We are Ana and Luis, the founders of Glitzi (https://glitzi.com.mx/). We provide certified beauty and spa services, same day and delivered at home, in Latin America.

In Latam, lack of regulations and licencing means that people struggle to access quality beauty and wellness services. Beauty salons and spas also offer very poor working conditions to professionals, who live mostly off tips or low commissions. As a Latin woman I always thought this was normal, but when I lived abroad I realized that it has more to do with lack of licensing standards. Latin men and women spend significantly more on these types of services than any other region. We deserve better!

Our platform connects customers with vetted, trained independent beauty and spa professionals. We allocate each appointment to the best suited professional in our network according to availability, distance and skills. We also train our professionals based on standardized protocols that we have developed, so we are becoming the quality standard in the industry. Most startups in this space in Latam are SaaS solutions for salons or spas. We believe in empowering who really matters in this space: the customers and the professionals. And it's really both: happy professionals are as important as happy customers.

Some of our best customers are working mothers and business owners who have little time to take care of themselves or go to the spa or salon. 95% of our network of third-party professionals are women who can decide when and how many hours they work at Glitzi, therefore they can continue with their professional careers when they become mothers. Not only that, but they can earn a lot more (as much as 3x more) than in salons or spas.

Comments, questions, and feedback are welcome!

Wow, this is a very real problem and I'm glad to see it addressed.

Every Friday my Abuela calls a stranger for manicure/pedicure they've known for years that she heard about from another friend, from another friend... Word of mouth, like most things in LatAm. They're not certified or anything, but they do a decent job.

I've always wondered about their background because they seem to hang out for too long at the house, and it sketches me out.

On my end, finding a good barber shop or beauty salon for my hair has always been a huge pain. The quality of cuts is extremely variable and online reviews are scarce, aside from maybe Facebook. There's no scarcity for cheap $10 cuts but the variability is incredible in quality. Some dude at the $10 barber shop could be a fantastic, trained stylist. But then next time you come in some other asshat ruins your hair.

Aka it's a bit of a crapshoot but it's all you know and what's accessible. I'm a broke college student and can't afford much more than that.

You're damn right that the beauty industry in LatAm is a bit of a wild west. I have a quick question: what are costs for customers like?

Hi Sergio! Exactly what you are describing is what we want to solve: we want you to be confident that you will get a standard quality service when you book with Glitzi. Now, we have learned that good professionals (trained and using good quality products) invest in their work & tools, therefore, they expect a higher pay than a cheap non-quality service (and that makes sense!). So our prices are not cheap but are not crazy expensive (also consider that these services are at-home, the professionals have to travel to your house). Our haircuts for men are $18 dollars. However, we think that as Glitzi grows (we have more bookings), we will be able to reduce prices as professionals will earn the same or more but will have more appointments per day.

18 dollars sounds very reasonable!

Down here in Puerto Rico a mid-range haircut is minimum $20. A low-tier, make-do barber shop cut is easily got at $10. A higher end cut can go up to $40.

$18 sounds like a great price, especially for a vetted professional. Rooting for you folks, let me know when the Puerto Rico beta opens ;)

Me encanta verte aquí Anahi. Q orgullo, muchas felicidades, haz llegado lejos y van a crecer mucho mucho más. -nes

Congratulations on launch. We , Urbancompany.com, have launched similar services (and more services like plumbers, technicians as well) in India around 6 years back and few countries in Asia. Customer response has been really positive.

Ohhh Urbancompany.com we know about you guys! Great work! Is it true that your main services are beauty and wellness? I will love to talk to you to share notes.

Well except where thee clientes are, you also have to where the least competition is right? So another approach to look at this is the door dash way, where is the real big market without much competition!

CDMX only :(

CDMX and QRO only (for now) :)

I get why. But why not MTY. Those maggafakkers in San Pedro are riiiiiiiiich.

Soon. We want to perfection our product before we take all Mexico and then Latam!!!

Hey HN, I’m Colum, a co-founder of Genuity (https://www.gogenuity.com) - a SaaS platform for companies to manage IT: things like keeping track of laptops, managing employee support requests, and buying software at wholesale prices. We are trying to solve two major problems: (1) there is no QuickBooks of IT - most IT solutions are costly, hard-to-use enterprise offerings; and (2) lower volume = higher prices. We believe we can fix (1) with better software and (2) with a marketplace with collective buying power - effectively building a community that grows stronger together.

At my previous company we paid full price for all our software, not realizing that larger companies were able to get 50% discounts. We didn’t have a central system to track everything like our assets, contracts, vendor licenses, and support requests. We even had a seven-figure contract auto-renew for a service we were migrating away from because nobody tracked it. Painful!

We have a unique business model designed to align our interests with customers: we charge $29 per company monthly and a small % on all transactions in our marketplace. This means if we can’t save companies money, we won’t make any.

We’d love to hear your feedback and would be thrilled if you would sign up at https://secure.gogenuity.com/users/sign_up/about_you and try it and let us know what you think!

How can one tell how much is being saved through your service compared to contracting directly with a SaaS (Box, Okta, for example.) keeping in mind, that rarely are list prices what small companies pay to begin with, though admittedly, larger companies can get bigger discounts.

When technical issues come up, does one get support directly from the vendor; if not, how does that work?

Thanks for taking a look and great questions. The premise of Genuity is smaller customers can get better pricing together by bundling lower demand into a single delivery system. Typically, smaller companies are harder to reach and service with a direct salesforce and are typically services by resellers and VARs like CDW. We believe our model lowers costs for customers but also the vendors by cutting the fat out of the system using software. As an example, we are running a promotion on MSFT and save customers 15% versus what is on their site. In the future we are also thinking of allowing customers to share what they are paying as well.

Also, today in our marketplace we integrate these apps directly for billing, provision, etc. so we handle all the support elements.

Genuity was a data-center operator in Arizona; it was purchased by GTE, then used as the name for the network operating company which was later sold by Verizon to Level3. L3 was bought by CenturyLink, now part of Lumen.

I suspect Lumen still owns the Genuity trademark for network related activities, and IT management is rather close to that.

Great memory. When GTE merged with Bell Atlantic to form Verizon, they had to spin out their Internet assets which became Genuity. Genuity was a large publicly traded ISP but ultimately went Ch 11 when Verizon did not buy them. Level 3 bought their assets, Qwest (now Lumen) bought Level 3 .

We always liked the name and did check on the mark.

It's not really a great memory if you were working for one or more of them -- and I was.

Very cool and you would know. Lots of battle scars from that period in telecom.

Qwest became Centurylink then Lumen :).

I'm Ish, the founder of Virtually https://www.tryvirtually.com/calendar. We're the easiest way to manage Zoom events for private communities.

Managing virtual events for more than a few people is a pain. Either you paste emails from spreadsheets into Google calendar or you rely on internal mailing lists, which get out of date and make calendar invites hard. If you want to do events for subgroups, or send out reminders, or track attendance, it gets worse. We make it all easy, for both one-off and recurring events.

We initially built Virtually as an LMS (Learning Management System) for online bootcamps in YC's S20 batch. However, over the past year we learned that our users love us specifically for managing their events. So we split out our events manager into its own product.

We've got an API that can sync with any database, for example to keep track of rosters or roles, and a Zapier integration is coming. Also, the same technology can be used to send out announcements in a targeted way. This will be a prominent feature in an upcoming release.

Our customers include some top cohort-based programs like Building a Second Brain, Flockjay, and Ali Abdaal's PTYA. Building a Second Brain used us to manage 150 live sessions for 1500 students. Throughout their 5-week program, we facilitated 7900 session joins. I would love to hear any feedback that the HN community might have for us!

What is the intent for showing how many people were late or no-shows? Is this app for internal meetings? That would explain the no-show / attendance thing.

Or is it for external events? In which case, what is the importance about late attendees. No-shows is to be expected, especially for free events (And even paid events have a substantial no-show rate).

I'm confused as to who the intended customer audience is meant to be.

I totally see your confusion. Our intended audience is online cohort-based programs.

Think online courses, bootcamps, or private commmunities.

Google calendar is great for 1-on-1 and small groups, but when you're managing hundreds of zoom events for a number of different subgroups within a larger community, it's a nightmare.

I used to do meetups for some hobbies before the pandemic. For me, managing no-shows is very important. Many events have an attendance limit, and everyone who flakes takes space from someone who intended on going.

I only started getting no-shows and late cancellations under control once I started kicking people out for doing more than X no-shows. Also, it really helps to take money for reserving a spot, contrary to your assertion.

For me, especially with pandemic restrictions, managing no-shows is a very important feature.

I run dozens of events a year. Online and even now in-person. I don't have any "space" issues with virtual events. Which platform that you're using has registered attendee limits (vs. actual live attendee limits) and how does a no-show at a virtual event take away space from someone who is going?

All the streaming / event platforms I use charge based on actual viewers and attendees or active users on the platform. If I had a limit of 100 live, I could literally have 1000 people registered with 900 no-shows and that wouldn't be any issue. The no-shows are not taking anything away from the shows.

The only reason to manage no-shows is to manage active engagement. And that's more of a community building thing than a platform thing.

Virtually, from what I can tell, is managing Zoom events, which are entirely online events, so live in-person attendee limits don't seem to be a factor here.

The issue is if you have a 100 live limit, what risk are you taking in the community by allowing 1000 to register? It’s not a problem when you get 900 no-shows. It’s a big problem when you get 800 no-shows and 100 did-shows who got rejected.

Are you worried about Zoom basically taking your idea and baking into their product?

Also, what does this have to do with Zoom specifically? Is it just the attendance tracking?

There's always risk of a big company doing this, but in general, no. We're not worried.

Most startups die by suicide, not homicide.

Teams already has this, so it's only a matter of time before Zoom adds it.

Hi HN — we’re Mauricio and Sergio from DailyBot (https://www.dailybot.com). We provide tools for async work and team collaboration. It's currently a chatbot with support for Slack, MS Teams, G Chat, and Discord and others coming soon. Here's a 2-minute video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHZnGl4c-9g

We've been working in distributed teams for over 6 years and even for us, async work was still challenging. We faced pains like having too many meetings. overusing calls, and processes that could and should be chat-driven, automated, or optimized. We wanted some sort of chat assistant that we could adapt to our daily workflows. We found a few bots with partial solutions but they didn't care much about privacy and security, and we didn't want to cobble a bunch of different apps together. So we started building a tool for teams like us!

DailyBot adds features that don’t exist in Slack - our goal is to replace many apps/bots you use, all integrated in one and with a web dashboard that combines insights from these add-ons in a simple way. You can use @DailyBot to automate daily stand-ups, periodic team check-ins, give kudos to your teammates, track team morale, and even run a virtual watercooler or random 1:1 coffees across the company. All inside your chat. We also made it customizable so teams can build their own chat commands that respond with predefined texts or with data from their APIs.

We’re building it with security and privacy in mind: we don’t read messages from Slack channels, nor private conversations, except when you tag @dailybot. We use granular scopes and get only the necessary API permissions, we encrypt data in transit and at rest and implement different roles/permissions at the web dashboard. DailyBot is being used mainly by product and engineering teams, to run stand-ups, agile routines and build their own chat commands. We offer a free trial, and seat-based pricing starting at $3/mo/user.

We’d love to hear any ideas on how you would like to see chat assistants evolving, for example: a) a command to send anonymous feedback to a person; or b) a better reminder feature, etc. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback!

Hi - this looks like a service that would be valuable to my remote team.

I'm interested to know the pricing before signing up. I'm curious what the reasoning is behind hiding the pricing behind a signup process.

We landed at this pricing: $3/mo per user (in a basic plan) and $5/mo per user in a standard plan that includes more security features, anonymous check-ins, culture/team values for kudos, API/webhooks, and some other details.

The reasoning behind hiding pricing: we've been running a/b tests for different pricing setups inside our web app. We had to hide it from the public page because of a technical limitation in our a/b implementation. Public site and web app are completely separated and we didn't want to spend time integrating more things to track users/sync info between both apps - it soon will be over.

[Edit] Pricing page is not hiding info now.

Super interested in your product as an alternative to GeekBot. But putting a "Pricing" page in your navigation and then not having pricing on that page is pretty aggravating.

I appreciate your feedback. We're moving fast here to solve that confusion, and it's done: https://www.dailybot.com/pricing

Awesome, I appreciate you guys working so well with the (sometimes hostile) HN crowd. We'll make the switch next week. Best of luck!

Thanks! Feedback is always welcomed and we're excited to have you onboard. Feel free to contact me directly if you need anything or have comments: mauricioatdailybotdotcom

@maomorales Thanks and congrats on a great product! I've been using DailyBot for a long time now for daily standups and it's the best way to keep everyone accountable and best way to end stupid and unnecessary meetings. Mil Gracias! Wish you continued success.

Oh, thanks! I shared this comment with my team - they're the ones behind what we're building. I'm glad to see you're finding value in what we're doing. Stay tuned for what's coming next! And feel free to send me any ideas or feedback directly, my email: mauricioatdailybotdotcom

We are Ahmed Nasser and Ahmed Omar of Odiggo (YC S21). We connect car owners with mobile mechanics in the Middle East. Our mobile app lets you schedule a tire change, an oil change, replacing any car part, or basically any service for your car in minutes. The mechanics come to where your car is.

As a kid I used to wake up very early on Friday to fix or do something to my fathers car, it was like a never ending process. Since then I always had one question, why can't the mechanic come to me? I started my own ecommerce setup during college, and then started an app back in 2014 for car owners to book their regular car service checkup online, but it was a disaster as customers booked but garages would not use any of our tech. Then in 2017 we started a marketplace selling pre-owned cars online, but eventually we pivoted and returned to my old idea, thinking that enough had changed that now it would be possible.

So now users can download Odiggo, add their car information (make-model-year), then find all the services and products that are compatible with their cars in one single app. Not only that, with certain APIs and integrations that we are working on, you (as a car owner) will be able to connect the car to the app to automate the process.

Our average user spends almost 7% of their life in their car. We can at least save them the hassle of going to the mechanic and wasting time and effort. We want to make this service as easy as buying your groceries and be the fastest out there. Looking forward to hearing your comments!

Hi Ahmed - I'm a very heavy user of YourMechanic in the US. One of the biggest benefits I've heard for mechanics is that without the overhead of a garage they can run their own operations much more profitably. Being able to recruit good mechanics who have more favorable economics lead to happier customers.

Yes, we have a full algorithm just for that, it filters out the bad mechanics and the slower ones and keeps the good ones and prioritise their offerings to our users

the tools at a garage are very physical - a good jack that raises the car up feet vs inches, all the tools that might come handy, additional supplies, etc?

I once had a mechanic come to my place, then he realized that due to a leak, he needed a different supply that is not there, then had to reschedule an appt etc.

Hi @foolinaround, yeah this is why we are now building our new tech, that will allow customers understand what is going on with their cars, after this is done, our database will be able to know weather this is something that can be done on prem, or it needs a pick up and drop-off to the car.

Are you seeing a lot of growth?

Is this just for maintenance or includes repairs?

40% Month-over-month for the past 8 months! It includes repairs but we focused on quick services for higher retention and car tyres replacement for bigger ticket sizes. We are about to cross an 8-figure(usd) ARR

I'm seeing a trend of apps that help to (micro)manage distributed / remote workforces. Virtually keeps track of who is late and no-show to Zoom events, Dailybot has automated standups that basically keeps tabs on employee work and productivity.

I'm curious to hear from the founders as to what motivated the creation of the apps and whether WFH plays a significant part in the value proposition. Would you need either app in a traditional work-from-office environment?

DailyBot was born out of our own need - we’ve been WFH for many years and needed to stay in-sync with each other. There was a behavior we were not happy about: managers or people coming to others asking about what they’re working on or requesting status updates, often. We wanted to change that behavior with our product, if you get some written updates on a periodic basis, the team will get more aligned, managers won’t need to bother (that frequent), and likely you’ll reduce the amount of unnecessary meetings.

Then we started extending the product around async work practices. Traditional work-from-office environments can indeed benefit from improving collaboration practices, getting more work done inside the chat, and (of course) decreasing the pointless meetings for things that could be written updates.

It could happen that teams use DailyBot improperly for micro-management purposes - that’s why we’re also creating a catalog of best practices and proper question templates; asking the right questions is key. We'll go further by adding more features to DailyBot so it becomes a highly useful personal assistant at work.

How is this different than established players in the space like GeekBot?

We're building a whole ecosystem of tools and add-ons for async work. Bots like geekbot are focused on stand-ups, and this is only a piece of what we're doing now - our goal is to replace several bots/apps with our toolkit, and implement security standards that are not followed by current bots; we're also available in more chat apps, not only in Slack.

DailyBot lets you give kudos to teammates, have a watercooler in a chat channel, random 1:1 coffees, run a virtual commute that reminds you to disconnect from work each day, run countdowns, pomodoros, and more. You can even build public web forms that are connected to your chat channels through the bot. In the end, we want to make the chat 10x better and at the same time provide only one dashboard that connects all that data.

Our product is extendable: you can connect your check-in responses to over thousands of apps through Zapier, and build your own chat commands without technical knowledge. For example: you can create a command that responds with your predefined text, like to access information quickly inside the chat, or to trigger a form, or get data from your back office tools, kind of useful for chat-ops.

We created a 2min video that shows a bit of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHZnGl4c-9g

>Virtually keeps track of who is late and no-show to Zoom events

Wow, back to high school. They don't track attendance in undergrad even. Why do companies need this sort of information? If the person is important to the meeting, them being a no show will be pretty evident. If they are so irrelevant to the meeting that they could just dip out and no one would be the wiser, why are they even wasting their time in the zoom meeting to begin with? Just email whatever information you need to get out if the zoom meeting is going to just be an announcement or one sided lecture.

It also wouldn't be hard to write a little script that automatically connects you to zoom meetings that are coming up. You probably only need a few lines of bash to write your own if you have a tool like icalbuddy where you can grep for upcoming zoom meetings in your calendar.

We're really building for bootcamps and online schools who need attendance data to know who's on track to finishing the program and who's at risk for falling.

it's also useful to communities who want to learn how to better engage members and which types of zoom events drive the most engagement

I don't understand why anything needs to be built here. Zoom already lets you export this data per meeting.

https://www.eduhk.hk/ocio/content/faq-how-retrieve-attendanc...

>You'd be the employee we're trying to get rid of. If you're lying about participation in things, saying you attended meetings when you didn't, I'd fire you.

You have it backwards. If this was happening in my team I would look at why there is a misalignment between company expectations and employee behaviour. If an employee needs to create a script to pretend to do something then there is most likely a deep cultural issue coming top down from management. It highlights an opportunity to refine and improve work practices and culture. The fact that an employee would lie is already a huge red flag that there is something wrong with the culture. Sure 5% of the time the employee is actually not fulfilling their duties but you will know this without the call logs because you would miss them on the call.

For a moment, I thought all these things were from 1 company that specializes in providing benefits to workforce... until I noticed it's "Launch HN", not "Show HN" :)

I was also attempting to work out how a company called "Sane IT" was undertaking such myriad endeavors. It was an accidentally good hook to get me to read more!

Launch HN in groups of 5 since there are so many companies now

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27877280

Yeah I got that, I just didn't quite catch the "Launch HN" instead of "Show HN" prefix on this post at first glance

The titles for these crack me up. Each time I quickly imagine one startup incorporating all the descriptions.

I thought it was some keyword stuffing SEO spam that had accidentally ended up on the frontpage.

Cramming multiple unrelated things into one post like this doesn’t feel very HN-y.

Not sure how to do the titles for these so I'm kind of winging it. The names of the startups wouldn't mean anything to most readers, and might not fit in the 80 char limit anyhow. The current style is kind of inspired by The Browser newsletter, which digs up assorted links on the web.

If anyone has a different idea for what to put in the title field for these, I'm all ears!

Edit: do semicolons help?

I still had the same feeling after the ';' edit. (didn't see it beforehand)

Perhaps with time we will recall this new format. This is my first time seeing it and I had to read the initial blurb before remembering you posted this 10 days ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27877280

I think semicolons may help. Will have to see when I read the next one. By the way, I didn’t mean my comment to be mean-spirited.

Oh no worries! like I said it sort of does the same to me.

Edit: oh - I guess I originally said that but then edited it out.

You could say "Launch HN Batch" instead of just "Launch HN", which would give enough context to the following text without making the title too long.

Semicolons definitely help. As for the 80 char limit, you can always use wider punch cards.

Same here. Even though as recently as yesterday I was wondering when the next installment of the launch HN group thread was going to be posted, and I even checked dang’s submissions yesterday to see if I’d missed one. And yet I read this title and for each word I read my jaw opened more and more as I was imagining one startup doing all of these things xD

Sane it for mobile chats would be pretty good startup idea.