vishalkgupta

MoneyLion (http://MoneyLion.com/) | New York, NY or San Francisco, CA | Full-time | Onsite

MoneyLion is a technology-enabled lending institution focused on helping all consumers gain access to credit. At MoneyLion we feel passionately that everyone should have a clear path to better financial products. We use data to offer better financial products to all Americans. By rewarding financial responsibility, providing top-notch customer assistance and offering insightful financial education tips we aim to positively impact our customers and enable them to better their financial health.

While we're quickly expanding in areas of Analytics, Engineering, and Marketing, My focus currently is to hire for a Front End Developer to join our team in New York or San Francisco.

Details here: https://jobs.lever.co/moneylion/419465cb-61d8-43c3-8e9a-0499...

1 year at Cisco Systems hardware engineering internship, 1 year at a mobile startup before mobile was really a thing, 8 years at Goldman Sachs in their electronic trading business- business side, 1 year own startup, 3 years electronic trading startup, now- building this out.. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11441020

1. Don’t be afraid to start over. The problem with largely starting my career at Goldman Sachs was that you feel like you’re running so hard/fast with blinders on. Also, and maybe this is a New York thing, I started to identify myself with my job. I had to learn that I am not my job. All of this made switching friction very high. In my time at GS, Facebook was being created, and Google became what it was today. In reality I was letting the outside world evolve, while I sat somewhere that refused to. I felt like everything I had “built”, career-wise, would fall apart the day after I left Goldman. The reality was that my career didn’t fall apart. But the products/businesses that I built meant less to me, and I was more excited about the future of what I wanted to build. I felt finally unchained. I should have left 4 years before I did.

2. Keep closer to technology. When graduating in 2002 with a Computer Engineering degree, I heard people around me snicker -“Didn’t all those jobs just get outsourced?” It was a bad time for technology, it was a bad time to graduate with a computer engineering degree. Because of my career choices, I ended up focusing more on the business end of things (which still worked out well), but technology is my first love. I love to build things. Now I just do it for fun and hope I can build stuff that people find useful.

3. Be less afraid to fail, take more risks when you can. I played it safe when younger. Focused on making as much money as possible. I love the Elon Musk quote - “Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.”

Vishal from WedWell here. Really appreciated the input from everyone who commented, and the votes. We're charging forward. Hopefully you'll see us in the next YC round ;)

Overall liked having an open forum for people to give feedback on our idea. We used some of that feedback to evolve the product, we even got some new clients from HN.

Changes for next year? I'd love the final run off to be a bit more like the final four, where you pit one start-up against another until there are only a few standing. Then YC can pick from the cream of the crop.

Thanks again

True-- Efficiency may not be the best term for marketing this thing (to anyone beyond the YC community). I'm all ears for sure.

I'd love to hear your thoughts. You can reach me at info@wedwell.co

Thanks again, we're still early here. Plenty of room to evolve the product. We'd love to hear your thoughts.

I second the idea that a facesmash like approach could really be a much better idea of how to handle this. It's easier to view one startup vs another instead of looking at voting on 20.

There are some stand outs that may just run over their opponents, but maybe there's some way to normalize that to some degree.

Thank you! Very helpful for our message

We're still iterating, but right now we reach out to vendors proactively. So ideally it's little/no work for the vendors to have to search for events, we post them on events that they should be able to handle. The work that they do to create a proposal is no different from the work needed for any clients, if anything our templates may make it easier.

Thanks for the comment. We really do think its less about finding the cheapest vendor and helping streamline the process. Elsewhere here it was coined as "vendor dating", which is something I really like. On top of the fact that vendors can start to see what other vendors are doing, allow for collaboration earlier in the process.

We started with the week long bidding contest, but for now are keeping it open to allow as many vendors in as possible. That may change over time.

Vishal from WedWell here. This competition was a bit unstructured in general. So not surprised that many teams didn't talk too much about their teams, and spoke more about their ideas.

We're a small team lead by myself. I am technical (computer engineer by education), but have a more technical partner (full stack engineer) onboard, and my sister is helping as well. My sister has had to plan her own wedding from start to finish without a wedding planner. She's helping a lot with on boarding.

I have a background in building electronic trading businesses with a specialization in market structures. Marketplaces like Airbnb, and how they start are something that I love to study.

There are more details about me on my profile here. I think in the future, it may make sense to put a bit of structure to how people describe their idea/team.

RE WedWell: Thanks for the comment. Funny enough we're moving slightly from "WedWell: Vendors bid for your wedding" more towards "WedWell: A more efficient way to plan your wedding". (Dang- Depending on how long the voting is going, we'd love to change our title!)

It's really less about cost savings (which may happen anyway with scale/competition among vendors), but more about efficiencies in the process. Less face to face meetings, less paper checks, more collaboration among vendors before the day of the event. So, as a potential client, I think you're hitting it on the head. It is more like vendor dating than anything else. Love for you to give the platform a go, and give us some feedback.

RE WedWell: I think it's less about unique insight, and more about timing/positioning. Couples expect to communicate with vendors over the phone/text, they don't want to write paper checks, they want vendors to find them. We're doing a lot of things that do not scale right now, but doing our best to keep clients happy.

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.

Vishal from WedWell here. Lol.. Zenefits was boring.. so thank you?

RE:WedWell - no good vendor would put themselves through his - they’d be too busy making money.

>Not what we're seeing. Were initially focused on the NYC area. There are a huge amount of great vendors who are constantly battling for each wedding here. Plenty are excited to extend their reach. Each market is different, but it makes sense right now in bigger cities.

Also RE: the RFP process. Initially vendors are using their own proposals to iterate with the clients, eventually we see this being baked into the system. Either way, drawing up a proposal has to be done whether you meet the client in person or via our platform. The time savings is the initial iteration is done electronically vs face to face.

Thanks gills. Love to pick your brain a bit about this. Happy to move to email at some point. What was your solution called?

We think that this is a process problem vs a technology problem at first. We're trying to distill the client's ideas into a wedding brief that can be viewed by vendors. Vendors then upload a proposal on Google docs (initially), that allow for comments by the couple. We allow the couple to iterate with the vendors and we go from there. We're trying our best to not just blindly build out tech, but to really focus on on boarding clients/vendors, then build technology around the bottle necks. We're experimenting right now.

Thanks again for being a client! We're really lucky to have clients like you and your fiancé. Your feedback is helping us make a better product.

Thanks! There's a lot of old tech in the wedding space, but the act of planning a wedding has largely stayed the same. We're hoping to evolve that. Our goal is to make it easier to iterate with more vendors. With scale, prices may also come down.

Thanks malyk! It's a huge space.

Some more data that we find really attractive in this space:

Average cost of US Wedding(1): $32,641

Average cost of Wedding in NYC(1): $82,299 (We are located in NYC and are focused here for phase 1)

Most of those vendors are paid with paper checks. There's an obvious push towards better payment solutions.

Mobile Wedding Planning (2) : Couples are using smartphones more than ever to plan their wedding and they expect personalized solutions.

More Couples Depend On Professionals(2) : Couples are spending on wedding professionals to help them plan a perfect day, and to ensure they have long-lasting memories.

There's plenty to disrupt, and couples are more and more asking for mobile and easy payment solutions. WedWell is really excited to be working on this space!

Sources:

1 - https://www.theknot.com/content/average-wedding-cost-2015

2 - http://ir.xogroupinc.com/investor-relations/press-releases/p...

Vishal from WedWell here.

Thanks for the breakdown of the shortlisted startups. It's really thorough and I largely agree with your assessments.

Your breakdown reminded me of a PG essay (http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html). It's essentially a long form checklist for coming up with and testing your start up ideas.

I had a doc that I created, that distilled this essay into a sort of checklist to help validate some of the ideas I came up with. Feel free to take a look at my checklist here - https://medium.com/@vishalkgupta/how-to-get-startup-ideas-a-...

I'll try to answer some of my check list here to validate why we think there is a great deal of promise in our small little startup.

>> Problem/Solution — 

1. Are you solving a problem that you, as founders, have themselves? Yes. We have all either gone through the painful process of planning a wedding or see that process happening in our horizon. Speaking for myself, I'm starting to budget the money and time necessary for my eventual wedding, and I kept asking myself.. Why can't I do something a bit smarter when iterating with vendors. After using 99designs, I thought that their process of iterating with potential designers could work well for wedding vendors.

2. Is this a solution you/your team can build? Yes, Absolutely. We don't think this is necessarily a hard technology build and we have backgrounds in electronic trading systems/marketplaces.

3. Do few others realize that this is a problem/solution set worth doing/building? While the wedding space is big, we have yet to see any innovation in the process behind actually planning a wedding, iterating with and paying vendors.

Well — 

4. Is there a small “well” of users who need your solution urgently? Yes! We have already a small group of clients who don't have the time to try to line up vendors, sit with them, and iterate with them to produce a proposal.

5. Who wants this “crappy first version” now? Pretty much anyone who wants to save a bit of time when it comes to wedding planning and wants someone else to do the leg work to get vendors to bid on their ideal wedding.

6.Starting with a small market is good, but do you have a fast path out of it (to grow into a bigger market)? As mentioned elsewhere the wedding market is globally as big as $300 bn globally.

Self — “Live in the future, then build what’s missing.”

7. Are you a “leading edge user”/”living in the future” of this silo? Yea! I kept asking myself, when I looked at budgeting time/money for wedding, why can't I do more of this online? Why does iteration have to be face to face?

8. How is this a “gap in the world”? Literally anytime I hear anyone say the word "paper checks" my startup mind turns on. There will be a world where not only will a couple get to iterate quickly through technology, but we will be able to pay initial and final payments with the press of a button.

Those were just a few questions/answers from PG's essay, but it could be helpful for other startups to think about these. Would love to hear from others.

Thanks again!

Thanks for the vote! Planning a wedding is super broken. Besides the fact that vendors largely up charge specifically for weddings, the amount of time it takes to iterate with vendors (often face to face) is way too long. We're hoping to make the whole process more efficient :)

My gut feeling is that YC wouldn't want to some how alienate those with low karma points, but they could do something like only allow those to vote who have commented on Apply HN posts (or something along those lines).

Hey HN! I'm Vishal. One of the team members behind WedWell(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11441020).

We're somewhere in the top group of entries with 43 points. I wanted to say that regardless of whether or not we get selected, we really appreciated the ideas and exposure that came from our discussions on HN. A handful of our first clients named HN as the reason why they came to us! Some of the ideas discussed are already being planned for our service. We applied to YC the regular way, and didn't get in. This way we got a bunch of feedback and some traction. Net positive for us.

Dang asked above how best to sift through the applications to give the community final say. I was reading through some of the ideas posted here on how to do that, the one that seem to resonate here with me was the one abhi3 posted above. I'm just worried that a public vote is easily gamed.

Another way to do this is to select the top 10, and get the YC partners (or some trusted groups within YC - perhaps the last group of YC alum?) to vote on the list of 10. I think it would be nice to see what the end vote looks like (release the vote count), and have select YC partners provide some quick feedback for those who are voted on.

Thanks again.

Thanks for the question!

One idea was to incentivize couples who've already had weddings to share their details of their weddings/vendors with us. We in turn we would build and host a wedding web page that the couple can always reference back to. The vendors would be evaluated by the couples there. We've considered even giving them credits if someone in their social circle booked a vendor that a friend has used through our service.

Either way, socially validated reviews/recommendations need to be a big part of this platform.

One of our initial marketplace platform inspirations was 99designs. I was really drawn to the idea of building a brief that was a text/link based representation of what I wanted our design to be. As I began my own time/money planning for marriage (I'm thinking ahead, but I'm at that age..), I kept asking.. Why can't I do something like what I did with 99 designs, and get a bunch of vendors to use my brief and respond back with proposals of service?

Re: connecting couples to wedding planners. Currently we find that only a small number of wedding actually use planners (< 20%). Evolving our initial thought of connecting couples to vendors, we could connect our clients to these wedding planners. Our initial thought was to offer something like this as a premium service, which would be our initial service plus a wedding planner who would help pull everything together. They would handle all the back and forth, pulling all of the details out of the couple, and also be there physically the day of to make sure it all goes off smoothly. The real question is do we start up market or down market? We're experimenting now.

Thanks for your points, they may really help evolve the product.

I think your question is about how to manage possible friction between the vendors and the couples. Currently for weddings that have planners (about %20 of them do), people can use the planner to broker discussions. I think we see a world where that planner is largely replaced by software/services. We've also considered having a premium "concierge" to stand in as a wedding planner at the time of the event.

Client acquisition is one of the biggest concerns we have with this idea. If we're creating a solution for couples, we will have low/no user retention.

We have considered creating a vendor focused service, but there are a couple of services in this space (Honeybook.com).

Love to hear any thoughts you or the rest of the HN audience has to say about this.

Absolutely, there could be many aspects of planning that could be made easier if they are tracking everything on one system.

Thanks for this. We've started experimenting with a brief that's a bit more visual, allowing for a client to select weddings that look inline with what they are looking to do.

Thanks, actually the team isn't a couple working together. Just a bunch of friends.

Agreed. Weddings are tough. You can't just win on price, it needs to be a win on expirience.

Client acquisition in the couple space is also not easy. Once you acquire the customer, the value has to come with that one wedding. We've considering creating this as a vendor solution that reduces friction between the vendor and clients. Then we can acquire vendors, and work on vendor retention. We're still really early here, so we're doing a bunch of trial an error as we launch.

Thanks again

I think you're on target. The hardest thing here is getting this the incentives aligned here. Our incentives for the couple need to be need to be more focused on ease of use/process, less on being cheaper. We may steer that way in our messaging as we iterate.

On the vendor side, one thought is that we may need to consider being less of a market place and more of a tool that allows couples to quickly iterate and pay for services with any vendor. So the discovery of the vendors could happen outside of our service, and we help with the pain points of initial iteration and payments. Eventually we could open up the market place as an addition to our services.

We're super early, so your thoughts and others are helping us shape our development. Thanks again.

First, congrats on getting married!

Some thoughts on your comments: 1. I don't necessarily think that our solution is for everyone. We're looking to find our little niche in the market where a couple is ok with forgo-ing some of the work involved with the planning process in the hope to save time and potentially money. It's not for everyone, the same way airbnb wasn't for everyone when it first came out. If we can unlock a small market, we think we can grow it. Time will tell!

2. Very similar issue here with vendors as well. We're looking at a niche vendor group at first. Ideally it's top notch vendors who need help getting the word out. Also will help if they are tech savvy and willing to respond quickly electronically.

3. We really like honeybook.com, we may consider using them until payments are fully built out. In terms of lock in, we're looking to get the clients to really work on the iteration back and forth with the vendors (in many silos) at the same time. The goal will be that they see the technology/payment/insurance/etc all integral to the process. It's ideally similar to the feeling you feel when you book an apartment with airbnb, sure.. you could just message the host through airbnb and try to pay them directly, but with the services they offer, it wouldn't make sense. We're still at an early stage, so yea.. it's a danger in the beginning.

4. We're brainstorming the many different monetization points possible. We may just lower the barriers as much as possible initially to find customers, then look to monetize more heavily when we have actual data.

Thanks for the thoughts here. Would love for you to check out wedwell.co and give the wedding brief a try (even just as a test). It's evolving over the next few days with feedback we've received here, but please do give it a try!