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Co-founder of a (yet to be launched) Mint competitor here [1]. One pattern I think we all see over and over again is when products get bought by a large company

Co-founder of a (yet to be launched) Mint competitor here [1]. One pattern I think we all see over and over again is when products get bought by a large company, they often lose their "soul" (and the original team). Both those things happened with Mint. Another important pattern I've seen is that products, in the long-term, morph to take the form of their revenue model. Many personal finance products are free, but make money by selling data or trying to upsell you on something else that you don't need (like, say, a credit card you don't need or a tax product that is overpriced [2]). This is what happened with Mint. It became a "top-of-the-funnel" lead generation tool for other products. This also explains a lot of the problems with the internet at large today—misaligned business models. I'd definitely encourage anyone joining (or starting) a company to think about what the revenue model they are choosing means for the product and company long-term. Every company will say they are different, and that they actually care about their users and about building a good product... and maybe in the early days, the original team can stay true to that, but eventually time and money take their toll. Companies that really want to build lovable, user-aligned products, set up a revenue model that encourages them to stick to that long term. [1] https://www.monarchmoney.com https://www.monarchmoney.com [2] https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-fight-to-stop-americans-from-filing-their-taxes-for-free https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...

teej 7y ago
> It became a "top-of-the-funnel" lead generation tool for other products If I recall correctly, the original pitch deck for Mint stated that this was the plan. Weird to say it morphed into something that was just the original vision. Edit: found the deck https://www.slideshare.net/hnshah/mintcom-prelaunch-pitch-deck https://www.slideshare.net/hnshah/mintcom-prelaunch-pitch-de...
- Ozzie_osman 7y ago
  Totally. But, and I'm speaking more generically than Mint here, in the early days of a company, a team (esp the founder) can more easily navigate the tension between revenue generation and building a great product. That's a lot harder to do as part of a larger (and especially publicly-traded) company.
- usaar333 7y ago
  That's not their pitch deck. That's a class or competition project. Source: was attending Berkeley with the people listed on the first slide when this was published.
roywiggins 7y ago
Mint never really lost its soul. It always seemed like it was going to try and upsell me on stuff, but that was fine by me because I'm not in the market for new credit cards or whatever. But I guess that's part of the problem, and they're just not making much money off referrals and therefore can't be bothered to improve the product? The problem for me with Mint is that it just... stopped getting any updates, and the visualizations are not configurable at all, so if you want something that looks a bit different, or doesn't use a pie chart, or shows more things at once, you just can't do it. And it's all in Flash! I ended up building a crappy set of graphs in Excel and using Mint's csv output to try and get a more useful view of the data.
- chrisan 7y ago
  > And it's all in Flash! I think they moved away from Flash, I see svg now for charts
  - WorldMaker 7y ago
    They moved the "Trending" section charts to something SVG based. The "Investment" section charts throws up a "You need Flash error" and now blocks you from navigating to other "Investment" section information even if you just wanted to look at the tables rather than graphs, making the entire "Investment" section a broken window.
- NegativeLatency 7y ago
  Transaction tagging is also super bad.
  - duderific 7y ago
    I used to use it pretty regularly, but I'd spend so much time categorizing transactions, one pulldown menu at a time. I got sick of it and haven't logged in in a long time.
    - L_Rahman 7y ago
koboll 7y ago
I gotta say, a Mint-that-doesn't-suck is something I could absolutely see myself paying $5 a month for, for the rest of my life. The core functionality is indispensable, but it's become so outdated, inefficient, and difficult to use that I'm champing at the bit to jump ship. I'm surprised it's taken this long for a serious competitor to emerge, given that it's been saturated with ads for at least half a decade and Plaid's been around just as long.
- eegilbert 7y ago
  That's You Need A Budget, which I love paying for.
  - illegalsmile 7y ago
    I'm still on v4, it works great and I had to pay for it once. I know the model is subscriptions these days and $7/mo ($84/annual purchase) really is nothing in the big picture but it still bugs me. Looking through their release notes it doesn't appear that there has been major improvements in the budgeting aspect of the software. If you've used v4 is it worth it?
    - rollerboi 7y ago
      I used v4 back in 2012-2013 (when I was in college). They switched to nYNAB a year or so after, and I hated that everything was "in the cloud" and there was an option to "automatically import transactions from my bank account." I was like, what? I thought YNAB was about manually tracking my balances so I always knew what was going on. But I got back into budgeting in mid 2018, and I actually love all of those features. imo the $7/mo I pay is well worth the auto-transactions, auto-syncing across all devices without dropbox, ability to link several different accounts (my checking acct is with a small local credit union, I have a brokerage account, a personal loan I'm paying down, etc.).
    - jimcsharp 7y ago
      YNABaaS brings automatic integrations to the table and the 'sync' story is, obviously, much easier since it doesn't involve Dropbox. That's all I noticed. I did a trial and just was not impressed. In my opinion, using the SaaS version when you own the desktop software should get you a charity write-off.
sshumaker 7y ago
This space is really difficult to crack for a few non-obvious reasons. The first is that the total TAM is less than you think; for most people, tracking their spending to manage budgets just doesn’t appeal to them. For many consumers, just seeing all of their finances is incredibly depressing. I suspect the 13mm Mint users are a large portion of the addressable market for this kind of product. So without a strong monetization engine that will work incredibly well at only ~10mm user range, you’re in trouble. Lead-gen isn’t sufficient here; Credit Karma has 10x the userbase and much stronger signals of intent, which is why they dominate digitize acquisition. When I was there, we put a lot of thought into how to crack personal finance, and ultimately felt that “spending” was too complex and too niche. The fact is you need radically different products for different parts of your consumer audience. That’s why you’ve seen a rise of more focused products like Robinhood, Wealthfront (going after the high end), savings apps like Acorn and digits, banking apps like Chime, etc (being a bank is profitable) that have incredibly strong revenue models attached. I think you could run a reasonable lifestyle business here if you don’t take VC, but I’m skeptical this can ever be truly mass-market.
- davidajackson 7y ago
  I was told recently by someone who runs one of these types of apps that TAM that has been tapped so far is <1B. And these apps have been around for a while. So for some of these businesses, their consumer app can be a "wedge" to get them going, but they hedge by exploring B2B opportunities.
- wpietri 7y ago
  That makes a ton of sense to me. In some areas, I think our natural categories obscure human variation that's important from the product perspective. For example, task management software sounds like a coherent thing. But in practice, people think and work so differently that there will never be a solution that everybody loves. At least from personal experience, personal finance is the same way.
  - eldavido 7y ago
    Meta: do you view a product through the customer's eyes or through the eyes of the person making it? That's been an important insight for me to understand. Describing something in terms of its features/how it works, you might say "photo sharing app". But this core feature could be wrapped, packaged, marketed, and described so many different ways: flickr, Instagram, Getty Images (!!), a scientific collaboration tool, etc. "Task management" feels similar.
harikb 7y ago
1. Is your new service still based on Yodlee backend? Everyone else who provides any consolidation service seems to. I am not saying they are bad, but it is better to be clear upfront. 2. Are their any features for Pro consumers who are not looking for budgeting or retirement planning? I don’t mind paying $100 a year for a good service. I would rather not have it free. 3. I am ready to switch banks or even brokerage firms if they provide a saner integration with your service
- vagostino 7y ago
  Hi. Monarch co-founder here. 1. We are primarily using Plaid, but will support multiple data aggregators to provide our users with the best coverage for their financial institutions. 2. Yes. We will go way beyond what current products do. I can't go into specifics ahead of our launch, but we are confident we can help people achieve better financial outcomes cheaper and faster. Our view is that a subscription-based model allows us to align our incentives with our users and focus on building the best product, rather than trying to optimize for advertising partners or data sales. On the latter point, we highly value privacy and will not share nor sell your financial data. 3. That's great to hear!
zifnab06 7y ago
I’ve looked at a lot of budgeting apps. In order of priority, I want: 1. Don’t be evil (aka don’t be intuit) 2. Web based with some sane security (2fa, encryption at rest, etc) 3. The ability to sync transactions from my bank. 4. Budgeting/reporting. 5. Some sort of sane forecasting. You’ve got N months of data from a customer, why can’t you tell them in 6 months this account is expected to have $x in it? 6. Sane APIs. No one I’ve been able to find has been able to do all 6 of these.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- kposehn 7y ago
  #5 is so critical. If you can’t enter transactions ahead of time and know where you will be, then what is the point?
- shashank 7y ago
  I'm the founder of Buxfer (https://www.buxfer.com https://www.buxfer.com) Forecasting is one of the strongest aspects of our product. We also provide alerts ahead of time if we can predict your account balance will fall below zero (or whatever threshold you configure). Forecasting can also be used to preview your expenses/income/cashflow for the upcoming months / years. We do have an API, but I admit it's not the best around. Other than that, our product does all the 6 things you point out. Happy to hear more feedback at shashank@buxfer.com
  - iudqnolq 7y ago
    I like your privacy policy. It's reasonably easy to read, has a nice chart, and makes nice sounding promises. Why don't you link to it from your home page? I had to do a Google site search to find it. (And maybe even put the 'what we share' chart somewhere more prominent)
    - shashank 7y ago
      Added. Was an oversight, thanks for pointing out!
joelrunyon 7y ago
I did an 'onboarding' with you guys. Really wanted to like the app, but stills seems very early in the ideation phase. When are you going to have a beta out?
haskellandchill 7y ago
Ridiculous, your company will be nothing different in ten years if it even exists. Best of luck though, prove me wrong :)
- uptown 7y ago
  Is this one of those things where if they fail you can point to this post as validation for your genius, but if they succeed you get to claim credit for motivating them?
  - haskellandchill 7y ago
    Win win baby.
s17n 7y ago
Hey, just wondering: was the fast company article was placed there by your PR people? Not that there's anything wrong with that, I'm just curious.
- Ozzie_osman 7y ago
  No, this wasn't placed. Fast Company was already working on the article and just reached out to our CEO for comment.
  - robpegoraro 7y ago
    I wrote the story and I can confirm that. It's been on my to-do list for a while--I had another client turn down the idea--and I finally remembered to pitch it to my editor at FC after being irked yet again at Mint telling me to install Flash, tweeting out my frustration and deciding I should monetize that frustration. (Val made his way into the post when another ex-Mint dev tweeted his apologies for what had become of the site; I got in touch with him and he suggested I talk to Val.)
cryptica 7y ago
They didn't lose their soul. They never had one. It was a financial scheme from beginning to end. There was never any intention to produce anything useful. Probably one of the founders had a rich daddy.
nerdkid93 7y ago
Out of curiosity, is Monarch using Plaid for financial data aggregation? I have been wondering how long it would take for a standalone budget/asset tracker to emerge using Plaid's services. It seems most Plaid users are selling other financial products, and tack on aggregation as an additional feature, like Personal Capital.
- annexrichmond 7y ago
  From their Privacy Policy[1], they are: > We use Plaid Inc. ("Plaid") to gather End User data from financial institutions. By using our service, you grant Monarch and Plaid the right, power, and authority to act on your behalf to access and transmit your personal and financial information from the relevant financial institution. You agree to your personal and financial information being transferred, stored, and processed by Plaid in accordance with the Plaid Privacy Policy. [1] https://www.monarchmoney.com/privacy https://www.monarchmoney.com/privacy
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
samename 7y ago
One of the features I think these types of products need going forward is end-to-end encryption. There's simply too much data being exchanged between Plaid, this service and any third parties used. Someone's every transaction, investment, and budget will be too lucrative not to sell. I would pay for a service that could keep all this data private.
- alanlovestea 7y ago
  You can use Quicken. It is a desktop software and does not store your data/password in the cloud.
pgt 7y ago
I fear there exists a class of product that seems like a great idea, but can only survive in a "big" acquisition, and that getting acquired is a poison-pill. Mint may be one of those. We have a regional clone of Mint called 22Seven that was acquired by Old Mutual (a big insurance company), which means I'm not going near them with my banking data.
criddell 7y ago
How do you guarantee to your users that the company will never be sold to another company?
alanlovestea 7y ago
> Many personal finance products are free, but make money by selling data or trying to upsell you on something else that you don't need (like, say, a credit card you don't need or a tax product that is overpriced [2]). This is what happened with Mint. It became a "top-of-the-funnel" lead generation tool for other products. Question about MonarchMoney. Is it going to be a cloud service or a standalone old-fashion desktop software? Most of serious personal finance people would prefer desktop software in order to protect their own data. However, most consumers prefer a free and hosted solution. Which market is MonarchMoney going after?
- Ozzie_osman 7y ago
  Initially we're going to be cloud-based, but we hope to support other storage models.
mattlutze 7y ago
How are you approaching your product in a way that discourages your company from morphing it into a money manager that upsells your users credit cards or loan products?
city41 7y ago
This is a super packed field. There are many budget apps out there. I was unhappy with all of them so I wrote my own. For a while I had some thoughts of pushing it and turning it into a company, but ultimately I just kept it for myself. Good luck, would love to see a budget app that is truly good.
- archeantus 7y ago
  I did the same thing. Shocked that five years later there still isn’t a great app that really wows. I think the fundamental problem is that the data is broken. Banks don’t get context from the merchants, and the devs only get ugly data from the banks. The only way this situation will improve is if we can somehow get devs better data. I kicked around ideas on how to do that for a year or so before running out of steam.
  - Ozzie_osman 7y ago
    Would love to hear more about what you tried and what you learned, if you're up for it. Couldn't find a way to reach you but if you're open to it, my linkedin is in my profile link.
MuffinFlavored 7y ago
How are you going to get around 2FA? NerdWallet (which probably has more than enough money to hire lots of really good engineers to solve this problem) consistently has problems syncing my 401k/credit card/checking accounts.
kposehn 7y ago
I have a few requests for you: 1. Allow people to enter transactions ahead of time and plan ahead. I dropped Mint in favor of Quicken because no other tool allows me to properly plan ahead. But Quicken still lacks support for a number of financial institutions as well as stock options. 2. Please support stock options and non-public wealth tracking. Quicken has to be shoehorned into it, Personal Finance supports it but doesn’t allow you to plan ahead. You could do a lot here for people. 3. Have it be cross-platform. I wish I could edit Quicken transactions on my phone but I get this dumbed down synced version that is practically useless. Put those three in and I’ll be one happy user.
- parthdesai 7y ago
  > 1. Allow people to enter transactions ahead of time and plan ahead This is such a no brainer. I tend to buy tickets to concerts/shows at times two months of time and I want to reflect that in that month's spending and not this months.
  - bryanmgreen 7y ago
    FYI - you can forward-date purchases in Mint by a few months. Just click on the transaction and then again on the date and modify.
    - kposehn 7y ago
      You can’t manually enter transactions in the register though last I checked. That’s the essential thing - predictive cash flow.
KirinDave 7y ago
Sure but... Let's not kid ourselves. The FIs are actively killing these products because we all realize how much we can damage the PBR stickiness of American banks. The "KLO-ification" of Mint, the C1Acquisition of Level, Visa tactically grabbing Plaid: they're all to consolidate the industry and allow existing players to stifle the American banking landscape.
hinkley 7y ago
Cogent Question: So are you saying you have a theory on how to build a business model here that continues to help people after they've gotten their budget sorted out? Tangent: Twice, I've had coworkers - developers, mind you - tell me in a meeting with the whole team that "We're not going to turn away money." Both times I was left speechless, and silently judging like mad. Because if you really dig into what a statement like that says about their character, you're going to be very, very disappointed, possibly lose respect for them, and once you have no respect the temptation to say something unpleasant is much higher. Which is not to say, "I'm surrounded by scoundrels." There's something systemic there. When we have to repeat back what we've said or how we've behaved it's often a lot easier to see that we're disappointed in ourselves. That this is not the person you want to be. You know someone who has done this to you, or rather, for you. You might even hate it a little bit at first but they've done you a huge favor. Eventually you see it. Problem is, there's no incentive or even huge disincentives to try to do things like this in a business setting. I'm sure this has been playing out in slow motion at Google, if only for statistical reasons. It seems to happen most places.
crobertsbmw 7y ago
I have had an idea of how I would want to build a mint competitor, but I’m not up for the challenge. But I’d love to see yours. Can I get on the email list? My username at google’s free email service..
xivzgrev 7y ago
YAMC? (Yet another mint copy?). There are a lot of apps out there doing pretty much same thing as mint - can you give us a preview of how your app will be different?
apple4ever 7y ago
I still can't believe Mint is free. In the era of subscriptions, I'd totally be willing to pay for it, especially if it led to actual development and ability to have useful support.
abvdasker 7y ago
Thank you for the thoughtful response. This is anecdotal, but I signed up for Mint as a pretty naive college student who had no idea that Mint was tossing my financial data all over the damn place. A few years later I eventually learned how Mint really works and promptly deleted my account (and then purged as much advertising data as I could in a bout of paranoia). I hope the next generation of personal finance apps maintain strict privacy guarantees while running on a subscription model. I'll definitely be giving Monarch a look!
chrbr 7y ago
Good to see that there are some other competitors looking to emerge. I've had several discussions with my colleagues who can't stand Mint, have used YNAB to life-changing effect, but feel like they've "outgrown" the YNAB philosophy as it's targeted towards people still looking to set a solid financial foundation. They also have to straddle multiple tools for different purposes - YNAB for budgeting, Personal Capital for investment tracking, typically. Looks like you're aiming to fill in the gap there. Looking forward to seeing what y'all come up with!
justusthane 7y ago
Hi there, always interested in personal finance services, but I'm having a hard time understanding from your website what sets Monarch apart from other apps? How does it differ from YNAB (of which I am a big fan), for example? At first glance YNAB has all the same features shown on your website, and the "budget with ease" screenshot in particular could have been taken right from YNAB. And what exactly does "The first all-in-one personal finance platform" mean? What does it have that others don't? Hope this doesn't come off as overly critical! I am really interested.
- Ozzie_osman 7y ago
  Thanks for asking! We're not yet ready to share too much, but if you're really curious feel free to find me (LinkedIn link in profile). At a high level, though, if you read the complaints in the rest of this thread you'd get a pretty good sense of what a product in this space would need to do to be successful (of course). YNAB is great as a budgeting tool if you're willing to subscribe to their entire budgeting system, which most people aren't.
flush 7y ago
Psyched to try it! Any idea what the wait list time frames are looking like? I'm currently at position 11,178.

teej 7y ago

> It became a "top-of-the-funnel" lead generation tool for other products If I recall correctly, the original pitch deck for Mint stated that this was the plan. Weird to say it morphed into something that was just the original vision. Edit: found the deck https://www.slideshare.net/hnshah/mintcom-prelaunch-pitch-deck https://www.slideshare.net/hnshah/mintcom-prelaunch-pitch-de...

Ozzie_osman 7y ago
Totally. But, and I'm speaking more generically than Mint here, in the early days of a company, a team (esp the founder) can more easily navigate the tension between revenue generation and building a great product. That's a lot harder to do as part of a larger (and especially publicly-traded) company.
usaar333 7y ago
That's not their pitch deck. That's a class or competition project. Source: was attending Berkeley with the people listed on the first slide when this was published.

roywiggins 7y ago

Mint never really lost its soul. It always seemed like it was going to try and upsell me on stuff, but that was fine by me because I'm not in the market for new credit cards or whatever. But I guess that's part of the problem, and they're just not making much money off referrals and therefore can't be bothered to improve the product? The problem for me with Mint is that it just... stopped getting any updates, and the visualizations are not configurable at all, so if you want something that looks a bit different, or doesn't use a pie chart, or shows more things at once, you just can't do it. And it's all in Flash! I ended up building a crappy set of graphs in Excel and using Mint's csv output to try and get a more useful view of the data.

chrisan 7y ago
> And it's all in Flash! I think they moved away from Flash, I see svg now for charts
- WorldMaker 7y ago
  They moved the "Trending" section charts to something SVG based. The "Investment" section charts throws up a "You need Flash error" and now blocks you from navigating to other "Investment" section information even if you just wanted to look at the tables rather than graphs, making the entire "Investment" section a broken window.
NegativeLatency 7y ago
Transaction tagging is also super bad.
- duderific 7y ago
  I used to use it pretty regularly, but I'd spend so much time categorizing transactions, one pulldown menu at a time. I got sick of it and haven't logged in in a long time.
  - L_Rahman 7y ago

koboll 7y ago

I gotta say, a Mint-that-doesn't-suck is something I could absolutely see myself paying $5 a month for, for the rest of my life. The core functionality is indispensable, but it's become so outdated, inefficient, and difficult to use that I'm champing at the bit to jump ship. I'm surprised it's taken this long for a serious competitor to emerge, given that it's been saturated with ads for at least half a decade and Plaid's been around just as long.

eegilbert 7y ago
That's You Need A Budget, which I love paying for.
- illegalsmile 7y ago
  I'm still on v4, it works great and I had to pay for it once. I know the model is subscriptions these days and $7/mo ($84/annual purchase) really is nothing in the big picture but it still bugs me. Looking through their release notes it doesn't appear that there has been major improvements in the budgeting aspect of the software. If you've used v4 is it worth it?
  - rollerboi 7y ago
    I used v4 back in 2012-2013 (when I was in college). They switched to nYNAB a year or so after, and I hated that everything was "in the cloud" and there was an option to "automatically import transactions from my bank account." I was like, what? I thought YNAB was about manually tracking my balances so I always knew what was going on. But I got back into budgeting in mid 2018, and I actually love all of those features. imo the $7/mo I pay is well worth the auto-transactions, auto-syncing across all devices without dropbox, ability to link several different accounts (my checking acct is with a small local credit union, I have a brokerage account, a personal loan I'm paying down, etc.).
  - jimcsharp 7y ago
    YNABaaS brings automatic integrations to the table and the 'sync' story is, obviously, much easier since it doesn't involve Dropbox. That's all I noticed. I did a trial and just was not impressed. In my opinion, using the SaaS version when you own the desktop software should get you a charity write-off.

sshumaker 7y ago

This space is really difficult to crack for a few non-obvious reasons. The first is that the total TAM is less than you think; for most people, tracking their spending to manage budgets just doesn’t appeal to them. For many consumers, just seeing all of their finances is incredibly depressing. I suspect the 13mm Mint users are a large portion of the addressable market for this kind of product. So without a strong monetization engine that will work incredibly well at only ~10mm user range, you’re in trouble. Lead-gen isn’t sufficient here; Credit Karma has 10x the userbase and much stronger signals of intent, which is why they dominate digitize acquisition. When I was there, we put a lot of thought into how to crack personal finance, and ultimately felt that “spending” was too complex and too niche. The fact is you need radically different products for different parts of your consumer audience. That’s why you’ve seen a rise of more focused products like Robinhood, Wealthfront (going after the high end), savings apps like Acorn and digits, banking apps like Chime, etc (being a bank is profitable) that have incredibly strong revenue models attached. I think you could run a reasonable lifestyle business here if you don’t take VC, but I’m skeptical this can ever be truly mass-market.

davidajackson 7y ago
I was told recently by someone who runs one of these types of apps that TAM that has been tapped so far is <1B. And these apps have been around for a while. So for some of these businesses, their consumer app can be a "wedge" to get them going, but they hedge by exploring B2B opportunities.
wpietri 7y ago
That makes a ton of sense to me. In some areas, I think our natural categories obscure human variation that's important from the product perspective. For example, task management software sounds like a coherent thing. But in practice, people think and work so differently that there will never be a solution that everybody loves. At least from personal experience, personal finance is the same way.
- eldavido 7y ago
  Meta: do you view a product through the customer's eyes or through the eyes of the person making it? That's been an important insight for me to understand. Describing something in terms of its features/how it works, you might say "photo sharing app". But this core feature could be wrapped, packaged, marketed, and described so many different ways: flickr, Instagram, Getty Images (!!), a scientific collaboration tool, etc. "Task management" feels similar.

harikb 7y ago

1. Is your new service still based on Yodlee backend? Everyone else who provides any consolidation service seems to. I am not saying they are bad, but it is better to be clear upfront. 2. Are their any features for Pro consumers who are not looking for budgeting or retirement planning? I don’t mind paying $100 a year for a good service. I would rather not have it free. 3. I am ready to switch banks or even brokerage firms if they provide a saner integration with your service

vagostino 7y ago
Hi. Monarch co-founder here. 1. We are primarily using Plaid, but will support multiple data aggregators to provide our users with the best coverage for their financial institutions. 2. Yes. We will go way beyond what current products do. I can't go into specifics ahead of our launch, but we are confident we can help people achieve better financial outcomes cheaper and faster. Our view is that a subscription-based model allows us to align our incentives with our users and focus on building the best product, rather than trying to optimize for advertising partners or data sales. On the latter point, we highly value privacy and will not share nor sell your financial data. 3. That's great to hear!

zifnab06 7y ago

I’ve looked at a lot of budgeting apps. In order of priority, I want: 1. Don’t be evil (aka don’t be intuit) 2. Web based with some sane security (2fa, encryption at rest, etc) 3. The ability to sync transactions from my bank. 4. Budgeting/reporting. 5. Some sort of sane forecasting. You’ve got N months of data from a customer, why can’t you tell them in 6 months this account is expected to have $x in it? 6. Sane APIs. No one I’ve been able to find has been able to do all 6 of these.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
kposehn 7y ago
#5 is so critical. If you can’t enter transactions ahead of time and know where you will be, then what is the point?
shashank 7y ago
I'm the founder of Buxfer (https://www.buxfer.com https://www.buxfer.com) Forecasting is one of the strongest aspects of our product. We also provide alerts ahead of time if we can predict your account balance will fall below zero (or whatever threshold you configure). Forecasting can also be used to preview your expenses/income/cashflow for the upcoming months / years. We do have an API, but I admit it's not the best around. Other than that, our product does all the 6 things you point out. Happy to hear more feedback at shashank@buxfer.com
- iudqnolq 7y ago
  I like your privacy policy. It's reasonably easy to read, has a nice chart, and makes nice sounding promises. Why don't you link to it from your home page? I had to do a Google site search to find it. (And maybe even put the 'what we share' chart somewhere more prominent)
  - shashank 7y ago
    Added. Was an oversight, thanks for pointing out!

joelrunyon 7y ago

I did an 'onboarding' with you guys. Really wanted to like the app, but stills seems very early in the ideation phase. When are you going to have a beta out?

haskellandchill 7y ago

Ridiculous, your company will be nothing different in ten years if it even exists. Best of luck though, prove me wrong :)

uptown 7y ago
Is this one of those things where if they fail you can point to this post as validation for your genius, but if they succeed you get to claim credit for motivating them?
- haskellandchill 7y ago
  Win win baby.

s17n 7y ago

Hey, just wondering: was the fast company article was placed there by your PR people? Not that there's anything wrong with that, I'm just curious.

Ozzie_osman 7y ago
No, this wasn't placed. Fast Company was already working on the article and just reached out to our CEO for comment.
- robpegoraro 7y ago
  I wrote the story and I can confirm that. It's been on my to-do list for a while--I had another client turn down the idea--and I finally remembered to pitch it to my editor at FC after being irked yet again at Mint telling me to install Flash, tweeting out my frustration and deciding I should monetize that frustration. (Val made his way into the post when another ex-Mint dev tweeted his apologies for what had become of the site; I got in touch with him and he suggested I talk to Val.)

cryptica 7y ago

They didn't lose their soul. They never had one. It was a financial scheme from beginning to end. There was never any intention to produce anything useful. Probably one of the founders had a rich daddy.

nerdkid93 7y ago

Out of curiosity, is Monarch using Plaid for financial data aggregation? I have been wondering how long it would take for a standalone budget/asset tracker to emerge using Plaid's services. It seems most Plaid users are selling other financial products, and tack on aggregation as an additional feature, like Personal Capital.

annexrichmond 7y ago
From their Privacy Policy[1], they are: > We use Plaid Inc. ("Plaid") to gather End User data from financial institutions. By using our service, you grant Monarch and Plaid the right, power, and authority to act on your behalf to access and transmit your personal and financial information from the relevant financial institution. You agree to your personal and financial information being transferred, stored, and processed by Plaid in accordance with the Plaid Privacy Policy. [1] https://www.monarchmoney.com/privacy https://www.monarchmoney.com/privacy
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

samename 7y ago

One of the features I think these types of products need going forward is end-to-end encryption. There's simply too much data being exchanged between Plaid, this service and any third parties used. Someone's every transaction, investment, and budget will be too lucrative not to sell. I would pay for a service that could keep all this data private.

alanlovestea 7y ago
You can use Quicken. It is a desktop software and does not store your data/password in the cloud.

pgt 7y ago

I fear there exists a class of product that seems like a great idea, but can only survive in a "big" acquisition, and that getting acquired is a poison-pill. Mint may be one of those. We have a regional clone of Mint called 22Seven that was acquired by Old Mutual (a big insurance company), which means I'm not going near them with my banking data.

criddell 7y ago

How do you guarantee to your users that the company will never be sold to another company?

alanlovestea 7y ago

> Many personal finance products are free, but make money by selling data or trying to upsell you on something else that you don't need (like, say, a credit card you don't need or a tax product that is overpriced [2]). This is what happened with Mint. It became a "top-of-the-funnel" lead generation tool for other products. Question about MonarchMoney. Is it going to be a cloud service or a standalone old-fashion desktop software? Most of serious personal finance people would prefer desktop software in order to protect their own data. However, most consumers prefer a free and hosted solution. Which market is MonarchMoney going after?

Ozzie_osman 7y ago
Initially we're going to be cloud-based, but we hope to support other storage models.

mattlutze 7y ago

How are you approaching your product in a way that discourages your company from morphing it into a money manager that upsells your users credit cards or loan products?

city41 7y ago

This is a super packed field. There are many budget apps out there. I was unhappy with all of them so I wrote my own. For a while I had some thoughts of pushing it and turning it into a company, but ultimately I just kept it for myself. Good luck, would love to see a budget app that is truly good.

archeantus 7y ago
I did the same thing. Shocked that five years later there still isn’t a great app that really wows. I think the fundamental problem is that the data is broken. Banks don’t get context from the merchants, and the devs only get ugly data from the banks. The only way this situation will improve is if we can somehow get devs better data. I kicked around ideas on how to do that for a year or so before running out of steam.
- Ozzie_osman 7y ago
  Would love to hear more about what you tried and what you learned, if you're up for it. Couldn't find a way to reach you but if you're open to it, my linkedin is in my profile link.

MuffinFlavored 7y ago

How are you going to get around 2FA? NerdWallet (which probably has more than enough money to hire lots of really good engineers to solve this problem) consistently has problems syncing my 401k/credit card/checking accounts.

kposehn 7y ago

I have a few requests for you: 1. Allow people to enter transactions ahead of time and plan ahead. I dropped Mint in favor of Quicken because no other tool allows me to properly plan ahead. But Quicken still lacks support for a number of financial institutions as well as stock options. 2. Please support stock options and non-public wealth tracking. Quicken has to be shoehorned into it, Personal Finance supports it but doesn’t allow you to plan ahead. You could do a lot here for people. 3. Have it be cross-platform. I wish I could edit Quicken transactions on my phone but I get this dumbed down synced version that is practically useless. Put those three in and I’ll be one happy user.

parthdesai 7y ago
> 1. Allow people to enter transactions ahead of time and plan ahead This is such a no brainer. I tend to buy tickets to concerts/shows at times two months of time and I want to reflect that in that month's spending and not this months.
- bryanmgreen 7y ago
  FYI - you can forward-date purchases in Mint by a few months. Just click on the transaction and then again on the date and modify.
  - kposehn 7y ago
    You can’t manually enter transactions in the register though last I checked. That’s the essential thing - predictive cash flow.

KirinDave 7y ago

Sure but... Let's not kid ourselves. The FIs are actively killing these products because we all realize how much we can damage the PBR stickiness of American banks. The "KLO-ification" of Mint, the C1Acquisition of Level, Visa tactically grabbing Plaid: they're all to consolidate the industry and allow existing players to stifle the American banking landscape.

hinkley 7y ago

Cogent Question: So are you saying you have a theory on how to build a business model here that continues to help people after they've gotten their budget sorted out? Tangent: Twice, I've had coworkers - developers, mind you - tell me in a meeting with the whole team that "We're not going to turn away money." Both times I was left speechless, and silently judging like mad. Because if you really dig into what a statement like that says about their character, you're going to be very, very disappointed, possibly lose respect for them, and once you have no respect the temptation to say something unpleasant is much higher. Which is not to say, "I'm surrounded by scoundrels." There's something systemic there. When we have to repeat back what we've said or how we've behaved it's often a lot easier to see that we're disappointed in ourselves. That this is not the person you want to be. You know someone who has done this to you, or rather, for you. You might even hate it a little bit at first but they've done you a huge favor. Eventually you see it. Problem is, there's no incentive or even huge disincentives to try to do things like this in a business setting. I'm sure this has been playing out in slow motion at Google, if only for statistical reasons. It seems to happen most places.

crobertsbmw 7y ago

I have had an idea of how I would want to build a mint competitor, but I’m not up for the challenge. But I’d love to see yours. Can I get on the email list? My username at google’s free email service..

xivzgrev 7y ago

YAMC? (Yet another mint copy?). There are a lot of apps out there doing pretty much same thing as mint - can you give us a preview of how your app will be different?

apple4ever 7y ago

I still can't believe Mint is free. In the era of subscriptions, I'd totally be willing to pay for it, especially if it led to actual development and ability to have useful support.

abvdasker 7y ago

Thank you for the thoughtful response. This is anecdotal, but I signed up for Mint as a pretty naive college student who had no idea that Mint was tossing my financial data all over the damn place. A few years later I eventually learned how Mint really works and promptly deleted my account (and then purged as much advertising data as I could in a bout of paranoia). I hope the next generation of personal finance apps maintain strict privacy guarantees while running on a subscription model. I'll definitely be giving Monarch a look!

chrbr 7y ago

Good to see that there are some other competitors looking to emerge. I've had several discussions with my colleagues who can't stand Mint, have used YNAB to life-changing effect, but feel like they've "outgrown" the YNAB philosophy as it's targeted towards people still looking to set a solid financial foundation. They also have to straddle multiple tools for different purposes - YNAB for budgeting, Personal Capital for investment tracking, typically. Looks like you're aiming to fill in the gap there. Looking forward to seeing what y'all come up with!

justusthane 7y ago

Hi there, always interested in personal finance services, but I'm having a hard time understanding from your website what sets Monarch apart from other apps? How does it differ from YNAB (of which I am a big fan), for example? At first glance YNAB has all the same features shown on your website, and the "budget with ease" screenshot in particular could have been taken right from YNAB. And what exactly does "The first all-in-one personal finance platform" mean? What does it have that others don't? Hope this doesn't come off as overly critical! I am really interested.

Ozzie_osman 7y ago
Thanks for asking! We're not yet ready to share too much, but if you're really curious feel free to find me (LinkedIn link in profile). At a high level, though, if you read the complaints in the rest of this thread you'd get a pretty good sense of what a product in this space would need to do to be successful (of course). YNAB is great as a budgeting tool if you're willing to subscribe to their entire budgeting system, which most people aren't.

flush 7y ago

Psyched to try it! Any idea what the wait list time frames are looking like? I'm currently at position 11,178.