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YC W17 Launch: Credy, Upcall, and Kangpe
- mcintyre1994 10y ago> This can be for debt refinancing, marriage, education or emergency needs. Our customers are those who want fast, hassle-free loans on a recurring basis. Why do your customers need to borrow on a recurring basis for marriage/debt refinancing? The model sounds like payday loans, lend for something small with an extortionate markup so they're forced to borrow repeatedly to be able to pay you back. Are you different to that?
- nikoan 10y agoWhat's different about Kangpe?
- Cyph0n 10y agoMy first thought is the huge untapped market. Nigeria alone has over half the population of the US.
- newsat13 10y agoWow, I thought this was not possible but indeed this is true. Nigeria has population of 182.20 million! Wow.
- jumpCastle 10y agoYet Nigeria's GDP is smaller than Florida's according to google.
- Cyph0n 10y agoAnd when the GDP improves, their startup will be on the ground to take advantage of that. There's a reason why investment in African startups is on the rise.
- jumpCastle 10y agoThat's true, although significant corruption might make GDP growth too slow such that the start ups will run out of money before they can benefit from it.
- watter 10y agoSince it is only available in English I can only presume it is some American Prince trying to repatriate Nigerian money.
- OoTheNigerian 10y agoAre you 4 Years old and unenlightened? Because you'd need such a combination to leave such a stupid comment.
- DJN 10y agoI'm not sure why you are being downvoted. @watter's comment was in extremely bad taste. Frankly, i expected him/her to apologise because the comment 1) Sought to impugn kangpe's achievements, 2) maligned an entire country whose official language is English, and 3) went against HN's guidelines on civility.
- OoTheNigerian 10y agoDifferent from? I believe having around you that you can visit is an in person consultation is needed gives particular advantage.
- tarr11 10y agoUpcall seems like a good idea.
- gingerlime 10y agoIs it really? I'm as farthest one can imagine from sales, but I thought the hardest part is not setting up a call centre, or making calls, but rather training the sales agent to be good at selling, and find and manage good leads... I can only imagine this being used for the rather spammy types of phone calls. The types that people on HN love to use something like Lenny for (I'm on mobile so can't find a link easily). Please don't take this as criticism, but I'm genuinely curious how this can be used for non spammy or super scripted sales (and we might use it if it really helps us build a sales team of some sort)
- stagbeetle 10y agoIt looks like an Upwork clone, but for cold callers. So, looking through the website it looks like they have a similar system. You personally vet your sales members (after they've been vetted by Upcall) and it looks like they carry ratings similar to Upwork (rating each call, i.e project). Now, I don't believe the focus of this will be B2C sales (that would be too unwieldly and is a shrinking tactic). This type of sales has always worked best for B2B (and so the small and unique subset of HN posters is exempt).
- gingerlime 10y agoI see. Thanks. But what's the competitive advantage over upwork? "Just" focus and pre vetting? The rating system in upwork should in theory counter-balance the need for vetting though... but maybe focusing on this niche is a good idea. We recently started using an inbound call handling service, and I can imagine having a more dedicated person could be beneficial. So my first thought was VA on upwork. If upcall covers this better, then I can definitely see potential. And then it's natural progression for outbound calls if we see a need. EDIT: and another big competitive advantage I would imagine would be having all the (virtual) wiring in place to make outbound calls. Right?
- newsat13 10y agoI am curious why you decided to launch on Sat late night. Is there some data backing what is a good time to launch.