No one should be handing out their address, mortgage information, and other sensitive details to someone who can't spend at least $300 on the bare minimum appearance of legitimacy.

Allow me to expound on @kojeovo's remark. Please take this as a constructive criticism to improve your success potential. Much of it is from a quick glance, and am sure there are many other facets to improve.

A business is not just about the product.

Your Privacy Policy. There is no default way to download it (see 9.), and since it is window-ed cannot print entire doc. That means I cannot keep a copy of it for myself.

> We collect the following types of information:

> Mortgage Documents: Loan Estimates and Closing Disclosures you upload for analysis.

Okay, but

> 4. Data Security

> We implement industry-standard security measures to protect your information from unauthorized access, disclosure, alteration, and destruction.

This means nothing. Are you ISO 27001:2022, NIST SP 800-53, CIS, CE+, Essential Eight, or something else? Have you been audited, and proof? Who is your ISP? What regs do you follow around data sovereignty?

Terms of Service. Again, no default way of download. Overall, I would never agree to this ToS. It demands all kinds of requirements on the user, but takes no responsibility for anything - or as described above, explain how you will protect your customers.

You have no reference anywhere where you are geographically. No address, no about us, no who you are. I would be very leery on uploading anything.

FYI, this reads as a very aggressive response to someone raising legitimate privacy concerns and doesn't engender the trust you very likely deserve.

Rather than talking up the value of the tool as superceding the concerns, a more constructive approach might acknowledge the concerns and emphasize how you already do minimize risk or commitments you're willing to make towards doing so.

Being dismissive doesn't help worried or skeptical people feel more secure, and worried and skeptical people make perfectly good users too.

It is fair to describe the pains of not getting analysis on mortgage loan estimates, but what I think folks are looking for is some kind of authentic answer to the problem posed.

For example, you could advise the person uploading to remove PII prior to the upload, and link to pdf editing tools that allow them to do that.

You could say that not including PII like full name(s) found on just about every loan estimate does not take away from the value of the tool.

Another thing that could be done is to provide clear means for removing any data uploaded, or opt-out pre-upload of any data being used for training.

For example by creating an account first.

Providing some skin in the game such as putting the removal behavior in the terms of service and a personal guarantee to do everything to ensure sensitivity to privacy of this information will be handled carefully staking your reputation, probably would help.

> not even comparable to the risk in uploading docs to a website which promises they won't share user data with anyone. This is genuinely a pro buyer tool with no association with any 3rd party.

I have no reason to think you're not completely sincere in this!

But, realize it doesn't mean anything.

Unless that promise is backed by some ironclad contract, it means nothing. Companies grow and hire new people who don't care about the original values. Or they get acquired and all bets are off. Or they start running low on cash and suddenly decide monetizing all that data is a good idea after all. Or it becomes visible enough to attract attention of the government who shows up demanding copies of data. And so on.

I've been in one or more startups where all of these things have happened.

I am genuinely surprised by the comments in this thread.

Privacy concerns are real but the importance of that matter in your project is overestimated here by an absurd level.

What I read is not a constructive criticism and the suggestions laid down are not realistic nor business relevant at all. I feel like this is some sort of mass wishful thinking.

Hey. I really don't care to compare the level of scamming nor the usefulness of the tool. I'm in the process of buying right now so I know it could be useful. That's besides the point. To clarify, here's a different thought. Reading the following copy, I am wondering "whats gonna happen to my data / file I upload?":

> We never sell or share data with third parties. All information is used solely to generate analyses to help borrowers analyze and optimize their mortgages.

I even looked further into the privacy policy, just to be diligent here.

> We implement industry-standard security measures to protect your information from unauthorized access, disclosure, alteration, and destruction.

With how much info I have been provided, I'm just not gonna upload a document to your site. Like I said, just doesn't inspire confidence as I scroll your landing page. Could just be a copy change to fix this.

I love this idea (haven't tried it) and it seems like a killer app for AI. I can think of a lot of other things like health insurance, home owners insurance, and many other types of contracts for which an AI advisor can be built for. Imagine being able to rake over a complex document and make decisions that clearly benefit you. That's a rare privilege.

Your response is a lighthouse sized red flashing light to never use your tool.

Great idea and execution. I understand the privacy concerns, but I believe implementing a client-side redaction step could alleviate some of them. This step would allow users to preview their uploaded content before submitting it. While designing this feature, it’s crucial to ensure user trust and convince them of its benefits. Personally, I would feel more comfortable uploading a PDF knowing that it will be anonymized or redacted before being submitted.

Also, you have no control over decisions that any future owner might have, and you won't care because you've already cashed out.

What happens when you get hacked? Not if. To come back at someone with valid concerns with a "no, you don't understand my point of view" does nothing but a disservice to you.

Expecting people to just accept things is just not a good way to operate. When you receive push back, you need better responses than this. Will the vast majority of your users push back, sadly, probably not. However, you did post this to HN and then reacted poorly to valid criticism. Tsk tsk

Doesn't matter your promise, even though you may or may not be trusted, hackers can get it and steal it all. So it's not necessarily you or your service.

How can you get scammed on a mortgage? They're typically standard products from nationwide banks.

>The scamming that happens to homebuyers is not even comparable to the risk in uploading docs to a website which promises they won't share user data with anyone.

Well as long as you promise, my privacy fears are allayed!

/s

Ignore the haters, they will probably never be your customer.

We're talking about enough information to create a list of people who are in the process of making the largest purchase of their lives, coupled with the name of the businesses that they're considering sending money to and the exact dollar amounts that they're considering sending.

Scammers pay a lot of money to people who can get them those kinds of lists.

As others have mentioned, title fraud. My recent closing disclosure has buyer, seller, agent, and title company. It'd be pretty easy to call the buyer claiming to be the title company and request a wire for exactly the right amount to a fraudulent location.

Public info that you bought a property is entirely different from info about all the properties you are searching for and seriously considering. Especially being able to couple that with what you eventually did later.

You are also signalling that you have enough money to buy said house and are actively in the process of doing so which makes you a mark. And if there is a whole DB of this info readily available...

Anyways the security could be fine. But if a user's primary action is uploading that document then maybe wanna have more than a quick sentence on it.

This business is a thinly veiled mortgage lead gen scam

Its going on nearly 20 years I have been watching this train wreck

Reminds me of Mechanical Turk's old tagline: "Artificial Artificial Intelligence"

If there are only a handful of operators in a given industry and they use the same billing format, why not?

Create a known good OCR to calculation mechanism, then generate reports based off it. If it is inaccurate, its probably a small amount of logic to fix it.

With GPT you could even get it to write the parsing logic for you perhaps, and maybe process bill data when a bill doesn't exactly match existing parser data.

> The goal is to help mortgage borrowers get better deals on their mortgage.

I don't get it. Better, LendingTree, Credible, Bankrate, and a dozen other firms all aggregate mortgages. If there are some "best" mortgages in absolute terms, show them, you don't need anything on the form to do that; if there are offers that have lower upfront costs in exchange for higher rates, because the buyer is sensitive to upfront costs, show them. Why do you need to see the document in order to give the user what he wants?

Since you already know all of this, it begs the question: why do you specifically want to collect these documents? I'm not saying there is some conspiracy or anything.

That makes sense, but simply isn't viable cost wise IMO if you're trying to bootstrap a side project - until you have your first users and a sense that you have something people are willing to pay for, spending thousands on compliance certifications seems pretty risky.

I'm interested in what the best strategy to build/establish trust when you can't yet afford to pay for certification is.

Your welcome, thank you for the message.

What, exactly, does SOC 2 have to do with anything?

Can you answer the question of why this tool doesn’t work when redacting irrelevant personal information? I took my own info, redacted personal information you don’t need, and it doesn’t work.

Thank you for the explanation.

As a LLM wrapper (is it wrapped around ChatGPT?) would you say what makes your product unique is the specific prompts you have designed?

Again, great job! Planning, building and launching should always be commended!

Going to work on this feature and ship it early next week if you're still in the closing process then.

… I'm not them, but in dark mode, it's <50% grey on black, and for the headers, <32% grey on black. (#374151 on black, I think.)

I was really just testing that the system works. I gave it a VA Home Loan and nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary in the analysis.

You are not doing any of the fancy table extractor stuff?