I worked as a product designer at Policygenius on their home/auto product. I was pretty obsessed with automating it so people would actually get their quotes instantly and I remember the challenges of being able to pull the accurate quotes with the info people could reasonably provide vs paying Lexisnexus etc. anyway it’s a slog. How are you guys getting quotes? And how have you thought about the acquired user challenge that they want to reshop but obviously insurers don’t want to pay you to lose their customers every 12mos ?
A lot of umbrella prices are somewhat parseable (think a simple-ish decision tree) vs auto and home prices which require reverse engineering rate cards to back into the pricing formulas.
Yes, folks come back at the end of their year. Most of the time their price remains the best (non-issue), when there are better options they switch. Carriers have been great partners so far since we bring them much more business than switches (and when the switches happen it's often because risk management wanted to reduce exposure in that region anyway).
I get the impression they’re doing this for the network that OpenRouter has built, something like 8 million devs on one side and hundreds of services on the other side. If more and more software will be built this way then it’s a good bet this will grow into trillions in transaction volume and Stripe can own a percent like Visa and Mastercard and any network.
There were fintechs that did this, I think yotta and one other that was acquired by a big bank. I think it was (is?) popular but if I remember correctly they lost customer funds because of Synapses failure and the way the customer funds were organized they weren’t insured.
Nice work! My local coffee shop uses square but I for some reason never redeem the stars, my wine shop has a physical punch card that I sometimes forget in my wallet when going. Seems like there’s room for experimentation in the area.
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