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Launch HN: Penny (YC W17) – a personal finance coach

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Re: Launch HN: Penny (YC W17) – a personal finance coach

#51

Post by felideon »

tbirrell wrote: post #25
kevinmannix wrote: post #20

What 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 sho…

To add on to this, even with the reticence many of us approach Mint with, it has the reputation of Intuit behind it. What can you say to alleviate these fears? (directed at Penny)

You forget that Mint was pretty successful prior to the Intuit acquisition. Their messaging was validated prior to launch, and it seems like Penny App took a page from that messaging with the use of "bank-grade security".

[1] https://blog.kissmetrics.com/how-mint-grew/

Re: Launch HN: Penny (YC W17) – a personal finance coach

#52

Post by DLarsen »

rgovind wrote: post #45

For some of us in Bay area, we pay $5000 in rent, utilities, day care etc. I, by and large can't optimize on these things. I can only optimize on groceries, restaurant eating, vacation/weekend outings and few things like that. So, I hope these personal finance apps remove rent, utilities, day care etc from their analysis. Also, one feature I would pay for is this. When I am entering a Walmart or Target or Whole Foods…

I've had a project on the back-burner for a while which tried to embrace this notion that most of your day-to-day transactions are outside the scope of optimization. Instead of importing all the transactions into view, it only showed transactions in categories where you were trying to change (or measure) spending behavior. If, for example, I don't intend to change my home water consumption... then in the context of personal finances I really want that left out of my tool.

Re: Launch HN: Penny (YC W17) – a personal finance coach

#53

Post by felideon »

This looks great, can't wait to try it out.

I hadn't heard of Plaid until now. It seems like they are stealing Yodlee's thunder. Is there a reason why Yodlee is falling out of favor with the new fintech generation of startups?

Another question, do you rely on Plaid's categorization, or did you write your own ML for the categorization?

Re: Launch HN: Penny (YC W17) – a personal finance coach

#54

Post by nichochar »

> - We built Penny as a web app (Cordova). It pretty much guarantees that we don’t get featured by Apple or Google, but it allows us to iterate really, really quickly. All users always have the latest version, and we can update the app in two minutes flat. We think the tradeoff is worth it.

Ah, yes, the reason why we designed the web the way it is. I really think this subject isn't tackled enough. Apple, and to a lesser extent google have ruined all the progress we made around continuous application updates through their stupid App paradigm. It boggles my mind that everyone is OK with it, when it's obviously terrible for the end user, compared to the web model where a URL just points to a resource, and you have full publishing power over that resource.

Re: Launch HN: Penny (YC W17) – a personal finance coach

#56

Post by mleonard »

Great write-up and thoughtful responses here on HN.

Very interesting that you've used Cordova. For a simple chat-based app that approach makes a lot of sense as you can push updates any time. Would you be able to share any chat-ui cordova libraries you've used or anything helpful in that regard? Or was it all custom built? Would you choose cordova if you were building the same app now or is there something else you'd consider using?

Also: your ruby DSL sounds interesting. Do you push the entire json syntax tree to the client? Chatbot platforms typically work by sending a user's chat message to a server then responding... so I'm interested how you've found doing things locally with a json syntax tree (assuming that's what you meant) and what were the pros/cons/trade-offs of that approach?

Re: Launch HN: Penny (YC W17) – a personal finance coach

#58

Post by quadrature »

adennis4 wrote: post #49
quadrature wrote: post #48

on your landing page the example with the monthly comparison has "3nd" instead of "3rd" in the dialog.

Whoa! Great catch. We'll need to record a new animation. Thanks for pointing it out.

while you're here, i'd love to know more about what your data infrastructure is like.

Re: Launch HN: Penny (YC W17) – a personal finance coach

#59

Post by BukhariH »

felideon wrote: post #53

This looks great, can't wait to try it out. I hadn't heard of Plaid until now. It seems like they are stealing Yodlee's thunder. Is there a reason why Yodlee is falling out of favor with the new fintech generation of startups? Another question, do you rely on Plaid's categorization, or did you write your own ML for the categorization?

Back when I was working on a fintech product (this is around 2 years ago) what pushed us away from Yodlee was the appalling pricing.

They wanted us to pay a hefty initial sign up fee ($XXXXX), pay monthly fee per user ($0.XX) and also they had minimums. Being students at the time we were just shocked and disheartened until we saw Plaids great pricing (free whilst in development and $500pm to set the product live) and tried to convince them to come to London which they told us was only 6 months away. It's been 2 years and they're still not here lol.

But there are a few more options in London now. I bumped into Steve Graham way back at HN's London event and he was working on Teller (https://teller.io/) which is now in beta and works pretty well from my testing.

There's also Saltedge (https://www.saltedge.com/) which is used by a few London fintech apps and I believe they have a startup package that a few apps like Cleo (https://meetcleo.com/) started on.

Some new startups still choose Yodlee though like moneybox (https://www.moneyboxapp.com) but they raised significantly more that we had (we had a very very small grant from our University).

Re: Launch HN: Penny (YC W17) – a personal finance coach

#60

Post by imalex »

rgovind wrote: post #45

For some of us in Bay area, we pay $5000 in rent, utilities, day care etc. I, by and large can't optimize on these things. I can only optimize on groceries, restaurant eating, vacation/weekend outings and few things like that. So, I hope these personal finance apps remove rent, utilities, day care etc from their analysis. Also, one feature I would pay for is this. When I am entering a Walmart or Target or Whole Foods…

Yup, Penny tries to focus on your discretionary spending since that's where you have the most agency. She tells you both your non-bills spending (assuming bills are mandatory) and your total spending, so you can get a sense of your spending that isn't basic needs. We also have spending goals which are curated to be mostly discretionary spending (eating out, department stores, etc).
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