Innovator of the Week – Where Are They Now?
Dan Karr
Founder and CEO of ValChoice
What’s new and exciting?
After having been featured through Live Free and Start’s Innovator of the Week series, we went on to win the 2016 Manchester Young Professional Network startup challenge. That was followed by receiving the Microsoft BizSpark Plus Award. For press and media coverage, the Associated Press did a video news story on us that was syndicated to news stations nationwide. With the release of our market report that quantified the difference in value buyers of car insurance get when buying from a mutual insurance company vs. a publicly traded company, Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist, Gretchen Morgenson, wrote a column featuring our work.
We recently launched the home insurance grading system. This is in addition to our already available auto insurance grading system. Transparency in home insurance is particularly important for a few reasons:
- From a price point-of-view, since 2000, home insurance prices have increased at nearly four times the rate of increase in median family income
- Comparing to health care costs, over the same time frame home insurance prices have increased 21% faster than the personal contribution to health care
- For most families, their largest asset is their home. Insuring the home with an insurance company that fulfills their promise to protect is critically important.
Readers can click this link to learn about insurance in New Hampshire and to get free reports on their home and auto insurance.
We’ve also been working with some sponsors of the MYPN award, including Grapevine Marketing, Cook, Little Rosenblatt and Manson and Millyard Communications.
What’s the most interesting thing you’ve learned in the last year?
It has been interesting to see how much insurance companies vary from one type of insurance to another. For example, a company that is great in New Hampshire for auto insurance many times isn’t for home insurance. The opposite way around is also true. It surprised us to see how often this is the case.
What’s the next year going to look like?
The next year will be incredibly exciting. We are working to make our independent, unbiased analytics platform the go-to service for consumers shopping for car or home insurance.
Because we analyze insurance companies by state, and every company under the corporate umbrella, we analyze more than 20,000 companies. This is all in place, fully functioning, and capable of handling large volumes of traffic. With this powerful platform in place, we are working on creative ways to help as many consumers as possible with their home and car insurance.
Check out ValChoice’s original Innovator of the Week profile here.