This was super interesting! The design really helped as well. I liked this one:
"Lesson learned: People care about the narrative behind your product, so don't be afraid to tell your story!"
As someone who finds new things on HN all the time, I always check the "about" page, especially if it's something that isn't free. I'm surprised at how often the "About Us" isn't actually "About Anyone", there's no names, it's all just "Us" and "We".
I'm surprised at how often the "About Us" isn't actually "About Anyone", there's no names, it's all just "Us" and "We".
That's something I often get instructed to use when doing freelance writing. It is considered "professional" and "corporate speak."
The other thing is that women and minorities sometimes intentionally hide or downplay their personal details. One guy with a very "foreign" sounding name legally changed his name to something normal WASPy sounding because it was a barrier to doing business. I have seen at least one article on the front page of HN where a woman founder was being sexually harassed and generally treated terribly by clients when doing support chats. She changed her picture and her name to make it appear you were dealing with a man and that largely stopped.
I'm a woman and I've had to deal a lot with awful behavior from people, much of which is pretty clearly rooted in misogyny, basically. I'm still not sure what the best path forward is for me.
One part of me is clear that hiding or downplaying my gender to try to be successful just reinforces sexism. Another part of me has to wonder if that's a hill I really want to die on or would I rather be able to, you know, eat more regularly and what not.
Related to this: I wonder if the days of founders naming their companies after their own (family) names are ever coming back. There’s something wholesome about it and it inspires confidence. Who is more trustworthy: someone attaching their name to their business, or someone who hides behind WeeBlee or BlooBloo or whatever it is they came up with?
Thanks for reading and great point. I toyed with the copy here, too, but mainly it looked weird to have "About Me" on a professional landing page. Also I figured if they cared enough to know more about the company behind the product, I guess they'd found out soon enough that it's just one person behind it. If not, we can leave it at "Us"/"We" and keep it professional.
I recently switched to Lunch Money from Mint (6+ years user). I was sold after spending a weekend setting it up and getting used to it.
The app is a delight compared to Mint. The interface is simple, fast and snappy. You never get an annoying "Refreshing your accounts" notice every time you login. I've come across far fewer connection issues compared to Mint (~everyday).
There is a host of nifty features I never knew I wanted: custom rules; recurring expenses; split transaction; grey/green checkmark for unreviewed/reviewed transactions.
Jen (the founder) is also very responsive to feedback. It feels great to have your bug report addressed and fixed in a couple days. Keep up the excellent work!
The bit about the lack of a mobile app, and the over-compensating for it was a great illustration of guessing at the importance of features to users.
Something I'm dealing with a lot right now as I strip out incomplete features to get to a better MMP.
Thanks for posting.
While I commend the creator on a good looking and well-designed user interface - I will say that it boggles my mind when people give up their login credentials to unknown entities on the internet.
There is this fundamental disconnect between wanting to save yourself some money - but not realizing that you are setting yourself up for immense risks. You can lose far-far more by signing up to a site like this than what it could ever possibly benefit you.
The same applies to the founder as well - it is all fun to reach 1k MRR - but are you prepared to shoulder the responsibility that comes with managing people's login accounts and finance records? It is a massive risk.
Someone that forgets to set the development flag on their production service should not be in charge of accessing bank accounts.
This is no different than giving out legal or medical advice on the internet. Most people don't understand what they are getting into.
>That is until I realized that it was my own dumb fault because I accidentally left my Plaid environment set to development
One of the last things you do before launch is pay money to yourself by running a real payment with real money in production. An automated test for config is nice, but nothing beats actually doing the critical thing yourself before launching to the world.
> which only supported 100 connected accounts. My free test accounts which I had been diligently rationing up until this point had been depleted and Plaid was rightfully denying any new connections.
I use YNAB but I'm compelled to give this a try. I love the simplicity and I enjoy the transparency behind the product's development (not that it makes a difference while budgeting, but I'm a sucker for a personal touch). Really cool, I'm stoked to see how the trial goes. Thanks for sharing Jen. Keep up the great work.
I've tried YNAB and use Mint alongside Lunch Money and I'm super sold. I started using it when she first launched on HN and have been in love with it so far because it's super speedy and not as manual as YNAB. The way she handles recurring expenses is what made it for me. I set a task in my todo app to reconcile my transactions every day (usually only happens every week).
Currently use YNAB and it drives me bananas. The way it refuses to reconcile budgeted money for a CC against the interest/fees for that card as monthly payments often go out BEFORE interest is assessed for the month, requiring a convoluted interest bucket and juggling. I'll give this a shot.
The way I treat interest/fees is as just another expense. Then there's no juggling. But I manually enter all the transactions, I don't know how this works if you automatically get transactions, as it would depend on how the CC or other companies add interest onto the statement (as a regular transaction or separately). So once a day (typically, at least 3-4 times a week) I go into each account and YNAB and make sure everything is present. If interest or fees are present, I add those as transactions. YNAB properly accounts for it (if you budget money into the interest/fees categories) for the next CC payment.
I subscribe to this application, and I love it. I was not one of the first 100 to experience any of these difficulties, and the one bug I did experience was fixed by Jen two days after I pointed it out. In the mean time, Mint still has not deleted my account two months after I requested it...
It'll always be a struggle but it's not something I'm actively pushing for anyone to do. If you're comfortable with it, great! If you're not, I think I'd be the last person to change your mind.
The company is definitely real, but anyone with at least a few hundred bucks can incorporate. Building trust is a non-trivial thing, and I try to do that by putting my name and reputation behind the product and blogging transparently about the journey.
I didn't see anything on the Plaid flow authorizing the ability to charge my accounts or make transfers, so I'm assuming it's only limited to to Transaction data.
Really wish Plaid showed what APIs were being authorized in the flow...
I like the look of this. I would think about switching but I've paid a year of YNAB and I don't have the time to switch budgets right now.
But I will probably re-evaluate in 11 months when my YNAB expires.
Onboarding with the kind of products may take longer than the author realises. People like my self will need reminders that this product exists. It took years of YNAB ads for me to switch from HLedger and that really only happened because I needed something my wife could use after I got married and we merged finances.
This looks great and I'm inclined to give it a try. But do you have a privacy policy? I try to avoid services that sit between me and my financial institutions, as I worry they're building analytics off my spending patterns and selling it to third parties.
A promise we make from the beginning is we're definitely not ever going to be selling any of your data. We don't have an incentive to since we're selling the service directly to the user as a subscription.
I felt the same way, and it's part of why I made spendweek.com (a privacy-first, easy-to-use competitor to Lunch Money, YNAB with a single focus on saving money instead of keeping track of all your accounts). I am sort of proud of my privacy policy, so it's a link right at the top of the home page.
Side note about budgeting apps: anyone just not have the time to use them? I just use a spreadsheet to keep track of subscriptions and balances — can’t bother to “categorize” transactions which seems like such an arbitrary grouping exercise anyway.
I would change the footer of your website. The yellow background / white text combination is really hard on the eye. I would switch to a lighter shade of yellow for the background and black text instead.
my wife and I live in Tokyo and I have been using a programmed google sheet for over two years since we moved here to track our expenses and also use currency APIs to fetch rates and convert currencies in my spreadsheet. I am also originally from Canada. Looking at this encouraging post, I realize that maybe there's a big market for this since it was able to reach $1k MRR in 6 months!
I think I will also start working on something like this on the side that encapsulates my budgeting knowledge. Should be a fun project. Thanks for posting and good luck.
> Totally understandable that you'd like to avoid using services like Plaid. We have a lot of users who share the same sentiment, and also many international users who cannot use Plaid, so it's a priority to ensure the experience is without Plaid is still an enjoyable/practical one.
> We offer two other ways to bulk insert transactions: 1. we offer a CSV import tool, and 2. we are currently beta-testing our developer API so you could write your own integrations to import data
I'm always hesitant to use any of these services because (AFAIK) they need to store your banking credentials in order to access your account. The one exception I've found to this is Chase, which actually has an API. But even with providers like Plaid, its not clear whether the API is being used - I don't think it is, because the request does not go to Chase.
Is there a better way? Or a service that would let me enter credentials if I want to update data? Rather than storing them and updating automatically...
I am building a similar app as a hobby, and have done some research on this. I am also very interested in avoiding Plaid, mostly because they are very expensive, and require a signed contract with them for production use (which I don't want to do under my own name, and forming a LLC is also expensive).
Without Plaid, you only have three options: connect to bank yourself with OFX, let user upload OFX file, or let user upload CSV.
OFX stands for Open Financial Exchange, an open standard to programmatically access and transmit financial data - which is basically Plaid, but provided by the banks themselves, which as you can imagine is 1000x worse than Plaid.
Connecting to bank using OFX is really annoying. First, if you want to do it without storing the user's credential, you need to run the app in the user's computer, so forget about auto update in the background. Second, I don't know a single bank that publishes their OFX connection parameters, so people rely on crowdsourced data, which is iffy at best and totally unreliable at worst. Finally, OFX is a disastrous format to parse. It uses SGML (!!!) and require DTD to parse correctly (!!!!). Furthermore, banks' implementation are, as you can imagine, widely inconsistent. For example, each transaction is supposed to have a unique identifier. However, HSBC decided to reuse them, so you can't completely rely on it to dedupe your input.
To be fair, OFX has improved, and the latest revision abandoned SGML in favor of XML and introduced OAuth for authentication. But few bank support them, and among those that do, the API is still not public, so you probably need to talk to the bank's BD people to use them. For example, Chase says "Access to the Developer Ecosystem is currently by invitation only and limited to developers and businesses that have a relationship with Chase."
Most banks support downloading OFX file yourself, so you can just let user upload them manually. This is obviously a huge hassle for the users, and you have the same problem with parsing OFX format.
For the rare cases where OFX is not available, you can count on CSV. However, since there's no standard, you can't automate the import, and must require user input to annotate the columns, which further increase user friction.
In conclusion, in today's landscape, Plaid is a necessary evil if you want to have a seamless user experience. Anything that preserves user privacy will result in a 10x worse UX.
Totally understandable that you'd like to avoid using services like Plaid. We have a lot of users who share the same sentiment, and also many international users who cannot use Plaid, so it's a priority to ensure the experience is without Plaid is still an enjoyable/practical one.
We offer two other ways to bulk insert transactions:
1. we offer a CSV import tool, and
2. we are currently beta-testing our developer API (so you could write your own integration with Chase)
[+] [-] blakesterz|6 years ago|reply
"Lesson learned: People care about the narrative behind your product, so don't be afraid to tell your story!"
As someone who finds new things on HN all the time, I always check the "about" page, especially if it's something that isn't free. I'm surprised at how often the "About Us" isn't actually "About Anyone", there's no names, it's all just "Us" and "We".
[+] [-] DoreenMichele|6 years ago|reply
That's something I often get instructed to use when doing freelance writing. It is considered "professional" and "corporate speak."
The other thing is that women and minorities sometimes intentionally hide or downplay their personal details. One guy with a very "foreign" sounding name legally changed his name to something normal WASPy sounding because it was a barrier to doing business. I have seen at least one article on the front page of HN where a woman founder was being sexually harassed and generally treated terribly by clients when doing support chats. She changed her picture and her name to make it appear you were dealing with a man and that largely stopped.
I'm a woman and I've had to deal a lot with awful behavior from people, much of which is pretty clearly rooted in misogyny, basically. I'm still not sure what the best path forward is for me.
One part of me is clear that hiding or downplaying my gender to try to be successful just reinforces sexism. Another part of me has to wonder if that's a hill I really want to die on or would I rather be able to, you know, eat more regularly and what not.
[+] [-] rootusrootus|6 years ago|reply
I tend to assume that a lot of times this is because "We" is a lie, it's "Me" and they want to avoid revealing that it's someone's side project.
I could be completely wrong. I am a lot.
[+] [-] tr352|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stevekemp|6 years ago|reply
It is nice to see when it comes from an obvious solo-developer, but mostly these things are sanitized and improved over time.
[+] [-] jnfr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|6 years ago|reply
But the whole story would include the number of users that they have now.
[+] [-] stevoski|6 years ago|reply
IMO getting to that first $1K is harder than getting from $1K to $10K. Most first timers never make it to $1K at all.
[+] [-] twentyloops|6 years ago|reply
The app is a delight compared to Mint. The interface is simple, fast and snappy. You never get an annoying "Refreshing your accounts" notice every time you login. I've come across far fewer connection issues compared to Mint (~everyday).
There is a host of nifty features I never knew I wanted: custom rules; recurring expenses; split transaction; grey/green checkmark for unreviewed/reviewed transactions.
Jen (the founder) is also very responsive to feedback. It feels great to have your bug report addressed and fixed in a couple days. Keep up the excellent work!
[+] [-] jnfr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codysc|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jtbayly|6 years ago|reply
Nope. Might want to fix that.
https://lunchmoney.app/features/recurring
[+] [-] jnfr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ALLLOWERCASE|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] viklove|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidsawyer|6 years ago|reply
https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/150-jen-yip-of-lunch-mo...
[+] [-] jnfr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] glofish|6 years ago|reply
There is this fundamental disconnect between wanting to save yourself some money - but not realizing that you are setting yourself up for immense risks. You can lose far-far more by signing up to a site like this than what it could ever possibly benefit you.
The same applies to the founder as well - it is all fun to reach 1k MRR - but are you prepared to shoulder the responsibility that comes with managing people's login accounts and finance records? It is a massive risk.
Someone that forgets to set the development flag on their production service should not be in charge of accessing bank accounts.
This is no different than giving out legal or medical advice on the internet. Most people don't understand what they are getting into.
[+] [-] daenz|6 years ago|reply
One of the last things you do before launch is pay money to yourself by running a real payment with real money in production. An automated test for config is nice, but nothing beats actually doing the critical thing yourself before launching to the world.
[+] [-] darkerside|6 years ago|reply
You picked an odd time to stop reading!
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] steve_adams_86|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jnfr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colinloretz|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krisroadruck|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jtsummers|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jnfr|6 years ago|reply
Feel free to let me know if you run into anything during your trial!
[+] [-] jazzex|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jnfr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drastorguev|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jnfr|6 years ago|reply
The company is definitely real, but anyone with at least a few hundred bucks can incorporate. Building trust is a non-trivial thing, and I try to do that by putting my name and reputation behind the product and blogging transparently about the journey.
[+] [-] GrifMD|6 years ago|reply
Really wish Plaid showed what APIs were being authorized in the flow...
[+] [-] lbj|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jnfr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xupybd|6 years ago|reply
But I will probably re-evaluate in 11 months when my YNAB expires.
Onboarding with the kind of products may take longer than the author realises. People like my self will need reminders that this product exists. It took years of YNAB ads for me to switch from HLedger and that really only happened because I needed something my wife could use after I got married and we merged finances.
[+] [-] roughfalls|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jnfr|6 years ago|reply
A promise we make from the beginning is we're definitely not ever going to be selling any of your data. We don't have an incentive to since we're selling the service directly to the user as a subscription.
[+] [-] projproj|6 years ago|reply
Here's the basic manifesto of the SpendWeek framework in case anyone's interested: https://www.spendweek.com/blog/you-need-a-different-budget/
[+] [-] _xnmw|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] juped|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wakatime|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dunky11|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frequentnapper|6 years ago|reply
I think I will also start working on something like this on the side that encapsulates my budgeting knowledge. Should be a fun project. Thanks for posting and good luck.
[+] [-] kareemm|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] homero|6 years ago|reply
But then again I don't trust Plaid and avoid them at all costs.
[+] [-] jnfr|6 years ago|reply
Pasting from an earlier comment:
> Totally understandable that you'd like to avoid using services like Plaid. We have a lot of users who share the same sentiment, and also many international users who cannot use Plaid, so it's a priority to ensure the experience is without Plaid is still an enjoyable/practical one.
> We offer two other ways to bulk insert transactions: 1. we offer a CSV import tool, and 2. we are currently beta-testing our developer API so you could write your own integrations to import data
[+] [-] kayson|6 years ago|reply
Is there a better way? Or a service that would let me enter credentials if I want to update data? Rather than storing them and updating automatically...
[+] [-] HeavenFox|6 years ago|reply
Without Plaid, you only have three options: connect to bank yourself with OFX, let user upload OFX file, or let user upload CSV.
OFX stands for Open Financial Exchange, an open standard to programmatically access and transmit financial data - which is basically Plaid, but provided by the banks themselves, which as you can imagine is 1000x worse than Plaid.
Connecting to bank using OFX is really annoying. First, if you want to do it without storing the user's credential, you need to run the app in the user's computer, so forget about auto update in the background. Second, I don't know a single bank that publishes their OFX connection parameters, so people rely on crowdsourced data, which is iffy at best and totally unreliable at worst. Finally, OFX is a disastrous format to parse. It uses SGML (!!!) and require DTD to parse correctly (!!!!). Furthermore, banks' implementation are, as you can imagine, widely inconsistent. For example, each transaction is supposed to have a unique identifier. However, HSBC decided to reuse them, so you can't completely rely on it to dedupe your input.
To be fair, OFX has improved, and the latest revision abandoned SGML in favor of XML and introduced OAuth for authentication. But few bank support them, and among those that do, the API is still not public, so you probably need to talk to the bank's BD people to use them. For example, Chase says "Access to the Developer Ecosystem is currently by invitation only and limited to developers and businesses that have a relationship with Chase."
Most banks support downloading OFX file yourself, so you can just let user upload them manually. This is obviously a huge hassle for the users, and you have the same problem with parsing OFX format.
For the rare cases where OFX is not available, you can count on CSV. However, since there's no standard, you can't automate the import, and must require user input to annotate the columns, which further increase user friction.
In conclusion, in today's landscape, Plaid is a necessary evil if you want to have a seamless user experience. Anything that preserves user privacy will result in a 10x worse UX.
[+] [-] jnfr|6 years ago|reply
We offer two other ways to bulk insert transactions: 1. we offer a CSV import tool, and 2. we are currently beta-testing our developer API (so you could write your own integration with Chase)