Comment by casca | Hacker News Reader

Comment by casca | Hacker News Reader

I'm the target audience for Charlie - long running small business in the UK willing to spend money on a service that saves time and effort. However I wouldn't risk something as important as my HR on a company that has no visible form of financial sustainability. When the VC bubble bursts, my data is gone and it would be irresponsible of me to take that risk on behalf of my staff, suppliers and customers.

Edit People seem to be comparing it positively to Zenefits. From what I can tell, Zenefits raised >$500mm and has $60mm annual recurring revenue (ARR)[1]. They also recently fired 250 people, which is 17% of their workforce. This means that they have around 1500 people working there. If each person conservatively costs $100k/year, their staff costs are $150mm/year so they have a way to go before they're profitable. Then of course there's the ethical issues[2].

I don't mean to imply that there's anything wrong with CharlieHR and I wish them all the success in the world. I hope the product works and that in a few years, I'll be able to use the service of a business that is likely to continue operating.

[1] http://uk.businessinsider.com/zenefits-missed-sales-projecti... [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/18/technology/zenefits-scanda...

Disclaimer - I know the founders and they're a really good crew. Super solid background in business and really care about creating a great product.

The business model for this is all based around providing pensions / pension brokering. Since all UK businesses have to transition to providing pensions over the next few years there's a huge opportunity in helping make it easy and painless and that's what the guys behind Charlie are focussed on.

Sorting out pensions is going to be a massive headache for both businesses and employees so there's a huge window for a startup to take that pain away and make it all seamless. They've got lots of companies using it already and it's very well built and well funded so I think they're in a great spot.

Will be interesting to see how they compete against Xero or perhaps integrate with them but in a pure HR/pensions play there's a lot of room to make a swoop

If they are trying to copy the Zenefits model, then their HR software product is simply a super advanced lead generation tool to fill the pipeline for their sales reps to sell you insurance and other staffing/benefits-related services.

Zenefits cut corners and behaved deplorably, but I have yet to see anything indicating that their was a fundamental flaw with their business model. On the contrary, it seems like a runaway success in some ways.

True point about risk. Further more, i do wonder why most businesses prefer to choose the sotfware-as-a-service model from the point of risk management ?

And why aren't we seeing a combination of cloud based software, leasing with possible extension,and after full term, an option to take everything and install it at a cloud container of my choosing?

Not sure of UK laws, but if they help administrate pension funds and take 0.25% (similar to Wealthfront and Betterment in the US), you won't have much to worry about.

Zenefits (free HR, monetize by being insurance broker) prints money in the US, despite the recent bad PR.

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