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Launch HN: Yotta Savings (YC S20) – Behavioral psychology to help people save

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Re: Launch HN: Yotta Savings (YC S20) – Behavioral psychology to help people save

#121

Post by CJefferson »

lukevp wrote: post #114
alexbanks wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should definitely rethink this. You're a savings account. Be honest (read: obvious and clear) with your customers.

It’s common knowledge that jackpots have an annuity or a lesser lump sum, that’s how lotteries work already. This is really just a way to gamify savings as a lottery, I think it’s a great idea and may sign up. I have a really low yield savings account right now anyway and was planning to sign up for an online high yield account.

Yes, but here you can't get the annuity. You can only the lesser lump sum, which after taxes won't be enough to get the annuity.

Re: Launch HN: Yotta Savings (YC S20) – Behavioral psychology to help people save

#122

Post by adammoelis »

ac29 wrote: post #99
adammoelis wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point. This wasn't intentionally made to be a short period of time. We will change this to allow for a longer period of time.

For reference, winner of large lottery prizes generally have 6 months to a year to collect winnings.

Thanks this is a helpful reference point for us

Re: Launch HN: Yotta Savings (YC S20) – Behavioral psychology to help people save

#123

Post by alexbanks »

lukevp wrote: post #114
alexbanks wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should definitely rethink this. You're a savings account. Be honest (read: obvious and clear) with your customers.

It’s common knowledge that jackpots have an annuity or a lesser lump sum, that’s how lotteries work already. This is really just a way to gamify savings as a lottery, I think it’s a great idea and may sign up. I have a really low yield savings account right now anyway and was planning to sign up for an online high yield account.

You're talking about lotteries. I'm talking about savings accounts. My point is that savings accounts should be held to a higher standard, because obviously.

Re: Launch HN: Yotta Savings (YC S20) – Behavioral psychology to help people save

#124

Post by jonfw »

RhysU wrote: post #105
adammoelis wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the alternative you're referring to here saving money and using the interest generated to buy traditional lottery tickets?

Yes, presumably it should be more efficient because this company is not taking a cut. Saving less and using the remainder to buy tickets is another possibility. No need to wait until the tickets are interest financed.

The lottery takes an incredibly high cut

Re: Launch HN: Yotta Savings (YC S20) – Behavioral psychology to help people save

#125

Post by adammoelis »

gruez wrote: post #82
adammoelis wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. In order to offer prizes via a game of chance, you can't require "consideration" and so there needs to be a way to enter for free

I wonder how effective that is. eg. you can make it so you get 1 entry for free, but make it so you get 1000 entries per $1 deposited so all the free contestants get buried by all the paid contestants who have millions of entries.

Yeah the lower the dollars saved per ticket, the less valuable the free entries. You're 100% right on that point

Re: Launch HN: Yotta Savings (YC S20) – Behavioral psychology to help people save

#126

Post by mathrawka »

Sounds interesting, but seeing as you are a VC funded startup, I have some reservations about this. How do you plan to sustain the business?

From the privacy policy, I see this:

> In addition, we may, from time to time, offer promotions with various businesses, websites, mobile applications or third parties, which may include opportunities for you to earn deposits within your Yotta account.

It sounds like you are just sharing our information with advertisers.

Edit: I know you addressed this in the post, but I don't see earning money on interest in accounts as a very sustainable business from a VC point of view.

Re: Launch HN: Yotta Savings (YC S20) – Behavioral psychology to help people save

#127

Post by adammoelis »

basch wrote: post #118
adammoelis wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We haven't thought about this yet but that's interesting. What kind of index fund gamification do you have in mind?

There was a company, forcerank, that was fantasy stock market. Rank stocks based on expected performance, and winner gets points, with cash prizes. They ran into a little SEC trouble, so careful with gamificating investing. https://www.sec.gov/news/pressrelease/2016-216.html That said, it was a fun idea. Instead of picking lottery numbers, ranking tickers in the right order, and then pulling a date out of a hat? Some…

Interesting I'd never seen this. We will look into this for sure. Thanks for sharing

Re: Launch HN: Yotta Savings (YC S20) – Behavioral psychology to help people save

#128

Post by adjkant »

onnnon wrote: post #22

The grand prize will be paid as a one-time, lump sum payment of $5,800,000. This is the current present cash value of a $10,000,00, 40 year annuity. The odds of winning this amount are 1 in 3,277,899,625.

For anyone that's curious, if you put enough money in to buy every single possible ticket (81B), you would get about an APY of 0.00125% per week for an annual APY of 0.06%

Not very useful but I guess if you have 81B in cash laying around, it makes sense to put your money in Yotta over some large banks! Of course that should probably not be in cash but hey, I'm not going to tell you what to do with your 81B dollars.

Re: Launch HN: Yotta Savings (YC S20) – Behavioral psychology to help people save

#129

Post by adammoelis »

mathrawka wrote: post #126

Sounds interesting, but seeing as you are a VC funded startup, I have some reservations about this. How do you plan to sustain the business? From the privacy policy, I see this: > In addition, we may, from time to time, offer promotions with various businesses, websites, mobile applications or third parties, which may include opportunities for you to earn deposits within your Yotta account. It sounds like you are jus…

On the privacy policy front, this is somewhat boilerplate language that is just there to allow us to have partnerships with other companies to attract deposits, which we haven't explored yet. But we didn't mean for it to be anything related to using information with advertisers.

On the VC side - the Premium Bond program has generated $100 billion in deposits. The UK is a fifth the size of the U.S in terms of population. Premium Bonds isn't completely apples to apples (it's run by the gov and has been around for 60 years), but if we can capture Premium Bond magic in the US, earning small interest on a massive deposit base can be a big business. We also plan to offer other revenue-generating banking services as we grow, like other neobanks have done.

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