It’s been a busy Q1 at Bunker — after the announcement last month regarding our partnership with Chubb, we’ve had quite a few people reaching out to learn more about what we’re up to. We thought we’d use this as an opportunity to share a little bit more about what’s behind the curtain.

First off, a little background about ‘what is Bunker’. Our mission is to Embed Business Insurance into the Contracting Process. Not many people love contracts, and fewer love insurance — when you combine the two it’s . The small business insurance market is $100B+ premium in the US, and we estimate that at least 50% of those purchases are being driven by a contract requirement. Just ask your local insurance agent how often they hear the words ‘they need this for a contract’ — it’s a lot.

Everyone hates the problem, except for us — which is why we decided to solve it!

The Future of Work

We’re very focused on enabling the Future of Work, playing a small but we believe high impact role to remove insurance friction from the onboarding process for independent workers. Even before the company was officially formed we developed personas to help define how we were reinventing the model for small business insurance. After my co-founder and I kept iterating on prototypes it became immediately obvious that saying ‘buying organization’ and ‘requiring organization’ wasn’t going to cut it!

On one side we work with Members (leading on-demand platforms, staffing companies, gig marketplaces, enterprises), and the persona we developed for Members is ‘Lois’.

On the other side we work with Customers (freelancers, independent contractors, small businesses), and the persona we created for Customers is ‘Clark’.

It’s true, we’re not just insurance and technology nerds, we also love super heros :). There also isn’t much more than a minute that passes in our company where an automated Slack notification in our #clark_cares channel or someone on the team isn’t referring to ‘Clark’ or ‘Lois’.

The Stats

So, how did Q1 wrap up — here is a peak behind the curtain:

We’re most proud that we’ve removed insurance as a barrier for thousands of ‘Clarks’ in Q1. Our ‘Clarks’ are talented and have a variety of skills they use in the on-demand world — anything from management consulting, web designing, oil & gas contracting, to warehouse work and medical technicians. Although it’s a tiny dent in the universe of 53M freelancers in the US, it’s a good start — and by our count we still have well over 52M ‘Clarks’ to go :)

Freelancers now make up 35% of the United States Workforce

What about ‘Lois’? We’re excited to say we had 15 active Members in Q1,almost all of them squarely in the on-demand, contingent worker, & gig economy space. About half of them joined as new Members in the quarter. Our goal is to do everything we can to ensure Lois is set up for success, so she can quickly and easily get Clark onboarded compliantly, without friction. Some of our Members today include MBO Partners, Wonolo, Field Nation, TalentWave, and Catalant — to name a few, along with a Fortune 500 financial services firm. Q2 is equally busy — we had a new on-demand marketplace Member go live this week, and another one next.

We measure Customer Success two different ways today. Our Net Promoter Score (NPS) for Q1 was 80, and our Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) score was 94.3% ‘satisfied’. While we love the high scores from our customers and it’s motivation for our team, we’re thirsty for any feedback as it helps guide our focus.

While we’re selling insurance every day, you won’t see us throwing much of our capital into Adwords, social targeting, or really much advertising at all (Sorry Google — we still love you Sergey and Larry :). We spent $4,473.58 on digital Customer advertising…in all of Q1. Many in the insurance and insurtech space spend more than that in one day. We figure for every nickel we don’t have to spend on advertising we can invest that into the business — building technology and insurance products that create sustainable value for Clark and Lois.

Lastly, when Lois onboards a Clark through the Bunker platform, our purchase conversion rate in Q1 was 67.1%. What we lack in spending mountains of money to drive massive traffic to our homepage, we make up for in delivering the right liability and business insurance at the exact moment it’s needed. This translates into conversion rates that are 2x or even 3x the industry average, and most importantly, ‘Lois’ and ‘Clark’ are happy.

The Team

Jeff (Our Controller) being affectionately shamed for not sporting a Bunker hoodie while on a conference call.

Not only is our team our most important asset, but I truly love being part of it. Like any team we have great days and less great days, but we’re on this mission together — learning and continuously getting better.

While we’ve grown considerably and now at 22 strong (welcome Mara, last week!), we’re competing against startups and incumbents that are multiples larger. What we lack in size we make up for in other ways. One of our values is #fearless, we’re motivated by problems that seem impossible for a team of our size to solve.

Looking Forward

Being an insurance nerd I’m a huge fan of Warren Buffett, and try to learn a bit from his annual letters. I admire his candid approach of self reflection, identifying opportunities to improve. On that note, we have much to develop as we move forward through the year — applying lessons from the past. I’m personally focused on becoming a better leader, with one area being improving my facilitation skills for our All Hands meetings. We’re also focused on improving Member onboarding and automated experiences for Clark. We have some pretty exciting things coming up later this year…stay tuned.

Q1 was great, but we’re even more excited for what the rest of the year will bring. We’ll look forward to sharing all things Bunker.

If your interested in learning more visit https://www.buildbunker.com/ or contact us at support@buildbunker.com