MoneyVoice

Maker

Thanks for hunting us, @chrismessina! I was inspired to build this by my experience leading a global social movement (Carrotmob) of people trying to make businesses more socially responsible. People loved the idea of “voting with their money,” but even though that is such a common concept, there was no product designed for doing that. What if there were a way to *literally* vote with your money? Well our team has built it, and we’re super excited to see how you use it and what you vote for! 😆 When you install the app you import your credit card transactions to verify that you are a real customer. Each verified purchase earns one “vote” at a business, and you can vote for what you want the business to do. Or add your own suggestion and see how many other customers upvote you.📈 We believe this is a better way to give feedback to businesses. It's faster and easier than writing reviews on Yelp. Businesses pay more attention than they do on something like Twitter, because they have verification that you are a real, valuable customer. Our upvoting system helps customers team up to make their voices louder together. 🗣🗣🗣✨ Our mission is to empower people to have a positive impact every time they spend money, and we hope that voting in MoneyVoice will help you express your values and desires to every business where you spend money. For more about why we think this could be a really big deal, here’s our launch blog post with some historical context: https://blog.moneyvoice.com/voti... Would love to answer any questions and hear your ideas for what improvements you’d like us to build next!

Report

7yr ago

Ognjen Vukovic

Reportz

@chrismessina @schulkin Congrats on the launch guys! :) This product is brilliant. I think that there was a huge demand for product like this. I will use it for sure. :) Be sure to check out our tool , it will be very interesting to you. https://www.producthunt.com/upco...

Report

7yr ago

Charley Ma

Alloy Credit Underwriting

Congrats on the launch everyone! How did you come up with the initial idea for the product?

Report

7yr ago

Brent Schulkin

MoneyVoice

Maker

@charleyma Thanks! It has been a long evolution... It started when I was at Stanford doing community organizing around various issues, and I realized that I could have a bigger impact by focusing on changing businesses, because what they do has such a big impact on society. I remember hanging out in Dolores Park with @jessep in 2007 and we were brainstorming the idea of an actual credit card that would let you send a positive or negative signal to businesses when you buy things, but we couldn't quite figure it out. Then a couple years later @stevenewcomb and I had this idea that you could have two different credit cards to choose from... identical in terms of payment functionality, but one would be a "carrot" card and the other would be a "stick" card... you would choose which card to pay with to reward or punish a business. We actually got a provisional patent for something like that, but then federal legislation made it impractical so we dropped it. Then I focused on Carrotmob for a few years with a focus on having people actually make purchases. People loved the idea, but we never figured out a good product. So finally I realized that it's pretty hard to get people to make new purchases that they weren't already planning to make, but it's much easier to just attach little pieces of metadata about customer desires to the purchases that people are already making. Hopefully we've finally cracked the code with this one! 😁🤞

Report

7yr ago

David Anderson

Ever since Carrotmob, this holy grail of consumer creating a tsunami of business change has been just around the corner...

Pros:

Brent knows consumer-business change

Cons:

Is it best done as a for-profit?

Report

7yr ago

Brent Schulkin

MoneyVoice

Maker

David, I love this con! :) Well even though for now we're mostly focused on the consumer side, for this to work long-term we need to get businesses on MoneyVoice responding, looking at the data, etc. That means we have to build and scale a SaaS marketing tool. The for-profit path to doing that is well-understood. The non-profit path is not so clear. I tried doing Carrotmob as a non-profit only to have three law firms tell us that we didn't legally qualify as a charitable org because the primary thing we did provided a financial benefit to private interests. The same thing happened to Couchsurfing. So I think it's probably illegal to do this as a non-profit, as outdated as I think that rule is. Don't worry though, we are a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation and we have lots of social benefit plans up our sleeves! And yes, about that tsunami... Sometimes you just need the right product. The masses want to express themselves, but they only actually do it when it is short-form and low-effort. The masses didn't write on Blogger, but they did on Twitter. The masses didn't post on Flickr, but they did on Instagram. The masses don't write reviews on Yelp, but maybe if MoneyVoice gives them an experience that is short-form and low-effort...?

Report

7yr ago

MoneyVoice

Vote with your money

Do you use MoneyVoice?

Review MoneyVoice?

Reviews of MoneyVoice