Pretty much "freshbooks for chores".
(in short: a mixture of "that's not what people liked about the concept" and "not big enough of a goal"?)
That right there, is the whole truth. Not only do they not use it, they don't buy it to begin with. What sells and what people like are not the same as what they need or think they need.
Case in point. I developed a process, software and hardware, to take an ordinary photo and turn it into a 3D carving in the early 2000s. There were CNC programs that could do it with a lot of human touch-up, mesh manipulation, and machine coding, but mine went pretty seamlessly from photo to 'send it to the machine'.
Everybody, everybody is not just family and friends, loved it when they saw the photo and sample maple hardwood output side-by-side. People made statements like, 'I would pay an arm and a leg to have a door carved for my house'.
I brought the carvings to wooden boat shows with my and my partner's handmade seagoing kayaks, and people flocked around our table/booth. 'Can I get this on the kayak too?' Not one sale! The only money ever made by it was doing carvings on wooden urns for a local animal or pet cemetery. In similar fashion, I had an offer from a company that did bronze bas relief plaques for tombstones for a one-time purchase of my software! Needless to say, this didn't help with my emotional state, Stephen King references aside.
Like Steve Jobs said, people don't know what they want. This is not a condescending comment, it's a great insight that comes from being able to understand how human mind works.
kid marks they've completed task, parent xfer bits to kids wallet. Kid can now buy games at newegg or gift cards from tons of stores through Gyft.
the smart kids (like my oldest daughter) roll the dice and Alex p. Keaton it for long term savings that has decent potential to multiply in value.
I do this with my kids already, but with no app..just verbal "do this and I'll pay you $0.25 in bitcoin" an app with actual chore list they can work through and automate fund transfers would be awesome.
If you're a rich VC make sure you PM me to partner up. There's only one way to successfully monetize this, and I'm the only one who knows it.
Small target market but growing every day...the power of "frictionless transfer of value outside the insanely regulated walled garden of fiat banking and high finance"
The problem as I see it is the founders didn't think about what they were doing, and didn't have the right attitude to find another way.
I could believe that. When I was a college student, it was a big deal when my parents got me a credit card. Even if you are limited in what you can spend, it shows that you're integrated into the same financial system that adults are and can make your own choices with money. You don't get that with a virtual currency or parents dispensing out $20 bills.
The card doesn't seem to exist any more, but it sounds almost exactly like what this app does (without the todo list functionality). It's linked to a parents' account so they can provide cash for fuel/going out and can keep track of the kids' expenses.
http://www.cnet.com/uk/news/paypal-targets-students-parents-...
So you need to legitimately work around the 'stored value' problem, i.e. you need to find a 3rd party with a legal solution. That's either a real bank account or a prepaid card. And the 3rd party has to have an API that allows you to open accounts, execute transactions, etc.
The card program requires a bank partner too. And card programs cost 10K+ a month to run, regardless of whether or not you have 1 card issued or 250,000. Lots of cash burn early.
So that's the target state. Johnie outlined some nice interim steps below, but this is not simple. Oscar took on a challenging business problem.
That sounds incredibly odd to me. Aren't you 18+ when you get into college? Couldn't you just get your own debit card without parental involvement?
For a debit card - yes, you can just open a bank account and get one. You need money in the bank account. If you arrange a way to automatically transfer money into a kids' bank account at the touch of the button, you end up with an app much like this postmortem.
Which is why if you pay your credit card statement by phone for example, you'll hear the service rep read the consent form for you to say 'yes' once they are done before they can withdraw the funds.
Does ACH have problems with actors making unapproved transactions from other's accounts?
Edit:
To answer the other part of your question, originating financial institution (ODFI) can issue a chargeback up to 60 days after the money was sent. Unlike credit cards, there isn't a process for the merchant/service provider to refute the dispute.
So, the bank account owner can dispute the ACH transfer with their bank a month and a half later and it pretty much assured that they'll get their money back. Their bank isn't going to fight their own customer for it.
If this is a merchant account which it needs to be if you're pulling from other ppl's accounts then yes. Hence the very strict consent rules. At the end of the day there's no guarantee of course but if it comes to litigation a recorded message with a verbal approval might tip the scale in your favor. Most merchants don't bother of course and just write this off as a cost of doing business and recoup the funds by factoring fraud costs into their prices.
Finally, they could have simply kept track of a kid's balance for their parents, and made a button to send mom and dad a push notification that they would like their money the next time they are together. That probably would have been the most useful of all these things.
They certainly didn't have to let the fact that they couldn't do things exactly as seamlessly as they wanted be a startup killer. I have had this attitude in the past, but then I would look around and discover people doing similar things with great success, using the alternative methods around roadblocks that I had dismissed as unacceptable.
If they really wanted to pursue this project, they could have done it.
[1] https://stripe.com/blog/send-money-to-debit-cards
[2] https://cash.me
Also, Stripe transfers funds to recipients only once a day at best. For many accounts, it's once a week. (This is also true of Venmo, but they hide it from you in the app. Send some money to a nearly empty account with Venmo and then try to spend that money, and it becomes clear that Venmo's immediacy is an illusion.)
Regular bank accounts work that way too, when you deposit a check.
The currency is not necessarily cryptocurrency; it can be "air-time".
If you want to initiate transactions in the financial system, you have to work through what happens when things go wrong, and be prepared, financially and operationally, to handle them. How does the money get from the parent's account to the kid's account? Note that if the kid can get cash out, you can't fund this with a credit card. Visa and MasterCard don't let you buy money with a credit card; that's too fraud-prone.
So, as someone pointed out, you're back to ACH debits. Getting set up for those is hard, for good reasons. It gives you a connection to other people's bank accounts. So you need financial strength, bonding, and good references.
Note that the chore list has to be secure, too. Otherwise the kid can add "Mow lawn, $1000", check off the item, and drain the parent's account.
If you try to do this by having the parent transfer money to you in advance, and you then release it to the kid later, you're now a depository institution. In most states, you have to be a bank or a money transmitter to do that. (It's so tempting to take the money and run, and that's happened enough times that such businesses are regulated.) Also, that's a pain for the parent. They might as well use Venmo.
PayPal was successful partly because, back when they were above the bike shop on University Avenue in Palo Alto, they started as a security token maker. So they had security people and were familiar with the problems. A big portion of PayPal's operating costs come from dealing with fraud. The legit transactions are fully automated; the problems require a big call center.