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

Post by clairity » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 11:04 PM UTC

zomglings wrote: post #179

clairity wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

incidentally, you’re describing a key limitation of economic systems, whereby value as represented by price doesn’t reflect holistic utility to infinitely-complex humans and human societies. it’s true of basically everything, including stocks (efficient markets and all that), and forms the basis of a material critique of laissez faire capitalism.

This is interesting. The way I understood the work of von Neumann and Morgenstern on game theory, there is an extensive discussion of utility and the derived ordering on preferences. I interpret recent work on behavioral economics as building on their work to call into question the claim that one can easily estimate such a utility function for an economic agent in a manner invariant to the internal state of that agen…

Post by adammoelis » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 11:26 PM UTC

fatmandu wrote: post #181

This is really cool! From what I've seen (though my knowledge is certainly not comprehensive) so many of the fin-tech/challenger bank apps and options that have sprung up over the past few years don't really have that interesting hook to differentiate themselves from one another. It looks like you guys have something special here. (It at least caught my attention :)) I don't know the economics around acquisition/rete…

Post by adammoelis » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 11:30 PM UTC

abalaji wrote: post #176

adammoelis wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This excludes any value from prizes, which is the bulk of the value of Yotta. 0.2% is what you get if you never win a prize, ever.

I might get around to doing the math myself, but what would be the APY given the expected earnings I calculated above with an average American savings account of say $7,000.

Post by adammoelis » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 11:40 PM UTC

imtavi wrote: post #196

adammoelis wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for this feedback. Did you know that this is only to show your first name on a leaderboard if you win prizes above a certain threshold or did you take this to mean something else? Wondering if it's an issue of it not being clear what it means or if even knowing what it means, it still is a privacy concern for you.

I figured that it would allow my name to be shown upon winning any prizes, although there being a threshold doesn't impact my feelings about it. Either way, I'm not interested in people knowing anything about my savings, and I was surprised that this was default-on and buried in the Privacy section, where I only had clicked out of curiosity.

Post by adammoelis » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 11:46 PM UTC

borisandcrispin wrote: post #180

Some years ago I built a digital piggy bank to help people save money automatically. The psychology behind the product is really hard. The biggest challenges is that you only see the value of saving money after a long time. Everybody knows they should do it, but it's easier to postpone as it's painful and hard to do in a daily basis. Yotta solves this with an amazing approach. You get the long term reward of saving m…