dontmitch

Heh, don't blame you. We did fight for and win approval to write a forward to our privacy policy to make it more accessible. Outside of that, we didn't want to innovate in an area we know very little about and instead deferred to what our law firm told us we should be doing.

Still around!

Sorry about the bug. We've been deploying all day and made the mistake of pushing something that received new server content before the updated clients themselves had time to propagate. I'm guessing that's what you ran into.

A bit about our process: we catch all errors (server and client) using Bugsnag and pipe them to Slack. Those errors are basically stack traces that hopefully give us enough context to reproduce and fix the bug. If the error was user facing (e.g. interrupted your conversation), we also open a ticket in Enchant that links back to the Bugsnag error. That way we track if/when a user hits a bug and can reach out to let them know when it's been fixed, or collect more info on the context surrounding the bug.

Like most customer support portals, Enchant can be populated with information about the person's account. In our case, we can see things like your first name (that's all we collect from you), when you joined, your phone platform, your app version, and which bank types you've attempted to link.

Does that answer your question?

As for financial data: we don't store your credentials, ever (thanks to Plaid's API, we don't have to). We do store your transactions so that we can serve them to you in-app (hopefully that's not a surprise?), along with the bank type and balance information that you see in your accounts tab. Since they're in our DB, engineers on the team can query that information. We do that on a need-to-know basis only; for example, if someone has asked us to investigate a bug they ran into, or why their numbers look off.

Hope that helps!

yep!

Appreciate it!

And just because we're working on this idea doesn't mean you can't too. It all comes down to execution. A little competition is healthy for everyone :)

This ^.

The startup costs are way higher with Yodlee and (before they shut off access) Intuit. Their APIs are also not nearly as friendly as Plaid's.

Just looked back at my notes.

That first Show HN post sent about 700 unique people to our website, of which about 100 clicked the download button and roughly 40 signed up. That may seem like a small number, but it was huge for us at the time. It gave us a lot of new information about where people would fall off in our funnel, uncovered some edge cases we hadn't accounted for, etc.

That FAQ is a little out of date—I'll update right now. Once you remove duplicates, we support closer to 8-10k banks through Plaid, and we have two monetization strategies (monetization was our focus at YC):

1. A premium subscription service that gets you some power features within Penny; we just launched that today. 2. Recommending affiliate products.

It's important to note that affiliates can be a mixed bag. Mint.com was the product that turned me onto Betterment when I was hunting around for ways to invest my money; I'm legitimately thankful that they did since I love Betterment. At Penny, we think we can tastefully and in good faith recommend some affiliate products. Those recommendations fit perfectly into our coaching model too.

Unfortunately, most personal finance companies start pushing credit cards on people that don't need them because it pays the most money. We're building Penny in a way that disincentives crappy behavior like that.

Agreed. We've reached out to Google a couple of times asking if they can display a more helpful message than "not compatible with an of your devices" when the real reason is "Only available in the US". Not a great UX.

A couple reasons:

1. Those other platforms didn't really exist when we first launched. Messenger launched their platform about nine months after we started Penny. 2. (The real reason) We still don't think we can provide a better experience via a chatbot platform than we can with a standalone app.

To motivate that second point:

The benefit to a chatbot platform is that you meet people where they already are, and "signup" generally has lower overhead.

The downsides are many, though. Most platforms don't allow for things like securely submitting username and passwords, e.g. when connecting a bank account (although Messenger is starting to allow webviews, which can be repurposed to handle this). Browsing your aggregated transaction history, changing the category of a transaction, viewing your balances, etc. are all poor fits for a chat interface (again, Messenger has only recently started to address this). Pre-populated responses aren't first-class citizens in most chatbot platforms. We get more control over the UI, e.g. when displaying animated graphs, in a standalone app than we do within chat. There is/was no way to lock individual chatbot threads behind passcodes to protect your privacy... and on and on :)

Finally, there's also the problem of discoverability, which no chatbot platform has solved in a convincing manner. Downloading a standalone app is a pain, but once you get over that initial hurdle we think the experience is still significantly better than delivering Penny over a chatbot platform.

Wow, that's awesome to hear!

For what it's worth, we don't think the premium experience (Penny+) is a good fit for most of our users. Locking extra complexity behind a premium version was actually our way of keeping the core experience simple (and encouraging people to not mindlessly turn on extra features unless they're confident they want them). We think the simplicity of the core experience is one of the main reasons people continue to use Penny over time; complexity begets churn, even if users ask for that complexity. We eschew traditional budgets for the same reasons.

Penny (https://www.pennyapp.io) | San Francisco | ONSITE - Hiring for a well-rounded engineer to join our three-person team working in the personal finance space. - You can expect to touch every aspect of the business and get serious equity. - Stack: React frontend, Ruby backend, iOS/Android apps, some ML, etc. - More details: https://www.pennyapp.io/jobs

I'm one of the two co-founders. Feel free to email me directly if you're interested: mitch ~at~ pennyapp.io.

That doesn't work all that well on mobile apps, since users first have to download a new app before you can record the referral code. Having a link click persist through that process is nearly impossible.

Great point. Typing emojis on non-mobile devices is a pain right now. Cmd+Ctrl+Space on Macs brings up an emoji-picker, but I doubt many people know that.

I guess this should be scoped to mobile-only applications. Web services can also use traditional referral links so a memorable referral code isn't as big of a UX win.

At this point, emoji support is almost ubiquitous (at least in the US). I'd imagine that within the next couple of years emoji support will be within a rounding error of 100%.

You'd obviously want to limit the set of available emoji to avoid any ambiguities but assuming you do—is there anything stopping their use in frequent flier numbers, passwords, etc.?

Sorry for not being more clear: the responses are just buttons that you click. For the majority of any conversation, there's no typing involved.

There are actually three major players in the transaction aggregation space: Intuit, Yodlee, and Plaid. We use Plaid, but it works the same as Intuit. In fact, Plaid has a partnership with Intuit to backfill support for bank accounts.

We never store any credentials on our system, and our access is read only. I can go on for days about why I think our system is more secure than, say, Chase[0], but if you trust Mint's practices it's probably sufficient to say that we use an almost identical system.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_JPMorgan_Chase_data_breac...

That was our understanding too.

One thing to clarify: it's just me and one other guy (imalex) working on this, although we're hoping to hire another person soon. We're not trying to screw anyone over with the privacy policy. We just don't know anything about legalese, so we relied on existing terminology.

We wish. A couple things that are stopping us: the transaction aggregator that we use (Plaid) doesn't support international banks, and the UK/EU in particular have stringent regulations on connecting to a bank account from a third party service.

There's actually not a lot of typing involved since the responses are pre-populated for you. You can see an example of what that looks like on the marketing page.

Fair point. Right now we're not making any money off of users. Down the line, we'd like to explore freemium features or perhaps a subscription model. We don't want to or plan to sell your data.

And for completeness: in the US the competition includes Level Money and BillGuard.

Mitch here, one of the co-founders.

I don't want to throw Mint under the bus: I used it for ~6 years before starting to work on Penny and it's a great tool for people that enjoy spreadsheets and crunching numbers (myself included). That said, it can be pretty intimidating to just to about everyone else. Penny requires a lot less effort on your part, since the number crunching is all done behind the scenes to generate cool insights.

To answer the specific question of why _you_ might switch: Mint hasn't really improved beyond the addition of more ads in the past four to five years. It's painfully slow (at least for me) and still has not learned that my gym membership is not software.

Do you think charging on day 1 is typically the smarter route (e.g. to better validate the product, prove the unit economics, etc.)?

We've been struggling with the question of when to monetize since there are also some strong points in favor of waiting. Some of those include avoiding a local maximum by way of pigeonholing yourself early, making it easier to reach scale and get feedback from a broader market, etc.

We'd love to hear your thoughts on this.

edit: To clarify, we have two monetization strategies that we think are especially viable—the question is when should a startup pull the trigger on their monetization strategy.

We've heard similar feedback on the security front before, so we'll get to work on adding more clarity around that.

Can you enumerate what else you'd like to know about how the app works?

I'm gonna try to respond to your points without being preachy about the product: forgive me if I overstep.

Mint has over 100 different ways to categorize a single transaction. That makes for an incredibly flexible system if you're willing to put in the leg work, but at the end of the day I wasn't seeing a lot of value add from knowing that 24% of my spending was on travel or that I exceeded my average monthly spending on gifts by 215%. The biggest benefit for me was just seeing all of my transactions in one place (fwiw, I used Mint for 6 years).

With Penny, you have fast access to all of your transactions in one place (the left pane is a history screen), and you can categorize them into one of five categories. But, the main value add is giving you context on that spending. Graphs are great, but graphs that are interpreted in a meaningful way are better. Essentially, the bigger vision is to do for finances what Google Now is doing for day to day life: pushing you useful information (now cards, or in our case conversations with Penny) rather than you having to ask for it.

That said, we know it's a huge ask to convince people to try something new when it comes to their finances, so totally understand where you're coming from.

btw, to clarify: when you go to the website you should be seeing animations unless you're coming from iOS 7. If that's not the case, lmk and I'll figure out what's going on.

anything in particular you wanted to know? I can answer things here and or incorporate them into the website later.

For context: totally agree with your point. we tried to avoid overwhelming visitors since they're notoriously hard to keep engaged, but the marketing page was just a first pass at best.