About

Insured

As a customer of an insurance startup, I'm suffering a poor user experience. Claims are sent though JetForm (a no-code forms platform) which forces me to re-enter similar information like name, birth-date, policy number, etc... over and over again (once at every claim). We are 4 people under my policy, in average I submit 3 claims every month for each of us; so I waste about 2 hours every week.

In addition to that, I have no visibility on the status of each claim, I have to wait for the reimbursement to hit my bank account or not, and match them manually (with an Airtable I built to track my claims 🤓). If the value does not show up, I have to write an email asking about what happened (more waste of my time).

As a founder, I understand the reasoning behind being scrappy and avoid coding your software if the value is on the underlying service (actually I wrote about it here). But I personally believe that in a business like this you can find a middle point and use the best from code and no-code to provide a great user experience while keeping a low cost internal platform.

This experience has been the inspiration for Insured, a code + no-code starter kit featuring a fully coded NextJS web application (with authentication) integrated with an Airtable database and Make automations acting as the backend.

The initial architecture is simple: the web application takes care of user management using NextAuth and a persistent MySQL database. We link user records in our Airtable database, which is used as the internal operations system to store members, claims and policy information like plan, status, members, etc...

Users use the built in Airtable forms to submit new requests, but they are prefilled with the member ID to attach the person information.

The web application retrieves the data from a Make endpoint (that reads Airtable) and displays it in a nice way to the user. With this in place, the user can have a view of all the claims and their status.

The result: a great user experience with an affordable operations platform.

I know there is more around an insurance business, this is not by any mean a complete solution, but I hope it can be a good starting point for you to build your own.