Launch HN: Pry (YC W21) – Finance for Founders | Hacker News Reader

Launch HN: Pry (YC W21) – Finance for Founders

100 pointssudizhe52 comments

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). 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) 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.

This 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.

Please do! Ask us any questions using the in-app chat and we'll be happy to help you out!

Hey 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.

Glad 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.

pry is an awesome product that i use in several companies that i run. feel free to ask me any questions about it.

It 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!)

Totally 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

I 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.

Good call. Thanks for the feedback!

You might find this helpful on this topic: https://latacora.singles/2020/03/12/the-soc-starting.html

Can you share what makes your financial data sensitive? This isn't intended as a ridiculous question. I want to understand what harm / thread model you are worried about with Pry staff seeing your company finances.

- Even the rumor that a company isn't doing well financially can easily sink them. Who knows what Pry employees say to someone they want to impress in the pub.

- Pry knowns my transactions, so they know who my customers are, and how much I'm charging them. Maybe one of my competitors could bribe a Pry employee to divulge this information. Same for suppliers, etc. Maybe not important for B2C SaaS, but for many companies this is a real threat.

Pry staff may leave and work for a competing company of the end user

Is it possible for Pry staff to do any actions in the accounts such as withdraws?

Does third part access void TOS with banks that have protections in place?

If Pry is sold to another company, how is data transferred to the new company? Does the end user have the option of preventing the transfer?

Pry staff cannot do any withdrawals. We use Plaid for our third party access and they are widely used. If we sold, I have no idea. But we have 24 months of runway right now and no plans to sell.

,,no plans to sell'' is the worst thing a company can say, as it just reminds me of WhatsApp and friends.

Isn’t this true for any traditional accountant you might use as well? Any form of outsourcing financials seems like it would have the same risk.

Accounting is a highly regulated field. My local accountant is properly certified, and takes information security very seriously (in part because of well established precedent around liability and professional misconduct).

> takes information security very seriously

I don't mean this as a giant joke, but where do you find these accountants?

I'm not saying that they don't try to, but things that would be major security no-no's to people on HN are often a regular part of business for others (emailing photocopies of 'secure' documents, copy/pasting passwords, etc).

It varies. My tax preparer will not even open PDFs that I want to send him due to the risks he perceives there.

This is nonsense in a startup its very transparent.

Sounds 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?

I 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.

This 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?

We 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.

I 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?

Yes! 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.

FYI 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.

Yeah, 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.

I'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...

More 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.

Looks 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..

Thanks 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.

Does the accounting system support Canada and other commonwealth countries? Or is this US only?

We 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.

What about TransferWise ewallets?

Very nice - exactly what I was looking for & happy with the 50$ price

Are you any different from https://finmark.com/ in the last YC class?

Yes. 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.

Hey 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?

Hi thomasdp! Either Quickbooks Online or Xero will work for us, we integrate with both. Thanks for giving us a try!

How does this compare to https://twitter.com/runwayco ?

Hi! 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.

Strong agree on the size of the space and the room for many approaches.

wave :)

Love summit too :)

<3

Runway.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.

Curious on how you are thinking about some competitors (specifically Finmark)

how does your product compare to Jirav? IIRC they had a similar mission

We 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 :)

Jirav is super slow. Causal is a pretty close competitor to this but more “general purpose” and built for complex forecasting.

I use Jirav and have no issues with it being slow. And we are a 10M business that is running multiple proforma models at once.

Yeah. I like Taimur, Lukas and the Causal guys a lot more :)

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