Goodly YCombinator Application

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYeR55ccjwE

Student Loan Repayment as an Employee Benefit.

Goodly makes it easy for employers to offer student loan repayment benefits. Our platform allows employers to make monthly payments directly to employees' student debt. Similar to a 401k to pay down student loans. Offering student loan benefits as an incentive for recruiting and retaining top employees and to foster diversity and inclusion has become increasingly essential for employers. Student loan benefits rank as one of the most desirable employee benefits for millennial and gen z employees. When we looked at existing options, it was clear that the market does not have a great solution for employers that want to offer student loan benefits. Current options are difficult to implement, expensive, and have limited resources for employees. Goodly will: Benefits administrator: implement plans, enroll employees, verify student loans, and facilitate payments. Improve workplace diversity: - Women hold two-thirds (66%) of all student loan debt - Black and Latinx Americans have 31% higher student loan debt - LGBTQ community holds significantly higher debt on average

San Francisco, USA / San Francisco, USA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvI8fei2nvA

Hemant writes the code and technical work.

Greg and Hemant have known each other for well over a year, and met when they started working as early hires at Rippling YC W17 out of Parker Conrad's unfinished basement in the Mission.

Last winter, we were curious about what it would take to build a decentralized social network and hacked together Peppy, a block-chain alternative to Twitter as an experiment.

We're building our MVP. Over a two week period we met with 40 thought leaders in the HR/benefits space, including startup founders, tech CEOs, VC's on the boards of HR/benefits companies, and HR and people operations employees in our target market to guide our product development. We started sales outreach for our alpha last Friday, by end of day Monday we had five alpha customers.

We quit our jobs at Rippling four weeks ago to work on this full-time.

We have five alpha customers that we're onboarding this week.

We're preparing to launch our beta and plan to have revenue soon.

This is our first time applying :)

Nope.

We picked this idea for three reasons: Idea: Goodly came from Greg's personal experience with student loans. After Greg's father passed away unexpectedly due to a heart attack, he had to borrow $80k in student loans to pay for his education at Dartmouth. After moving to Silicon Valley to work for a startup, he saw the war for talent and how challenging it is for tech companies to hire a diverse workforce. Need: - 44 million Americans hold $1.5 trillion in student loan debt (300% increase since 2006) - 70% of Americans graduate from college with debt - Average borrower owes $37,127 - 22 years (average time to payoff) - 1 in 4 student loan borrowers are in default - 37% have missed at least one payment 49% of millennials prefer student loan benefits to a 401k and 53% would consider a salary cut to have this benefit. 86% of employees said they'd stay with a company for at least 5 years if their employer helped pay down their student loans. Goodly bridges the gap between the demand for this benefit from employees and the cost and complexity of administering student loan benefits for employers. Domain expertise: Hemant and Greg gained deep domain expertise building and selling HR/benefits software at Rippling. They started working together a week apart, before Rippling launched or had customers, and helped build the company from the ground up. Hemant built over 100 of Rippling's integrations. During YC W17, Greg worked with Parker to develop and execute Rippling's go to market and first sales strategy. Greg had a 75% close rate selling Rippling's HR/benefits software.

The implementation process for employee benefits solutions on the market today can be needlessly complex and expensive. Many HR/benefits solutions are cumbersome and cost prohibitive for many employers to offer. Goodly can be implemented in 10 minutes and is flexible enough to fit any budget with no setup or annual fees.

A focus on employees (not just employers) as end users: Many employee benefit vendors are focused on developing relationships with employers, Goodly is building a highly differentiated brand that is employee centric. Goodly will provide all of the tools needed for employees with student debt manage and pay off their student loans, allowing Goodly to become a trusted resource for employees and employers.

Gradii, Tuition, Student Loan Genius, Peanut Butter We fear large financial institutions with significant resources and existing partnerships.

Starting with a bottom up approach, our initial target market will be startups with 1 to 500 employees. Our immediate source of revenue will be a SaaS-based pricing model of $6/month for each employee that participates with no setup costs or annual fees. 44 million Americans have student debt, charging $6/month x 12 months would produce $3.16 billion in ARR. The total U.S. student loan market is $1.5 trillion (larger than all consumer credit cards and auto loans) and growing by $2,726 per second. Bipartisan legislation in Congress would make up to $5,250 a year in employer contributions for student loan repayment tax-free. The bill has 118 co-sponsors as of April 17, 2018.

Bottom-up approach targeting other startups as beta users and rapidly expanding to target professional services companies (law firms, consultants/MBAs, medical/dental) to gain a foothold in the market and then expand to other sectors. - Working through personal networks to gain traction with beta users - Connecting with startups in major tech hubs - Education/Awareness: seminars/workshops for employees on how to manage student loans - Online distribution to employers - White papers/case studies - Gaining traction in the press/media

Yes

Delaware C Corp.

50/50

We're bootstrapping, but have received investment offers.

500

We're bootstrapped, but have received investment offers, including from the CEO of Postmates How to use the Postmates delivery app, and what you can order through it Postmates is a delivery app that allows you to order food and goods from your phone and have them delivered to your door. Read more Image related to article. We have enough savings to go a year without funding or revenue, but we hope to get revenue soon.

We formed the company using Gust Launch. Goodly's incorporation documents were reviewed by Mike Sullivan (a partner and head of the Corporate Group at Orrick serving as a mentor to Greg).

Marketplace for job applicants to find open roles at companies that offer the benefits that matter most to them.

Recent college grads in the Bay Area without student loan debt will spend 12 years saving for a home. Recent college grads with debt will spend 27 years to do the same.

The first thing Parker said when Greg told him what we're building was "Apply to YC!" We want to rapidly accelerate our growth and saw first-hand the value YC provides to early stage companies during our time working at YC companies, including at Rippling W17 and Optimizely W10. Many of our friends and colleagues are YC founders and pushed us to apply for the S18 batch, including: Parker Conrad Rippling W17 and Zenefits W13, Ryan Jackson MicroEval S12 and Paid S14, Jeff LaBarge Tule S14, Marta Jamrozik VanGo W17, and Zack Brown Haiku W18.

Reading PG's essay's over the years and being early employees at YC companies.