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

news.ycombinator.com

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

#61

Post by imalex »

nichochar wrote: post #54

> - 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 les…

100% agreed. Yet another benefit of a single endpoint is that we rarely have to worry about backwards compatibility. It's a huge tax on engineering time to support those few users who're using a client that's six months old. We don't have that issue.

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

#62

Post by dontmitch »

BukhariH wrote: post #59
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…

This ^.

The startup costs are way higher with Yodlee and (before they shut off access) Intuit. Their APIs are also not nearly as friendly as Plaid's.

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

#63

Post by BukhariH »

mijoharas wrote: post #40

For people in the U.K. there is Cleo[0]. It is also a chatbot that provides insight into finances primarily via messenger. (Full disclosure: I work for Cleo :) ) [0] https://www.meetcleo.com

It's so great to see Cleo expanding and hiring people.

I remember first seeing Cleo way back when it was just the two founders (didn't they meet each other at some startup hackathon type event?) and they were rolling out cleo as a SMS based money assistant.

Looks like you guys shifted towards the Messenger platform. We (http://dispatch.pm/) looked in to the messenger platform but found it a bit restrictive for our purposes. How is it working out for you guys? Do you see yourselves sticking long term to messenger?

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

#64

Post by notwhoyouthink »

This is really neat; having just signed up I'm yet to see how useful it actually turns out to be. I'm really happy to see startups using Plaid.

I tinkered with building a budgeting app (think Simple's Goals feature but for any bank) and used Plaid. They were a super helpful bunch and the service "just works."

Along those same lines, I think it's great you're using Cordova. Sometimes people feel the need to do everything "the right way" because otherwise they won't get funding / their app won't take off / etc. In reality, there is no right way and you should use the tool that will do the best job for you. Sounds like Cordova was the right move here.

Congratulations on a really awesome product! I'm jealous I didn't think of it first :)

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

#65

Post by imalex »

mleonard wrote: post #56

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…

We built everything by hand. Cordova is our glue to the native side, but React is what really makes the chat stuff tick.

As for the Ruby/JSON stuff, that was also built by hand (actually the very first thing we built before we even had the UI in place). Whenever a conversation is started, the client gets the entire syntax tree from the server and evaluates it to make the conversation happen. We actually thought that pushing the state to the client actually made things easier since the server no longer has to manage the status of many concurrent conversations. It also means faster responses in poor network conditions.

I think the main reason for chatbot platforms to push things to the server is out of necessity because they work across many clients (Messenger, etc) where they don't control the client, and because they may be doing some heavy lifting with NLP that can only be done on the server.

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

#66

Post by notwhoyouthink »

notwhoyouthink wrote: post #64

This is really neat; having just signed up I'm yet to see how useful it actually turns out to be. I'm really happy to see startups using Plaid. I tinkered with building a budgeting app (think Simple's Goals feature but for any bank) and used Plaid. They were a super helpful bunch and the service "just works." Along those same lines, I think it's great you're using Cordova. Sometimes people feel the need to do everyth…

If anyone from Penny is still around, I have a question. In using the app an error occurred and Penny apologized and said someone would look at it shortly.

About 15 minutes later I got an email from an engineer saying my request got caught right in the middle of an upgrade and that's why it failed.

Great service and a fast response time, but I'm curious how much information is shared with the engineer when that happens? Considering that happened automatically without me requesting help, I'd hope extremely limited information (and absolutely no financial information) is given to the engineer assigned to the ticket.

How much information can an employee see about a particular user? How about when an error occurs? Is it possible for someone at Penny to see financial data, and if so what is the process for an employee querying that information about a user?

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

#69

Post by dontmitch »

notwhoyouthink wrote: post #64

This is really neat; having just signed up I'm yet to see how useful it actually turns out to be. I'm really happy to see startups using Plaid. I tinkered with building a budgeting app (think Simple's Goals feature but for any bank) and used Plaid. They were a super helpful bunch and the service "just works." Along those same lines, I think it's great you're using Cordova. Sometimes people feel the need to do everyth…

Appreciate it!

And just because we're working on this idea doesn't mean you can't too. It all comes down to execution. A little competition is healthy for everyone :)

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