vagostino

Hi Hacker News! I’m Val, one of the co-founders of Monarch.

The personal finance problem is near and dear to me, as I was the first product manager on the original team that built Mint over 13 (!) years ago.

Despite that (and having tried every personal finance app since) I found that my wife and I were still manually updating spreadsheets to manage our household finances. We set out to solve that problem with Monarch.

We’re often asked “How is Monarch different from other personal finance apps?”.

Here are some of the things that make Monarch unique:

1) Many apps are good at showing you what happened to your money historically, but by then it’s too late to make any changes. Monarch helps you create a financial forecast (or plan) toward your goals, and then follow that plan. Unlike a spreadsheet, your plan stays up to date in realtime.

2) Personal finance apps are only as good as their underlying data. We’ve built Monarch to work across multiple data aggregators and automatically route you to the best aggregator for a given financial institution.

3) We have a transparent, subscription-based business model. We set out to build the best product in the personal finance space and believe in the “you get what you pay for” mantra. We don’t show ads nor sell your data, and we’re obsessed about your privacy.

4) We’re customer obsessed. Because we’re paid by our customers instead of advertisers, we listen to what our customers want and then build it. (Crazy, huh?). We have daily calls with customers and publish our roadmap for feedback.

5) We’re multi player. Managing your finances is often a multi person activity. Monarch makes it easy to securely add multiple people to your account, such as a partner, financial advisor, or accountant.

Monarch is available for web, iOS and Android. Finally, we’re just getting started. We have a lot of exciting things planned (Crypto support coming soon!).

We hope you’ll check us out!

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!

Hi, I was one of the early Mint.com product guys.

I just want to say thanks to Marc for sharing this. I know how difficult it is to be objective in a post-mortem analysis, and I think your post is a very balanced (and dignified) assessment.

There's one more important differentiator, however, that hasn't been discussed yet and which pre-empts a lot of this commentary, that I thought I'd share: Mint intentionally targeted a different market.

Most consumer spending in the US is managed by middle aged men and women that are not especially financially nor technically savvy. It was our view that previous personal finance solutions (Quicken, MS Money, and the following web-based solutions) catered more towards the technically/financially proficient, and had therefore missed the larger market opportunity.

So we tried our best to ignore the Silicon Valley drivel around "viral distribution" and "cloud security" and focus instead on issues like "How can we make it easier for a soccer Mom in Kansas to set and meet her monthly grocery budget?".

The Mint brand (including the name, visuals, and user experience) were all designed with this in Mind. They were definitely supportive, as Marc correctly points out, but in no way were they determinate.

I think Mint and Wesabe were both strong products that served their users' needs well. We just happened to target different users, and ultimately there were more of ours.

You've hit the nail on the head here.

See Scott Cook's (Intuit's founder) blog post: http://www.mint.com/blog/updates/intuit-not-out-to-change-mi...