Directions Brain

Directions — SMB survey design, first verticals, and the FIDA/Europe question

4 min read

Directions — SMB survey design, first verticals, and the FIDA/Europe question

Source: raw/meetings/notetaker/2026-08-10-test-10-51.json (Notetaker title: “test”, 10:51; a real working session despite the title — all three founders speaking)

Summary

Morning working session preparing the alon-huri pitch on two fronts: a quantitative SMB demand survey and the geography/regulation chapter. The team accepted Huri’s point that “SMB” is not a homogeneous entity and decided to segment by size and by expected bundling difficulty, shortlisting three survey verticals. In parallel, Saar walked the group through the fresh geography research (geography-alternatives-europe-latam): LatAm was struck off (only ~17% of businesses carry any insurance), the UK was flagged as a real candidate (license in ~2 months, US-like game), and Guy floated a contrarian FIDA play — build European broker infrastructure early so the 2029 EU policy-data API arrives onto a ready integration layer.

Key takeaways

  • SMB must be segmented before surveying. Restaurant pains are not barber-shop pains; classify by size and by how hard the insurance bundle is to compose, then survey only the chosen verticals.
  • First vertical shortlist (Guy): (1) IT services — software/consulting firms of 10–50 employees with genuinely complex needs (cyber, General Liability, Workers’ Comp, EPLI, Crime, Umbrella) that owners cannot self-compose, and the largest segment closable digitally end-to-end without a human in the loop; (2) accounting/tax-booking firms — real bundling difficulty, closable direct-to-consumer with a human agent at the end; (3) restaurants — proven 100%-online distribution, but underwriting complexity keeps them less simple than the first two.
  • Survey platform economics: Listenna looked expensive and “שכונה”; the team pulled Harmony’s Wynter history — the April “State of the SDR” survey cost 1,250 credits for 250 respondents — and sized the new survey at 30–50 respondents (~a tenth of the credits). Nizan defended surveys as an insight source regardless of platform polish, based on the Harmony experience.
  • The business-change trigger beats the calendar trigger. The UK stat that 52% of SMEs had a material business change without updating insurance (from geography-alternatives-europe-latam) was adopted as narrative reinforcement.
  • FIDA as a strategic option (Guy’s “איפכא מסתברא”). Since FIDA will force EU insurers to expose non-life policy data via API (~2029), one could enter Europe from day one via two local brokers per country and be the best-integrated player when the rail goes live — incumbents like State Farm-equivalents will not be building segment-level dynamic pages. Not adopted as plan; recorded as an option that reinforces why the team’s AI/tech-heavy founder-market fit matters.
  • UK reading: low insurance awareness is either a deep problem or an opportunity; licensing there takes ~2 months, so the UK could be a first non-US market before any continental move.
  • BOP fluency before the Huri meeting. BOP (Business Owner Policy) = general liability + commercial property + business-interruption income insurance, a cost-effective SMB bundle; Huri (ex-next-insurance) speaks in this vocabulary.
  • Division of labor for the pitch: Guy distills go-to-market (fundraising narrative, founder-market fit, AI-integration advantage); Nizan distills problem/solution/world/who-we-are; work continued in the 15:00+ follow-up session (2026-08-10-directions-huri-pitch-deck-build).

Decisions

  • Segment SMBs by size and bundling difficulty before surveying; run the survey on a handful of “sexy” top-5–10 verticals where bundling is relatively straightforward (in-session working decision, not promoted to a decision page).
  • Prefer the AI/technology-heavy path as the founder-market-fit story rather than competing on traditional insurance knowledge.

Action items

  • saar-arbel — build the new SMB survey on Wynter/Listenna: segment by size/vertical, reuse the Harmony survey as a base, write narrative-supporting questions, and run drafting through Claude.
  • saar-arbel — send Nizan the platform details and collect his experience with other survey/CRM tools (incl. Brazil) before committing to a platform.
  • nizan-shifman — check the existing Wynter account, confirm credits consumed by the Harmony survey, and estimate the cost of a 30–50-respondent survey.
  • guy-barkat — distill the go-to-market chapter (fundraising narrative, founder-market fit, AI-integration advantage vs incumbent insurers).
  • nizan-shifman — distill problem/solution/world/who-we-are for the alon-huri meeting.
  • Team — be fluent in BOP and its components before the Huri meeting.

Open questions

  • Is low UK insurance awareness a disqualifying problem or the opportunity itself?
  • Which survey platform actually fits a 30–50-respondent SMB study — Wynter, Listenna, or something from Nizan’s toolkit?
  • Does the FIDA pre-positioning idea ever justify real investment before ~2028, or is it pitch-narrative option value only?

Graph View

Backlinks