Leaky (YC S11) is Hipmunk for Car Insurance

http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/08/yc-backed-leaky-is-hipmunk-for-car-insurance/#yc

by jasontraff • 15 years ago

162 123 15 years ago

salem• 15 years ago

I'm looking forward to using this. I hope it exposes a certain insurance companies practice of underinsuring people to make it appear they are cheaper and get the sale. Save 15 minutes to get less insurance than you need, for more than it would cost elsewhere...

jerrya5• 15 years ago

It's probably a terrific service and I look forward to using it, but wow, just to get a quote I have to give out enough information to own me good, not just in cyberspace but IRL.

  Name
  DOB
  Address
  Make, model, year of car
  Drivers License
  Optional Social Security
  Sex
  Marital Status
  Student/military affiliation
  Optional Employer
  Optional Professional/Alumni Associations

zacharycohn2• 15 years ago

It's the same information you'd have to give out to any insurance provider...

jerrya5• 15 years ago

That could be -- it's been awhile since I checked.

There does seem to be a bit of chicken and egg barrier though. I may be willing to give out this information to allstate.com or statefarm.com or progressive.com but I am not sure I or others will be as willing to give it out to leaky.com.

Maybe they are awesome, and maybe it's just me, but if you want me to give this information out on the spur of the moment, I guess I would like a site that somehow exudes a bit more trust.

mahyarm• 15 years ago

How is that different than esurance.com, a close competitor?

jerrya5• 15 years ago

It may not be. I was just going to Progressive which I think does something similar and iirc they say if they can't get you the best quote themselves, they're okay with that.

Otoh, how IS leaky different from esurance? I don't understand that from their website either.

mtogo2• 15 years ago

Esurance is an insurance company, leaky is an aggrigator for insurance prices.

grep• 15 years ago

I'm wondering how they are going to reach users. Given that PPC for "insurance" can cost $50++ per click, how to reach users?

prawn8• 15 years ago

Word of mouth will work if the benefit is there.

Hisoka2• 15 years ago

So they get paid once for every affiliate they refer. Seems like a site someone will visit once or twice in their lifetime.. and not a "sticky" site like Reddit. What are they going to do if Google penalizes their site (even by mistake) for something incredibly dumb, and they lose all their traffic, and all their income because it's not recurring revenue?

hugh32• 15 years ago

Seems like a site someone will visit once or twice in their lifetime

If you're smart, you'll visit every six months and see whether someone else is cheaper. At the very least you should visit every time you get a new car.

If they're smart they'll send you a reminder email every six months to get you to try again every time your insurance is up for renewal. Heck, they could recalculate everything for you (based on the new set of assumptions) and email you a set of quotes -- that's one semi-spammy email I wouldn't mind getting at all.

However, I can't get the site to work. Maybe it's getting hammered, maybe it doesn't work yet, maybe there's something iffy about my input (I did put in a fake licence number because I was too lazy to find my real one). All I'm getting is a bunch of "N/A"s. Never mind, I renewed my car insurance last month anyway, so they've got four months to fix it.

wheels• 15 years ago

If they're smart they'll send you a reminder email every six months [...]

Eventually that would just drive down the affiliate fees. The reason that they're (presumably) high is that they've factored in the lifetime value of a customer. If you systematically lower that, then the referral fees will follow.

ccollins• 15 years ago

Heads up guys: I am getting 500 errors when I enter a zip code on your site.

mey2• 15 years ago

ditto

darrennix3• 15 years ago

Our database servers aren't able to handle the traffic. We're working on increasing space.

puls• 15 years ago

I got a 500 error after entering my ZIP code. So much for that.

sahillavingia• 15 years ago

Great idea, but I think you should differentiate a little bit more from Square, design-wise:

http://www.leaky.com/ vs. https://squareup.com/

EDIT: I realize they say "until we can hire a designer of our own." — but don't they have the Start Fund + YC + SV Angel money?

benologist2• 15 years ago

Down the bottom it says they actually derived their layout from Square till they can get their own designer.

prawn8• 15 years ago

It's a bit more than just the layout - the colours and look and feel are almost completely identical.

prawn8• 15 years ago

"All design credit goes to Square. We based our design on their home page until we can hire a designer of our own."

With their permission?

yid4• 15 years ago

Why would they need permission?

ck23• 15 years ago

Wow, quotes without having to get a credit and background check on every insurance site?

Oh wait, DOB and SS# and driver's license?

Um, NO - there is no need for this kind of info to get a general quote - I've had it with big insurance harvesting personal info. There really ought to be a law.

Car insurance quote should be three questions:

    1. What zip code do you live in
    2. What year were you born
    3. What do you drive

(and obviously if you've had accidents recently)

Insurance tables shouldn't work like they do. What they are trying to figure out from all your personal info is if you own or rent, where you work, how many times you have moved recently, etc. That's a bunch of bull.

rorrr2• 15 years ago

No, insurance depends on your previous fuckups, so you definitely need DOB and SSN. Otherwise they might misquote you, which can end up in court.

jahmed• 15 years ago

There's usually some disclaimer saying this is just a quote and may differ from the actually policy written for you.

ck23• 15 years ago

They they should have two types of quotes.

A "soft" quote based on general information.

A "hard" quote based on very specific information.

They'd never convince me they cannot do this, especially with all the extremely misleading commercials on television.

rjett• 15 years ago

Filling out the survey was a breeze but it took at least 3 minutes to calculate quotes and then when it was finished, it listed quotes for each insurer as N/A... buggy and anticlimactic. I'll check back later when they've worked kinks out.

krisneuharth• 15 years ago

Am I missing something about the name? Leaky abstraction? It sounds more like a service targeting people in need of a plumbing repair quote.

ebiester• 15 years ago

Or, at least homeowner's insurance. The last thing I want my car to do is go "leak."

yid4• 15 years ago

Just curious -- how are you guys storing all this super-personal information, or is it ephemeral while you make API calls to various insurance provider backends? That's quite the identity theft kit that I'm being asked to upload to a site called "leaky".

darrennix3• 15 years ago

The information is transmitted via HTTPS to the carrier. Once your session on Leaky ends, the data is gone -- there is no data store.

yid4• 15 years ago

Interesting -- so are you ruling out the possibility of storing the data in the future for features like periodically checking for updates in my rate? That sounds like a killer feature (that I would even be willing to pay a subscription for), but then I'd also want to be damn sure that you're storing that data well.

EDIT: in fact, for a subscription based service, you could figure out the optimal pricing quite easily. If the annual price of your subscription were less than the typical insurance savings by having it monitored, you'd have a hell of a business model.

qeorge• 15 years ago

That implies you're keeping such information with my session (across requests). Is that the case? I may just be misunderstanding.

If so, you need to encrypt it first. Storing sensitive data in the user's session is akin to writing it to disk in plaintext.

craigmc2• 15 years ago

In the UK pretty much every second advert on TV is for a car insurance price comparison site. The 3rd best selling book last Christmas was the fictional account of the character of one of these adverts (a meerkat called Aleksandr). Meanwhile the market leader is a FTSE 250 company. As such I couldn't believe it when I read (in the TC article) that Leaky is the first (or even the 10th) real-time aggregator in the US.

These sort of sites aren't a perfect solution by any means, but a large % of people in the UK now use them to buy car insurance, and so presumably Leaky is on the road (see what I did there...) to being a household name by doing the same thing in the US.

jasontraff3• 15 years ago

Hi Craig, yes -- we too someday we hope to have a mascot as cute as Aleksandr

craigmc2• 15 years ago

They've even started giving you a free Aleksandr when you use Comparethemarket.com... Which was almost enough to get me to switch my loyalty from Confused.com.

Of course in the States you guys have that old bloke and his gecko to compete with... and he has pretty deep pockets ;)

pplante• 15 years ago

Maybe its just me, but I hate the idea of giving all my personal information to a site called leaky. It fails to instill confidence.

The design is pleasing on the eyes, thanks square!

watty• 15 years ago

Is there an option to hide the (YC ##) spam?

jergason2• 15 years ago

A greasemonkey script would do it pretty easily. That is the traditional HN solution, it seems.

JunkDNA• 15 years ago

Congrats on launching! Some comments:

1)Even though I know you guys are from YC (and not for example the Russian mob). I still bailed when you asked for my driver's license # and SSN. It's not enough for you to just say "trust us".

2) I checked it out from the couch quickly on my iPhone. The experience was not that good. The form drop-downs were slow loading and left me staring at empty pick lists. I had to scroll side to side to read the label on each field.

3) I was prompted twice to enter my email as an early adopter (once for each car I was entering presumably). This did not instill me with confidence about supplying personal info.

Hope that's info you guys can use. Good luck!

iwd32900• 15 years ago

After going through all that, I just get a page full of "N/A" as quotes. Cool idea though.

jasontraff3• 15 years ago

Sorry about that -- something seems to have slipped through and we're working to replicate the errors and fix them.

prestia• 15 years ago

Same here. I actually have to renew my policy by September 1, so I was hoping this would be a fun experiment!

mark242• 15 years ago

Yes, total and complete fail, after going through what seems like a pretty standard 2-driver use case.

There's no sort of progress meter, so I don't know how long I have to wait, and after the N/A quotes there's still a spinner running, so I'm unsure as to whether I should wait, or what.

Idea: great. Execution: really sub-par.

mtogo2• 15 years ago

Hmm.. the mixed content on the homepage is not very reassuring about your security practices, esp. with all the personal information you're asking for.

joelmichael2• 15 years ago

There is actually another company that has this concept: CoverHound. I'm one of the co-founders. We started a few months before Leaky.

We went through the AngelPad incubator during the Winter 2011 class. TechCrunch covered us in a little blurb at the time. Since then we've received VC funding and have built out our team a little bit.

There's no publicly available pricing API for insurance carriers yet, so I'm curious as to how Leaky comes up with their numbers.

InfinityX0• 15 years ago

You need more clarity on the homepage. It's obvious that it's car insurance but the process is information->information->start, which Leaky makes it obvious and it basically goes start->figure it out.

Get the user started on the conversion funnel while you explain to them what the service does - I'm pretty certain (based on my lead generation experience) that this will end in a far superior conversion rate for you.

slouch• 15 years ago

I agree with this guy. CoverHound.com reads like the envelopes I get from Progressive...a few pages more than I am willing to read.

edit: To find this page I went to the bottom of the home page, tried to click on the Pennsylvania state outline, clicked the Pennsylvania text link, looked for my car on the most stolen cars lists, found "Car insurance quotes get started" at the bottom http://coverhound.com/step1

jerrya5• 15 years ago

I greatly appreciate you will help me find insurance that protects my car from alien abduction. Does that cover me, my passengers, and cow, or is it just for the vehicle itself? :)

http://i.imgur.com/B9zdt.png http://coverhound.com/

lacker• 15 years ago

I don't think it's really the same concept. On Leaky, you type in your information once, and then they show you insurance quotes. Whereas CoverHound just gives me links to insurance companies' websites, and then I have to fill out my information on each of those websites. If I were you guys, I would switch to the Leaky model, because it seems a lot easier for the user to only type in their information once.

joelmichael2• 15 years ago

Currently, our recommendation engine is the only publicly available product. We're building a platform similar to what Leaky portrays, but it's still in development. Displaying truly accurate and actionable rates is not a simple task.

elbelcho• 15 years ago

The product that cover hound is offering at this moment (as far as I can tell) is practically without use. It just gave me links or phone numbers for 4 companies that sell car insurance in my state. I can get similar results by searching for "Ohio car insurance" and clicking the ads that come up.

What appears to be their full featured future product looks EXTREMELY interesting. It appears that coverhound will almost work like an automated insurance agent, for example, give them your info once, and they'll check rates for you on a regular and recurring basis. THAT product seems extremely valuable to me and would be doing the world a great favor.

Hisoka2• 15 years ago

Is it just me or does Coverhound and Leaky just look like lipstick on a pig? It's backed by big names like YC, but in the end what distinguishes them from "thin affiliate" sites that get penalized by Google? Ok, so they both have slightly better web designs than the average affiliate site, what else? I'm not saying these sites aren't useful, but if you're gonna punish thin affiliates, you might as well penalize these guys too if you don't want to be hypocritical

heyitsnick• 15 years ago

Just watching the Leaky vid, it seems like they are adding real value.

gcb• 15 years ago

sorry, your company is just one more of those 'we will send your email to every company around'. I just filled both forms. one is email passive, the other is just showing a list of companies that do not give me no more information than a link and phone number.

The change leaky (or coverhound) has of succeeding, is if they do what mint did. provide a way to work with insurance companies, even if there's no 'publicly available pricing API'. There will be the magic that is missing in this market.

but, of course, once you have your service mandated by the gov (as is here in cali) you will make it harder and harder for the public to be informed about prices of your service. That's the gotcha with car insurance. no company benefits being transparent about rates.

jamiequint• 15 years ago

It just hangs here for me after I took the time to fill in all that information: http://o7.no/pHl2qg

Do you have plans already for filling the top of the funnel here? Its going to be really hard to compete with established businesses buying traffic in this market.

philfreo• 15 years ago

We need a Hipmunk for pretty much every type of insurance...

akent3• 15 years ago

Perhaps I've just not been paying attention, but I'd never really heard of Hipmunk before.

The "X for Y" only works if X is sufficiently common. Surely better to define in simple terms what the site actually does.

rglover• 15 years ago

Not sure why they ripped off Square so blindly (and no "All design credit goes to Square. We based our design on their home page until we can hire a designer of our own." doesn't cut it), but I'll be honest, that discouraged me from using their app. It's the little things that matter, folks.

jcc80• 15 years ago

I think they ripped it off because Square's design is great. And, personally I think it's pretty decent they acknowledge it. I've seen plenty of designs ripped off and nobody ever has the guts to give credit.

muppetman• 15 years ago

Am I the only one that thinks "I don't want to type my personal details into leaky!"

What a bizzare name choice. Looks like a good product though, but isn't this sort of thing fairly old? Or is it just new for car insurance? These sort of price comparison websites have been the staple of UK Prime Time TV advertising for the last 3 years.

martingordon• 15 years ago

If I'm going to be handing over my personal information to someone, I don't want it to be to some fly-by-night operation. I'm not saying you guys are but you need to eliminate all appearances of it:

1. Hide the About Us page, or make it less specific (instead of "four guys", call it a "team of entrepreneurs". A grainy cell phone picture of the team playing video games in lawn chairs with a messy coffee table doesn't lend any more confidence to the average consumer.

2. Get rid of the "design credit goes to Square until we can hire a designer". The average consumer will wonder why you haven't hired a designer yet and will be turned off by whatever answer you give them.

3. This one is more for the nerds than the average consumer (though the average person might spot that something is wrong even if they can't pinpoint it): that iPad on the homepage is badly photoshopped (it's extra wide and the Safari toolbar doesn't extend the width of the screen).

4. The word leaky has a negative connotation. Your product offers a positive outcome (saving money on car insurance), so you need to come up with a more positive name for your business.

wyclif• 15 years ago

Re: #4. The name is not working for me. "Leaky" in association with anything vehicular is not one you want to make. Even without that association, the thought of anything leaking is not a pleasant one, esp. with young potential customers who are the intended user base. See other recent posts submitted here (from DHH and others) about how expensive, short, .com domains aren't necessarily essential for launching.

vaksel2• 15 years ago

yeah #4 could mean that they leak your information to identity thieves.

AltIvan• 15 years ago

https://leaky.com/about_us/ Alcohol, video-games and four guys that couldn't get together for a photo in formal suits... introduction, you are doing it wrong.

johnx123-up• 15 years ago

Hmm.. I think, the world doesn't need another tied slaves.

cssndrx• 15 years ago

Re #4: I don't mind the name "leaky"! I took it to mean that you guys are leaking the information that insurance providers don't want consumers to easily get, to the consumers.

thomasilk• 15 years ago

This is a major problem of many startups.

Branding is so important, especially in the early stages of a company. A bad branding can kill even the best company.

Despite that fact, there are nearly no articles about branding for startups.

ethank• 15 years ago

I got to the part where I needed my drivers license and my wife's and I bailed.

1) You should state up front what materials I should gather before I begin the process

2) The back button doesn't work during the data-entry process. I fucked up putting in one of my cars data and I couldn't go back

3) The name "leaky" and requiring PII?

4) If you require so much PII, you need some really good disclosure as to your data retention, opt-out, etc during the process.

jergason2• 15 years ago

One slight UX issue: The "Next" buttons seem like they have two different controls on them. I wasn't sure if clicking the arrow would do something different than clicking the text of the button. I think it would be more clear without the extra arrows on the buttons.

lozofsky• 15 years ago

Interesting site. But not really new. I work at Answer Financial (www.answerfinancial.com) we're a national auto and home insurance agency that represents over 20 insurance carriers. You can get quotes and buy online from our carriers in 49 states. We do this via direct XML connections into the carriers we've contracted with. We're also the company that powers comparative quotes on esurance.com (our sister company).

I very much like this concept though, its much like Confused.com in the UK as the techcrunch article pointed out. The challenge is getting enough carriers to actively participate so there's a high quality customer experience. I would guess Leaky is screen scraping the carrier sites. A bit easier in CA since you can't use credit scoring to price auto insurance here.

vaksel2• 15 years ago

um, is it me or aren't there like a hundred other insurance comparison sites? Granted I'm not sure if they are realtime, but insurance lead generation is a MAJOR business.

I'd think a site that makes 40 million a year off lead generation would be able to offer anything like this as well.

pitdesi• 15 years ago

We are very similar but in a b2b space... http://feefighters.com - Love what you guys do... it is in many ways exactly what we do (as for the site layout, hey - it looks good!)...

The trick is convincing people that what you're providing is different from the standard lead gen sites. You've done a good job in the description, but people will always be wary. Drop me a line if you want to talk shop

Question: anyone know if someone has a similar model in the health insurance space? It's sorely needed.

auston• 15 years ago

This is quite interesting! I suppose your plans are to revolutionize the entire Insurance industry? I personally know how bass-ackwards it is to get a quote for things like general liability.

Is there any chance you guys are going to break into the commercial insurance space? I'd love to talk to you!

dfc4• 15 years ago

Who is hipmunk? i am not a huge start up junkie so I am assuming it is another YC funded company. On your actual website you say you are orbitz for car insurance. I would stick with the orbitz analogy. (Or is it simile, i always forgot which is which.)

akent3• 15 years ago

Who are Orbitz? Why not just explain what the site does without namechecking other companies.

dfc4• 15 years ago

Come on you have never heard of Orbitz?

sendos2• 15 years ago

Besides the name issue (leaky) and the giving-your-sensitive-data-to-a-small-startup issue, one other thing that I question is how sticky is this startup? That is, how often will you visit it? Once a year, tops.

If you find an insurance that you are happy with, you'll likely stick with it for a couple years at least, and there is no reason to visit this website during these years.

Given the above, I don't see how they can ever make a ton of money.

waterlesscloud• 15 years ago

I suspect that the referral fees from the insurance companies are paid out as percentage of the premium for the life of the policy. If so, that would add up fast.

sendos2• 15 years ago

Assuming people pay ~$500/year, and assuming 200 million drivers, and leaky gets x% of the drivers and y% of each premium, then they get $10xy million per year

If x% is 1%, and y% is 1%, that leads to about $10 million per year. Not too bad, if they can get those sorts of numbers for x and y.

One question would be, how long will people use them for, once they find a good insurance company? I've stuck with one insurance company for the last 10 years. I suspect that x will start low, and then grow as the company becomes known, and then shrink as people stop using it.

philwelch2• 15 years ago

If you've turned on a TV at all in the past several years, you'll see there's TONS of money in getting people to switch car insurance providers.

blackboxxx• 15 years ago

The name "Leaky" is such an obviously lousy name, I'm suspicious it's a marketing ploy. Are you going to change your name a few weeks from now to get more ink from Techcrunch et al?

It's the only reason my mind can fathom.

JoshTriplett• 15 years ago

Looking at your homepage, you say "car insurance" in the smaller text, but the big text just says "quotes from every major insurer" and doesn't say "car"; you also don't have any images anywhere that hint at which type of insurance. Since you very specifically cover car insurance, you should make that more clear.

I'd also really appreciate it if you added "why do we ask this" flyouts next to each field. For instance, when you ask about home ownership, you don't actually provide homeowner's insurance, so you should make it clear why: "Some car insurance companies give you a discount if you own your own home."

For some reason, the text "(including your spouse)" seemed like an odd bit of reminder text. Do people forget this often? In any case, the flyout reminders could help here too, since you could add more detail: "This includes anyone who will drive any of your vehicles---you, your spouse, your kids, etc"

Stratego• 15 years ago

Who gives a shit about appearances, nothing looks more respectable on the surface than insurance companies, yet they are some the most opaque and dubious businesses there is. This is precisely what the insurance business needs, a breath of fresh Web air.

I'll be eagerly waiting for this service to make it to Florida. Good luck guys.

FraaJad• 15 years ago

Sorry guys, but you have to work on the delivery a lot more.

I spent not less than 15 minutes filling out all the information on your site and the site back with NOTHING. The quotation page kept spinning and spinning.

My experience with regular insurance company websites has been a lot better and that's why they have my money.

I gave my(and my spouse's) personal info and time because this is a YC venture. Disappointing.

krschultz• 15 years ago

So I ran my information through even though I'm not really in the market for changing since I just just switched a few months ago.

- The homepage is hit or miss, the pictures really conveys what youare about but there are a lot of words clouding the message

- I thought the interface was very responsive and intuitive through the initial steps

- I didn't like how the 'options for coverage' was buried below the fold, everything looks cheap when they offer $50k/100K liability, you really have to compare apples to apples on that page if you want to tell me how much I am saving

- I only was shown a quote from 1 insurance company, that's no big deal for me right now but obviously that limits the usefulness, I got a prompt saying 'we're not available in your area' and took my email so at least you won't lose customers who see what I'm seeing right now

- [BUG] The 6 month premium shown in the left hand column with all the insurance companies is different than the 6 month premium shown in the 'buy now' box.

Shenglong• 15 years ago

An note about claims histories:

When I worked briefly for an UK-based insurance company, I realized they had a strange policy: non-fault claims raise your premium more than at-fault claims. Why? Because statistically, they've found that people who get into a non-fault claim typically end up in a serious at-fault claim within the next two years. Creepy huh?

If there is no API available for the US carriers, I'm very curious as to how internal information like this is being collected.

flomincucci• 15 years ago

I actually worked for a company making a product exactly like this, but for Argentina. They launched almost 6 months ago: http://www.123seguro.com.ar

seasoup• 15 years ago

What would be neat instead of filling out a bunch of questions and then getting results would be to list one question at a time and have it adjust your estimated totals as you complete questions. You could spin it positive by listing your savings, starting with $0 and as people fill in information, have it raise their savings based on the information they fill in. And don't require people to fill in all of their information, allow them to bail out at any time and go get the insurance. You could even have people enter their current rate and compare what you can get them against that, so they see themselves saving more and more. That would actually end up being kind of fun to fill out, and I would be enticed to enter more and more information to see if I saved more. If I do not save more, I would want an indication of why for that question I did not save more. You could contract with a game designer for this, since they have experience making things fun.

Leaky (YC S11) is Hipmunk for Car Insurance

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