I remember a time when this very TechCrunch article would come out and I'd read through it with a sense of dismay at the sheer unadulterated badness of every single idea.
Things have changed.
An example: Teleborder charges $5,000 per visa application, ... gathering documents, collecting information, and sending information to the government.
This is one of those ideas where you just stop and wonder why nobody has run with it before. These guys are going to make bank. I rode a dotcom into the ground in the early 'aughts that was tackling a similar problem with 10x the paperwork of a H1B and roughly 0% of the hair-on-fire demand that tech companies with tons of money have for help getting labor into the country.
That's the kind of company I wish I'd founded. Nice work.
The cost per app goes down with each additional app. After about 10 apps the company typically has figured out and streamlined the entire process. The documentation requirements for the H1B applicant are pretty well known. (previous status, transcripts, degree certificates,...). These are not overly complicated documents (unless you are a special case).
Also 5k fee sounds kinds of high (I am assuming these are in addition to the government fees). A lawyer for h1b application should not cost more than 2 to 3k. So, why would a company pay more NOT to work directly with a lawyer?
On the other hand, if the fees include government fees then this is a very good deal.
H1b applicant feels secure in the knowledge that his application is handled by a lawyer. Its like buying an insurance, they are indirectly buying "peace of mind". If they find out that company is not directly using a lawyer, I am not sure how they will react.
My girlfriend and a couple friends recently went through this year's LCA process (H1B, H1B1, etc.) and the lawyers cost exactly that: $2-3k.
The $5k price point is only going to drive away your target market. These customers are people who have already busted their ass to get a work sponsor, so they know the ins and outs of the market, including what the laywers cost and who is typically better. If they don't, then they are deferring to their employer's lawyers, who are already experts, to handle it completely.
There isn't anything new that teleborders is bringing to the market here, except a more expensive price point.
There seems to be a bit of confusion around our pricing in the comments below, so let me clear it up: we charge an average of $5,000 per visa application. The real fees range from sub-$2k for simple transfers all the way to above $10k for some green c cards. For simplicity, we (and the press) sometimes abbreviate this to "$5k per visa".
So far, customers haven't had a problem paying a slight premium to use us; what they pay out in cash they more than make back in time saved and employee happiness, and that's why some even told us we're cheap!
> This is one of those ideas where you just stop and wonder why nobody has run with it before.
Hahaha... seriously? You have never heard of "immigration lawyers" and "travel agents"? This is exactly the service they have been providing since the dawn of time.
Unlikely. Most immigration firms (outside of the Bay Area and New York) charge less than $5000 to handle all immigration visa matters, and I am including major specialty firms like Fragommen. While the idea is sound, the pricing is going to need a lot of work if it wants to take off outside of the Bay.
One thing going against them is how h1b gets consumed. The 2013 cap (last year, not thing year) distribution indicates more than 40k out of 65k worker cap was filled by outsourcing company. (source: http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2013-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.aspx). I am sure the number is similar even this year just as it has been the last so many years.
Even the other often abused visa L1 is primarily filled by outsourcers (I am trying to find some numbers on this but hard to find).
The outsourcing companies have been filing h1 for less than 1k lawyer fee (outsourced too!).
5K seems too high for someone to take note . The best law firms themselves charge about that here in USA.
I think this company can help out the startups in the bay area that are clueless how to sponsor a H1 (all the legalities of it) and makes it simple to them perhaps doing everything online from get go. That won't be more than 15/20k per year. So even the best case they are probably seeing a $1million dollar run rate per year (Which might be great for a 4/5 member startup?).
They should diversify into other areas - tax (for immigrants)/corporate (hiring/transfers) - which will have more incidences to charge.
It does seem that YC companies have moved away from the "give some service away on the internet for free" model that used to predominate. Most of these seem like they are filling real needs.
"Reminds me of a tactic used by my father's friend, who owned a pizzeria. He noticed that about half the orders were for large pepperoni pizzas. So he had his drivers always carry an additional large pepperoni pizza in the car, and he'd call them mid-route if an additional order came in. It usually did, so thankfully very few cold pizzas died, and he sold more pizzas per hour than before. Saved on gas, drivers made more tips, and eventually he ended up getting heaters and drivers carrying as many as 10 per trip. Combine that with the deeper large pepperoni price cut he could now afford, it was quickly became the busiest joint in town. Too bad he never expanded."
Makes me imagine a person/duo in a van, back filled with a limited range of curries on the go and rice cookers, driving around a particular area getting delivery requests and payment on their phone. Drive the short distance (you're already in the van with the product), ladle out servings and walk them to the door. It'd be hard to beat that sort of delivery time and it might make for a few impulse orders.
> Almost all programming [pizza delivery] can be viewed as an exercise in caching.
-- Terje Mathisen
Extra food in the car is like the L1 cache of the food world. Now that I think about, I'm pretty sure that every company in the world is just an exercise in caching.
Floobits works really well from my limited experience. I've used it in Sublime while my friend was in vim and it worked flawlessly. Much better than our experience with attempting something similar with Screenhero. We tried Flooty (live terminal-sharing) as well, and it's in a mostly-working state. If you've ever tried Nitrous.io's shared tmux sessions, it works almost as well. I see Floobits becoming a tool used by many, many developers.
I like Toutpost's idea, but I'm not convinced by their approach at the moment. Though I'm actually in the process of making something pretty similar for a specific audience in Django.
If they were in my area already, I would probably try out SpoonRocket immediately. I already prepare and cook all my meals, but I'm still prone to getting some food near campus once or twice a week. $6 for a delivered "designer" meal is pretty compelling if they manage to maintain that price outside of their current area.
There is no way that YC now considers 10% weekly revenue growth low. That's 142x a year. I'm pretty sure any investor would be happy with that kind of traction, especially if the company has their unit economics figured out, like Prim appears to have.
> A good growth rate during YC is 5-7% a week. If you can hit 10% a week you're doing exceptionally well. If you can only manage 1%, it's a sign you haven't yet figured out what you're doing.
Kivo sounds really fantastic. I can remember having 272 versions of the presentation back in the day I worked in the bank.
The only obstacle I see is that majority of the potential users are not allowed to install any software themselves, but given that they already signed up some big customers they definitely can cope with that.
Also starting with consultancies is smart. Once you get Deloitte and McKinsey they're going to be recommending that to clients since it's what they know.
Article claims that Prim's 10% weekly growth is "low by Y-Combinator standards", but in "Startup = Growth" pg wrote that 10% weekly growth is great growth pace, and above 5% is good. Has the baseline of YC companies improved that much?
Techcrunch author may be reacting to growth rates right after launch that Demo Day pitches tout, which of course are through the roof (often over 100% week-over-week).
The 10% PG talks about is something you try to do week in and week out long after your press spike. It's insanely hard to do, but even if you come anywhere close you are doing very well.
Prim: interesting and I'm sure useful for a lot of people. I hope they're right that they can eventually lower prices though because that seems very expensive. Also is there a trend towards or away from using laundromats? Where I'm from it's unusual not to have your own washing machine and I wouldn't move anywhere that didn't have one.
RealCrowd: Really interesting startup but with the recent housing crisis they may have trouble convincing people it's a worthwhile investment and not a total gamble. I'm really interested to see where this goes and if it ever moves to include the general public (i.e. non-accredited investors).
StatusPage.io - I'll be using this immediately. Useful product and it looks like they already have quite a few high profile companies as customers. Hard to have an opinion on the pricing as I've no idea how many users would subscribe to these notifications.
Founder of RealCrowd here - thanks for the comments. We're focused only on commercial assets now that produce stable cash flow - think of a starbucks or an office building in SoMa that has consistent monthly income from rental payments. Homes should be viewed as shelter, not as a primary vehicle to create wealth.
It will be very interesting to see where the JOBS Act goes and how we can incorporate pure crowdfunding into our platform. Bringing access to this class of investment is what we're after and we're really excited to do so!
I think GoComm and Kivo have the best chance of this batch. I think GoComm especially is a good idea and in retrospect so obvious, that i wish i would've though of it. Coordinating people, even in small scale events is painful. I remember when i helped with fencing tournaments our club ran (running computer system) it was a constant trouble tracking down free pistes, referees, making sure other stuff (refreshments, garbage and similar) was ok... we solved this with having a dedicated person on the floor in the hall, keeping an eye out and keeping me in the loop, but that isn't very scalable
StatusPage.io looks like a very good and needed product but I feel like the fact they are a 100% AWS service this wouldn't be ideal for companies who also host their product in AWS. What happens when an AWS-related issue comes up? Your customers may not be able to get to your product as well as your status page.
I love that every app is labeled "It's (insert other app) for (insert what is does)." Example: YAMMER FOR MOBILE WORKFORCE, Mint.com for legal spend, CLICKTALE FOR MOBILE, YELP FOR LATIN AMERICA.
I don't think that is an issue. The value in Yelp is largely in the reviews, the rest of how it works has been done plenty of times for plenty of different things.
Just like a groupon or stripe, the venue reviews space really needs boots on the ground and some local knowledge to work right, so there is a big opportunity for essentially a copycat model for that market (same as has happened for a long time in china).
Bringing these tried and tested ideas to places just catching up to the rest of the world with digital connectivity is probably going to be very lucrative over the next decade for people well positioned to do so.
It goes both ways. The names are so nonsensical that I had to stop and think about what each service they were referring to does. No idea what Yammer is, and I was so inundated by weird names that by the time I read Yelp it didn't even register.
Yeah there's another error in the Floobits section. The bit about earlier coverage was mistakenly copy-pasted from the section about Standard Treasury.
Things have changed.
An example: Teleborder charges $5,000 per visa application, ... gathering documents, collecting information, and sending information to the government.
This is one of those ideas where you just stop and wonder why nobody has run with it before. These guys are going to make bank. I rode a dotcom into the ground in the early 'aughts that was tackling a similar problem with 10x the paperwork of a H1B and roughly 0% of the hair-on-fire demand that tech companies with tons of money have for help getting labor into the country.
That's the kind of company I wish I'd founded. Nice work.