About this episode
Michael Babineau is cofounder and CEO of Second Measure . Second Measure analyzes billions of credit card transactions to answer real-time questions on consumer behavior. They were in the Summer 2015 batch of YC and you can check them out at SecondMeasure.com . Kevin Hale is a Partner at YC. Before working at YC he cofounded Wufoo. You can find Michael on Twitter @mikebabineau and Kevin is @ilikevests . The YC Podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon . Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year. Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/ *** Topics 00:00 - Intro 00:35 - What idea did Mike apply to YC with? 01:20 - Where did the idea come from? 4:35 - From project to company 10:20 - What info did investors want to know that Second Measure could provide? 12:05 - Their first customers 14:35 - The primary use case of Second Measure for VCs 15:20 - What questions are they trying to answer? 19:35 - Data examples from their blog 21:05 - Post: Fashion retailers have nothing to fear (yet) from the rise of Stitch Fix 23:35 - Post: Holiday sales rocket Peloton memberships ahead of SoulCycle active riders 25:05 - Post: Prime members deliver for Amazon every day 27:35 - Second Measure's product development process 29:35 - Finding good data scientists who work from first principles 37:05 - Why is credit card data so messy? 42:05 - Cleaning data 44:20 - Using their product for competitive analysis 47:35 - Their sales process 49:05 - Raising money from Goldman Sachs and Citi 52:05 - Focusing on a specific problem 54:05 - Keeping the product compelling when it's table stakes