Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

hn_throwaway_99

While I thought this was a pretty good read, I didn't really feel like it answered the question in the title: "was it worth it"?

First, this post was from 2024, and as another commenter mentioned, it doesn't look like Helios Companies (www.helioscompanies.com) is a going concern anymore. That's not that surprising - the change in the interest rate and VC funding environment killed off lots of unprofitable fintechs that were originally funded in 2021 or earlier.

I'm not saying money is the end all and be all, and this guy certainly got a lot out of it. But assuming this company is now defunct and he didn't get any substantial payday out of it, would he do it again knowing what he knows now? When you think about it, we all have relatively very limited time in our careers - while VCs can fund 100 different companies with the expectation that 95% will fail, workers don't have that luxury. Putting in 5+ years of lots of late nights and blood, sweat and tears can be tough if the outcome isn't a winner.

So I'm left wondering if the author feels like it was still worth it.

I work with him at this company. We are still going, just don’t have much of a public facing side, because most of the sales are direct b2b. We’re working on showcasing more of what we do, but it hasn’t been our top priority.

Thanks very much for the correction. FWIW, the reason for my apparently faulty assumption is that when searching for your company online, the top result is the Crunchbase entry, https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/helios-companies, and it shows web (www.helioscompanies.com) and LinkedIn links that are both defunct.

To be honest, I find it kind of bizarre that your company doesn't appear to have any public web presence. I also worked at a B2B-only fintech very recently, and we still had a website. Heck, my neighborhood barbershop has a website. I know it sounds like I'm knocking y'all (and maybe I am a little), but I'm honestly just curious. If I were a tech leader at a bank and got a direct sales call from a vendor and they said they didn't have a website, I'd just assume it was a scam. It must be working for your company so I'm very interested in how you haven't found the need to have a website in 2025. That I think would actually be a more interesting blog post!

I know it's weird, I'm a long time software guy myself, and would be surprised too if I didn't see this for myself. The thing about us is that our customers are banks. New banks are joining because they already know about us from the other banks. Our founders do the literal legwork of flying places and talking to people, establishing direct relationships, and talking on the phone. This is actually one of our strengths, we are not primarily a tech shop trying to sell tech to banks, but rather our founders are former bankers themselves who are trying to help solve their problems first, and sell tech as a side effect of that.

Speaking as former CTO of a bank, the procurement team and risk team still typically attempt to validate online presence and run some kind of risk score SaaS on you, lack of presence is a minus and conversations ensue. When I brought in firms like yours it took extra energy to advocate for if they didn't tick these nominal boxes. Clipping every little bit of hair is an ROI based decision, where leaving hair on it can help filter for banks that are "easier to work with" when you are still subscale, fewer resources than prospects. Put another way, being turned down during early stage can be good ROI.

Thanks very much, this is really helpful. I do honestly think this would be a great blog post! So many of us (like I just did) approach these problems from a "tech first" approach, and that's often not the right strategy, depending on the domain.

"Having a website" is such a double-edged sword.

The amount of bad / low quality leads that they generate is insane if you're in any market that isn't purely D2C. So many people hours wasted dealing with churn.

That's not even accounting for the sheer volume of spam it'll generate from other businesses trying to cold-pitch random SaaS products and contractor outsourcing companies.

My favorite / most hated tactic is calling someone in the org and telling them that they're trying to return my call, hoping that the message will get passed along and the actual details (such as who they represent because I certainly never called them) get lost along the way.

I'm not affiliated with this company, but I personally believe that not having a website (or any public presence) is the future of our industry. The issue is that any information you put out there can now be used by AI to emulate you. This can be used by competitors to quickly reach feature parity with your product, it can be used by bad actors like scammers, and just generally is harmful to you.

I know it sounds silly but not having a website is probably the future of the web.

Wow that is a wild take. I would not trust a business without a website, I did a quick poll of friends in tech and they all felt similar for b2b and consumer.

...and your CEO took down his LinkedIn page? Hmmm....

It's not down, but it's under an abbreviated name (I had the same question until I found it).

But his Linkedin page used to be https://www.linkedin.com/in/shivan-govindan-582202

Now if you search nothing matches.

https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/people/?firstName=Sh...

So even if he has a Linkedin page, it's clearly not meant for anyone to find....why?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com