Company Overview
Gilad Levin is Founder at Inkaway, an early-stage startup in the services industry that insures your ink. Learn more at https://www.linkedin.com/company/inkaway-co/about/.
Can you tell us a little about your background before starting at your company?
I was working for a healthcare startup in operations, managing CRMs like Salesforce and the interconnectivity between the app, the database, and operational workflows. This included how users moved through the system, as well as supporting sales and marketing efforts by automating business processes. This is what I’ve been doing for most of my career.
Working with HomeThrive gave me insight into the insurance space. Taking that knowledge about insurance and combining it with my development skills allowed me to work on InkAway.
How did you start at your company? What were the first steps you took to get it off the ground and how did you identify the need for your product/service in the market?
It started out pretty funny. I was on an onsite with my company, on a long Uber ride with a coworker. She was complaining about her tattoo the whole time, so I asked her why she didn’t get it removed. She said it was really expensive. I asked why she didn’t use insurance for it, because I thought that was something that existed. She asked what I was talking about.
I wrote it down as a billion-dollar idea in the list of ideas on my phone that I planned to get to one day. Then there were layoffs at the company, and I decided that instead of going back to being a consultant, I was young enough to try this for a year and see how it went.
The first steps I took were research—whether this was something people wanted and whether the math worked. Since we had to launch an insurance product, I needed to gather the data, put together realistic pricing models, and work through actuarial numbers. From there, I learned how the insurance industry works, how to regulate the product I wanted to bring to market, and began building the systems.
I worked on developing the platform on the backend, building the claims management system, the quote and binding system, and everything associated with it. Those were the first baby steps I took.
What innovations or unique features set your company apart from others in the industry?
I think we’re bringing a brand-new product to market. Our product and the value proposition it offers don’t exist today. We’re creating a form of personal choice insurance, where a choice you make today can have a financial impact down the road. In a sense, we’re protecting people against their own instincts.
That’s pretty unique.
What has been the most effective strategy for scaling your business?
Since we haven’t scaled yet, it’s a tricky question, but I expect our approach will be partnering with insurance MGAs and specialty MGAs to introduce this product as a group policy for tattoo shops. That will be an important mechanism for launching and scaling—having insurance providers that sell traditional coverage to tattoo shops introduce our model as part of their offering when onboarding shops, allowing them to also sell our product.
The second driver will be embedding our coverage into booking platforms. As you book an appointment with an artist, you can add coverage the same way you would for a flight.
Those are the two main drivers.
Looking ahead, what are your goals for the future of your company?
I think InkAway has the potential to be national, if not global, coverage. If we can make it a household name and an automatic add-on to every tattoo, it can empower people and give them more freedom when making decisions that impact the rest of their lives. I believe we can create something with national consequences.
I’d love to see us reach that point and then take it beyond insurance into areas like makeup and similar offerings.
