Unknown: Are people willing to pay $5-$10 for a personal finance service when so many free alternatives exist? Selling data is a hard no for any business that I create, and I'm making a bet that people will pay for data privacy.
How to find out: Launch sooner rather than later :) if an MVP fails to gain traction among people who have a vested interest in trying out the things that I make (friends, family, coworkers), I'll have a pretty good idea of whether or not I'm onto something.
When I do know: If people are willing to pay, great! If not, I may launch as a free service and find a data-conscious way to connect people with vetted financial advisors (financial advisors would pay to be seen by users in their locale). This would effectively be a pivot to B2B I guess?
Piggybank calculates daily, weekly, and monthly running budgets that can be recreated with Google Sheets and some no-code services like IFTTT (that’s what I was doing when I was originally solving the problem for myself), but the no-code services can get expensive and manually entering purchases and finance info into Google Sheets can be a pain...still, it’s a possible substitute
One issue I've seen related to monetizing cost-saving services is that they, by design, attract price-sensitive customers.
So that might be tricky and indeed something you should test. Hopefully you can figure it out in a manner of days or at most weeks. You wouldn't want to spend months on something people won't pay for.
Unless you can find an alternative revenue model similar to comparison sites, where you take a commission. Those models are somewhat proven, but require a large enough userbase.
Unknown: Are people willing to pay $5-$10 for a personal finance service when so many free alternatives exist? Selling data is a hard no for any business that I create, and I'm making a bet that people will pay for data privacy.
How to find out: Launch sooner rather than later :) if an MVP fails to gain traction among people who have a vested interest in trying out the things that I make (friends, family, coworkers), I'll have a pretty good idea of whether or not I'm onto something.
When I do know: If people are willing to pay, great! If not, I may launch as a free service and find a data-conscious way to connect people with vetted financial advisors (financial advisors would pay to be seen by users in their locale). This would effectively be a pivot to B2B I guess?
I wonder if you can find out this unknown, without even needing to launch the product.
Do you know what substitutes people are currently using to solve the same problem?
Piggybank calculates daily, weekly, and monthly running budgets that can be recreated with Google Sheets and some no-code services like IFTTT (that’s what I was doing when I was originally solving the problem for myself), but the no-code services can get expensive and manually entering purchases and finance info into Google Sheets can be a pain...still, it’s a possible substitute
One issue I've seen related to monetizing cost-saving services is that they, by design, attract price-sensitive customers.
So that might be tricky and indeed something you should test. Hopefully you can figure it out in a manner of days or at most weeks. You wouldn't want to spend months on something people won't pay for.
Unless you can find an alternative revenue model similar to comparison sites, where you take a commission. Those models are somewhat proven, but require a large enough userbase.
That makes a ton of sense! I'll probably sideline some features and prioritize an earlier launch. Thanks for the help :)