Not compatible with any of my devices.
I guess that is because my devices are located in Europe. (I have a Samsung S7, english setup and an older Tab).
Launch HN: Penny (YC W17) – a personal finance coach
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Re: Launch HN: Penny (YC W17) – a personal finance coach
#12From the Privacy policy ( https://www.pennyapp.io/privacy.html ): > We will never sell any information that could identify you for marketing purposes, and we only share limited amounts of information with third-party services on a need-to-know basis. Very nice! It doesn't show up in HN but they've even gone out of their way to bold the relevant bits. From the FAQ: > Penny supports over 15,000 banks in the United Stat…
Both Credit Karma and Mint make their revenue by offering financial products that might help you based on your financial profile so I imagine that can be fairly lucrative.
Re: Launch HN: Penny (YC W17) – a personal finance coach
#13What parts of your app and service do you update outside of the App Store/Google Play? Do those things get included in changelogs somewhere?
Other co-founder here:
Since we use Cordova, the entire app is a website. So when you open up the app, it launches a webview pointed to a website that we deploy to like any other website. That means we can change any client logic and it'll go out in minutes. We also have a conversation DSL that lets us make conversation flow tweaks in under a minute, and since the bulk of the app is conversations, that allows us to move super quickly.
Great question about the changelogs! Since we don't have a longer cadence between feature pushes since we're deploying all the time, we have to go back and look at historical pushes whenever we need to write a changelog. We typically roll up all the little features and announce them whenever we make a new version in the app store. On top of that, we usually announce new features inside Penny, where she'll give a little intro on the new functionality. That also doubles as onboarding to the new feature if needed.
Re: Launch HN: Penny (YC W17) – a personal finance coach
#14From the Privacy policy ( https://www.pennyapp.io/privacy.html ): > We will never sell any information that could identify you for marketing purposes, and we only share limited amounts of information with third-party services on a need-to-know basis. Very nice! It doesn't show up in HN but they've even gone out of their way to bold the relevant bits. From the FAQ: > Penny supports over 15,000 banks in the United Stat…
Both Credit Karma and Mint make their revenue by offering financial products that might help you based on your financial profile so I imagine that can be fairly lucrative.
Ah so it's high end affiliate revenue as presumably you've got the customers financial background? Interesting.
Re: Launch HN: Penny (YC W17) – a personal finance coach
#15Not compatible with any of my devices. I guess that is because my devices are located in Europe. (I have a Samsung S7, english setup and an older Tab).
Sorry about that! Since we only link to US banks, we're only available in the US. Hopefully international expansion will be a thing, but we're a little too small for that at this point.
Re: Launch HN: Penny (YC W17) – a personal finance coach
#16By the way, this is US only. We only link to US banks, so it wouldn't be very useful to download the app in a different region. Our team is pretty small, so international expansion probably won't be in the radar for awhile.
Re: Launch HN: Penny (YC W17) – a personal finance coach
#17Why did you make the decision to not be on any other chatbot platforms? If that's the primary interaction mode, it seems odd to launch a separate app just to chat with a singular bot.
Re: Launch HN: Penny (YC W17) – a personal finance coach
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Both Credit Karma and Mint make their revenue by offering financial products that might help you based on your financial profile so I imagine that can be fairly lucrative.
Ah so it's high end affiliate revenue as presumably you've got the customers financial background? Interesting.
Yes. You can do all kinds of segmentation and credit risk controls to target certain customer segments.
Re: Launch HN: Penny (YC W17) – a personal finance coach
#19I have been using Penny since the second launch on Show HN and have been absolutely loving it. Hands down solves the number one problem I have with Mint, et al which is an overload of information. The screen with all my purchases auto-categorized (not always right but close enough) is fantastic and I depend on it. The simple chat options are exactly what I want to know and only a few clicks away. The gifs are also su…
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.
Re: Launch HN: Penny (YC W17) – a personal finance coach
#20What are the security concerns? What are you doing to protect user data? One of the biggest drawbacks to Mint I've encountered from friends is that they don't feel that the account data they provide is safe, or that it has a large possibility of being exposed - this has led many of my peers to not use Mint (personally, I've been using Mint for 3+ years).
That being said, very willing to try this. Personal finance should be a priority for all! Congrats on the launch.