6 months in and $1k MRR: my biggest mistakes so far

https://lunchbag.ca/lunch-money-mistakes/

by jnfr • 6 years ago

454 161 6 years ago

blakesterz• 6 years ago

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".

stevekemp• 6 years ago

To be honest I assume 99% of startup-stories about their inspiration, their journey, and their motivation are just faked.

It is nice to see when it comes from an obvious solo-developer, but mostly these things are sanitized and improved over time.

bluetwo• 6 years ago

Yep. I get so tired of the "Shark Tank Template" in which entrepreneurs must pretend that they stumbled upon the need their product fills.

rootusrootus2• 6 years ago

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 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.

rhizome3• 6 years ago

Not to jump on you specifically, but seriously, why does this matter? I'm not saying "don't think about this thing I don't think people should talk about," I'm saying, "in what way is pronoun selection important?"

jnfr28• 6 years ago

I wouldn't go as far as to say "We" is a lie especially with malicious intent. In short, "we" can be an appropriate way to refer to a company as a whole. Btw this is a hotly discussed topic among solo founders (whether to use "I" or "We") so it's nothing you can be "wrong" about!

AmericanChopper• 6 years ago

"We" is a lie, it's "Me" and they want to avoid revealing that it's someone's side project.

Or if it’s a small group of co-founders and they don’t want to paint a target on their back, and have their employers suing for the IP they created on weekends and evenings.

tr3522• 6 years ago

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?

rcfox• 6 years ago

I've always dreamt of doing that, but someone else already used my name: Fox. Even if there weren't probably some kind of trademark issue, there's definitely a negative sentiment associated with it.

jkarneges• 6 years ago

HashiCorp :)

DoreenMichele16• 6 years ago

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.

hef198987• 6 years ago

Damn, I might be guilty as charged! Not long ago, I officially launched greenleaves.io, a logistics startup. The main issue I have with the about us thing is, that for now it is just me. So I use a lot of we and such (the co founder will join as soon as there is enough money to sustain a second person, we both have family, so...).

Would you to have quick look at https://greenleaves.io/about/? Because the last two weeks told me that I might be overthinking a couple of things...

wolco• 6 years ago

I would recommend hiding your gender. You'd be surprised at how awful women can be to each other. The only people I see activity holding back women is other women. I just don't understand it.

quickthrower22• 6 years ago

The “royal we” as they say!

z3t42• 6 years ago

If you get somewhat a big audience you will get weird messages anyway, it doesn't matter if you are a man or women. For an app that probably have hundred of apps just like it I think it helps go get personal, you want to build trust and bound.

jnfr28• 6 years ago

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.

amelius• 6 years ago

People care about the narrative behind your product, so don't be afraid to tell your story!

But the whole story would include the number of users that they have now.

HorizonXP• 6 years ago

Wow, great job! I love how you're documenting all of this, it's super inspiring. Congratulations on this!

jnfr28• 6 years ago

Thank you!

steve_adams_862• 6 years ago

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.

colinloretz• 6 years ago

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).

jnfr28• 6 years ago

Colin, that's awesome to hear! Thank you for your support from the beginning!

steve_adams_862• 6 years ago

Ahhh this speaks to me! Recurring expenses and the sheer manual labor required for YNAB makes it a chore. I don't expect software to be magic — the stuff I make certainly isn't — but it always feels like too much effort.

jnfr28• 6 years ago

Thanks for the kind words! If you run into anything during your trial, feel free to let me know!

codysc• 6 years ago

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.

nicoburns• 6 years ago

Yep! I took over a 3 year old product where we're rewriting/refactoring a lot of features that we're poorly engineered (and UX designed). For a bunch of them, the "rewritten" version is just stripping out the feature, because no one is using it or ever has used it.

hef198987• 6 years ago

I had that revelation last week. Well, actually earlier but it took a while to settle.

The plan was to build product until around May / June, simply because I wanted a little bit more sophistication than spreadsheets ( these would do the job, by the way). A chance encounter with a potential customer ended with me sending an offer after his most important question was "are your transports insured". Pretty much looks like my MVP is much more M than I assumed!

jnfr28• 6 years ago

Thanks for reading and I'm glad that bit helped you out! I was in my own head so much about the lack of mobile app and it was paralyzing at times. Good luck with your own product!

krisroadruck• 6 years ago

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.

Jtsummers• 6 years ago

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.

jnfr28• 6 years ago

Ah, that sounds complicated.

Feel free to let me know if you run into anything during your trial!

Guidii2• 6 years ago

WRT the android/ios app question: Why do you want to implement a native app? Seems like a significant investment if you're already meeting user needs with your PWA offering.

jnfr28• 6 years ago

Exactly :-)

It's definitely punted for now as I continue to round out the product. When the time comes and we're ready for an official mobile offering, we'll evaluate the current solutions out there (the landscape is always changing!)

Guidii2• 6 years ago

As a browser developer, I really do want to know why folks choose native over web. [Disclaimer: I'm not denying that there are sometimes valid reasons!]

If you do reach that point, I hope you share the factors contributing to your decision.

ericmcer• 6 years ago

The part about the lack of an app is a great insight, I think people do have a lot of fatigue around apps right now, and a really well done responsive page will work for most users.

Most of the features enabled by making an app are ones users are tired of: push notifications, mic/camera access, etc.

jnfr28• 6 years ago

Good point! Also, web apps are definitely making a comeback!

drastorguev• 6 years ago

Did you struggle in convincing people to share their account details with an unknown startup? What if you are fraudster and not a real company?

GrifMD• 6 years ago

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...

jnfr28• 6 years ago

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.

MapleWalnut• 6 years ago

It would be great if you could add an RSS feed to the blog.

jnfr28• 6 years ago

Noted! I know a friend of mine reads my blog via an RSS reader, so they still might be able to automatically parse it?

roughfalls• 6 years ago

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.

projproj2• 6 years ago

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.

Here's the basic manifesto of the SpendWeek framework in case anyone's interested: https://www.spendweek.com/blog/you-need-a-different-budget/

nikon• 6 years ago

There are more than 4 weeks in a month, should you not divide by 4.33?

DLarsen2• 6 years ago

Nice domain and nice concept. I too am among those with a home-grown approach to managing the budget. Mine is more of a spending journal than it is about planning or reconciling the entire budget, with motivations similar to those who would have a meal journal. I focus on the decision making process and self-evaluate spending according to my budget and my overall values.

My approach won't appeal to a lot of folks, but there are dozens of us who find it super useful: https://www.spendlight.com/#how-it-works

We're on the same page regarding privacy. Except for taking money for the subscription, I keep my hands off bank accounts. And for those wanting a complete air gap, there's always the printable paper version: https://www.spendlight.com/download/paper-spending-journal

jnfr28• 6 years ago

Cool approach! Best of luck!

jnfr28• 6 years ago

A very valid concern! Our Privacy Policy is listed here: https://lunchmoney.app/privacy

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.

jtbayly• 6 years ago

"A $5 monthly membership adds up to $72 per year."

Nope. Might want to fix that.

https://lunchmoney.app/features/recurring

viklove• 6 years ago

I don't even understand how you could get a number not ending in 5 or 0 and think it's remotely correct...

kaishiro• 6 years ago

Presumably because they used to have $6 in the copy (or in their head) and fat fingered it.

xutopia• 6 years ago

Probably because they AB tested multiple prices as the article states and settled on the current price and forgot to replace one mention of an older price in the copy. No biggie... doesn't mean that person is dumb.

ALLLOWERCASE• 6 years ago

Comical. A budgeting app that can't get basic math correct.

quickthrower22• 6 years ago

Compounding!

jnfr28• 6 years ago

Guess it's a good thing I'm not calculating totals by hand within the app! :)

jnfr28• 6 years ago

Haha thanks, great catch :) Just patched that up!

sydney1• 6 years ago

Thanks for sharing! I've been using Lunch Money for a couple months and really like it.

jnfr28• 6 years ago

Thank you for the support!

davidsawyer• 6 years ago

I'd recommend listening to the Indie Hackers Podcast episode that Jen was a guest on. Super enjoyable listen.

https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/150-jen-yip-of-lunch-mo...

jnfr28• 6 years ago

Thanks for the plug :)

projektfu2• 6 years ago

Are you on a path to get 5-10x users?

projektfu2• 6 years ago

What, that doesn’t matter? I’m just interested in how to go from hobby to career.

jazzex• 6 years ago

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...

jnfr28• 6 years ago

Awesome! Thank you for your support!

stevoski• 6 years ago

Hey Lunch Money founder, if you are reading these comments, a big congratulations on reaching $1K so quickly! I loved reading your story so far.

IMO getting to that first $1K is harder than getting from $1K to $10K. Most first timers never make it to $1K at all.

ronyfadel3• 6 years ago

To be clear, 1k to 10k in recurring revenue (SaaS style). I sell one time purchase apps, and I’m not sure I’ll be able to scale from what I make (2k$/month) to even 3k$/month any time soon.

rhizome3• 6 years ago

To be sure, what you have is MR, not MRR.

hopia2• 6 years ago

Can I ask why you picked this model instead of a subscription based model?

jnfr28• 6 years ago

Thanks for the kind words! And that's encouraging to hear seeing as getting to $1k was quite the journey to me!

homero• 6 years ago

How close is this to Mint? I'd be interested in paying for a Mint alternative. They've really gone downhill plus they sell my information.

But then again I don't trust Plaid and avoid them at all costs.

jnfr28• 6 years ago

Here's a quick page on Lunch Money vs Mint: https://lunchmoney.app/compare/mint-alternative

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

lbj• 6 years ago

What a trooper. Well written, very interesting journey and very forgivable mistakes for a startup. Hope this takes off big time

jnfr28• 6 years ago

Thank you for the incredibly kind words!

kayson3• 6 years ago

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...

HeavenFox• 6 years ago

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.

kayson3• 6 years ago

I reached a pretty similar conclusion investigating OFX to add support to Firefly III. I think best case scenario would be to setup OFX connections to the institutions that require the user to enter credentials and manually refresh data. Unfortunately you wouldn't get the benefit of automatic budgeting/spending alerts, but in my case, for just tracking spending, it would work. Right now I have to export each account to csv monthly, and import to Firefly. Fortunately the import settings are saved as JSON so as long as the format doesnt change it works well enough.

I have read in some places that you can get OFX access as an individual if you call the right customer service dept.

jnfr28• 6 years ago

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)

kayson3• 6 years ago

I'll give the CSV import a shot, thanks!

daenz3• 6 years ago

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.

darkerside• 6 years ago

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.

You picked an odd time to stop reading!

daenz3• 6 years ago

I don't see how this changes anything? If they had attempted to do a production import of their live bank account, it would have been denied, same as what happened to their customers, and they would have caught it before the mistake affected real users.

xupybd• 6 years ago

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.

jnfr28• 6 years ago

Thanks! In a year, the product will likely be more fleshed out, so it'll be a good time.

IMO, onboarding with YNAB specifically would take longer than most other budgeting apps, since on top of getting used to the interface, you also need to get used to their very specific method of budgeting. With Lunch Money, I've heard from users coming from YNAB that it's easier to get set up likely because we've approached organizing transactions and budgeting in a more pragmatic and flexible way.

Love to hear what you think when/if you ever decide to join Lunch Money!

dunky11• 6 years ago

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.

Someone1234• 6 years ago

The contrast (1.81) is also so low it isn't considered accessible at even the worst tier. And while the legal status of accessibility requirements is a complex topic, in terms of user experience, good accessibility normally means good experience (particularly color contrast, there are a lot of color blind people, or older people with diminished eyesight).

jnfr28• 6 years ago

Thanks for the tip! Great reminder that I need to be more mindful of these things.

c256• 6 years ago

I clicked on the link thinking that this was about the card game “Lunch Money”. Disappointed.

huangc10• 6 years ago

Loved the UI and signed up for your 14 day trial. Looking forward to using your web app and seeing if it can benefit my life or not.

frequentnapper2• 6 years ago

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.

kareemm• 6 years ago

Fyi TillerHQ does this.

frequentnapper2• 6 years ago

thanks that looks interesting. I realize there's probably a lot of solutions in this space. I probably won't implement a spreadsheet solution like TillerHQ. I am thinking more in line with an app and thinking of features to differentiate the app from run of the mill personal expenditure tracking apps.

twentyloops• 6 years ago

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!

jnfr28• 6 years ago

Thanks for the awesome review and for your continued support!

_xnmw• 6 years ago

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.

wakatime• 6 years ago

Businesses already do bookkeeping as required for taxes, so categorizing is a must. We use bench.co for bookkeeping.

juped• 6 years ago

Plaid's API, and probably other similar APIs, already returns broad categories when you query bank or card transactions.

everybodyknows• 6 years ago

Suggestion: A heavier font, in darker grey or black. Hard to read as is, on my 7" tablet screen, with Firefox.

CodiePetersen• 6 years ago

Honestly seems like you are doing well and that many of these had quick solutions. Great job.

glofish• 6 years ago

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.

graeme• 6 years ago

Isn’t it Plaid that manages all the logins?

Still a security risk, but I don’t think the dev is the risk.

antigirl• 6 years ago

Jesus, its comments like this that will stop future developers from documenting their stories honestly or even having an About Me page. As already pointed out, Plaid takes care of this not the dev. Sheesh

sudhirj• 6 years ago

Plaid is handling the credentials, and they work with banks with their cooperation. This is FUD - it’s no different from accusing projects using Stripe of hoarding credit card numbers.

fragmede• 6 years ago

Or they do, they've done the calculus, and their threat models are different from yours. Ideally, yes, Bank of America, Chase, and Wells Fargo would make an API and give OAUTH (or SAML) access for mint.com to your bank account. But that problem's been around forever, and they trust lunchbag.ca with their login creds. You could fake a site similar to lunchbags' and grab a bunch of login creds and steal all their money? Go for it.

The issue here is the banks: until they change, the status quo here is stupid - you, the user of mint/lunchbag/etc, have to trust an agent with your password.

How do I convince Bank Of America that it's worth their time to work on giving 3rd parties API access to my account?

https://xkcd.com/364/

6 months in and $1k MRR: my biggest mistakes so far

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