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New YC Startup: Buxfer

buxfer.com

11–20 of 23 posts

Re: New YC Startup: Buxfer

#11
post #9

I think it looks great. Well done taking the concept and getting it to the "just right" stage without overdoing it. The start page/index is perfect- in 5 seconds I know pretty much what it does and whether or not it's something that I've been waiting for. Does anyone over there mind if I ask what the plans are for monetization? Paid subscriptions at some point? Tie-ins with other financial institutions like credit ca…

Your guesses are pretty accurate. And ordered from most - least preferable. :) We'd really hate to place ads particularly if they reduce usability and cleanliness of the site.

Re: New YC Startup: Buxfer

#12
post #10

Congrats to the founders for building and launching a very nice-looking site. At this point though, I'm more likely to use something like wesabe for keeping track of my spending since it understands my existing online bank accounts rather than requiring me to enter transactions by hand - that seems like a killer feature to me since my spending these days is overwhelmingly electronic. [disclaimer: I haven't used eithe…

This is Ashwin - one of Buxfer's founders. Glad you liked the look of the site. We do allow you to import transactions from your bank and credit card accounts - provided they are in Quicken or Microsoft Money format. Integrating directly with banks is on the cards as well. One of our goals (besides tracking shared expenses) is to be able to better reason about cash transactions. Our experience as students indicated w…

"Ultimately the goal is to understand *all* your expenses completely at a central location."

That's an excellent goal to have. Full integration of bank and credit card accounts would definitely be important for me.

The following may be outside of the scope of your product, but I would love to have a system that knew my finances and goals so well that it could give me useful advice such as "start buying product A, which you seem to use a lot of, in bulk from store B", "use the savings you have in account X to reduce the debt you have on credit card Y", "apply for this savings account that has a higher interest rate than the one you have now", etc. Such a system would have to understand things like credit cards that are zero-percent for a given period of time and so on. It would probably also need to know my credit rating so that it could guess what credit card offers I could realistically apply for.

To make this a little more concrete, my fiancee and I have spent a lot of time recently trying to figure out how we should best combine our various debts and assets. It's been very boring to be honest - lots of comparing interest rates that seems like it could be automated.

Good luck anyway!

Re: New YC Startup: Buxfer

#13
post #10

Congrats to the founders for building and launching a very nice-looking site. At this point though, I'm more likely to use something like wesabe for keeping track of my spending since it understands my existing online bank accounts rather than requiring me to enter transactions by hand - that seems like a killer feature to me since my spending these days is overwhelmingly electronic. [disclaimer: I haven't used eithe…

This is Ashwin - one of Buxfer's founders. Glad you liked the look of the site. We do allow you to import transactions from your bank and credit card accounts - provided they are in Quicken or Microsoft Money format. Integrating directly with banks is on the cards as well. One of our goals (besides tracking shared expenses) is to be able to better reason about cash transactions. Our experience as students indicated w…

Congrats guys. I had the same idea last summer, started to implement it and then never bothered to finish it. What you guys have looks good. Safari support would be nice though.

Re: New YC Startup: Buxfer

#16
post #10

Congrats to the founders for building and launching a very nice-looking site. At this point though, I'm more likely to use something like wesabe for keeping track of my spending since it understands my existing online bank accounts rather than requiring me to enter transactions by hand - that seems like a killer feature to me since my spending these days is overwhelmingly electronic. [disclaimer: I haven't used eithe…

This is Ashwin - one of Buxfer's founders. Glad you liked the look of the site. We do allow you to import transactions from your bank and credit card accounts - provided they are in Quicken or Microsoft Money format. Integrating directly with banks is on the cards as well. One of our goals (besides tracking shared expenses) is to be able to better reason about cash transactions. Our experience as students indicated w…

I just wanted to compliment your use of third party APIs for authentication. This definitely helps that initial adoption barrier.

How do you guys feel about OpenID?

Re: New YC Startup: Buxfer

#19
post #4

I'm imagining two intersecting lines. The positively sloped line represents the amount of time saved increasing as transactions of this kind increase. The other negatively sloped line is the cognitive overhead of using the system, i.e. higher when the number of transactions is small. I'm trying to figure out where exactly they cross, because while I like the system in theory I can't really see myself using it, at lea…

Well, that's a challenge for us, then. Let's see if we can make the y-coord of the overhead line start below the time-saved line :P

Also, we'd love to know what is causing your inertia at this moment.

Re: New YC Startup: Buxfer

#20
post #10

Congrats to the founders for building and launching a very nice-looking site. At this point though, I'm more likely to use something like wesabe for keeping track of my spending since it understands my existing online bank accounts rather than requiring me to enter transactions by hand - that seems like a killer feature to me since my spending these days is overwhelmingly electronic. [disclaimer: I haven't used eithe…

This is Ashwin - one of Buxfer's founders. Glad you liked the look of the site. We do allow you to import transactions from your bank and credit card accounts - provided they are in Quicken or Microsoft Money format. Integrating directly with banks is on the cards as well. One of our goals (besides tracking shared expenses) is to be able to better reason about cash transactions. Our experience as students indicated w…

Integrating directly with banks is on the cards

Did you mean 'in the cards' or are you an Agile/XP shop?

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