![[y2mate.com - StartUps Dont Outsource Coding.mp3]]


You have your Hilton rewards card. You're United airlines mileage plus card. And you can't forget your Safeway rewards card. Everyone has multiple loyalty programs they've signed up for, but no way to truly manage them. All incomes Pika lo it's a student run startup that has a recently emerged from Stanford.

University's  entrepreneurship. It was selected as one of the top projects by a group of venture capitalists, including Charles river ventures, partner, bill Tai, and their instructor, Chuck easily. And as such earned a private meeting with Navarro  founder of angel list, a matchmaking side for angel investors and startups.

We had the opportunity to sit in on the session as Ravit Kant offered some valuable ideas. Good for all entrepreneurs. Give me a sense of how the idea came together and what you guys have done to date. And then what do you want to do with it going forward? We initially wanted to make one physical card to combine all your different loyalty cards.

Right? We found that the average American household is a member of 14 different loyalty cards and that just poses such a hassle. Right? And then we began iterating the product and realizing that really the smartphone application platform is really going to be a lot more efficient for users. How scalable do you think her ideas?

You think it's a good idea? Yeah. I think it's a huge space. I'm going to give me a lot of money doing it. I think it's going to be fiercely competitive. Yeah. I think I have a lot of, lot of players in the space. It is one of the more crowded spaces out there. It's not, it's not a Groupon club. It's not that bad, but it's kind of in the next year.

Okay. Um, what status did you guys get to? Did you build out a product? Did you build a prototype or we have like a screenshot prototype. We don't have per se working present, right? Yeah. Okay. Did you try it out? And you were, how did you get a sense of like what should go into it, how it should work and those kinds of.

We've been in contact with both loyalty experts, people who manage Lightsey programs and as well as retailers. So we have explained our product iterated and we've actually been in contact with a representative who has agreed to give us a one week trial run. So we're really excited about that's pretty great.

And it's a one week trial, but you're at screenshot mode. So you got to code something up, right? So we've got the demand, but not much of a product, right. We are planning to work with, um, Philip Rosedale. Who's the creator of second life. And he has a really good platform to develop our app efficiently and effectively.

But you'd be writing code or is it like a drag and drop thing? It's like outsourcing code. So you outsource it and small parcels and like 50, a hundred. Uh, little segments and he'd be, he said he had mentors cause it's a new, it's a new site that he's, that he's put up. So he mentors through the process and tell us how to describe what we want so that the coders know what you know, what to produce and then go from there.

And so you have to kind of build out this prototype through Phillips, um, platform and hopefully he's covering the cost or, or subsidizing now what's it going to cost you 25,000? That's real money. Um, you guys should be coding from the start. Uh, I have a lot of respect for Phillip and I'm sure that his platform can do a lot of great things, but just web startups and phone startups are so competitive right now that you're, you have to assume that anything you're doing, there's a team of two to four dedicated hardcore hackers is working 24 7.

It's something extremely similar. So if you have this iteration loop where you have. Submit something out to someone else and they have to come back. You're like, no, that wasn't quite right, because all this stuff lost in translation. You're going to get like one or two cycles per day at best. Meanwhile, there are other teams getting 20 cycles a day.

I mean, to the, it's gotten so intense now that non-coding founders and startups are having a really difficult time adding value at these early stages. Uh, but it just seems really risky.