Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

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hn_throwaway_99

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.

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.

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.

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.

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