Financial services APIs
Exploring an interesting piece of internal tech: A customer (Venmo) asked about licensing their backend infrastructure.
Tried 5-6 ideas, including an app that recommends ways to could spend less money
Low retention
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgnCs34mopw
“In the early days we tried to build a consumer application that was linked to banking data, and we built a bunch of different products, I think five or six of them. The first one was around recommending places where you could spend less money. One was around helping you budget and figure out how much to spend. We had two fundamental problems with what we were doing, looking back on it. First is that I don’t understand anything about consumer apps, and so we were building bad consumer applications. And more specifically, we were creating products that didn’t jive with the way that consumers want to be treated. We were telling consumers to spend less money, and the automatic thing that you do when you get an application that tells you to spend less money is you to leave the application and delete it. So part one is consumer psychology, but part two is we fundamentally had a lot of difficulty getting data from the banks and we were trying all these different services to use them, we were trying to build our own, and we found that along the way building the infrastructure was a much more powerful way to get to where we were going.” —Zack Perret, CEO and co-founder
5 months
One piece of tech