Allay

We started Allay in 2015 with the idea of building a better HR and employee benefits platform for insurance brokers and the companies they worked with.

Benefits administration was unnecessarily complicated, particularly for smaller businesses. We thought there was an opportunity to make that experience considerably better.

But as we got deeper into the industry, we discovered a more interesting problem.

Self-funded health insurance was traditionally something much larger employers could access. Smaller companies didn't have the scale or the underwriting tools to make it practical, even though the potential savings could be significant.

So we changed direction.

We built an underwriting and plan-modeling platform that allowed benefits advisors to offer self-funded plans to employers with as few as two people. It was a very different product from where we started, and a much more complicated technical challenge, but it opened up a market that had previously been difficult to serve.

As co-founder, I led our core product and engineering efforts, worked on early go-to-market, and was closely involved in fundraising. We raised approximately $7.5M from investors including 500 Startups, AngelPad, Inovia Capital, The Blue Venture Fund, and founders of Hootsuite, and grew the business to 24 people.

In February 2020, Novo Benefits acquired Allay and integrated the technology into its platform as Novo Connection.

Looking back, the most important thing we did probably wasn't building the original product. It was recognizing that we'd uncovered a more valuable problem and being willing to change direction to solve it.

Sometimes the best product decision is to stop building the product you thought you were going to build.