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Launch HN: Pry (YC W21) – Finance for Founders
Hey HN! I'm Andy Su and I'm here with my cofounders Hayden Jensen, Tiffany Wong, and Alex Sailer. We are the cofounders of Pry (https://pry.co https://pry.co). Pry is solving finance for founders. Instead of using Excel, founders and finance analysts can use Pry to manage their budget, hiring plan, and cash runway.
As a long time HN lurker, I'm excited to share this project with you. In a previous life, I cofounded a tech-enabled accounting company. We help thousands of companies keep their books (accounting) up to date. While growing, I could feel Javascript improve year after year but the way our finances were done in Excel just got worse and worse.
The product I wanted was simple: something to replace the Excel files that the finance gurus use. I looked around and couldn't find anything that did what I wanted so I decided to start working on it (originally http://budgithub.com http://budgithub.com) two years ago.
There is a lot to build. Most Excel files have these components:
- A summary view with budgets and actuals
- Separate tabs for different departments
- A hiring plan (list of employees) and a hidden pivot table to make things work
- A revenue model
- A dashboard
Today, I'm happy to announce that we have finally launched a release that covers all of these components and it's available for anyone to try for free.
We built this tool to serve the startup and small business community. Our pricing ranges from $50-$100/mo and we're determined to continue offering our full suite of functionality at an affordable price.
We have a lot to build still - integrations, currency support, etc, but if you are using Quickbook Online, Xero, or don't have accounting set up, give us a try. We connect to most US banks, and we have a few happy overseas customers using Pry + Xero.
One of our guiding design principles is the Ruby on Rails "convention over configuration". We've done a lot of things the hard way. Happy to answer any questions over the next few hours.
- thomasdp 6y agoHey sudizhe, I have keeping an eye on your product and would love to try. What do I need to get started for my french startup? Xero or Quickbooks?
- Tiffanyw 6y agoHi thomasdp! Either Quickbooks Online or Xero will work for us, we integrate with both. Thanks for giving us a try!
- forgotmysn 6y agohow does your product compare to Jirav? IIRC they had a similar mission
- sudizhe 6y agoWe are built for founders and normal people. You should not need a finance background to use our software. We've spent a lot of time designing things differently :)
- Artistry121 6y agoJirav is super slow. Causal is a pretty close competitor to this but more “general purpose” and built for complex forecasting.
- sudizhe 6y agoYeah. I like Taimur, Lukas and the Causal guys a lot more :)
- PatrickRyan77 6y agoI use Jirav and have no issues with it being slow. And we are a 10M business that is running multiple proforma models at once.
- samstave 6y agoSounds like your platform would be helpful to help personal finance management. Release a free student version for personal finance management - and teach people how to manage money?
- sudizhe 6y agoI actually use it for my personal finances and so does Alex I think! I know this is a much bigger problem for businesses so we're trying to solve for them first. Plus they can help pay for improvements for our product. Will consider building this for personal finance management when we are ready to tackle that problem.
- jeffwass 6y agoThis is interesting! It’s great you’re dogfooding your own product for personal use, but I’m curious how your offering (which seems specialised for businesses) compares to something like Mint which is designed for personal use?
- sudizhe 6y agoWe give month by month data in much more detail. Also thinking of building some custom models for buying a house, retirement, college education, etc. But again, this is probably not happening for a couple years - or unless we struggle to enter the small business market.
- bberenberg 6y agoI think it would be helpful if you had a "Signup + QBO to Value from Pry" guide. Also, can you speak to why you chose total spend as what you base your price on?
- sudizhe 6y agoYes! We've updated our landing page but our docs pages are still not updated yet. We chose total spend because our value is helping businesses manage spend. We also only have one benchmark - $100k/mo in spend. Our gauge is that anyone who spend more than $100k/mo are able and usually willing to be on the $100/mo plan.
- bberenberg 6y agoFYI we spend more than 100k/mo because we're a reseller. This means we transact a lot of dollars, but it's not really "spend". Not saying you should optimize for edge cases like us, but giving you an explanation of a failure mode.
- sudizhe 6y agoYeah, we may move this to a $100k in expenses instead in the future. If your costs are in "COGS" then it won't count. For now, we do not allow for this because we don't want to incentivize founders to stuff as much stuff in COGS just to pay us $50/mo less. I have seen people do silly things like this before.
- CapriciousCptl 6y agoI'd love to sit on that board--- Chairman: WHAT THE #$%$ happened to our gross margins? CEO: Let me tell you how we saved $600 on our new accounting platform...
- sudizhe 6y agoMore like: you know, we need to advertise to make sales so that’s like a cost of revenue... insurance too... We ran into this at inDinero.
- TechBro8615 6y agoIt sounds really useful, but it's a non-starter if I need to give sensitive financial data to some startup where any engineer can probably log into the DB and check how much money I have left. I saw a tweet recently to the effect of "I'm not sure who I'd rather have my data, a giant megacorp or a startup with 5 employees who can query the DB from their laptop." I think this is a good example of that. I would use this if it included encrypted data storage with client-side computation, and/or was self-hostable (you can still charge a license fee!)
- sudizhe 6y agoTotally understand. The web platform is still the fastest to develop on (at least for me). I have an idea for moving everything to native apps and keeping data offline, but it's pretty far down on the roadmap T.T
- Androider 6y agoI think what would help is, and what I've seen other companies do: - First add a security page, I need to know you're doing basic things like encrypting the data on your end etc. Hopefully you're using at least something like KMS for your at-rest encryption (all DBs and disks) if using AWS. - Then also publicly state on the security page something to the effect of "No Pry employee has the ability to access customer data without your explicit approval, and all access is audited". Meaning, if you need to work a support case for some customer, you have to ask them before you look at their data, and you have to track when this access occurs - Ultimately you'll get something like a SOC2 cert to show that you actually have these controls in place that you say you do I think with this, you'll be able to overcome some of the fears. Native apps is a shrinking market and a distraction for you IMO. Your customers are already fine with cloud solutions, since they're using Quickbooks Online, Xero etc. by definition, you just need to convince them you're trustworthy as well.
- sudizhe 6y agoGood call. Thanks for the feedback!
- narrationbox 6y agoDoes the accounting system support Canada and other commonwealth countries? Or is this US only?
- sudizhe 6y agoWe have some happy customers from outside of the US. They usually use Xero and integrate that to Pry. We do have customers using Quickbooks online in Canada. If you have a bank that is not supported by Plaid, it's not going to work. We will build more API integrations.
- narrationbox 6y agoWhat about TransferWise ewallets?
- smalter 6y agopry is an awesome product that i use in several companies that i run. feel free to ask me any questions about it.
- alexanderrofail 6y agoAre you any different from https://finmark.com/ https://finmark.com/ in the last YC class?
- sudizhe 6y agoYes. I have worked on this product for over two years. Our pricing does not scale with revenue and we are ready for general access; 14-day free trial for anyone to try.
- tmpz22 6y agoHey I like the product so I'm going to give the most critical feedback I can think of. * Are you going to be around 3 years from now? Do you want to work on this project for the next 3+ years? * If initial attempts at monetization don't work could customers become the product? * How do I get data OUT of the product if I outgrow it or switch to a different platform later on.
- sudizhe 6y agoGlad to hear that you like what you see. * I will keep this around as long as people find it useful. My last company was founded in 2009 and is still around. There is still a lot more I want to build for Pry so 3+ years is no problem for me. * I actually really hate the idea of customers as the product. I know this product has valuable financial data. We have raised funding and I have always tried to prioritize good investors who align with this value over the ones offering the most money. You’ll have to take my word on this one. * You can export the report data to google sheets. Our formulas cannot yet be exported. We will work on an API at some point to address this.
- wyck 6y agoLooks cool , some points 1. Lot very early stage start-ups will simply use excel instead of 50$/month. You should have an easier price point to onboard just the planning features. As they grow they upgrade. 2. The docs leave a lot to be desired, not going to go through all work of sign-up without better docs. 3. Security is no where to be found, double authentication, policies, something..
- sudizhe 6y agoThanks for the feedback! 1. There are several tools that offer only the planning features. Our view is that budgets and actuals should be on the same system for the product to provide value over time. We may offer a free version with just the planning features in the future, but I built Pry for myself and I wouldn't like to use it that way. 2. Agreed. Documentation is one of those - if they complain, we'll improve it kind of things. And we've certainly heard some complaints about it here today. 3. Got good feedback on this from another user earlier too. We'll look into making our security practices more visible on our site since we work with finance data.
- randtrain34 6y agoHow does this compare to https://twitter.com/runwayco https://twitter.com/runwayco ?
- sudizhe 6y agoRunway.com is a good team that is recently backed by a16z. They are still in early access development so I am not sure how our products differ. I think there are several people tackling this problem and that's a good thing for founders and entrepreneurs overall.
- blader 6y agoHi! I'm a cofounder at Runway. I've been poking around with Pry for Runway, and I think their approach is super compelling. There's a lot of overlap between our approaches, and some meaningful philosophical differences in product strategy. Overall, the problem space is enormous and I'm super impressed by how much Andy has built with a small team. Out of all of other products in the space that are publicly available, I consider Pry to be the most impressive one I've seen. And I strongly agree that we need more people in this space innovating on finance, so more options is a good thing.
- rsweeney21 6y agoThis is super interesting. I'm your target customer. We have that spreadsheet you describe, even the tabs. Pricing is good. My only skepticism is that it can model our forecast the way we need it modeled. Gonna check it out.
- sudizhe 6y agoPlease do! Ask us any questions using the in-app chat and we'll be happy to help you out!
- nkotov 6y agoCurious on how you are thinking about some competitors (specifically Finmark)
- jacob_rezi 6y agoVery nice - exactly what I was looking for & happy with the 50$ price