Launch HN: Hivy (YC W17) – An App to Get What You Need at the Office | Hacker News Reader

Launch HN: Hivy (YC W17) – An App to Get What You Need at the Office

56 pointspaulinetordeur23 comments

Hi HN,

I’m Pauline, the co-founder of Hivy (https://hivyapp.com). We're part of the YC Winter 2017 batch.

Hivy is an office management platform that makes it easy for employees to tell their office managers what they need to be comfortable at the office.

I started Hivy after working in big companies where it was always complicated to get what I needed to work efficiently. I once spent 6 months with the slowest computer, and gave up trying to change because there was no clear way for me to request a repair / new one.

We've developed a Slack app, an iPad app and a web app to make the request process for employees easy and fast.

You can use Hivy to make orders (snacks, supplies, perks, business travel) and suggestions to improve your life at the office. Office management teams review these orders, manage them and collaborate on Hivy to keep employees happy and productive.

We're really excited about what we are building and would love you and your Office Manager to try it out. If your team is on Slack, I’m sure you’ll love our Slack integration :)

You can try Hivy for free here: https://app.hivyapp.com/signup. Just don’t forget to invite your Office Manager!

Happy to answer questions about Hivy, our users, and our plans for the future.

Edit: replaced 'desktop' with 'web' above.

* The pricing page does not contain any info about the pricing. Could you briefly mention how your pricing works?

* Did you find that large companies are welcoming of Hivy or was there any resistance to adopting a third party service?

* What was your growth rate like between the start of YC and demo day?

Best of luck with Hivy!

Hey! Thanks for your comment. Our pricing is based on the number of employees and admins using the app. For now we haven't witnessed any resistance from companies to adopt a third party service. They find value in our vendors curation and appreciate they don't have to change all their service providers thanks to our system. We grew 40% monthly during YC.

I want to second that it would be nice to see actual pricing.

Are you live outside of the Bay Area, in cities where you might not have recommended vendors yet, for example?

As I said, we are flexible. We try to stay close to 1$/employee/month. We are live in the Bay Area and in Paris. And we have opportunities to open the services in other cities very soon.

I haven't re/viewed the product/website, but I do want to mention that I immediately pronounced the product name as "H-IVY" (aitch-ivee) in my mind. There may be a stigma associated with that pronunciation.

Finding a new name will probably be on our 2018 Roadmap ;)

I winced at the name from associating it with the skin disease Hives (Urticaria) [1].

For when you're exploring rebranding - I'd recommend looking at AppAnnie [2] and their previous branding [3] for some inspiration. I'd imagine a similar brand would work well exceedingly well for an employee facing office management platform.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hives

[2]: https://www.appannie.com

[3]: https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/screen-...

Will Hivy have vendors built into the system? Allowing employee's to search for products they want and then have the office manager buy the items through Hivy seems like a great potential revenue stream.

Great question! We've already built an Amazon integration that lets office managers convert employees requests into direct purchases on Amazon. And we plan to build many more in the future.

Any plans to integrate with existing procurement systems, manage approved vendors, handle approval levels/purchase limits, asset tracking/management, invoice management, etc.?

Yes, we do have features that let you manage and approve vendors and multiple approval workflows. Invoice management is on the way. What procurement systems were you thinking of?

If you're planning to go in the big-enterprise space... the big one is Oracle Financials. Many companies use it to manage vendors, purchase sites, GL codes, buyers, approval levels, an item master, net payment terms, etc.

You guys are on the right track, but eventually you're going to hit a wall where you'll need some serious maturity with procure-to-pay.

I'm not sure how the tone of this comes across, or if it's in any way negative because you guys are onto something... but have a lot of competition that is often deeply integrated (see Service-Now catalogs for example).

Thanks for your analysis! The market is huge. There's a lot to be achieved on the SMB market before hitting a wall luckily.

I noticed you didn't launch to the web. Any comments there? This seems like a common line-of-business tool that would traditionally make sense for a simple web application.

Did you do your desktop apps using electron?

Sorry for the misunderstanding, we are building a web app and we are not planning to provide any desktop application for now.

Toujours sympa de voir ce que font des frenchies! ;-)

Thanks Bambax!

What kind of vendors do you deal with? How would I go about seeing if we could integrate?

Anything Office Managers look for: IT support, travel arrangements, catering ... We feature providers only if they've been recommended by office managers from our community. But we can evaluate the fit together. Feel free to reach out at hey@hivyapp.com.

We're interested too - sent you an email.

Ok, thanks! We'll get back to you asap.

hmm...not sure I can make use of..it but Good Luck !

Thanks!

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