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I've been building a tool (tool) that ingests my bank and credit card statements and builds a dashboard. It's still pretty new, but I've got a small number of users who are giving me some feedback.
I'd love to hear why you think this product is useless, confusing, lame, hard to understand, has a very weird landing page, etc.
I'm still trying to figure out which "direction" to take this project and looking to be directed by a good roast.
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Replies
Product Hunt
Cool; I'm impressed with how well it processed by CC statement! Some thoughts:
I think a guided tour and/or landing page could be useful; especially to let users know they need to upload their cc/bank statements. Right now I don't think it's obvious the kind of files you're looking for.
Even though my bank/CC statements don't contain much personal data it still feels a little scary uploading them to the internet. Maybe an explanation on how you handle/use the data could assuage my fears?
Tab Slayer
@lagap Amazing, thanks for taking a look!
Yeah i think there should also be a like "how does this work" real landing page. good callout!
also a +1 on the bank / cc info. Part of this approach vs using @Plaid was the hope that it feels less "committing". It's still a lot of personal though, so I think there are some more steps I've considered:
I would really love for the app to just be local first, where all the data just gets stored in sqlite in local storage and never is persisted on my server at all. then maybe there is an option to back it up to the sever if the user wanted to make sure it was persistent.
I explored homomorphic encryption a bit as well, so I could process the files but never actually be able to see the data, but that seemed pretty far away from being possible.
I settled on RLS policies on all the tables, with another layer on the ORM that should be redundant for protecting anyone from accessing your data beyond yourself.
At a minimum I should make sure I have a policy explicitly stating that i'm not selling your data, and make sure there are options to delete it all.
I'm always curious how much this stuff matters to the average user and how much to engineer around it.
Maybe a paid feature could be "local only" where no data is every actually pushed to the server (or at least saved there).
Product Hunt
Nice product! Roast below:
1. Usually, when I enter a password, Google suggests one for me. It didn’t this time, which added friction in making an account.
2. I was slightly sad but also slightly relieved that I didn’t actually sync up my account. With that said, I don’t know off the top of my head where to export my finances, so that will take some work. but i dont know if i'd trust a new brand with syncing my financials so i think this makes sense.
3. I tried to set a budget, but it broke after one click. You did warn on the screen this would happen though!
Overall, I like this as a lite version of Copilot. I use Copilot, but I think it can be a little much. I like the idea of a barebones way for me to track what’s coming in, what’s going out, and no extra frills.
Tab Slayer
@mat_sherman Incredible, thanks!
1. good to know about the password -- i think in the future I will try to add OAuth to remove this altogether.
2. yeah i'm really trying to decide what to do with this. Some people I talk to review their bank / cc statements each month, and they are in theory who i'm targeting with this. I have looked into integrating with @Plaid which is probably the easiest way to onboard a tech savy user.
3. hah oops yeah the budget page is very nascent -- one of my early users asked for it so i hacked something really quickly so they could start testing. I can apply a bit of polish to that page.
Thanks again for the thoughts! I hadn't heard of anyone using @Copilot before but that does look really feature complete. I think simplicity is probably a good angle to take to be positioned against a tool that rich.
Tab Slayer
@mat_sherman also quick followup, did it feel weird to have the landing page just be the tool itself with demo data?
Product Hunt
@catt_marroll for me, not weird at all. Could be weird for an avg consumer though not as neck deep in tech as i am though. I personally thought it was better than a landing page. It was kinda like show, don't tell. I thought it was effective to get me to sign up.
Tab Slayer
@mat_sherman ok great feedback. thanks again for taking a look!
😸 Pretty cool ! OpenBanking is booming! Be sure to check out midday.ai
Tab Slayer
@sentry_co nice ping! @Midday is crazy nice, probably a lot more feature rich than I would try to make this at first! One idea I've had for this product was to make it really simple -- targeting people who are not super tech advanced (like my mom who does everything by hand currently).
thanks for taking a look!!
Product Hunt
I spent some time building a mobile app to give you clarity on your finances before Tandem. It's a tough space. In my mind, there are two problems to overcome:
Behavior change: Does this actually cause you to change behavior in a way that's good for you?
Stress: People who aren't stressed about money don't need an app. Until they get to the point where you're managing a complex investment portfolio, people who are stressed about money are often too stressed to spend time in an app.
One question to ask is, "Where's the dopamine here?" We tried to approach this by taking inspiration from @Headspace or @calm with very soothing (british) voices reading out advice. We still had a hard time getting people to open the app. I wish we'd asked the question, "Where's the dopamine?" rather than simply "How do we reduce stress."
Another question to ask is what behavior are you trying to enable or drive? I don't fundamentally believe people want to look at their finances. What does looking at this dashboard unlock for them?
For example, if the goal is to get a sense of net burn versus savings or if you're in between jobs your runway that suggests a certain type of dashboard. I actually think @Monarch is decent for this use case.
(As an aside, I've always wanted an app that does a good job of parsing recurring transactions vs. one-off transactions and thus estimating mid-month where you'll end up for that month. I have a feeling the problem is something similar to a discrete Fourier transform... But this definitely seems like more of a pet idea than an actual product problem to solve. )
Tab Slayer
@rajiv_ayyangar these are great points . I think for a lot people this tool probably has very little utility -- many many people don't want to engage with their finances at all.
My thesis for (continued) building is that there is a group of people who once-per-month-ish look at their finances and take stock of things. they may use excel, or just manually peruse their transactions. I'm hoping they would be served by something pretty simple that meets them where they are -- their bank statements. in some ways it's like both ends of the bellcurve, but decidedly not the middle:
it's still a bit unclear where the dopamine is for this -- on one had there probably wont be very much since its sort of a "use once a month" type of tool that isn't meant to be highly engaging. most of my personal use (before i turned it into an app) was just curiosity and sanity checking. I have an "ehh that's unacceptable" threshold on some categories in my mind, and it's an easy way for me to have conviction that the day to day choices i make without much thought are having reasonable longterm outcomes.
really there is no notion of net worth in the tool at all, it only notes inputs and outputs on accounts.
I'm very prepared for nobody to care about this in the long run though. I think the best thing I can do is build to the point of an MVP, launch (happening next week!) , and try to talk as many user as I can.