Hey @dontmitch and @imalexquach, checked out Penny this morning, excited to give it a try! A few questions for you:
1) How do you guys make money?
2) Can you add a password or PIN code needed to open the app so others don't use my phone and dive into my finances?
3) How do I change the category that something's in?
4) How'd you guys build this? React Native?
@zackshapiro great questions!
1. Our cost per user is pretty low right now, so we haven't monetized yet. That said, our strong preference is to make money using a subscription model. Mint, Level, etc. all make money by selling your information to advertisers; it's great in that allows them to provide their services for free, but it also doesn't sit well with us.
2. We've gotten quite a few requests for this, so we'll be adding that option soon.
3. When in your history view, click on the category icon for any transaction. That will let you quickly switch between different categories. The third animation on our marketing page (https://www.pennyapp.io/) has an example. (We'll also be adding better education around this.)
4. We built the frontend using React + Cordova, which allowed us to ship Android and iOS apps within two weeks of starting. We're only a two person team right now, so we didn't have the bandwidth or desire to go fully native right off the bat.
Let me know if you want more depth on any of those!
@dontmitch Thanks for the quick response Mitchell. Glad to see you're not selling my financial data away. I'd be off Penny ASAP if you were. Looking forward to using this!
@dontmitch I was more asking if I could switch something from Everything Else to Food, for example. Doesn't look like there's a way to do this at the moment
@zackshapiro I think this is what you're looking for:
That let's you switch the category to whatever you like (or ignore the transaction altogether). Again, we'll make the user education better moving forward, sorry about that!
Liked the initial tutorial and concept of this. Unfortunately no Capital One support yet, so it won't be useful for me at the moment. Are you planning to send some kind of push notification or e-mail when specific banks users ask for become available?
This app is so well executed. It's amazing.
Love the conversational on boarding that let me gain more trust with the app as we progressed through the conversation.
Props to the whole team.
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Love the interface and the fact that it's based on chat interface, I think it's a great way to subtly get into a consumers daily life. Also Mitchell loved your thoughts on your PH launch on your blog, great going 😄
This looks great. Once again a product I wish was in Australia. Great job guys. 😺
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This app is great so far - I am really enjoying the UI. Chatting with Penny makes dealing with my finances feel less like a chore :) as a semi-frustrated Mint user, I am glad you don't try to give me budgets (since they just don't really work for me). Do you have an alternative to budgeting?
@lizziegwagner :) Happy that Penny's working out for you! re: alternatives to budgeting: based on the feedback we've been getting so far, we've found that Penny can change people's spending habits just by helping them stay in closer touch with their finances. Penny delivers a useful insight into your spending almost every time you visit, which means that over time, you gain an intuitive understanding of where your money is going and how your behavior could change. Some of the insights are as simple as telling someone they spend $300/mo on Uber or have a bunch of fees/bills they've been unknowingly paying for months—multiple users have learned stuff like this from Penny, done a mental double take, and changed their behavior. For these users, knowing is 80% of the battle ;) We want to make this keeping-in-touch experience as amazing as possible before considering budgeting, because like you said budgets don't work for some people.
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@imalexquach@lizziegwagner I can vouch for this approach to be working for me. Penny's simple and timely insights into my spending is helping me slowly change my behavior. I don't have to provide a lot of input for the app to be useful for me and I have started to love the app for that reason alone.
I've been using this app for awhile now, and it just keeps getting better - at a pretty amazing rate. I love getting the occasional push notifications of my transactions, because in the past I have been bad at checking my statement at the end of the month. It also hits what I want right on the nose, to consistently spend an overall amount a month (I don't really want/follow a more granular budget than that) Overall, super pleased with the app.
The one thing that I have noticed is that I actually have 2 chase credit cards, so when I go to look at my spending on the cards, I have no way of knowing which is which, as they both show up as "Chase Credit". Do you have plans to make that a little more clear?
@ydawant Glad to hear you're having a good time! Getting that push is pretty clutch for casual, quick review of your spending over the last day.
Regarding two Chase cards: we never considered that edge case before. We'll fix it ASAP :)
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@imalexquach sounds great about the cards edge case. As for the push notifications - honestly I failed to check regularly before I had them enabled. Guess I needed a little reminding :)
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Just installed and let Penny dig into our checking account -- painless! My favorite use cases for this app: People who don't know how to budget yet. For those with learning disabilities which make working with a Mint-like interface very challenging. For me because why not have a smoother ux --it's 2015 already! NB: if a user chooses "other bank," they could ask you to email them when you have completed the integration. Build that list now.
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@kkdub Some of Penny's forecasts are...odd. Glitch? Also might be nice to have an option to skip convo mode if desired.
@kkdub thanks for checking it out and glad you like the UX.
And we actually do exactly that when it comes to linking a bank account: if we don't support your bank, Penny asks you which one you want to link so we can notify users when we add support for their requested account(s). Great minds think alike ;)
With respect to your weird numbers, the most likely culprit is miscategorized transactions. We do our best to auto-categorize all of your incoming transactions and learn from your categorizations moving forward, but we're definitely not perfect yet. Just head to the settings pane, click on the icon next to any transaction, and select the correct category. The third animation on https://www.pennyapp.io demonstrates this process if you're interested. Hope that helps!
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I've been using the product for a few months now and I find myself falling back to mint still. I like that Penny isn't full of a shit ton of categories but it is nice to get a little bit deeper than the big categories that Penny includes. Would you even consider adding a few more category options?
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@alykumpula I see what you mean. Penny's focused on 2 things right now: providing meaningful context to your finances and give you actionable advice on how to spend better without having to actually budget, they've done really well in keeping the app simple. (also, they're a 2 person team too....)
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