Jury Board: SaaS note taking to enrichment (third-party api) to ML; solid long term strategy. Real user interest. With a large unique dataset you could essentially build a monopoly business. Founder seems to understand the space, but perhaps not commercial/sales side. Selling to legal firms will probably mean a salesforce which results in a much higher per-unit cost but that’s potentially sustainable. Not clear there’s a large enough market to take to IPO but could be a decent size trade-sale to someone like Lexis-Nexis or Reuters. Accept.

AuthorInvestments: Interesting approach to modernising “advances” structure of book publishers, likely extendable to other markets. As more content creation becomes freelance this could provide an alternative for creators that doesn’t rely on fans (ala Patreon) or pre-buyers (Kickstarter) but rather treats it as a form of alternative investment. Not clear if the founder is capable of delivering but definitely has potential to be a breakout. Accept.

Trusert: Seems to fix a hypothetical problem rather than a real one. Not clear what the market is for employers who are concerned that people crammed for test. Might be useful in markets with high-rates of cheating on exams. But doesn’t seem generally applicable. Pass.

Since any potential employer can't rely on a candidate's certificate/degree to indicate that they actually knows the material (or can apply it), they are forced into retesting every candidate (i.e. the dreaded technical interview). This is an incredible wasteful process for both candidates and the employers. What is needed is a certification process that can't be gamed that measures true retention of knowledge and skill.

Not that it matters too much at this stage, but I would encourage you to read through the whole discussion - the idea is not as obvious as it appears on the surface.

If I could go back and rewrite that description, I would. The idea, at least on the economic side of things, is fairly fully fleshed out. The key thing, which I didn't even mention in my initial description, is the timer/expiration mechanism:

Rather than offer on-demand exchange between USD and GD, we will automatically exchange GD for USD after it remains in a user's account for a period of time. When an amount of GD is transferred from one account to another, that GD's lifetime resets. Consequently, the more that GD circulates, the less we will convert GD into USD and the less we tap into our USD reserves.

Here's a white paper (also linked in another comment) that describes it in more detail:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B2jhCMrrxoeONVNQTVd6NG5pNz...

Other online currencies are not both pegged to USD and handed out for free, so Greshm Dollar doesn't face some of the same adoption challenges that they do. Instead of thinking about Greshm Dollar as just another online currency, try thinking of it as a payment/credit system with a basic income attached to it. Or like PayPal but with free money continuously added to your account.

You can think about it that way for user adoption purposes, but, of course, that's not the whole picture.

Traditionally this market is underserved due to the customer acquisition cost (CAC) but our differentiator is to use social media / referral based rewards in addition to more traditional physical marketing and partnerships to drive sales at a low CAC

Finally this will be an incredibly sticky service, we are expecting hyper low attrition once acquired

We believe there is a $100MM opportunity here.

Very few businesses which aren't inherently social/viral manage to make social media, referral, etc. channels scale without significant cost. Unless you've got a strong expertise in making such marketing channels work you'll be likely to struggle (and investors will know this and won't take you seriously if you make this pitch).

I'd recommend you look at other businesses in this space (ComparetheMarket, uSwitch) in other countries. Generally they make a brand play and then amortise the cost of customer acquisition by up-selling price comparison on everything (insurance, mobile contracts, etc.) so they have a much higher revenue per-customer.

I wouldn't assume attrition is going to be low either, especially if you require user effort (photographing bills) and presumably your cohorts will decrease in value organically over time (i.e. if you keep switching to cheaper providers approximately each switch is going to be a smaller saving than the previous).

We think this business is inherently viral because everyone everyone knows buys electricity, and people who find a simple way to save money are usually eager, even proactive, about telling their friends about it.

We respectfully disagree with your assumption that the value prop diminishes over time or that we would have high attrition. The value is not in the relative price of the switched plans but in the total time & money savings to the customer versus staying with their more expensive incumbent supplier.

The snapshot of a customer’s bill is only needed on signup, not ongoing. In fact our system is designed to be zero effort after signup. The whole point is for us to work in the background, saving our customers money without them having to worry about a thing. However we will employ site features and notifications to remind users of how much they’ve saved and will continue to save, as well as how much we’ve saved our customers in aggregate. Once a customer is in our system there is high incentive to stay and refer their friends, and little reason to leave.

P.S. Thanks for Fizzbuzz!

I will say that initial customer acquisition in NYC is our hyper focus right now. The great thing about opening this discussion up on HN is that there are so many minds out there looking at your problems. I'd be happy to hear any ideas on how to best acquire these clients initially. We're doing a bit of FB ads, and think this will be a heavy marketing lift. But as we monetize our first couple clients, we are getting a clearer picture of customer value.

Krewe is not a "Tinder for friends." It's about giving people the kind of network they can rely of for anything including making career connections, finding romantic partners, becoming connected to their local community, and having incredible real world experiences.