Thread

Launch HN: Coverage Cat (YC S22) – Umbrella insurance via your personal agent

54 points · 31 comments · botacode

Loading the complete thread in the background. This saved snapshot is available now. Refresh

0c3ca83z · 1790098482 · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
downrightmike · 1790098703 · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
1. redanddead · 1790102609 · focus · HN ↗
  dont leave us hanging
hnlmorg · 1790098710 · focus · HN ↗
That’s a very lengthy introduction.
I’d recommend distilling that down because I stopped reading before figuring out what your product does. And if I did that, then you can bet others did too.
I do wish you the best of luck with your business though.
1. botacode · 1790098787 · focus · HN ↗
  Thank you for the feedback, let's see if they'll let us edit it down a bit.
2. mock-possum · 1790099254 · focus · HN ↗
  Yeah this reasonable sounding explanation is all the way at the bottom strangely:
  > Coverage Cat is a licensed insurance brokerage that helps you compare home, umbrella, auto, and renters coverage side by side — with straight pricing, no sold leads, and a real broker on the other end.
  > Ask a question or start a comparison. Coverage Cat pairs AI-guided intake with a licensed brokerage team, so you can size up coverage, see honest price ranges, and compare real carrier options without handing your details to five agents overnight. Developers can drive the same flow through the Agent API.
  1. ISL · 1790100616 · focus · HN ↗
    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLUF_(communication)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLUF_(communication)
    botacode · 1790101504 · focus · HN ↗
    Ironically one of my favorite acronyms
dgacmu · 1790099446 · focus · HN ↗
I'm probably your target audience - I have umbrella insurance - but I just grabbed it through my existing GEICO/travelers insurance and it was basically painless. It isn't so expensive I felt compelled to shop massively for it and nothing I read above convinced me I'm wrong there?
1. remotecar · 1790099636 · focus · HN ↗
  If you're happy with it, then great, no issue! I think Coverage Cat excels for people that want to get quotes from more than just a single option, have underwriting details that make it so an umbrella policy isn't dirt cheap, and would rather not talk to a salesperson on the phone. But if that isn't you, that's just fine!
  1. dgacmu · 1790101300 · focus · HN ↗
    Perhaps I'm not making myself clear: There might be reasons I _shouldn't_ be happy with it! Maybe I'm overpaying, maybe I'm missing out on subtleties of one insurer vs another, etc. And I mean, hello, I'm posting here, of _course_ i'd rather not talk to a salesperson on the phone.
    Your post actually inspired me to go raise the amount of my coverage. I was paying attention. It triggered some thinking. It even triggered action. But maybe I wasn't paying attention to the part you wished I was.
    remotecar · 1790101718 · focus · HN ↗
    Maybe I'm a bad salesman, but based on your description so far, if you're satisfied it likely isn't worth the chore of changing. Actually, my hope is that fewer people ever have to spend hours of their life dealing with insurance matters, and we can find a new efficiency in a society where everyone is always getting the best policy without having to think about it at all.
    Part of what inspired us to do this is a serious frustration with the millions of people that buy the wrong coverages or are overpaying because they don't have the time or energy to shop around. It would be nice if everyone was our customer, but I'm also the kind of person just satisfied to hear you made a little improvement in your own finances.
    dgacmu · 1790104538 · focus · HN ↗
    seems reasonable to me! Thanks for responding.
    botacode · 1790101729 · focus · HN ↗
    This is great to hear, I'd count this as a success in our book!
    After much trial and error, we've come to realize that trying to separate users from their existing insurance arrangements is very hard unless there's some sort of stark event that triggers the switch.
    I.e., folks will usually only make a purchase with us if one of the following is true (even if they could save money or improve coverage):
    - they're shopping for the first time and want a modern, online-first, service that avoids hassle
    - their premiums have jumped
    - they were non-renewed
    Most users' experience of shopping for insurance has been historically so bad that they're very averse to optimizing it, even if 10m or so could save them hundreds (and in extreme cases thousands) of dollars.
2. quickthrowman · 1790119471 · focus · HN ↗
  How do you get umbrella insurance from GEICO? I have maxed out my auto policy limits but would like more coverage due to rich … people driving around $250,000 cars on the same roads uninsured people with bald tires drive on and things of that nature, I don’t want to go bankrupt if I get in an accident and a G Wagon and Porsche are somehow involved.
abirch · 1790099662 · focus · HN ↗
Do you take into account that if you know Berkshire Hathaway you can get an extra discount on GEICO, Home, and Umbrella insurance?
1. remotecar · 1790099769 · focus · HN ↗
  Coverage Cat actually gets a lot of GEICO customers, because it's pretty often the case you'll find better prices unbundled than bundled. That's not true for everyone of course, but it's true for most folks — a different way of thinking about it is, "Even after a small bundle discount, what's the likelihood the single bundling option is the cheapest" and the answer is that often it isn't.
  Just to give you some sense of this, someone with identical underwriting details can often see $1000+ price differences between carriers. So a 10% bundle discount begins to fade compared to something like that.
  1. ISL · 1790100519 · focus · HN ↗
    GP meant "own" where they stated "know". Berkshire shareholders get a discount on Berkshire's insurance.
    botacode · 1790105055 · focus · HN ↗
    To answer more directly, yes we do! Most of the umbrella coverage we offer though is of the unbundled variety.
Cockbrand · 1790103934 · focus · HN ↗
I live in a rainy and windy place, so I often need to replace a flipped umbrella. How did I not know that there's umbrella insurance!?
1. remotecar · 1790104142 · focus · HN ↗
  Some people do in fact ask us why we offer $10 million in limits for umbrella insurance... that's a lot of umbrellas...
2. andy99 · 1790104690 · focus · HN ↗
  I didn’t know what umbrella insurance was (is it an American thing?). Was going to make a joke about umbrella replacement cost being the least of your concerns, it’s the liability from blinding someone with a pointy flipped umbrella flying in the wind you need to be concerned about. Turns out that’s what umbrella insurance is apparently (extra liability, not specific to umbrella incidents)
jtap · 1790104663 · focus · HN ↗
Congrats on the launch. The first startup I joined years ago was Insurance.com, and I really enjoyed my time there. I helped to buildout quite a bit of it. If you ever want to chat about the space feel free to message me.
1. botacode · 1790105998 · focus · HN ↗
  DM-ed yah, thank you for the note!
cruffle_duffle · 1790117915 · focus · HN ↗
My biggest line item is my auto insurance and your agent tool can’t do that. And I rent not own and thus have renters not homeowners.
Basically, this sounds interesting in theory but it’s useless for me. I even tried letting codex go over it and it wasn’t clear without additional prompting what was supported.
Sorry.
1. botacode · 1790129681 · focus · HN ↗
  In a few years we'll cover all the categories! Thank you for taking a crack at it!
DeltaCoast · 1790120480 · focus · HN ↗
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 ?
1. botacode · 1790123393 · focus · HN ↗
  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).
  1. DeltaCoast · 1790126136 · focus · HN ↗
    Thanks for the response!
mannyv · 1790121080 · focus · HN ↗
Having just gone through an umbrella insurance process, I find it interesting that it's your primary product.
My understanding of umbrella coverage is like what you said: it's an adjunct product and a way to increase the fees on their other lines, which is why if you get umbrella via your existing carrier they generally enforce minimums on your auto (and home).
As someone with kids who drive, umbrella was much more complicated than expected.
I wish you guys operated in my state so I could run my numbers through you.
1. botacode · 1790122617 · focus · HN ↗
  We're eyeing nationwide expansion in 2027 or later this year!
  They'll enforce the minimums even as a standalone policy, my understanding is it's that the umbrella always "sits" ontop of something. I.e., they want you to clear the other liability limits before they step in to provide coverage.
  It is kind of a huge hassle, especially in states like CA or FL where a lot of carriers have withdrawn and the default bundle option isn't necessarily available. We went looking for high pain X feasibility and this is where we landed!
skyberrys · 1790124951 · focus · HN ↗
I want to check it out for homeowners insurance in CA, but I can't be sure you guys will never ever send my info onto someone else to send me annoying emails or phone calls? Besides my home is not the best deal to insure I think, I'm barely above sea level, it makes me worried to switch insurance. What if the new deal drops me in a year?
1. botacode · 1790126508 · focus · HN ↗
  We only send your information to insurers we quote you with and do our absolute best not to spam (we send 2-3 reminders depending on policy type), our goal is to never call.
  In California we specialize in harder-to-insure homes, i.e. stuff that will place with a non-admitted/surplus policy, the goal is to help keep people off FAIR.
  RE: cancellation/non-renewal, these do happen but it could happen to your existing deal too unfortunately. No one will force you to switch if it isn't a good deal and our agents do their best to always advise to the user's best interest. Our goal is to retain you as a customer for life (our agents just optimize automatically for you every year!) rather than make a quick buck one year.
arshxyz · 1790147532 · focus · HN ↗
I don't understand the point of putting visible Agent Instructions on the page taking up real estate while a human has the page open in a browser. Won't an agent be able to trivially extract these instructions if they came with a display:none rule?
insNerd · 1790177488 · focus · HN ↗
Doesnt seem to work when I paste the prompt into ChatGPT web.
1. [deleted] · 1790178746 · focus · HN ↗
  [deleted]
creditupside · 1790178103 · focus · HN ↗
great idea
lfdo0870 · 1790210786 · focus · HN ↗
For that there's Python: with 30 lines you can automate this task. If you want I can send you the script I use. DM me if interested.
kdautaj · 1790532493 · focus · HN ↗
Congrats on the launch - curious on how you handle PII data when routed through someone's personal agent - does the agent see anything, or kept aside, and someone is handed a quote? Congrats again, exciting times for you guys :-)

Open on Hacker News to reply ↗

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.