Insurance accounting software?
It’s a question we get a lot, especially because it’s off the beaten path in Silicon Valley.
So how’d we end up here?
The truth is, we didn’t expect to. My co-founder and I left our jobs in tech and followed the common startup advice of “solve your own problems ”. We had a whole list of spaces to go after: fintech APIs, work collaboration software, even an automatic birthday card generator.
But none of them worked. In many of these spaces, users’ problems were already mostly solved and we’d just be saving them a few clicks. On top of that, there were often 10+ other startups doing nearly the exact same idea. Our gut told us this isn’t what we wanted to spend years of our life on.
So, we decided to do something different. Something outside of our wheelhouse. We happened to meet some people in insurance and decided to give it a shot. We reached out to folks we found on LinkedIn and articles, and some of them were gracious enough to help guide us. We did this as a full-time job for months and spoke to hundreds of people.
We became increasingly interested in insurance brokers and the high levels of pain they experience in their standard accounting processes. It felt like we had come across a corner of the economy that was yet-to-be touched by modern software. So we put together an MVP, got a commitment for our first pilot customer, and a few months later, landed our first contract.
A week into using the product, the lead accountant there started crying tears of joy on a Zoom call. We were shocked. We knew that was not a normal reaction to a B2B SaaS product - no one was crying about our birthday card generator. We were onto something.
Why we’re building this
Software has not eaten this world. The insurance brokers we serve are often using clunky, on-prem, Windows desktop apps. They’ve grown accustomed to manually processing thousands of PDFs and spreadsheets every month. They know it sucks but they don't know any other way. They’ve been sold snake oil in the past that doesn’t live up to expectations, so they’re understandably skeptical. We’re changing that.
How? At their core, many of the problems we solve are workflow problems. Revenue needs to be accounted for, employees need to be paid, etc. The industry expertise can be picked up quickly; what really matters is deeply understanding the customer and what's possible with technology. Typically this responsibility is split between 3+ people playing a game of telephone relaying what the customer wants into what gets shipped. Inevitably some gets lost in translation, and the team still finds themselves in "syncs" and internal comment threads all day. That’s why we’ve found so much success in building a culture in which engineers do both product and engineering. They're able to move quickly and decisively, all in the pursuit of better serving customers.
The Opportunity Ahead
We’re at a fascinating point in our space. Billions of dollars per year are still spent on manual processes, just as they have been for decades. Meanwhile, AI is rapidly developing to make automation easier and easier.
But in order for AI’s potential to be realized, it has to be done thoughtfully. We’ve seen enough cases of companies throwing in a chatbot where it doesn’t actually make sense. The useful applications require deeply understanding the customer and how what technology is capable of — exactly what our team specializes in, and why we’re so well poised to take advantage of this shift.
It’s an exciting future and a highly rewarding one. Come join us and see.
