead generation experience) that this will end in a far superior conversion rate for you.
edit: To find this page I went to the bottom of the home page, tried to click on the Pennsylvania state outline, clicked the Pennsylvania text link, looked for my car on the most stolen cars lists, found "Car insurance quotes get started" at the bottom http://coverhound.com/step1
http://i.imgur.com/B9zdt.png http://coverhound.com/
What appears to be their full featured future product looks EXTREMELY interesting. It appears that coverhound will almost work like an automated insurance agent, for example, give them your info once, and they'll check rates for you on a regular and recurring basis. THAT product seems extremely valuable to me and would be doing the world a great favor.
The change leaky (or coverhound) has of succeeding, is if they do what mint did. provide a way to work with insurance companies, even if there's no 'publicly available pricing API'. There will be the magic that is missing in this market.
but, of course, once you have your service mandated by the gov (as is here in cali) you will make it harder and harder for the public to be informed about prices of your service. That's the gotcha with car insurance. no company benefits being transparent about rates.
Do you have plans already for filling the top of the funnel here? Its going to be really hard to compete with established businesses buying traffic in this market.
The "X for Y" only works if X is sufficiently common. Surely better to define in simple terms what the site actually does.
What a bizzare name choice. Looks like a good product though, but isn't this sort of thing fairly old? Or is it just new for car insurance? These sort of price comparison websites have been the staple of UK Prime Time TV advertising for the last 3 years.